Abstract
Certain Buddhist texts contain statements that are prima facie contradictions. The scholarly consensus has been that such statements are meant to serve a rhetorical function that depends on the apparent contradictions being resolvable. But recently it has been claimed that such statements are meant to be taken literally: their authors assert as true statements that are of the form ‘p and not p’. This claim has ramifications for our understanding of the role played by the principle of non-contradiction in Buddhist argumentation. I argue that these make the claim less plausible.
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Notes
Logical paradoxes typically involve sets of statements. Such is the case for instance with sorites paradoxes. But there are formulations of the Liar that involve a single statement, e.g., “This statement is false.”
In his comments on Mūlamadhyamakakārikās XV, 2. See Prasannapadā, ed. La Vallée Poussin (1970, pp. 264–265): “Whatever is called the dharma-ness of dharmas, just that is the own-form of that. But what is this dharma-ness of dharmas? It is the intrinsic nature of dharmas. What is this intrinsic nature? Essence. And what is this essence? Emptiness. And what is this emptiness? Being devoid of intrinsic nature. What is this being devoid of intrinsic nature? Thusness.”
Garfield and Priest note that in employing reductio arguments, Nāgārjuna shows himself to be committed to the falsity of contradictions in the conventional plane (Garfield 2002, pp. 94–96). They claim he holds that it is only “at the limit” in the domain of the ultimate truth that there may be true contradictions. But they do not explain how such a distinction can be shown to be principled.
Cf. Candrakīrti' Prasannapadā on Mūlamadhyamakakārikās xxvii.28, which concerns the rejection of the possibility that existence both has and does not have a limit: “Because the object of the negation cannot really be, so the negation is not possible.”
References
Garfield, Jay L. 2002. Empty words, Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
La Vallée Poussin, L. de. 1970. Mūlamadhyamakakārikās (Mādhyamikasūtras) de Nāgārjuna, avec la Prasannapadā commentaire de Candrakīrti, first published St. Petersburg, 1903–1913, reprinted Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück.
Priest, Graham G. 2004. Dialetheism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/stanford/entries/dialetheism/, first published 1998, substantially revised 2004.
Priest, Graham G., and Jay L. Garfield. 2002. Nāgārjuna and the Limits of Thought. In Beyond the limits of thought, ed. Graham Priest. Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press, also included in Jay Garfield (2002).
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Siderits, M. Contradiction in Buddhist Argumentation. Argumentation 22, 125–133 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9073-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9073-8