Honest to "God" and grammar in medieval India: recovering the import of a neglected Buddhist lecture

This thesis is a translation and study of a medieval Buddhist manuscript that has been taken to provide, in the context of a lecture, an argument for the non-existence of God understood as a sentient agent. This study situates and reconstructs the argument by appealing to canonical Indian arguments for and against God and attempts to show that while the strategy employed is unique in the context of late philosophical Buddhism, it is anticipated by particular strategies employed by the Buddha in Buddhist canonical literature; the argument shows signs of synthesizing some independent arguments offered in early scholastic Buddhism into a single strategy in line with a canonical motivation. The thesis further claims that the strategy employed in this neglected manuscript has the virtue of not indulging strong metaphysical principles and enjoys a better fit with diagnostic strategies arguably central to the Early Buddhist movement. Significantly, the claim that the argument is designed to argue the non-existence of God must be refined to read that the argument attempts to show the semantic emptiness of either an affirmation or denial of a God identified as the sentient agent intentionally responsible for the creation of the world.