Mādhyamikas Playing Bad Hands: The Case of Customary Truth Abstract This article looks at the Indian canonical sources for Mādhyamika Buddhist refusals to personally endorse truth claims, even about customary matters. These sources, on a natural reading, seem to suggest that customary truth (saṃvṛtisatya) is only widespread error and that the Buddhist should do little more than duplicate, or acquiesce in, what the common man (or “the world”) recognizes (lokaprasiddha) about it. The combination of those Indian canonical themes probably contributed to frequent Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka positions on truth, i.e., that the customary is no more than surface level truth, mere consensus amongst the mistaken, or, similarly, that there can be no right answers or truth claims to endorse about customary matters, as there are no sources of knowledge (tshad ma = pramāṇa) that have them as objects. Tsong kha pa and the dGe lugs pa, by contrast, adopted what I consider to be a philosophically more promising stance, one that recognized the need for a robust normativity: things customary are not just reduced to accepted errors; there are right answers about them that should be endorsed and may well defy current consensus of opinion. Not surprisingly, however, they needed a quite different and even strained exegesis of that same Indian textual legacy.

Non-existent Things as Subject of Inference in Bhāviveka’s Dacheng Zhangzhen Lun Abstract This paper is a preliminary study of Bhāviveka’s Svātantrika-Mādhyamika justifications for taking non-existent things as the subject (pakṣa) of an inference, based on his Dacheng Zhangzhen Lun (*Karatalaratna). Bhāviveka’s treatment of inference is similar to that of Dignāga in that the subject is required to be existent. Bhāviveka also holds that, in a conventional sense, words refer to universals and to the existent entities that possess them, while the two are cognised together. However, in his inference for the unreality of unconditioned things, he likens these things (the subject) to a sky-flower (the example, dṛṣṭānta) that never arises and is unreal even conventionally. This paper first demonstrates how taking unconditioned things (being non-existent) as the subject of an inference can be problematic for Bhāviveka. Then, it discusses Bhāviveka’s attempts to address the problems by subsuming the unconditioned things under the domain of conventional reality. The paper concludes that these attempts show his flexibility in terms of what is taken as conventionally real.

Words, Concepts, and the Middle Way: Language in the Traditions of Madhyamaka Thought

The Prapañca Paradox Abstract Madhyamaka claims that while everything is in fact empty, the use of concepts invariably leads to the error known as prapañca or hypostatisation, in the form of the supposition that there are things with intrinsic nature. This may be put as the claim that all conceptualisation falsifies. But this claim is paradoxical in that its truth would entail its falsity. While Mādhyamikas have not directly addressed this problem, a solution might be found utilizing the resources of contextualist semantics. This paper explores the origins of the paradox by tracing the history of the notion of prapañca, and then examines how a contextualist approach might resolve the difficulty.

Nāgārjuna and the Philosophy of Language Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the key points of Nāgārjuna’s discussion of problems relating to the philosophy of language. We will focus on two works from Nāgārjuna’s yukti-corpus that address these matters most explicitly, the Vigrahavyāvartanī (VV) and the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa (VP). The discussion will concentrate on four topics: Nāgārjuna’s views on semantics, the problem of empty names, the relation between language and momentariness, and the implications of Madhyamaka views on parts and wholes for the existence of language.

The Sense Madhyamaka Makes as a Buddhist Position: Or, How a ‘Performativist Account of the Language of Self’ Makes Sense of ‘No-Self’ Abstract Revisiting the author’s characteristic line of interpretation of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti, this essay responds to critiques thereof by arguing for the sense Madhyamaka makes, on the author’s interpretation, as a Buddhist position. For purposes of the argument, it is allowed that especially on the author’s characteristic interpretation, Madhyamaka appears to have affinities with the “personalist” (pudgalavāda) doctrine long regarded by Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions as unorthodox. In particular, it is accepted that on this interpretation, Mādhyamika arguments to the effect that conventional truth cannot be explained away by any “ultimate” truth are tantamount to the view that a personal level of description cannot coherently be thought superseded by the kind of impersonal analysis typical of Abhidharma literature. The main burden of the essay is to explain the sense it makes to think this supposedly unorthodox embrace of the category person counts, in fact, as elaborating the tradition’s orienting no-self doctrine (anātmavāda).

Etymologies of What Can(not) be Said: Candrakīrti on Conventions and Elaborations Abstract Madhyamaka philosophers, like most Buddhist authors writing in Sanskrit and Pāli, often express their philosophical positions through the etymological expansion and interpretation of specific key terms. Their format and style reflect an attitude towards language that, while being largely shared by the entire Sanskrit tradition, is also attuned to uniquely Buddhist concerns. I shall here reconstruct and discuss some Sanskrit and Pāli etymologies, offering a possible context for the understanding of Madhyamaka thought in India. As it would be unfeasible to analyze a large amount of terms, I focus on a few expressions that bear upon the question of how Mādhyamikas understand language, both as actual linguistic expression and, more broadly/figuratively, as the activity of conceptualization. I will propose a specific reading of the Sanskrit sources in terms of linguistic, lexical, and philosophical analysis. In particular, I interpret Candrakīrti as advocating a layered view of conventional truths. He restricts the perceptions and thoughts that may qualify as conventionally valid, so as to exclude impaired perception or distorting philosophical stances. These restrictions are embedded in his etymological explanation of key philosophical terms. In brief, when Candrakīrti discusses ‘worldly conventions’ (lokasaṁvr̥ti) or refers to ‘what is established in the world’ (lokaprasiddhi), not everyone fits in his ‘world’. (In my footnotes, I leave untranslated those passages meant simply to offer textual support to my claims about specific terms, whenever they do not affect the main line of argumentation.)

Social Origins of Buddhist Nominalism? Non-articulation of the “Social Self” in Early Buddhism and Nāgārjuna Abstract In the following, it will be argued that Nāgārjuna (ca. 150 CE) adopts a Buddhist nominalism that encompasses not only a position towards abstract entities, but resonates with a nominalist perspective on the “social reality” of persons. Early Buddhist texts, such as the Suttanipāta, argue that human persons defy a classification in hierarchic “classes” (jāti), because there is no moral substance, e.g. of Brahmins. Differences between individuals do not exist by nature, since it is the individual that realizes difference according to the specific personal realization of action (karman) and moral cultivation. Buddhist “nominalism,” therefore, has at least one of its central roots in a rejection of a socially privileged “selves,” a stratified social hegemony, and religious truth claims. Nāgārjuna, on his part, radicalizes nominalism as a threefold correlation of the “non-articulated self,” a “non-articulated” reality, and finally, a “non-articulated” dimension even within all concepts, names, and designations. In this vein, Nāgārjuna’s śūnyavāda can be seen as a consequent attempt to neutralize unwanted social and psychological consequences of ontological language-use. Nāgārjuna even self-critically questions the position that the workings of a Buddhist path of liberation can be articulated, which seems to be a remarkable parallel to certain roots of Western nominalism.

Logic, Scripture, and Hermeneutics in Zhencheng’s Critique of the Thesis of No-motion Abstract This paper examines the philosophical debate on Seng Zhao (僧肇 384–414)’s Thesis on No-Motion of Things (Wu buqian lun 物不遷論, hereafter WBQL), a debate which took place approximately at the turn of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. Without doubt the Zhao Treatise (Zhao lun 肇論) is the most precious gem in the early Chinese Madhyamaka legacy. The sterling reputation of this seminal treatise had never been challenged until Zhencheng (鎮澄 1546–1617) published the Logical Investigation of the Thesis of No-Motion of Things (Wu buqian zhengliang lun 物不遷正量論, hereafter WBQZLL) during 1588–1589. The following focuses on Zhencheng’s WBQZLL to see how he applied hetu-vidyā in his hermeneutical project. How did Zhencheng employ the syllogism in his critique of the Zhao Treatise? Is his critique justifiable? How is the role of syllogism employed as a hermeneutic tool to understand classical Buddhist texts? In highlighting the innovative features in the application of hetu-vidyā in the late Ming Chinese Buddhist scholasticism as showcased in Zhencheng’s WBQZLL, The controversies swirling around Zhencheng’s challenge to traditional doctrinal authority reveal the distinctive contrast between two forms of Buddhist hermeneutics in the late Ming Buddhist scholasticism: experiential hermeneutics and analytical hermeneutics. While the former has long been practiced in the mainstream of Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), the latter has received little attention.

Seng Zhao’s “Prajñā is Without Knowledge”: Collapsing the Two Truths from Critique to Affirmation Abstract This essay explores one of the first distinctively Sinitic reappropriations of Madhyamaka epistemology: Seng Zhao’s essay “Prajñā is Without Knowledge.” Seng Zhao’s work is here read as a deliberate collapse of the traditional Madhyamaka Two Truths into two simultaneous aspects of sagely wisdom, rather than a diachronic means-end relation, arriving at a crypto-Zhuangzian “trivialist” conclusion aimed at undermining epistemological bivalence at its roots. For Seng Zhao, because nothing can be established as true, nothing can be excluded as false. Here the understanding of Emptiness has become not the exclusion of all views, but the inclusion of all views. This is rooted in Seng Zhao’s view that, to use Jan Westerhoff’s terms, the denial of substance-svabhāva is always also implicitly the denial of essence-svabhāva. Seng Zhao move from Emptiness as exclusion to Emptiness as inclusion, and from denial of ontological substance to denial of mutually exclusive determinateness, sets the agenda for the distinctive developments of classical Chinese Buddhist philosophy to come.