Abstract
With regards the crucial issue of the existence of the self, within canonical texts of the Buddhist Abhidharma schools we find passages that are frequently at odds with one another. Sometimes the Buddha defends or respects the belief in the self and in personal continuity; at other times he seems to deny that beyond the psycho-physical factors to which our existential experience can be reduced there is an ātman that contains, owns or controls these same factors; in further cases still, he states that the use of the metaphysical categories of “being” and “non-being” must be avoided – thus, about the self (or everything else), it is inappropriate to say that it exists or that it does not exist. Faced with these divergences (or contradictions) within contemporary Buddhist studies, we can detect two main tendencies. Some scholars start from the assumption that the Buddha’s teaching is or should be coherent and univocal, and, therefore, propose readings of his original message that are supposed to iron out or conciliate any inconsistencies. Others believe that the inconsistencies are actually irreconcilable and, therefore, maintain that the Abhidharma canons are a composite and stratified redaction in which the opposite views of different writers overlap and intersect. Against these historiographical approaches, the purpose of the present paper is to show that the three aforementioned modes of the Buddha’s teaching are, in fact, both alternative and irreconcilable. This, however, far from presenting a puzzle to be solved or explained (by resorting to suppositions of which, in the canons, we have no explicit confirmation), is nothing more than a feature of the Buddha’s Dharma, which appears to be a teaching that develops different pedagogical/soteriological modes for different purposes, and which is conceived for the spiritual growth of followers with different intellectual and psychological profiles.
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Notes
Actually, the coupling of “early Buddhism” and “Buddhism of the Buddha” is by no means obvious. It could be questioned both by those who consider Buddhist canonical texts to be layered writings, produced by various hands at different times, and by those who question the very historical existence of the Buddha Siddhārtha Gotama (see e.g. Drewes, 2017).
We may think, for example of the Attavaggo of the Dhammapada (157–67), wherein the Buddha explicitly invites his disciples to establish, appreciate, protect, and cultivate their own attā (Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti, in their commentaries on verse 18.6 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, choose verse 160 of this scripture as an emblematic passage where “the self was showed by the buddhas”); or recall the notorious Bhāra-sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya 3.1.22), wherein the Buddha explains to his disciples that the five aggregates are the “burden” (bhāra) loaded by the “person” (puggalo).
I use “philosophical mode” to engender a sense that the notions of being, non-being, or neither being nor non-being of the self are not necessarily objects of explicit teachings by the Buddha (although they may even be this, since, in particular, this is the case with doctrines of “non-being” and of the “middle path”, to which the Buddha devotes specific sermons). These modes are primarily three different ways of presenting his ideas; three kinds of language or theoretical modalities to which most of the notions and reasonings advanced by the Buddha can be traced.
“Karma is my favourite point of entry to the Buddha’s world view” (Gombrich, 2009, p. 11).
Gombrich’s approach is by no means the only one, within modern Buddhist studies, that prefers the “positive” mode of the Dharma. In a brief summary of twentieth-century Buddhology, Collins (1982) distinguishes between authors “who refuse to believe that the ‘real’ doctrine taught by the Buddha is what the canonical teaching of anattā appears to be; and those who do accept that the doctrine of anattā is what the Buddha taught, and that it means what it appears to say”. The former are, therefore, those who, like Gombrich, exclude that the “non-being” doctrine amounts to an absolute and definitive denial of the self. Unlike Gombrich, however, the authors mentioned by Collins (e.g. Collins 1982, pp. 7–10) – the Rhys Davidses, Humphreys, Zaehner, Coomaraswamy, K. Bhattacharya, Frauwallner – admit the existence not of a merely “processual self” but of an “unseen self or soul”, a “Real Self”, an “Absolute”, “spiritual Atman”.
Gombrich’s purport of offering a coherent reading of the Dharma, ironing out and ruling out all possible inconsistences, is pointed out by Schmithausen, who, among the scholars who look for a “coherent picture of the authentic doctrine of the Buddha” (Schmithausen 1990, p. 1), mentions him together with Norman, and not without a polemical vein.
This kind of denial of the self – which is not absolute but, rather, relative to its characteristics of independence and immutability – is sufficient, according to Hamilton (manifestly in contrast with the authors mentioned in note 5, who, behind the Buddhist denial of the self, go so far as to identify an outright “Absolute”), to distinguish the position of early Buddhism from the “Upaniṣadic teaching that the essence of one’s self is immortal and unchanging: identical with the essence of the universal absolute” (Hamilton 2000, pp. 22–23).
In the same way, Hamilton, who, in the passages quoted above, had argued that the right way to understand anattāvāda is to conceive of it in the light of the doctrine of dependent arising, according to which there is no independent self, interprets the same pratītyasamutpāda in the light of the “middle way”: “the Buddhist teaching that everything is dependently originated indicates that the ontological status of all things is neither that of existence nor that of non-existence, but of a middle way between such extremes” (Hamilton 2000, p. 44). In other words, “the lack of independent existence of anything at all” – which according to this author is the actual meaning of the doctrine of dependent co-arising – “is conceived of as the ‘middle way’ between existence and non-existence” (Hamilton 1996, p. 68).
The English translation of anātman/anattā is problematic. According to Brown (2018), each of the three main versions that we find in contemporary studies – “no-self”, “not-self”, and “non-self” – present difficulties and lead to very different understandings of the concept at stake: “‘no-self’ might mean that self does not appear at all. If the self does not appear at all, as no-self might suggest, how would one explain our experience of it? […] ‘Not-self’ suggests that if it is not self, then it must be something else, and thereby implies that that something else is self. If I was to say I know what something is not, then by means of negation, I must know what it is […]. Finally, in contrast to no-self or not-self, both of which suggest the complete negation of self, the translation of anātman as ‘non-self’ validates the mere appearance of self but can also imply that this self does not exist as it appears” (Brown 2018, p. 20). If Brown’s understanding of these three expressions is right, then it seems to me that “non-self” (in the only sense of “mere appearance of self”) is a more appropriate version of anātman – but I definitely prefer to leave to native English speakers the solution, if there is one, of this conundrum.
In recent years, several publications have been devoted to the link between and comparison of the Buddhist reflection on the self and subjectivity and the modern and contemporary Western philosophical (and “neuroscientific”) debate about the mind – a debate whose prodromes could be traced back to Descartes and Hume. An essential reference, among others, for orienting within this debate and getting an idea of how much Buddhism can contribute to it is Siderits, Thompson and Zahavi (2011).
Inasmuch as this interpretative approach denies the existence of a permanent self, it could remind us of Gombrich’s conclusions outlined above, but it differs from this in that, while Gombrich believes that a processual self is ultimately established, in this case what is admitted is simply an ultimately inexistent conventional self.
This is, for example, the interpretation of madhyamā pratipad that the Ge-luk-pa doctrine of the “four Tenet Systems” ascribes to the Vaibhāṣika system.
Japanese critical Buddhism, mentioned above, has a much more drastic solution to the conflict between the Buddha’s sermons that affirm or admit the self and those that deny it. The authors of this movement tend to consider somehow false or spurious the Buddhist discourses of the first mode and regard as Buddhist only those of the second kind, which maintain the anattāvāda. In other words, instead of looking for a conciliation and an integration of the different aspects of the Dharma, this interpretative view goes as far as to consider “non-Buddhist” the very teachings of the Buddha that possibly contradict the doctrines of the anattā and pratītyasamutpāda (see Hubbard, 1997, pp. xii–xiii).
Although it is clear that Gombrich’s (2009) monograph What the Buddha Thought – which is devoted to the Buddha’s philosophy – is both an acknowledgement of Rahula’s 1959 work and a distancing from it, it seems to me that it is in any case misleading to present what we find in the nikāyas as “Buddha’s thought”. The only certainty we have in approaching the Buddha’s discourses is that they are presented as teachings within a programme that develops according to peculiar pedagogical strategies. Even though there is no doubt that its content is mostly “philosophical” – and, therefore, that it has to be considered, in all respects, as “thought” – there is no actual reason to believe that it is, partly or wholly, shared by the Buddha, and that it is, therefore, thought that belongs to him.
With regards this point, the following remark by Gombrich seems perfectly reasonable: “[a] tradition, whether scribal or oral, always tends to iron out inconsistencies […]. If our texts preserve something awkward, it is most unlikely to have been introduced by later generations of Buddhists who had been taught to accept the generally neat and uniform doctrine expounded in the commentaries” (Gombrich 1990, p. 9).
ātmêty api prajñapitam anātmêty api deśitam / buddhair nâtmā na cânātmā kaścid ity api deśitam //
It is, in fact, in this way that Gombrich understands the Buddha’s “skill in means” – as the skill of expressing in different ways the same message, which is the truth experienced during the enlightenment: “He had had a clear and compelling vision of the truth and was trying to convey it to a wide range of people with different inclinations and varying presuppositions, so he had to express this message in many different ways” (Gombrich 2006, p. 18). In this case, too, Gombrich’s main worry is that the philosophy contained in the Dharma is, after all, coherent: “If the Buddha was continually arguing ad hominem and adapting what he said to the language of his interlocutor, this must have had enormous implications for the consistency, or rather the inconsistency, of his mode of expression” (ibid.).
As noted by Āryadeva, “That for which someone has [l]iking should first be assessed. Those who are disinclined will not [b]e vessels for the excellent teaching” (Catuḥśatakaśāstrakārikā 110; trans. R. Sonam 2008, p. 139).
A commentarial support to this view may be found in the Chung-lun ad Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6, which argues that the teaching of the self is for people “whose mind is as yet unprepared”, who have “no inkling for nirvana” and know “no fear for punishment” (transl. Bocking, 1995, p. 279).
At first sight, it may seem more likely to suppose that addressees of the teachings of the first mode of the Dharma are actually people attached to the ordinary belief in personal self. Nonetheless, Ganeri’s suggestion that the same teachings are directed, in fact, to “material hedonists” is supported by Nāgārjuna’s commentators, who agree that when the buddhas teach the self they are addressing “nihilists” who deny the self and the karman (cf. Prasannapadā 356.1–9 and Prajñāpradīpa ad Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6a), or assert that “Diese Welt existiert nicht; Die jenseitige Welt existiert nicht” (Akutobhayā ad Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6; transl. Walleser 1911, p. 105).
The author of the Akutobhayā, less emphatically than Candrakīrti and Bhāviveka, confirms that the target of the teaching of anātman are people who simply believe that the self somehow exists as “the doer of good and bad actions, and as the enjoyer of their fruits” (cf. Walleser 1911, p. 105). This view is not confirmed by Piṅgala (Vimalākṣa, Kumārajīva or whoever was the author of the Chung-lun), who holds that the teaching that there is no self was for the sake of “those who practice the blessed virtues of almsgiving, holding the precepts etc., detest and distance themselves from the saṃsāra as lasting extinction” (Chung-lun ad Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6; transl. Bocking, 1995, p. 280). We can suppose that the spiritual approach of such people springs from an egotistic attitude, which could be countered by the theory that “[a]ll dharmas are merely the combination of [empty] causes and conditions” (ibid.), and, therefore, that the self exists “only as a conventional designation” (ibid.).
According to the Akutobhayā, the target of the middle way were/was “[d]en guten Schülern, welche die Gesamtheit guter Anlagen (eig. Wurzeln) zum Reifen gebracht haben (kuśala-mūla-sāmagrī-paripakva), fähig, den Strom des Daseins (bhava) zu durchqueren, Behälter der Mitteilung des höchsten Sinnes (paramārtha-kathā-bhājana-bhūta)” (Akutobhayā ad Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6; transl. Walleser, 1911, p. 105). This kind of people, actually “close to nirvāṇa” (Prasannapadā 358.4–5), “have accumulated vast roots of virtue, have developed their moral faculties (indriya), have broad and profound aspiration (āśaya), and have received the ambrosial teaching of omniscience” (Prajñāpradīpa ad Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6cd; trans. Eckel 1980, p. 219).
Cf. Bopearachchi (2016).
The ordering of these two sermons is that which we find in the first chapter of the Mahāvagga of the Vinayapiṭaka, in the section named “Discourses to the group of five” (Pañcavaggiyakathā). Essentially the same sequence is to be found in the Vinayakṣudravastu of the Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition (T24, no. 1451, 406b29ff.), the only difference being a short passage that in the Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda traditions is considered part of the Dharmacakrapravartana sūtra is here presented as the second Buddha’s sermon and, therefore, the Anātmalakṣana sūtra is reported as the third. In the Vinaya of the Sarvāstivāda school (T23, no. 1435, 448b13ff.) there is only the indication of the Dharmacakrapravartana as the first Buddha’s sermon.
By the same logic, the anomaly pointed out by Williams could also be solved by following Bronkhorst’s (1993, p. 107) suggestion, according to which “initially those Four Noble Truths were not part of the sermon in Benares, and consequently probably not as central to Buddhism as they came to be”.
Even though it seems possible to me to understand the sense in which an intellectual or solely theoretical approach to the Buddha’s teachings differs from a practical or “meditative” approach to the Dharma, what is not clear is what the “contemplative” approach to the same teachings is, how the notion of “contemplative” could be considered an equivalent of “intellectual” (cf. Wynne 2009, pp. 99–102), and in what sense the “contemplative” could be opposed to the “meditative” (rather than the “intellectual”). The expression that Wynne translates as “contemplative/intellectual” is dhammayogā, which may be understood literally as “devoted to the dhamma” (see ibid., p. 96). However, I have my doubts that the word yoga, in an early Buddhist context, could define an “intellectual” and “anti-meditative” approach.
In particular, what seems questionable to me is the pivotal thesis from which Wynne elicits the rest of his argumentation – that is, that the ātman that is denied in the second Buddha’s sermon would not be the “controller” but rather the “controlled”. This would mean that in the same sutta the Buddha would not be attacking “the Upaniṣadic notion of the ātman as the inner controller” (Wynne 2009, p. 87), but rather the notion of a self – allegedly advocated for by the faction of “meditators”, attacked by the school of “contemplatives/intellectuals”, who would have composed the Anattalakkhana sutta – that was changeable “at a person’s whim” (ibid.). Such a self, “consisting of the five aggregates” (ibid., p. 86), would be “controllable by simple thinking”, out of an alleged, denied by the sutta, “‘magical’ ability to exert control over the five aggregates” (ibid., p. 106). Instead of this cumbersome reading, an interpretation like that proposed by Siderits (2007, pp. 37–50) seems definitely more fluent and philologically likely: the ātman ruled out in the second Buddha’s sermon would be a self that is at the same time controller and controlled. The Buddha’s argument is indeed that, if the self existed, it would correspond to one of the skandhas (given that introspection does not confirm to us the existence of anything more than these clusters of psycho-physical phenomena). However, in this case, that skandha should have a reflexive power that allows it to modify itself. This is because our ordinary (rather than, possibly, “Upaniṣadic”) notion of self contains the idea that it has some sort of control over our inner experience. Now, the Buddha argues out of the “Anti-Reflexivity Principle” (Siderits 2007) that none of the aggregates has the power to modify something of itself; hence, none of the aggregates can be the self. So, it is actually true that the hypothesis at stake (and ruled out) in the sutta is that of a self that, insofar as it is identified with a skandha, ought to be controlled – but controlled by itself. If the second Buddha’s sermon is not talking about an alleged (unlikely) power of auto-control, Wynne should explain by whom or what the self would be controlled: should the “whim” and the “thinking” pointed out by Wynne as possible controllers of the self be understood as themselves skandhas? How should we understand the “person” that in the view ruled out in the sutta, according to Wynne, would have control over the self? Would it be another self? Without clarity on these issues, Wynne’s thesis and arguments seem quite weak.
Of course, the point here is not to establish whether the account of the tradition is properly true, that is, historical. Indeed, if we apply strict historical-philological criteria, we can even doubt – again, following reasonings such as that of Drewes (2017) – the existence of a person called Siddhārtha Gotama, who, around 450 AD, had the gnostic experience called bodhi; even more, we may doubt whether the Buddha’s guru career actually began with the delivery, at Isipatana, of the Dhammacakkappavattana sutta and of the Anattalakkhana sutta. The point here is to understand if, by excluding the historicity of everything that is recorded by the tradition, the “invention” and construction of a spiritual tradition like the Buddhist one has happened, nevertheless, under the guidance of an univocal philosophical rationality (which, if it is not that of the historical Buddha, will be that of some other individual or individuals – which for whatever reason remained completely anonymous), or if it is the anarchic and casual outcome of opposing factions of Buddhists who fill the sutta “basket” with disparate views and doctrines. In short, is the reflection the nikāyas devote to the issue of the existence of the self the outcome of a single mind or of different, conflicting intelligences?
Once we have the possibility of explaining the first moments of the Buddha’s preaching in a way that substantially coincides with that recorded by the tradition (which is confirmed by more than one Buddhist school) – even admitting that the same tradition can sometimes depart from the actual course of the facts, but granting that these possible deviations from “history” are, however, respectful of the spirit, contents, and ways of exposition of the Buddha’s teaching – it seems (from an Occamian perspective) “uneconomical” to suppose alternative versions, in complete opposition to the explicit account of the same tradition. These alternative versions, indeed, seem to cause more problems than they solve. For example, Wynne’s explanation of the contents and sequencing of the first two sermons, even though it offers a solution of the alleged problem of the seemingly discrepancy of the sermons, leads us to ask why of the supposed infighting within the early Buddhist community there is no explicit trace either in the tripiṭaka or in the reports of the schism of the saṃgha at the Second Council, and also to wonder how it could happen that a “school” succeeds in ascribing to the Buddha a discourse that he never pronounced, managing to insert it (as his second discourse) within a canon mostly compiled by monks who belonged to different factions.
The circumstance that the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths is formulated so as to not contradict, and apparently respect, the ordinary belief in a personal self does not mean that it cannot be read in a reductionist fashion as well, and thus that it is in sharp contradiction with the teachings of the anattā mode. Indeed, at no point of its formulation is there any explicit mention of the existence of the self: the presence, the causes, the cessation of dukkha are in fact presented in impersonal terms (“birth is suffering, aging is suffering”), and not as characteristics of an ātman or a pudgala ( “I am suffering from birth”, “you have the problem of suffering”). Clearly, due to the importance of this doctrine – which more than once the Buddha points out is his only teaching – it is formulated in a way that, even though the most immature disciple cannot but understand it in personalist terms, it is not in utter friction with other aspects of the Dharma but rather could be – unlike other teachings, as those mentioned in the note 2 above, that are more openly “personalist” – reconciled with them.
It is worth noting that both Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti, after observing (in the introduction to their respective commentaries to Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6 and in their first explanations of the verse) that it is the Buddha himself who sometimes affirms, sometimes denies, and sometimes neither affirms nor denies the existence of the self, give a second interpretative hypothesis according to which the pādas a (ātmêty api prajñapitam) and b (anātmêty api deśitam) of Nāgārjuna’s verse would not refer to the Buddha’s point of view, but rather, respectively, to that of the Sāṃkhyas and the Lokāyatikas: the former would defend the existence of the self while the latter that of the non-self. Therefore, in this alternative reading of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6, Nāgārjuna would be ascribing to the buddhas only the point of view of the denial of self and non-self. Now, regardless of what Nāgārjuna actually meant in his verse, the affirmation that the Buddha “sometimes explained the self, at other times showed the non-self”, on the basis of canonical texts, seems perfectly defensible (and indeed this is clearly the interpretation preferred by Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti themselves).
Candrakīrti is quite explicit in this sense: while still introducing Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18.6, after quoting passages in which the Buddha, respectively, affirms or denies the self, he asks: “why there would be no contradiction between the texts just quoted and the present writing?” (Prasannapadā 355.7–8). The answer is that it is necessary to understand the “aim” (abhiprāya) of the Buddha’s teaching, wherein there is the sharp distinction between “provisional and definitive meaning” (neyanītārtha, Prasannapadā 355.9).
Hayes (1988, pp. 41–52), for example, thinks that the reading of the “canonical collections” (nikāyas) of the Buddha’s sermons shows that he does not endorse any view, neither about the “ultimate nature and extent of the cosmos” (ibid., p. 47) nor about the ultimate nature of nirvāṇa (ibid.). Such a philosophical attitude, Hayes maintains, could be profitably compared to Sextus Empiricus, who avoids both the affirmation and the negation of anything (ibid., p. 52).
A well-known passage where Nāgārjuna establishes the equivalence between “emptiness” and “middle path” is Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.18. The same equivalence, however, can also be established indirectly from the observation that the assumed founder of the Madhyamaka school presents himself, in the Vigrahavyāvartanī and Vaidalyaprakaraṇa, as a “theoretician of emptiness” (śūnyatāvādin) or, more simply, “a person who talks about emptiness” (Huntington 2003, p. 76).
“Emptiness is taught by the conquerors as the expedient to get rid of all [metaphysical] views. But those for whom emptiness is a [metaphysical] view have been called incurable” (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13.8; transl. Siderits/Katsura, 2013, p. 145).
There are several cases, reported by the canon, of followers of Buddha who, though lacking any specific spiritual or ascetic background, were touched by the Dharma and experienced a fast or immediate enlightenment.
Cf. Madhyamakāvatāra 185–186.
From the Madhyamaka point of view, the understanding of the definitiveness of the middle path – i.e., of the emptiness (of the person and the dharmas) – as a view about reality that is truer than the views expressed in the first two modes, would be altogether a misunderstanding of the Buddha’s teaching. In a passage of the Ratnakūṭa quoted by Candrakīrti (Prasannapadā 248.11–12) in his commentary to Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13.8, those who make such a mistake are compared to a sick person who cannot excrete the drug that is supposed to treat her disease. In that case, “the suffering of that person would increase” (gāḍhataraṃ tasya puruṣasya glānyaṃ bhavet, Prasannapadā 248.13–14). Such a comparison – which should be understood as an outright epitome of the Madhyamaka thought – cannot but remind us of Sextus Empiricus’ simile of the laxative at the end of the second book of Against the Logicians (cf. Bett 2005, p. 183). However, this coincidence does not justify, in my view, the conclusion that the Buddha (and Nāgārjuna) may be considered sceptical, albeit (like Sextus Empiricus) “non-dogmatic”: indeed, even though the Buddha definitely cannot be considered a sceptic who, dogmatically, claims to know that we cannot know/say whether x o ~x, it would be equally (philologically) inappropriate to ascribe to him a position such as that of not knowing whether x or ~x or “whether or not it can be known whether x or ~x” (Burton 2001, p. 23).
See Ferraro 2017.
We can also recognize this trend in the Tibetan tenet system doctrine (grub mtha’), wherein the Madhyamaka follower is considered, in general, as “[a] proponent of Buddhist tenets who totally refutes all extremes of permanence, i.e., that any phenomenon ultimately exists, and refutes all extremes of annihilation, i.e., that phenomena do not exist conventionally” (Jam-yang-shay-ba, Great Exposition of Tenets, ca 1a.2; trans. Hopkins 1996, p. 451). Furthermore, the subsystems Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika would split because the follower of the former “is someone who refutes true existence and ultimate existence (thus avoiding the extreme of permanence) but asserts that all phenomena inherently exist in a conventional sense (thus avoiding the extreme of annihilation)” (Newland 1999, p. 64) while the follower of the latter “denies that phenomena inherently exist even conventionally (thus avoiding the extreme of permanence), but does admit the mere conventional existence of phenomena (thus avoiding the extreme of annihilation)” (ibid.). Thus it is clear that in this case, too, the Middle Way is understood as a denial of “being” and “non-being” only in a certain sense, while in another sense they are both affirmed.
See Ferraro 2020.
References
Texts
Akutobhayā. German Translation in Walleser, M. (1911). Die Mittlere Lehre (Mādhyamika-śāstra) des Nāgārjuna. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung.
Aṅguttaranikāya. Pāli text in https://www.tipitaka.org/. Dhamma Giri, Igatpuri: Vipassana Research Institute.
Catuḥśatakaśāstrakārikā. English Transalation in Sonam, R. (2008). Āryadeva’s Four Hundred Stanzas on the Middle Way. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications.
Chung-lun. English Translation in Bocking, B. (1995). Nāgārjuna in China: A Translation of the Middle Treatise. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.
Dhammapada. Pāli text in https://www.tipitaka.org/. Dhamma Giri, Igatpuri: Vipassana Research Institute.
Madhyamakāvatāra. English Transalation in Huntington, C. W. (1989). The Emptiness of Emptiness. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Madhyāntavibhāgabhāṣya. Sanskrit text in Pandeya, R. Madhyāntavibhāgaśāstra. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971.
Mahāvagga Vinayapiṭaka. Pāli text in https://www.tipitaka.org/. Dhamma Giri, Igatpuri: Vipassana Research Institute.
Mūlamadhyamakākārika. English Translation in Siderits, M. and Katsura, Sh. (2013). Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Mūlamadhyamakākārika. Sanskrit text in Ye S. (2011). Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā. New Editions of the Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese Versions, with Commentary and a Modern Chinese Translation. Shanghai: Zhongxi Book Company.
Prajñāpradīpa. English Translation in Eckel, M.D. (1980). “A Question of Nihilism: Bhavaviveka’s Response to the Fundamental Problem of Madhyamika Philosophy”, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University: Cambridge, Massachusetts. 185–263.
Prasannapadā. Sanskrit text in La Vallée Poussin, L. (1903-1913). Mūlamadhyamakakārikās (Mādhyamikasūtras) de Nāgārjuna avec la Prasannapadā Commentaire de Candrakīrti. St. Petersburg: Bibliotheca Buddhica IV.
Saṃyuttanikāya. Pāli text in https://www.tipitaka.org/. Dhamma Giri, Igatpuri: Vipassana Research Institute.
Vinaya Sarvāstivāda (十誦律). Chinese text in Junjirō Takakusu, Kaikyoku Watanabe (1924-1934). Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. 100 vols. Tokyo: Taisho Issaikyo Kankokai. T23, no. 1435, 448b13ff.
Vinayakṣudravastu (根本說一切有部毘奈耶雜事). Chinese text in Junjirō Takakusu, Kaikyoku Watanabe (1924-1934). Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. 100 vols. Tokyo: Taisho Issaikyo Kankokai. T24, no. 1451, 406b29ff.
Studies
Bett, R. (2005). Sextus Empiricus. Against the Logicians. Translated and Edited by Richard Bett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bopearachchi, O. (2016). Seven weeks after the Buddhas enlightenment: Contradictions in text confusions in art. Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Shaoyong Ye for his help in drafting note 25 and its related references. I would also like to thank Professor Leonardo Vieira for his support in translating some parts of my sources, and the anonymous referee of this paper for their helpful comments.
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Ferraro, G. The Three Modes of the Buddha’s Dharma. J Indian Philos 49, 23–44 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-020-09458-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-020-09458-7