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Framework Absence Yields Nihilism

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The claim

Modern interpreters who deliberately bracket the Mahāyāna hermeneutical framework — the Two Truths as pedagogical method, the provisional / definitive distinction, the Three Turnings — and treat MMK as a standalone philosophical text in its immediate Abhidharma or Early Buddhist context predictably arrive at one of two destinations: nihilism (Burton, with Williams as background) or deflationary pragmatism (Kalupahana). These outcomes are not random misreadings; they are structural consequences of removing the interpretive resources by which the commentarial tradition avoids them.

Evidence for

Framework-removal does not produce random misreadings; it produces a small, recurring family of failure modes. The two main destinations are nihilism and deflationary pragmatism, with three further sub-patterns — bare formalism, Western-category overlay, and partial removal with localised collapse. The exhibits below are grouped by failure mode and followed by the diagnostic evidence — Tsongkhapa, Nāgārjuna himself, and Westerhoff’s catalogue — that explains why the move drives the verdict.

Burton (1999) — nihilism by the Abhidharma route (the paradigm case)

burton-emptiness-appraised-1999 is the cleanest exhibit. Burton deliberately disengages from the commentarial tradition — “I will be dealing with Madhyamaka at its very earliest stage of development… careful not to import what are actually later Mādhyamika concepts” (p. 6) — and reads MMK in its Abhidharma context. The result is the regress argument: if all entities are prajñaptimātra, there must be something unconstructed out of which they are constructed and someone unconstructed who does the constructing; without these, conceptual construction cannot take place; therefore nothing can exist. Tellingly, Burton acknowledges the dGe lugs “emptiness of emptiness” reply (Ch 4 n. 23) as “the most ingenious attempted solution” he has met — and then excludes it by self-imposed method. The nihilism follows from the methodology, not from the text.

The mechanism is visible one chapter earlier. Burton’s Ch 3 (“Non-Conceptuality and Knowledge of Reality”) reaches a deflationary way-station — interpretation (2): there is no unconceptualisable reality₂, only a meditative experience of the absence of svabhāva — which is not yet nihilism and is in places framework-friendly (he reads Candrakīrti’s emptiness of emptiness at MA VI.186 non-foundationally: emptiness is no dngos po / bhāva). It is the un-retracted Abhidharma foundationalist premise of Ch 4, not the deflation of Ch 3, that tips the reading over the edge — confirming that the move, not the deflation, drives the verdict. (The Ch-3 internal inconsistency — non-foundationalist gloss conceded, then a foundationalist regress run — is developed at nihilism-charge-refuted, “Refuting Burton”.)

Wood (1994) — nihilism by the formal-logical route

wood-nagarjunian-disputations-1994 reaches the same destination from a non-overlapping direction. A consistent prasajya reading of the catuṣkoṭi (Routley–Meyer relevant logic, Matilal’s speech-act and Buridan–Prior treatments, and Ruegg’s FPC all dismissed) terminates in sarvam sarvena nāsti — “sheer, unqualified, absolute nothingness” (Ch V ). Two features make him distinctive:

  • He does not ignore the framework. He engages the Two Truths and rejects them as “a literal or philosophical distinction” (Ch V ; Ch IV n. 11), and engages Jayatilleke’s pragmatic reading of the avyākata questions and dismisses it as a category mistake (Ch II §–4). This is the cleanest case of argumentative, not merely methodological, framework rejection — the case the framework-as-pedagogy specification has to handle on its own terms.
  • His nihilism is textually broad. Beyond the catuṣkoṭi he reads the nirvāṇa chapter (MMK 25) nihilistically (Ch IV §–20), taking 25:7–8 to concede only that nirvāṇa is not a cessation-of-an-existent while remaining “absolute non-existence,” and reading the nirvāṇa = saṃsāra equation (25:19–20) as denying every mode of nirvāṇic existence.

Wood is mutually unaware of Burton; the independent convergence by a different path strengthens the case. He also presses the external-reception argument the framework defence must answer: the unanimous fifteen-hundred-year Indian reading of Madhyamaka as nihilism (Mīmāṃsakas, Vedāntins, Naiyāyikas, Jainas and Vijñānavādins — Ch I ; Ch V ).

Oetke (1991) — framework as bare formalism

oetke-remarks-interpretation-1991 gives the cleanest single-sentence formulation of the framework-absent reading: “on the level of the highest truth there is nothing of any kind.” But Oetke is not a clean removal reader — he retains the Two Truths as a formal sentential-operator scaffolding while emptying it of pedagogical content (no neyārtha / nītārtha, no Three Turnings, no soteriological function), glossing the paramārtha-level by analogy with the theoretical level in physical science. The result is structurally identical to nihilism while still admitting a “neutral” phenomenal discourse. This refines the thesis: framework-as-formalism without framework-as-teaching is not framework retention — the pedagogical content is the load-bearing part. His MMK 24:18 / upādāya prajñapti derivation (fn. 6) is the same regress-from-universal-prajñaptimātra inference Burton presses, in a different idiom.

Kalupahana (1986) — the other destination: deflationary pragmatism

kalupahana-mmk-1986 removes the Mahāyāna framework by treating MMK as “a superb commentary on the [Kaccāyanagotta Sutta],” returning Nāgārjuna to Early Buddhism. The result is a deflationary pragmatic reading: emptiness becomes “absence of metaphysics, not special insight,” and the Two Truths becomes flat and non-hierarchical. The instability is self-referential — Kalupahana reads Nāgārjuna as apophatic about ultimate reality while himself being hyperkataphatic about what Nāgārjuna “really” meant (empirical pragmatism), what his “true” project was, and what counts as “authentic” Buddhism. The same etymological tool (sammuti → saṃvṛti) is deployed to opposite conclusions across his 1976 and 1986 books with no retraction of method (cf. kalupahana-buddhist-philosophy-1976) — showing the cataphatic interpretive authority doing the work the framework would do for a framework-respecting reader.

Williams (1998) — partial removal, localised collapse

Via siderits-reality-altruism-2000, Williams is the intermediate failure mode between full removal (Burton) and full retention (the tradition). He accepts the Two Truths as a level-distinction and engages the Indo-Tibetan commentators by name, but defects on the universal-emptiness extension: he holds with Abhidharma that pains have svabhāva (“It hurts. Its existence is its hurting”; p. 247 n. 86) and finds the claim that nothing bears intrinsic nature “equivalent to metaphysical nihilism” (p. 222 n. 26). The predicted incoherent reading follows — he reads BCA 8.101–103 as destroying the bodhisattva path, since Śāntideva needs persons to be conventionally as well as ultimately unreal. Siderits’s diagnosis (pp. 418–420) is the structurally important part: Williams’s own functional analysis of pain undermines the intrinsic phenomenal character he simultaneously needs pains to have — multiple realisability, functional role, and the Abhidharma “found under analysis” cannot all be true. Framework-as-scaffolding without framework-as-content yields a localised collapse on a specific item (pain) rather than Burton’s global one. (Williams was Burton’s doctoral supervisor; the Bristol school’s posture is the partial-removal pattern Williams instantiates and Burton presses to the limit.)

Della Santina (1986) — the Western-category overlay

della-santina-madhyamaka-western-1986 diagnoses a third sub-pattern: what happens when Western interpretive categories are overlaid on a partially-retained framework. Murti’s Central Philosophy of Buddhism (1955) reads the Two Truths through Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal split and arrives at “absolutism”; Streng (1967) and Gudmunsen (1977) read it through later-Wittgensteinian ordinary-language theory and arrive at a “leave everything as it is” positivism. Della Santina’s diagnostic against both: the framework’s content is pedagogical and soteriological (“devices, soteriological tools, not ontological assertions”), and overlaying it with Kantian ontology or Wittgensteinian semantics ontologises what was meant as a teaching-device. Framework retention without framework content is thus a partial-engagement failure mode parallel to Oetke’s formalism — yielding absolutism on the Kantian overlay and positivism on the Wittgensteinian one. (Methodologically convergent with Sprung’s reading-from-inside, but reaching the opposite verdict on Wittgenstein.)

Siderits (2000) — corroboration from the analytic side

Beyond exhibiting Williams’s failure mode, siderits-reality-altruism-2000 (pp. 421–422) supplies evidence in the opposite direction. When Siderits — an analytic reconstructor, not a commentarial reader — defends Śāntideva against Williams, the move on which the whole defence turns is the graded-teaching framework: BCA 8 (Meditation) read as provisional Reductionism, BCA 9 (Understanding) as the Madhyamaka nītārtha corrective, cross-referenced to MMK 18:8. Siderits does not name neyārtha / nītārtha but uses the device. The framework does real interpretive work even for a reader who would not antecedently reach for it. (Pair with BCA 9.1, “all this was taught by the Buddha for the sake of gaining prajñā,” as the text’s own warrant.)

Tsongkhapa — the diagnosis, six centuries early

jinpa-tsongkhapa-qualms-1999 names the shared assumption of nihilist and essentialist alike: both equate existence with intrinsic existence (svabhāva-sat). The essentialist runs it forwards (things exist, therefore they have svabhāva); the nihilist runs it backwards (things lack svabhāva, therefore they do not exist). Burton’s regress runs the second inference exactly. Tsongkhapa’s framework — dependent origination as the content of emptiness, conventional existence preserved — is the device that breaks the equation. Strip it out and the nihilist conclusion follows mechanically.

Nāgārjuna himself — the primary-text anticipation (Śūnyatāsaptati 44 & 70)

A primary-text witness against the framework-removed reading — neither commentarial nor modern (komito-seventy-stanzas-1987 / Śūnyatāsaptati). ŚS 44 instructs the reader that “whatever is said by the Buddha has the two truths as its chief underlying thought… when he says ‘existence’ his chief underlying thought is conventional existence; when he says ‘non-existence’ his chief underlying thought is non-inherent existence” — Nāgārjuna forbidding the Burton inference: “non-inherent existence” must not be read as “non-existence.” ŚS 70 diagnoses why the misreading recurs: those who do not understand what the Tathāgata explains as “conventionally existent and empty of the sign of true existence are frightened by this teaching.” The objection itself is staged in śrāvaka form at vv. 15–22 (Vaibhāṣika at v. 15; the horns-of-a-rabbit worry at v. 18), answered by naming the two extremes (v. 21), with the positive-conventional qualifier supplied at vv. 40–42 (the emanation simile). Four tightly-coupled nodes in a 73-verse text: Nāgārjuna names the failure mode and pre-emptively closes it.

Westerhoff’s catalogue — three constituencies, one move

westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016 (pp. 339–354) surveys three independent constituencies who have read Madhyamaka as nihilism; once their reasoning is examined, all three exhibit the framework-removal pattern:

  • Non-Buddhist Indian critics — Uddyotakara (Nyāya), Kumārila (Mīmāṃsā), Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, Madhva, Mādhava — all share the svabhāva-equation Tsongkhapa diagnoses (existence = svabhāva-existence, so niḥsvabhāva = non-existence); external readers without the framework that breaks it.
  • Buddhist critics — Asaṅga (Bodhisattvabhūmi, the pradhāna nāstika charge), Vasubandhu (sarvanāstitā per AKBh + Yaśomitra), with Sthiramati, Ratnākaraśānti, and the Yogācāra interlocutors of Śāntideva and Kamalaśīla — operate before or outside the Prāsaṅgika apparatus. Asaṅga’s argument that “all is mere designation” requires a non-designated vastumātra basis is structurally identical to the modern Williams–Burton regress (Westerhoff makes the lineage explicit, p. 354), confirming that the type of move drives the conclusion, not the side of the Buddhist boundary.
  • Modern Buddhologists — Burnouf (1844), Kern (1896), Walleser (1911), Keith (1923), Wach (1924), Stcherbatsky (1927), de la Vallée Poussin (Hastings entry), Wood (1994), Oetke (1991), Williams (1998 ff.), Burton (1999 ff.) — each instantiating framework-removal in some form.

The convergence across all three constituencies, despite their radically different starting points, is the strongest available evidence that the move is doing the work. Westerhoff uses the same convergence against the “two millennia of misreaders” dismissal (p. 358); his own diagnosis differs (he reads it as evidence that a sophisticated nihilism is defensible), but the two are compatible — this thesis explains why the misreading recurs, Westerhoff’s reply how to articulate the recurrent move philosophically. For the per-author argumentative content (Uddyotakara’s four epistemic-instrument arguments; Kumārila’s denial-of-cognition extension; Śaṅkara’s vyavahāra point; Rāmānuja’s local-vs-universal grammar; Madhva’s asat-causality objection; Mādhava’s mutual-dependence collapse; Asaṅga’s durgṛhīta-śūnyatā diagnosis), see the catalogue section of westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016.

The mechanism behind the first two constituencies — why the svabhāva-equation bites for them in particular. The non-Buddhist Indian critics and the Yogācāra/Buddhist critics share a feature that the bare “they removed the framework” diagnosis leaves implicit: each was committed to a positively-grounded conventional ontology of its own — the Naiyāyika categories, the Mīmāṃsaka and Vedāntin sat, the Yogācāra three-natures register with its grounded paratantra. A reader holding such a commitment approaches any analysis expecting a positive remainder once the negation has done its work. Madhyamaka — the Prāsaṅgika above all — supplies none: it negates every conventional ontology and grounds conventional truth only “in accordance with the world” (MA 6.160), with no objective grounding (Phya pa’s twelfth-century Question 5; Prāsaṅgika-Svātantrika). Where a positive remainder is expected and none is found, the svabhāva-equation (existence = svabhāva-existence) converts the absent remainder directly into abhāva. This is why the equation Tsongkhapa diagnoses bites for the system-builders specifically: it is not merely that they lack the framework that breaks the equation, but that their own conventional-ontological commitment primes the backwards inference. The classical-Indian consensus is therefore the same phenomenon as the modern nihilist verdict — system-building readers meeting a deliberately system-refusing method — positively characterised at madhyamaka-is-method-not-standalone-system and deployed against Wood’s reception-history argument at nihilism-charge-refuted (Wood Step 7).

In the disambiguation set out at nihilism-charge-refuted, the charge these system-builders actually establish is nihilism₂ — the saṃvṛti-level absence of a grounded conventional ontology, which is true and is just the method-not-system thesis seen from outside — which they then misread as nihilism₁, the metaphysical “nothing exists,” via the svabhāva-equation. The Buddhist critics are the clearest case: Asaṅga’s pradhāna nāstika and Vasubandhu’s sarvanāstitā both turn on a missing basis (the non-designated vastumātra) — a demand for conventional-level grounding — so what they name is precisely nihilism₂, not the ultimate-level denial they are taken to have proved.

The contrast is sharpened by the Svātantrika who supplies a positively-grounded conventional ontology and yet does not collapse into nihilism: Śāntarakṣita takes the grounded Yogācāra register (mind-only-appearances, reflexive awareness, causally-efficient things) as conventional truth — exactly the “positively-grounded conventional ontology” that primes the svabhāva-equation — but, crucially, then runs the same neither-one-nor-many analysis over that register to empty mind itself (Madhyamakālaṅkāra v. 92; shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara). Because the grounded conventional is retained as conventional and emptied only ultimately, the system-builder’s expected-positive-remainder is satisfied at the relative level and the backwards inference to abhāva never fires. This is the in-tradition control case: it is not the presence of a conventional ontology that yields nihilism but the expectation of a positive ultimate remainder that the Prāsaṅgika method refuses to supply.

The convergence pattern

Burton (Western analytic, Buddhist practitioner) reaches nihilism; Kalupahana (Sri Lankan academic, Theravāda-leaning) reaches pragmatic deflation; Wood reaches nihilism by formal logic; Oetke by bare formalism; Williams collapses locally. Scholars from very different starting points, all employing the same methodological move, produce the same small family of failure modes across 1979 / 1986 / 1991 / 1994 / 1999 (with Sprung as the deflationary elder). This is corroborating evidence that the move, not the scholar, is doing the work.

The genre-level grounding — why the text formally requires the framework

The deepest point, developed in tenpa-personal-notes-2025 via westerhoff-madhyamaka-2009’s methodological remarks: “Indian philosophical texts (unlike their Western counterparts) were generally not intended to provide the reader with a self-contained exposition of the author’s thoughts. Instead their versified form provided the structure of the argument to be memorized, which would then be elaborated on by written commentaries and by a teacher’s oral explanations.” MMK is a versified memorisation-structure designed to be filled in by commentary and oral transmission. This sharpens the argument from a contingent pattern (framework-removed readings happen to collapse) into a methodological exclusion (the genre of the text formally requires the framework). Bridged on the Tibetan side by George Dreyfus’s Recognizing Reality on the commentarial mode of Tibetan scholastic discourse, and convergent with the Padmakara Translators’ Introduction to mipham-introduction-middle-way-2002 on Madhyamaka being best understood through oral exposition by a qualified teacher.

Evidence against / objections

Walser — the strategic-publication reframing

walser-nagarjuna-2005 (Ch. 7 pp. 234–235, 257–260) is a complement at a different level of explanation, with one narrow residual tension. Walser endorses Burton’s textual reading that Nāgārjuna equates dependent origination with prajñaptisat at MMK 24:18, but reframes the move as a strategic alliance with the Prajñaptivādins / Pudgalavādins (whose Saṃmitīya Nikāya Śāstra used upādāya prajñapti in just this way) rather than as a regress-generating category mistake. The two accounts answer different questions: Walser explains why Nāgārjuna phrased the verse this way (sociological — institutional alliance with schools whose cooperation he needed); this argument explains what the verse means within the broader project (hermeneutical — its placement in the neyārtha / nītārtha scaffolding). The only residual tension is whether the prajñaptisat-equation at MMK 24:18 is best explained as Pudgalavādin alliance (Walser/Burton) or as a neyārtha-friendly conventional formulation the framework dissolves — a narrow textual question, not a wholesale alternative. Walser himself distinguishes MMK from the Ratnāvalī (which directly attacks Pudgalavāda), so the doctrinal content cannot be read off the institutional setting alone; framework-internal interpretation retains explanatory work the Walser thesis does not displace.

Westerhoff — the equilibrium principle (the strongest counter)

westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016 (with westerhoff-madhyamaka-2009) is the strongest counter. Westerhoff partially concedes the nihilist reading while remaining framework-engaged: a sophisticated nihilism — emptiness as “conventional corrective” rather than ultimate description, truth as warranted assertibility — can be internally coherent without collapsing into Burton’s regress. This complicates the “framework-absence → nihilism” framing in two ways: nihilism need not be incoherent, and a framework-engaged interpretation can itself reach nihilist-adjacent conclusions. The textual root of the concession is Candrakīrti’s own “theft” example (Prasannapadā on MMK 18:7, vastutas tulyatā): Candrakīrti grants that the Mādhyamika and the nihilist say “essentially the same thing” about what is not established (two men accuse a third of theft — one lying, one having witnessed it), conceding ontological sameness while insisting on a vast epistemological and soteriological chasm. This is exactly why the charge tracks a real feature of the system rather than being a simple misunderstanding — and it is the point the rebuttal sibling, nihilism-charge-refuted, turns to the framework’s advantage (the conceded sameness is the non-affirming negation, not annihilationism). Westerhoff is best treated as the limit case distinguishing “nihilism as predicted failure mode” from “nihilism as defensible philosophical position.” On the disambiguation of nihilism-charge-refuted his concession is label-level: the vastutas tulyatā sameness he grants is nihilism₂ (the shared saṃvṛti-level absence of a grounded conventional), while the epistemological-soteriological chasm he insists on is the refusal of nihilism₁ — so his “sophisticated nihilism” disputes the word, not the metaphysical claim, and is opponent-relative (sharpest against naturalistic realists, who are the readers expecting the grounded conventional whose absence it names). However, his survey (pp. 337–376) is itself the richest single body of positive evidence for this thesis — see “Westerhoff’s catalogue” above.

Burton as internal critic, not hostile outsider

Burton’s self-identification as a practising Buddhist complicates any framing of him as a hostile outsider whose nihilism is a category mistake from without. He is offering internal critique — and the argument has to engage it on its merits, not dismiss it methodologically.

The dGe lugs solution is itself contested within the framework

Gorampa and the Ninth Karmapa both reject Tsongkhapa’s specific resolution while remaining framework-internal. So the claim “the framework dissolves the regress” must specify which framework-internal resolution is meant — there is no single dGe lugs answer that covers the field.

Selection effect

Burton and Kalupahana are paradigm cases chosen because they fit the thesis cleanly. Garfield and Siderits also work largely outside the traditional framework yet produce more coherent readings (outline , ). The argument needs to show that their success comes from partial framework-engagement rather than from their being framework-absent counter-examples.

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