Current Project

Richard Nance is putting finishing touches on a book (with the working title The Logic of Explication) that offers the first translation into English of an influential Buddhist text on the practice of scriptural commentary. This text, composed in Sanskrit but extant today only in Tibetan translation, is attributed to the great Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu (c. 4th-5th c.). It situates the practice of commentary as a form of pedagogy and discusses myriad difficulties that beset teachers—whether in fifth-century India or in twenty-first century Indiana. How should a teacher proceed when confronted by a group of unengaged students? What is one to do when a particular text can be interpreted in many ways—ways that can at times seem diametrically opposed to one another? Vasubandhu takes up these questions (and many more), endeavoring to answer them not by offering a one-size-fits-all rulebook for teaching, but rather by taking his readers through a series of illuminating examples. Nance’s translation will be the subject of an upcoming workshop at Stanford University in May 2026.