Garfield

Position summary

Jay Garfield (Smith College; previously University of Tasmania; widely co-teaching at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath) is among the most influential modern interpreters of Madhyamaka in the analytic-philosophical world. His reading, set out most fully in The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995, his MMK translation and commentary — not yet added) and applied in garfield-causality-2001, treats Nāgārjuna not as a quarry for historical reconstruction but as a correct philosopher whose insights bear directly on contemporary problems.

Jay Garfield’s reading is now grounded on its fullest statement, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995, his complete MMK translation and verse-by-verse commentary, garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995), with the application-paper garfield-causality-2001 presupposing it. Two claims are load-bearing there: (1) the two truths are “Nāgārjuna’s greatest philosophical contribution” — emptiness is the lack of intrinsic nature, and to be empty is not to be non-existent but to be conventionally real, i.e. dependently arisen and dependently designated; (2) the emptiness of emptiness is the architectural key — emptiness is itself empty, “not a self-existent void standing behind a veil of illusion… but merely a characteristic of conventional reality,” a doctrine present already in MMK Ch I and made explicit at MMK 24:18 (which he calls “the climax of the entire text”).

The core of his reading is the co-relativity of emptiness (སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་) and dependent origination (རྟེན་འབྲེལ་): to be empty just is to be dependently arisen (MMK XXIV:18–19). From this he derives a deflationary account of causation — Nāgārjuna rejects causal powers (the hetu of the metaphysicians) and retains only conditions (pratyaya), yielding a conventionalist regularism in which explanation tracks regularities embedded in ever-wider regularities, never bottoming out in an occult “cement of the universe.” Garfield reads this as a genuine middle way between a realism about causal powers and “a random and inexplicable universe,” and as anticipating Hume and Wittgenstein.

He is emphatically anti-nihilist: the nihilist reading is one “nobody who reads the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā through to the end could seriously defend.” The deepest reificatory temptation, he argues, is to posit a hidden substratum holding causes to effects or the self together across time; yielding to it leads at once to nihilism about the empirical world and to untenable realism about the transcendent.

A distinctive second strand is his framework-internal critique of Geluk doxography. In the bodhicitta/rebirth argument of garfield-causality-2001 he charges the dGe lugs pa tradition (via rGyal tshab on Dharmakīrti) with “Farabi’s fallacy” — the assumption that two great philosophers (here Nāgārjuna and Dharmakīrti) must be mutually consistent — and argues that the claim “belief in rebirth is necessary for bodhicitta” presupposes a substantial causal basis that Nāgārjuna’s emptiness of causation denies. He calls this position “absolutely orthodox Madhyamaka” while heterodox within Geluk.

Hermeneutical approach

Garfield works in the analytic idiom (Hume, Wittgenstein, Quine, Kant, Sextus Empiricus, philosophy of science and mind) but, unlike Burton or Wood, he does not bracket the commentarial tradition. In The Fundamental Wisdom (garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995) he says so programmatically: the reading is “situated squarely within a Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamika interpretation… more specifically… heavily influenced by the Tibetan Geluk-pa tradition that takes as central the commentaries of dGe-‘dun-grub, mKhas-grub-rje, and especially, Je Tsong Khapa,” supplemented by oral commentary from Drepung Loseling geshes (Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe, Gen Lobzang Gyatso). He declares the reading “never conflicts directly with that of Candrakīrti,” reads the dedicatory verses through the Prasannapadā (“the dedication determines the Prāsaṅgika reading”), and uses the prasajya/paryudāsa and emptiness-of-emptiness machinery throughout. On the final chapter (27:30, “the relinquishing of all views”) he “depart[s] from the most common Geluk-pa interpretation entirely in favor of a line more closely associated with the Nyingma-pa reading.” He is also a translator of the tradition — his co-translation (with Geshe Ngawang Samten) of Tsongkhapa’s Ocean of Reasoning is in the wiki at tsongkhapa-ocean-of-reasoning-1408.

With FWMW added, the placement can be settled on his fullest statement, and it cuts decisively against “primarily Western method”: his reading is framework-internal by his own declaration. The honest qualification is now about register, not method — his primary idiom and audience are Western, and his most distinctive flourishes are comparative (Hume, Wittgenstein, Kant). He is more framework-engaged than the deflationary cohort (Kalupahana, Burton, Wood, Oetke), at or past the Westerhoff/Siderits boundary. The accurate placement: a framework-engaging modern with a Western primary register who reads the MMK through the Indo-Tibetan commentaries, an ally on framework-necessity, method-not-system, and the nihilism rebuttal — and (on the bodhicitta/rebirth question of garfield-causality-2001) a critic of Geluk doxography. (See the revision flag on garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995 — flagged for the outline, not applied.)

One tension to keep in view. FWMW leans hard on the Tractatus (the ladder 6.54, “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” 7, the showing/saying distinction) and on a Kantian “inexpressible noumenon” gloss of MMK 18:9. This places his register close to Sprung’s Wittgensteinian-deflationary reading and to the very quietism this wiki distinguishes its own reading from (the anti-Hashang/Samyé guardrail via Mipham/Kamalaśīla). Garfield is not Sprung’s quietist — he insists the position is “a logical tightrope act, not an incoherent mysticism,” and he fully recovers the conventional world within emptiness — but on that specific axis he sits closer to the warded-off side. Enlist him for the self-consuming negation and the conventional-recovery; do not enlist him for the terminus-of-analysis-vs-blankness distinction.

Key claims

• The two truths are Nāgārjuna’s greatest philosophical contribution, and the conventional is not “less true”; understanding the ultimate is “completely dependent upon understanding conventional truth” (from garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995, on MMK 24:8–10).
• The emptiness of emptiness is the architectural key, present already in MMK Ch I and explicit at 24:18 (“the climax of the entire text… the entire Mādhyamika system in embryo”); it “saves [Madhyamaka] from falling into metaphysical extravagance,” and the apparent regress is rendered harmless by Madhyamaka nominalism — “conventional” names a mode of subsistence, not a self-cancelling negation-operator (from garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995, on MMK 24:18).
• A “how to read the MMK” procedure (earliest freestanding statement, a year before FWMW): read Chapter 1 through Chapter 24, holding the emptiness of emptiness in mind throughout, so that negations otherwise reading as “unrelentingly nihilistic” take on “a remarkably positive tone” — “it is one thing to argue for the emptiness of some phenomenon simpliciter and quite another to argue for that emptiness with the emptiness of emptiness in mind.” This answers why Nāgārjuna began with causation: the emptiness of dependent arising (Ch 1) is the emptiness of emptiness (Ch 24) in embryo — against Kalupahana’s “causation is a fundamental doctrine of Buddhism” explanation, rejected by name (from garfield-dependent-arising-1994).
• The motion chapter (MMK 2) as worked example: read in isolation it “can appear unrelentingly nihilistic” (a static universe); read with the emptiness of emptiness imported from Ch 24, motion is recovered as a merely conventional, dependent relation — a modern, non-sectarian demonstration that without the structural key the negation reads as annihilation (from garfield-dependent-arising-1994).
• The twin-distortion thesis: “nihilism about one kind of entity is typically paired with reification of another” (from garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995, on MMK 24:16) — reifying the conventional requires reading emptiness nihilistically, and reifying emptiness requires nihilism about the phenomenal world; both share the premise to exist = to exist inherently.
• MMK 15:7’s Kātyāyana citation is a Mahāyāna middle-way anchor, “one of the fundamental suttas of the Pali canon for Mahāyāna philosophy” — the direct competitor to Kalupahana’s deflationary “MMK = Kaccāyanagotta-commentary” reading (from garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995, on MMK 15:7).
• The closing verse 27:30 has a double reading, the second (Nyingma-associated) including Nāgārjuna’s own view under “all views to be relinquished” — the no-thesis backstop as self-consuming pedagogy (from garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995, on MMK 27:30).
• Emptiness is the co-relativity of emptiness and dependent arising; “because things exist they are empty,” not the converse-as-nihilism (from garfield-causality-2001, on MMK XXIV:18–19).
• Causation is deflated to conventionalist regularism: Nāgārjuna rejects hetu/causal powers and retains pratyaya/conditions; explanation is the embedding of regularities in further regularities, with no explanation of the totality (from garfield-causality-2001, on MMK I and VII).
• His reasons for rejecting causal powers anticipate Hume and Wittgenstein (powers unobserved; cannot inhere in isolated events; generate regress; impose uniformity) (from garfield-causality-2001).
• A Madhyamaka philosophy of science is a catholic realism — “let a thousand entities bloom”; “to exist is to exist conventionally, dependently” — that privileges no level as uniquely real, because the urge to privilege always rests on locating genuine causal power (from garfield-causality-2001).
• The nihilist reading of Nāgārjuna is untenable; the reificatory “cement of the universe” instinct produces both nihilism and reified transcendent realism (from garfield-causality-2001).
• Farabi’s fallacy: the axiom that Dharmakīrti’s pramāṇavāda and Nāgārjuna’s śūnyavāda must be consistent (paradigmatically Tsongkhapa’s project) is a hermeneutic error; the Geluk rebirth-bodhicitta argument is its casualty (from garfield-causality-2001).
• Belief in personal rebirth is not a necessary condition of bodhicitta; a transpersonal model of soteriological causation suffices, and the “I” made a substratum for a cross-life causal process is a subtle self-grasping (from garfield-causality-2001).

Related scholars

• Anti-nihilist ally of Westerhoff (who reaches the opposite label — “sophisticated nihilism” — but agrees Madhyamaka is not crude annihilationism) and of Della Santina (“soteriological therapy, not ontological category”).
• Sharper framework-engagement than Burton, Wood, Kalupahana, Oetke (the deflationary cohort he is grouped near in modern surveys but reads against).
• Engages Siderits directly (on disunity-of-science and the causation-presupposition objection).
• Translator and admiring critic of Tsongkhapa; framework-internal critic of the Geluk rebirth-bodhicitta argument (rGyal tshab, Dharmakīrti).
• Convergent, by an independent route, with Atiśa and Gendün Chöpel on the pramāṇavāda/Madhyamaka consistency question.