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Glasenapp–Westerhoff Vedānta Unification

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The claim

Two independent sources separated by seventy-four years of Western scholarship — glasenapp-vedanta-buddhism-1950 and westerhoff-candrakirti-2024 — converge on a structural finding that 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 the location of the Vedānta-approaching tendency, on the doctrinal mechanism by which it operates, and on Candrakīrti’s specific role as its critic. Their convergence is methodologically striking — Glasenapp is a 1950s German comparative Indologist working from Pāli and Sanskrit; Westerhoff is a 2020s Oxford analytic philosopher working from Tibetan and Sanskrit — and the wiki has not yet thematised the convergence as a load-bearing argument. This page does so.

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.” By contrast, Glasenapp reads Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka as remaining 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 — that is the limit of the rebuttal — but he locates 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 — exactly the move that, on Glasenapp’s reading, would have brought Mahāyāna closer to Vedānta. Westerhoff’s reading is independent of Glasenapp’s and reaches the same structural verdict 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 — Mahāyāna-being-corrupted-into-Vedānta — runs counter to the documented 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 Glasenapp / Westerhoff convergence is therefore not just 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 Upaniṣadic Ātman as a concealed positive principle. This rules out the philological version of the Vedānta-charge: that Madhyamaka’s śūnyatā is a Vedāntic Absolute under another name. Glasenapp supplies the 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 Glasenapp / Westerhoff convergence supplies the Indian-side basis for the same boundary: if Yogācāra is the school that historically approaches Vedānta, then the zhentong reading that imports Yogācāra-recursive structure into Madhyamaka is structurally Vedānta-approaching too. The two arguments reinforce one another: Glasenapp / Westerhoff defend Candrakīrti at the Indian level; Red mda’ ba / 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. The rebuttal is structural, not textual, on the Glasenapp side. This limitation is partially closed by Westerhoff 2024 (which 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; using Westerhoff against Kalupahana invites Kalupahana to reply that Westerhoff and he are closer than the rebuttal admits (both reject the Tibetan tradition’s reading; both arrive at deflationary positions; the difference is one of degree, not kind). The reply is weak — Westerhoff explicitly defends a Two-Truths-presupposing reading and explicitly distinguishes Madhyamaka from nihilism in his constructive moments — but 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-not-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) requires a contested reading of Yogācāra to go through.
  • Kalupahana could downgrade Candrakīrti’s anti-Yogācāra polemic. A Kalupahana-line reply: 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 reply, Glasenapp and Westerhoff are both showing that Candrakīrti is anti-Yogācāra — but Candrakīrti’s anti-Yogācāra moves are themselves Mahāyāna distortions of Nāgārjuna, not faithful Madhyamaka. This reply is internally consistent with Kalupahana’s overall stance but it sacrifices the original 1986 charge: if the Vedānticisation claim is now a charge against the Mahāyāna scholastic apparatus generally, it ceases to be 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 that subsequent work (Schopen, Silk, Walser) has substantially complicated. 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.

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