Tillemans - How Do Madhyamikas Think? : And Other Essays on the Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle

HOW DO MDHYAMIKAS THINK?

Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism

This series was conceived to provide a forum for publishing outstanding new contributions to scholarship on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and also to make accessible seminal research not widely known outside a narrow specialist audience, including translations of appropriate monographs and collections of articles from other languages. The series strives to shed light on the Indic Buddhist traditions by exposing them to historical-critical inquiry, illuminating through contextualization and analysis these traditions unique heritage and the significance of their contribution to the worlds religious and philosophical achievements.

Members of the Editorial Board:

Tom Tillemans (co-chair), Emeritus, University of Lausanne

Jos Cabezn (co-chair), University of California, Santa Barbara

Georges Dreyfus, Williams College, Massachusetts

Janet Gyatso, Harvard University

Paul Harrison, Stanford University

Toni Huber, Humboldt University, Berlin

Shoryu Katsura, Ryukoku University, Kyoto

Thupten Jinpa Langri, Institute of Tibetan Classics, Montreal

Frank Reynolds, Emeritus, University of Chicago

Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, University of Lausanne

Ernst Steinkellner, Emeritus, University of Vienna

Leonard van der Kuijp, Harvard University

How Do Mdhyamikas Think? collects philosopher Tom Tillemanss writings on the most rarefied of Buddhist philosophical traditions, the Madhyamaka, and its radical insights into ontology, epistemology, and the well-lived life. Tillemans excels in bringing analytic and continental philosophy into conversation with thinkers in the Sanskrit and Tibetan traditions. His approach ranges from relating the history of ideas, to considering implications of those ideas for practice, to formal appraisal of their proofs. These twelve essays are products of rich and sophisticated debates and dialogues with colleagues in the field, bringing readers on a fascinating journey through Buddhisms most intriguing school of thought.

This collection comprises much of Tillemanss best work, illuminating with uncommon clarity a range of questions in Buddhist epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic. The insights he provides are often highly original and are very profound. The methodology on display should be a model for philosophical engagement with the Buddhist tradition.

JAY GARFIELD, Smith College

Among this marvelous, wide-ranging collection of essays will be found insights that will both deepen the understanding of scholars and address the spiritual and ethical concerns of Buddhist practitioners.

STEPHEN BATCHELOR, author of After Buddhism

A great addition to the growing field of philosophical studies of the Madhyamaka tradition done by a scholar who combines to the highest degree philological rigor and deep philosophical acumen. This is an absolute must-read.

GEORGES B. J. DREYFUS, Williams College

TOM TILLEMANS was previously coeditor of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. Now an emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne, he is editor in chief of 84000, an online translation of the Buddhist scriptures preserved in the Tibetan canon, and co-chair of the editorial board of the Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism series.

Table of Contents

Contents

Publishers Acknowledgment

T HE PUBLISHER gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution of the Hershey Family Foundation toward the publication of this book.

Introduction

T HE ESSAYS COLLECTED here are on the Madhyamaka, the philosophy of the middle that begins with Ngrjuna and ryadeva in the second century CE and evolves throughout Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhism. Many have appeared previously and are reprinted with a few revisions; some (chapters 5, 7, and 12) are new. As in my previous work on other Buddhist philosophers, notably Dharmakrti, these essays zigzag between a historico-philological approach and philosophical analysis. It is a delicate balance. Madhyamaka needs to be understood charitably with the best philosophical reading that textual data and intellectual contexts permit.

The book is loosely organized in terms of four topics: Madhyamakas philosophical promise (chapters 1 and 2), features of its philosophy of logic and language (chapters 37), its ethics and spiritual path to Buddhist enlightenment (chapter 810), and its potential contributions to contemporary philosophical controversies (chapters 11 and 12).

This philosophy has had a mixed reception, both in the past and nowadays. It has been taken as the pinnacle of subtlety by its promoters but also vilified, and even simply ignored, by many Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, one of the frequent objections being that it distorted opposing realist positions willfully and thus refuted straw men. The first essay, Trying to Be Fair, attempts an initial view of the lay of the land, in a charitable light. The second, How Far Can a Mdhyamika Refute Customary Truth? takes up issues of relativism, truth, and ontology. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the question of whether the Mdhyamika respects universally the law of noncontradiction; the argument is that while a weak, nonadjunctive type of inconsistency may well fit some stras and possibly Ngrjuna, inconsistency of any sort is considered as a fault by the time of the sixth century and is thus not endorsed by major Mdhyamikas such as Candrakrti, Bhviveka, and their successors. Chapter 5, Prasaga and Proof by Contradiction in Bhviveka, Candrakrti, and Dharmakrti, takes up a crucial application of the law of noncontradiction: reductio ad absurdum, or prasaga, which has long been considered the preferred strategy of the Mdhyamikas who follow Candrakrti (commonly known as prsagikas) to expose the internal flaws of philosophical positions while not taking a position of their own. The use of proof by contradiction in the Mdhyamika thinkers Candrakrti and Bhviveka is contrasted with that of Dharmakrti, a sixth/seventh century non-Mdhyamika metaphysical realist, who along with the founder of the Epistemological School, Dignga (fifth century), is sometimes the direct adversary, and often the minence grise, in so many later Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka debates. Chapter 6, Apoha Semantics: What Did Bhviveka Have to Do with It? is the most historical and philological chapter of the book. It shows how close the relationship between Epistemologists and Mdhyamikas was historically in India, as the dominant semantic theory adopted by the leading Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thinkers seems to have been quite significantly influenced by the sixth-century Mdhyamika Bhviveka. Chapter 7, What Happened to the Third and Fourth Lemmas in the Tibetan Madhyamaka? takes up problems that arise in Tibetan interpretations of the third and fourth lemmas in the famous tetralemma, or catukoi, whose use Mdhyamikas claimed as essential to their abstention from all theses (paka, pratij) or philosophical positions (