ISBN: 9789392510748
Author: Th. Stcherbatsky
Year of Publication: Feb'2025
Binding: PB
Language: English
No. of Pages : 112
ABOUT THE BOOK : This short treatise was originally conceived as a contribution to the Royal Asiatic Society’s Journal. The work explains in detail the principle of radical Pluralism which asserts that the elements alone are realities while every combination of them is a mere name covering a plurality of separate elements. The principle has been elucidated by its contrast with arambhavada which maintains the reality of the whole as well as of the element and with parinamavada which ascribes absolute reality to the whole.
The work is divided into sixteen sections dealing with the Skandhas, Ayatanas Dhatus, elements of mind, Pratityasamutpada, Karma, impermanence in sankhya-yoga, theory of Cognition. Pre-buddhic Buddhism, etc.
It has two appendices dealing with the views of vasubandhu on the fundamental principle of Saruastivada and the classification of all elements of existence according to the sarvastivadins. The two indices appended to the work record proper names and Sanskrit terms occurring in the work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR : STCHERBATSKY, THEODORE (1866–1942), was a Russian Buddhologist and Indologist. Fedor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskii, who signed his non-Russian writings "Th. Stcherbatsky," was born in Kielce, Poland, and died in Borovoi, Kazakhstan. He studied philology and Indology in Saint Petersburg under I. P. Minaev, Sanskrit poetics in Vienna with Georg Bühler, Indian philosophy in Berlin with Hermann Jacobi, and Sanskrit and Tibetan logic with pandits in India and lamas in Mongolia. From 1900 to 1941, Stcherbatsky taught at Saint Petersburg (later Leningrad) State University. His students included O. O. Rozenberg, E. E. Obermiller, and A. I. Vostrikov. The Russian Academy of Sciences named Stcherbatsky corresponding member (1910), academician (1918), director of the Institute of Buddhist Culture (1928–1930), and head of the Indo-Tibetan section of the Institute of Oriental Studies (1930–1942). He helped S. F. Olʾdenberg produce the academy's "Bibliotheca Buddhica" series of texts, translations, and monographs (1897–), which included several of Stcherbatsky's own works.