Abstract
Mark Siderits’s contributions to the study of Indian philosophy have long included rational reconstruction of arguments and positions typical of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist thought. A widely-known expression of this tradition’s core contention – “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth” – is widely attributed to Siderits, and my own studies of Madhyamaka have from the outset been influenced by his philosophically sophisticated work. Nonetheless, I have always resisted Siderits’s predilection for characterizing Madhyamaka as exemplifying anti-realism, as well as the notion that this tradition’s concerns are best characterized as semantic. On my reading, the insight aptly expressed by Siderits’s signature formulation is better characterized as transcendental – as identifying, that is, something presupposed by the very fact that pursuit of the Buddhist path is in the first place intelligible. Siderits, then, would dispel his formulation’s air of paradox by taking it to mean, “it is ultimately true that no statement corresponds to the ultimate nature of reality.” I have taken the same statement as aptly expressing the contention, rather, that “it is ultimately true” – that is, practically incontrovertible once it has been clarified, by Madhyamaka critique, what it would mean for anything to be ‘ultimately real’ – “that there are no ultimately real existents.” While these make sense as philosophically distinct emphases, it is reasonable to wonder whether there is any practically significant difference between these ideas. By way of honoring Mark Siderits’s influence on my own understanding, this essay explores the extent and significance of our divergent emphases.
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Notes
- 1.
Siderits (2003: 192–93, 202); see, too, p.195, note “o,” for acknowledgment of the famous Zen saying echoed here. It should be noted that the second edition of the book (2015) differs here.
- 2.
See Siderits (2006: 20).
- 3.
See, e.g., Siderits (2001).
- 4.
Mark’s essay here (2009: 69n14) issues a promissory note referring the reader to Siderits (2003, chapter 3). Regarding my reading of reductionism, Mark has said I confuse that with eliminativism (2006: 20); I would say, rather, that I am persuaded by Baker (1987: 9) that both approaches crucially “share the view that there are no irreducibly intentional entities or properties.”
- 5.
Here I’ll stipulate that by “Madhyamaka” I mean the thought of Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti as I understand them. I would also note that in doing philosophy in conversation with Buddhist philosophers, Mark and I commonly face both philosophical and exegetical challenges, which represent the basic poles of the hermeneutic circle. Insofar as I was intellectually socialized in the field of religious studies, the balance of my work surely skews more towards the exegetical.
- 6.
This characterization is rather a moving target; Mark has variously characterized Madhyamaka, also calling it, e.g., semantic non-dualism. Nevertheless, I find anti-realism an ideal-typical characterization that is helpful in scouting possible readings of Madhyamaka, and so will here emphasize that.
- 7.
The reader may notice various Heideggerian elements to the reading here developed; see Arnold (2019) for further reference to Being and Time as warranting some of this.
- 8.
Consider as analogous Locke’s thought that “person” is a chiefly forensic category.
- 9.
I’m here quoting the Vajracchedikā, but most any paragraph from any of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras likely includes something comparable. Compare Harrison’s translation (2006: 144): “it is by virtue of the featurelessness of his distinctive features that a Realized One can be seen.”
- 10.
Cf. Siderits (2006: 20).
- 11.
See Arnold (2005: 143–152) for further development of this line of thought.
- 12.
Compare Siderits and Katsura (2015: 275–276).
- 13.
That Tibet’s Gelukpa tradition similarly understands Nāgārjuna seems to me reflected in its view that Nāgārjuna does, in fact, have a distinctive thesis: viz., that “emptiness” means “dependent origination.” (See Matsumoto 1990: 33.) For further development of this train of thought, see Arnold (2005: 143, ff.), et passim.
- 14.
Cf. Kapstein (2001: 211, ff.).
- 15.
- 16.
See Arnold (2006: 15note13).
- 17.
I take it Jay Garfield (2006: 5) agrees: “to call a position according to which the reality of everything that, say, an idealist, or for that matter a materialist, denies is real, is real, ‘anti-realist’ seems to be at best misleading.”
- 18.
While this, I think, is the reason that really motivates the tradition’s emphasis on a Buddha’s non-conceptual awareness, that emphasis nonetheless became philosophically significant; particularly in the epistemological tradition epitomized by Dharmakīrti, the question of how essentially non-conceptual perception can relate to any propositional knowledge loomed large. See, e.g., Dreyfus (1997), Arnold (2012a), Siderits et al. (2011).
- 19.
- 20.
Cf. Siderits (2007: 52–54).
- 21.
- 22.
Though controversial, the idea of Pudgalavāda influence on Madhyamaka is not novel; see Vetter (1982, 1992); Kapstein (1987: 88–114); Walser (2005: 245–253) (et passim). It’s worth noting that it’s anachronistic to think Pudgalavāda obviously “unorthodox”; the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang calculated, at the time of his travels in India in the seventh century ce, that 25% of the subcontinent’s Buddhists were adherents of Personalist schools (Williams et al., 2012: 92). See, too, Cousins (1994).
- 23.
The Vātsīputrīyas are thus represented as “accepting an existent person” (pudgalaṃ santam icchanti; Pradhan 1975: 460).
- 24.
I will be returning to the sense of the word prajñapti in the last section.
- 25.
- 26.
ādhyātmikān upāttān vartamānān skandhān upādāya pudgalaḥ prajñapyate (Pradhan 1975: 460). I will explain my translation of prajñapyate as “shows up” in the last section of this essay.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
Before taking leave of Vasubandhu, I would note that when he represents his Personalist interlocutors as trying to salvage their view following his initial interrogation of the word upādāya, he considers pudgalavāda’s characteristic preoccupation with fire and fuel as best exemplifying the kind of relation they have in mind – an example that is central, too, for Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti, as has been noted by those who have argued for pudgalavādin influence on Madhyamaka (see note 22, above; see, too, Arnold 2012a: 224, ff.).
- 30.
“A chariot, for example, is not admitted as distinct from its parts, nor as indistinct, nor as possessing them. It is not in its parts, nor are the parts in it; it is not a mere collection of them, either, nor is it their arrangement.” (I have translated Candrakīrti’s Sanskrit verses from Li (2015); I have translated passages from his commentary, still extant only in Tibetan translation, from La Vallée Poussin (1970a).)
- 31.
Translated from La Vallée Poussin (1970a: 276.12, ff).
- 32.
Earlier in the same chapter of the Madhyamakāvatāra (at 6.126), Candrakīrti represents Abhidharma philosophers as saying just that: “Some of our fellow Buddhists say that just because there is no substantiating a self that is distinct from the aggregates, the aggregates themselves are the object of the notion of self. Some such Buddhists affirm all five aggregates as the basis of the notion of self, others just one (i.e., thought).”
- 33.
Candrakīrti’s argument here has affinities with Mark Johnston’s variously advanced case for the reality of the “manifest” world; Johnston similarly argues that “observing that the facts of personal identity do not involve superlative entities is not itself a criticism of the practices organized around identity. It would be a criticism only if such practices had to limn the metaphysical joints in order to be justified. But this is [an] impossibly strong condition on justification, [a] condition that would produce an all too automatic victory over ordinary life” (Johnston 1992: 618; emphasis original). Johnston’s argument is redolent of “sceptical solutions” to philosophical problems, as characterized by his teacher Saul Kripke: “A sceptical solution of a sceptical philosophical problem begins … by conceding that the sceptic’s negative assertions are unanswerable. Nevertheless our ordinary practice or belief is justified because … it need not require the justification the sceptic has shown to be untenable” (Kripke 1982: 66–67).
- 34.
On the philosophical significance of the grammarians’ kāraka analysis, see Matilal (1990: 40–48).
- 35.
As Mark says in this regard, “The Buddhist view of persons is based on … mereological reductionism, the view that wholes are reducible to their parts.” (2007: 105, et passim)
- 36.
Translated from La Vallée Poussin (1970a: 278, lines 9–18).
- 37.
Chief among the Personalists’ concerns, Carpenter argues, is that Abhidharma’s reductionism makes sense of basic facts about personal identity by affirming that causal relations among aggregates occur in relatively discrete continua (santāna) – but these continua cannot themselves be individuated without reference to the “persons” they constitute. Thus, “The Pudgalavādin recognizes and avoids [the] circularity by acknowledging that in one central case, our convenience does not determine but rather tracks the different ways in which aggregates are related” (2015: 19).
- 38.
This represents, I think, a good way to make sense of Jonardon Ganeri’s similar contention that Candrakīrti affirms a “performativist account of the language of self.” As Ganeri says of the “appropriation” Candrakīrti has emphasized, that should be understood “as an activity of laying claim to, not the making of an assertion of ownership. Grammatical form notwithstanding, the avowal or self-ascription of a mental state, ‘I have a pain’, is not a two-place relation between me and my pain…. When I say ‘I am in pain,’ I do not assert ownership of a particular painful experience; rather, I lay claim to the experience within a stream.” (Ganeri 2007: 202; see Thompson 2014: 356–66 for a similar reconstruction of Madhyamaka’s position.) Stanislaw Schayer (1929–30) has in this regard said that Nāgārjuna’s critique of motion is more generally meant as targeting action; see Arnold (2012b: 559−560) for discussion of this.
- 39.
Consider again Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.14 (note 12, above).
- 40.
Burton (1999: 4–5). Burton’s critique parallels that of Sthiramati, a proponent of Buddhism’s idealist Yogācāra school of thought. Sthiramati denounced Madhyamaka for pressing its analysis not just against all existents, but also against consciousness (vijñāna). The resultant Madhyamaka position – that “even consciousness, just like the objects thereof, exists only conventionally, not ultimately” – is untenable, Sthiramati thus thinks, since it “entails that the conventional doesn’t exist, either.” That, he says with another use of the familiar word upādāna, is because “the conventional does not make sense without something taken up” (na hi saṃvṛtir nirupādānā yujyate; translated from Buescher 2007: 42).
- 41.
- 42.
So, the entry from the Rangjung Yeshe dictionary (http://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/Main_Page).
- 43.
So Apte (1992), s.v. prajñā.
- 44.
Rhys Davids and Stede (1999), s.v. paññatti. (This entry also includes “description, designation, name, idea, notion, concept.”)
- 45.
Matilal notes in this regard that the grammarian Pāṇini disregarded any distinction “between agents (kartṛ) which are sentient beings and those which are not” (1990: 42).
- 46.
- 47.
Translated from La Vallée Poussin (1970b: 578).
- 48.
Consider, too, Madhyamakāvatāra 6.25–26, where Candrakīrti says that what counts as true in ordinary discourse is “what everyone takes as apprehendable by any of the six senses (so long as these are unimpaired)”; other things – everything, e.g., “variously imagined by non-Buddhists (whose heads are nodding with the sleep of ignorance),” and everything “imagined in such cases as magical illusions and mirages” – are “falsely constructed.”
- 49.
See The Cowherds (2016: 43–54), et passim.
- 50.
Cf. Siderits and Katsura (2015: 279).
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Arnold, D. (2023). The Real According to Madhyamaka, Or: Thoughts on Whether Mark Siderits and I Really Disagree. In: Coseru, C. (eds) Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13995-6_13
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