General conclusion: Buddhism and civilizational history 2 – reprise

Summary

This General Conclusion returns briefly to the large-scale perspective of the General Introduction, looking to discern structures and processes of Buddhism and civilizational history. I first describe how this book has constructed its argument; and then return to two points of historiographical method: the use of analytical dualism in the attempt to understand Buddhism as a social fact, a phenomenon of civilization, and the endeavor to combine thinking about the inside and the outside of Pali Buddhist texts together.

There have been a number of cycles of argument. The cycle in Part 1 focused on nirvana, trying to offer a multifaceted account of how it appears in the traditional Pali imaginaire as a concept in systematic thought, as an image, and as a moment in narrative, both in narrated time and in the time of narration. I argued that it is important to take account of all three modes of thought, separately and together, and to try to understand both what is said about nirvana and what is left unsaid about it in them, which both contribute to the extensive and concentrated textualization of time, and thus timelessness, to be found in Pali Buddhist texts. Nirvana provides the sense of an ending in both systematic and narrative thought.