Madhyamaka Wiki

Glasenapp–Westerhoff Vedānta Unification

6 min read

The claim

Two independent sources, separated by seventy-four years of Western scholarship, reach the same structural finding: glasenapp-vedanta-buddhism-1950 and westerhoff-candrakirti-2024. That finding defeats Kalupahana’s 1986 charge that Candrakīrti led Madhyamaka toward a “Vedāntic interpretation”. The Mahāyāna school that historically approaches Vedānta is Yogācāra (Asaṅga, Vasubandhu), and Candrakīrti is the principal Indian Mādhyamika critic of Yogācāra. Glasenapp and Westerhoff agree on three things: where the Vedānta-approaching tendency sits, the doctrinal mechanism by which it operates, and Candrakīrti’s specific role as its critic. The agreement is methodologically striking, because the two scholars could hardly be further apart. Glasenapp is a 1950s German comparative Indologist working from Pāli and Sanskrit; Westerhoff is a 2020s Oxford analytic philosopher working from Tibetan and Sanskrit. Two such different routes arriving at one verdict is what gives the convergence its force.

Evidence for

Glasenapp’s structural location of the Vedānta-approaching tendency. Per glasenapp-vedanta-buddhism-1950 (p. 2): “Asanga and Vasubandhu, however, in their doctrine of Consciousness Only, have abandoned the Buddhist principle of denying a positive reality which is at the root of all phenomena, and in doing so, they have made a further approach to Vedānta.” Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, by contrast, Glasenapp reads as staying within the no-substance principle: Nāgārjuna “sees the last unity as a kind of abyss, characterized only negatively, which has no genetic relation to the world” (p. 2). Glasenapp does not engage Candrakīrti by name (the limit of his contribution here), but he places the Vedānta-approaching move in the school Candrakīrti opposes.

Westerhoff’s textual confirmation in 2024. westerhoff-candrakirti-2024 is the most recent sustained analytic-philosophical commentary on Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra (OUP 2024). Westerhoff treats MA 6.45–97, the systematic refutation of vijñaptimātratā and the ālayavijñāna, as the polemical centrepiece of Candrakīrti’s project. Far from leading Madhyamaka toward Vedānta, Candrakīrti’s signature contribution is blocking the Yogācāra exemption of consciousness from universal niḥsvabhāva — the very move that, on Glasenapp’s reading, would have brought Mahāyāna closer to Vedānta. Westerhoff reaches this verdict independently of Glasenapp, and by a different route: verse-by-verse analytic commentary on Candrakīrti’s actual arguments, rather than comparative-Indological structural classification.

The reversed direction of influence. Per Glasenapp (p. 3), the documented historical direction of doctrinal influence is Buddhism → Vedānta, not the reverse. Gauḍapāda (8th c.) absorbed Buddhist illusionism into early Advaita; the world-as-screen image and the formal apparatus of two-level reality in mature Advaita have Buddhist provenance. Kalupahana’s narrative, in which Mahāyāna is corrupted into Vedānta, runs counter to this historical asymmetry. Glasenapp does not cite Mahadevan or Richard King here, but their 1995 work confirms the Buddhism-to-Advaita direction with much fuller historical detail. The convergence is therefore not merely a structural classification; it is the structural classification that maps onto the documented historical influence.

The philological argument from anatta. Glasenapp glosses anatta as denying “substance” in the Western metaphysical sense: “something existing through and in itself, and not through something else; nor existing attached to, or inherent in, something else” (p. 4). This is structurally identical to the Madhyamaka definition of svabhāva that Candrakīrti negates. The term Madhyamaka denies has the same conceptual shape as the anatta of the Pāli canon, not the shape of an Upaniṣadic Ātman concealed as a positive principle. That rules out the philological version of the Vedānta-charge, the claim that Madhyamaka’s śūnyatā is a Vedāntic Absolute under another name. Glasenapp supplies this philological argument; Westerhoff is consistent with it but does not press it.

Convergence with the zhentong cluster. zhentong-is-refined-cittamatra-not-madhyamaka argues that Dolpopa’s gzhan stong ultimate is structurally Yogācāra, not Madhyamaka. The convergence supplies the Indian-side basis for the same boundary: if Yogācāra is the school that historically approaches Vedānta, then a zhentong reading that imports Yogācāra-recursive structure into Madhyamaka is structurally Vedānta-approaching too. The two arguments reinforce one another. Glasenapp and Westerhoff defend Candrakīrti at the Indian level; Red mda’ ba and Gorampa apply the same boundary at the Tibetan level.

Evidence against

  • Glasenapp’s limit. Glasenapp does not engage Candrakīrti by name and does not cite the Madhyamakāvatāra or Prasannapadā. On his side the rebuttal is structural, not textual. Westerhoff 2024 partially closes the gap, since it does engage Candrakīrti’s arguments in detail, but the Glasenapp 1950 piece on its own cannot defeat Kalupahana on the textual level.
  • Westerhoff is not a Madhyamaka apologist. Westerhoff also publishes the westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016 reading, on which Madhyamaka is best read as a sophisticated nihilism. The 2024 volume is constructive antirealist, not Tibetan-tradition orthodox. Setting Westerhoff against Kalupahana therefore invites Kalupahana to reply that the two of them are closer than the rebuttal admits: both reject the Tibetan tradition’s reading, both arrive at deflationary positions, and the difference is one of degree, not kind. The reply is weak, because Westerhoff explicitly defends a Two-Truths-presupposing reading and, in his constructive moments, explicitly distinguishes Madhyamaka from nihilism. Still, it is not formally absurd.
  • Yogācāra-as-approaching-Vedānta is itself contested. Glasenapp’s reading of Yogācāra has been challenged by Lusthaus (2002) and by Garfield’s defence of Yogācāra as phenomenological rather than idealist. If Yogācāra is not the Vedānta-approaching school, the convergence loses one of its premises. The minimal version of the argument survives — Madhyamaka does not approach Vedānta — but the maximal version (Yogācāra does, Madhyamaka does not, Candrakīrti polices the boundary) needs a contested reading of Yogācāra to go through.
  • Kalupahana could downgrade Candrakīrti’s anti-Yogācāra polemic. A Kalupahana-line reply runs as follows. Candrakīrti’s MA 6.45–97 critique of vijñaptimātratā is itself part of the Mahāyāna-internal scholastic apparatus that the original Nāgārjuna would not have recognised. On this reading, Glasenapp and Westerhoff have indeed shown Candrakīrti to be anti-Yogācāra, but his anti-Yogācāra moves are themselves Mahāyāna distortions of Nāgārjuna, not faithful Madhyamaka. The reply is internally consistent with Kalupahana’s overall stance, yet it sacrifices the original 1986 charge: if the Vedānticisation claim is now a charge against the Mahāyāna scholastic apparatus generally, it is no longer a charge specifically about Candrakīrti.
  • Glasenapp’s mid-century Indological assumptions. Glasenapp accepts the hard-edged Hīnayāna–Mahāyāna division and a unidirectional Pāli-then-Sanskrit chronology, both substantially complicated by subsequent work (Schopen, Silk, Walser). The structural argument survives this complication, but Glasenapp’s other claims (about which texts Nāgārjuna had access to, about the dating of Prajñāpāramitā literature) cannot all be carried forward.

Linked pages

Graph View

Backlinks