Kenneth Liberman's innovative sociological work is a refreshing addition to scholarship on Tibetan debate and general dialectical practice. Liberman looks beyond the textual record for the key to Tibetan philosophical production, painstakingly analyzing the in vivo methods of the debaters themselves. He clarifies misconceptions about the highly formalized style of Tibetan debate, demonstrating how formal reasoning and socialized dialectics work together to produce the rich philosophical culture that still exists in Tibetan monasteries. The book also comes with a well-executed interactive CD-ROM containing video of the debates analyzed in the text.
The book opens with a critique of Orientalist scholarship on Asian religion and philosophy that is isolated from the lifeworld of the subjects. Liberman points out the essential racism (p. 10) of conservative philology, which refuses to acknowledge Asian traditions as dynamic, and dismisses their native practitioners as philosophically naive. He also indicts the present state of Tibetological graduate...
