Position summary
Peter Della Santina took his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of Delhi. When he wrote his 1986 Philosophy East and West article (see della-santina-madhyamaka-western-1986), he was a Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. His published work spans Madhyamaka — a 1986 Motilal Banarsidass volume on the Mādhyamika schools in India — and Theravāda, in the Buddhist Publication Society Tree of Enlightenment lectures. The 1986 article is a comparative essay with a single target: the most influential Western readings of Madhyamaka. Murti’s Kantian “absolutism” and the Wittgensteinian “positivism” of Streng and Gudmunsen both fail, Della Santina argues, because they import Western philosophical categories onto a tradition that is soteriological rather than descriptive.
His positive position runs as follows. Madhyamaka, as the systematic articulation of the Buddha’s pragmatic anti-metaphysical stance, is neither nihilism nor absolutism nor positivism. Emptiness is “not an ontological category, but a soteriological therapy”; the Two Truths is “nothing more than a pedagogical device.” Forms of experience — space, time, substance, causality — are objectified concepts conditioned by vāsanā (བག་ཆགས་) and corresponding to prapañca (སྤྲོས་པ་). They are also, and this is the decisive point, alterable through the soteriological process. Madhyamaka grants that all experience is essentially mental, yet it does not ontologise consciousness. That refusal separates it both from Yogācāra and from any Kantian framework that requires extra-mental things-in-themselves.
Hermeneutical approach
Della Santina practises framework-respecting comparativism from the Indo-Tibetan side. He presupposes the Mahāyāna hermeneutical framework — Two Truths, neyārtha / nītārtha, the soteriological priority of the path — and then tests Western philosophical categories for their fit, or lack of fit, with that prior commitment. He opens with a methodological warning: comparison should not be used to secure “academic philosophical respectability” for non-Western systems, nor to license “facile and superficial equations.” That warning is itself an articulation of a framework-engaged hermeneutic.
His engagement with Western philosophy is selective rather than systematic. Kant and Wittgenstein come in for treatment because modern scholars have “recognised” them “as such” — as resembling Madhyamaka. Hume, Locke, and Berkeley appear only in passing, as exhibits in the realism/idealism evolution. The article does not treat analytic Madhyamaka (Robinson, Streng, Cheng aside) as a substantive philosophical interlocutor. Its register is closer to mid-twentieth-century Philosophy East and West comparative philosophy than to the analytic Buddhist philosophy of the century’s end.
Key claims
- Western philosophy and Indian philosophy occupy non-overlapping universes of discourse. The Western descriptive/scientific tradition has, since the rise of Christian orthodoxy, lacked the soteriological-existential dimension that defines Indian philosophy.
- The rationalism / empiricism dilemma does not arise for Madhyamaka. Buddhist vāsanā (impressions) accounts for “innate” ideas as the residue of accumulated cross-life experience — neither a priori rational insight nor merely a posteriori convention.
- Madhyamaka is not Kantian absolutism. The translation of paramārtha as “absolute” and saṃvṛti / vyavahāra as “relative” cannot be justified etymologically; the division between the two truths is pedagogical, not ontological; emptiness is a “soteriological therapy,” not an absolute reality. Murti’s Central Philosophy of Buddhism (1955) is the principal target.
- Madhyamaka is not Wittgensteinian positivism. The negation of the conventional truth is itself negated, but “the negation of a negation for the Madhyamaka does not entail the reinstatement of the original hypothesis.” Ordinary language is “neither true nor false” — a concession to conventional usage, not a paradigm of truth.
- Madhyamaka is not Yogācāra. Although all experience is mental, consciousness is not ontologised. Yogācāra “make consciousness into a real, an existing, thing”; Madhyamaka does not.
- Forms of experience (space, time, substance, causality) are alterable. They are vikalpa objectified by vāsanā into prapañca, and the vāsanā that gives rise to them can be self-consciously transformed. Kant’s treatment of these forms as necessary and unalterable is “inescapably ontological.”
- The ultimate is knowable both immediately and mediately. Citing Madhyamakālaṅkārakārikā v. 75: “By the reason that sunders conceptualism, the ultimate is known mediately.” Directly contrasts with Kantian epistemic closure of the noumenal.
- Madhyamaka unifies the rigour of philosophy with the relevance of religion in a way that the Western tradition, fragmented since the rise of Christian orthodoxy, has not been able to recover.
Related scholars
- T. R. V. Murti (The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 1955) — the principal target. Della Santina rejects Murti’s Kantian “absolutism” on etymological, doctrinal, and methodological grounds.
- Sprung — Della Santina prefers the Tibetan exegetical reading of prapañca (as the crystallised objective counterpart of vikalpa) over Sprung’s “manifold of named things” rendering. The two share Mahāyāna-respecting comparativism but diverge on the Wittgensteinian deflationary register.
- Frederick Streng (Emptiness, 1967) and C. Gudmunsen (Wittgenstein and Buddhism, 1977) — the Wittgensteinian-positivist line Della Santina criticises at length.
- Hsueh-Li Cheng (1981) — cited approvingly. Cheng’s San-Lun reading agrees independently with the Tibetan exegetical reading of prapañca that Della Santina endorses.
- Th. Stcherbatsky (Buddhist Logic, 1962) — cited as the source of the Sautrāntika-unique-particulars reading that Della Santina suggests is the better candidate for a Kantian “things-in-themselves” comparison than the Madhyamaka paramārtha.
- Kalupahana — same year (1986), opposite direction. Della Santina cannot have read Kalupahana before this article, but the diagnostic transfers cleanly.
- Mipham, Śāntarakṣita — structural alignment on the “all experience is mental but consciousness not ontologised” architecture; not named by Della Santina but doctrinally close.
- Candrakīrti — cited at p. 47 (Prasannapadā on MMK XVIII.5) for the principle that Madhyamaka can deploy any philosophical position as a soteriological tool.