Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge c8.60

c8.60

(165) It is not intrinsically impossible that there were a set of thinkers in the Vedic tradition who, because they believed in the efficacy of rituals and the value of faith, pronounced that knowledge, whether empirical, metaphysical, or intuitive was a hindrance to moral progress and salvation. But their existence is not testified in the literature itself and it would be methodologically unsound to believe in their existence since we would have to depend on an *argumentum e silentio*. Even if they existed without leaving a trace of their doctrines in the Vedic literature, they cannot be identified with the first school of Sceptics as we know them from the passage under discussion. For in that case they should not declare the impossibility of knowledge but merely denounce it as morally dangerous. As we have shown (*v* supra, 148–150) it is unlikely that this first school of Sceptics would have come into being before the air was polluted (or rather enriched) with a multitude of contending theories. Thus people came to feel on the one hand that knowledge was uncertain and on the other that claims to knowledge were morally dangerous in that one might believe in what was in fact untrue and/or lead a factious and contentious life engaged in dispute and debate in defending one’s beliefs. It is in such circumstances that we can expect to find an intellectual scepticism at the theoretical level coupled with the practice of the good life as it was traditionally known or best understood at the time.