SYSTEMATIC AND NARRATIVE THOUGHT – ETERNITY AND CLOSURE IN STRUCTURE AND STORY

It is, surely, no more than common sense to recognize that people react to problems, ideas and events by telling stories about them, or by understanding them in terms of already-known stories, as well as – and sometimes at the same time as – by thinking logically or scientifically about them; and that what counts as a good story is not the same as what counts as a good argument, and vice versa. In the study of Hinduism, it would hardly be novel to insist on the fact that narratives are just as important as doctrinal or philosophical texts to our understanding of its intellectual history, as well as of its cultural and religious history more generally. Twenty years ago, for example, Wendy O'Flaherty showed clearly and convincingly that if people had thought there was no “Problem of Evil” in Hinduism, it was because they were looking in the wrong place: “in philosophy rather than in mythology” (1976: 7). In the study of Buddhism, however, this suggestion might still appear to be something new. Although in the early days of the modern academic study of Buddhism many narrative texts were made known, since that time there has been little serious work on Buddhist stories beyond the vital task, still scarcely begun, of providing editions and translations of them.