Hayes

Position summary

Hayes is a Sanskritist and philosopher of Buddhist logic, best known for Dignāga on the Interpretation of Signs (1988). His Madhyamaka intervention is the 1994 JIP article hayes-nagarjunas-appeal-1994, which is the sharpest modern analytic attack on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā the wiki holds.

The argument has an unusual shape. Hayes begins from a historical puzzle — Nāgārjuna fascinates modern Buddhologists but had little visible effect on later Indian Buddhist philosophy, where abhidharma and then Diṅnāga–Dharmakīrti epistemology proceeded without answering him — and proposes one explanation for both halves: the arguments are fallacious. Classical Buddhists trained in sound argumentation had reason to ignore them; twentieth-century readers, receptive to conclusions at odds with classical assumptions, had reason to be drawn to them.

His reconstruction of Nāgārjuna’s goal is broadly therapeutic and often sympathetic. The dedicatory verses give prapañcopaśama, MMK 27:30 gives the abandonment of all views, and the final chapter shows that the views in question are those presupposing a definite personal identity. So the method is to starve opinions by showing that their subject matters are insubstantial, as the sensual appetites are starved by withdrawing attention from sensible objects. A second route to the same place is drawn from the Sanskrit grammarians via Bhattacharya and Ingalls: speech is an act of will rather than a depiction of the world, so one free of desire has nothing to say.

The arguments, on the other hand, he holds to fail. Working from Pāṇini’s account of the verbal noun in GHaÑ, he distinguishes svabhāva₁ (identity, the differentiating characteristic the ābhidharmikas meant) from svabhāva₂ (causal independence), and parabhāva₁ (difference) from parabhāva₂ (dependence), and shows MMK 1:5 and the whole of MMK 15 sliding between them: each verse is true on one reading, but the conclusions do not follow from the premises because the readings differ. A parallel equivocation on “exists” — existing simpliciter versus existing as a cause — is diagnosed in the argument from the interdependence of cause and effect.

Two of his negative conclusions matter as much as the positive charge. Nāgārjuna’s logic is standard: he states the law of contradiction and the excluded middle, and depends on being able to derive contradictions. And the modern schools that read him otherwise — Absolutist, Positivist, Deconstructionist — are each reading their own century into the text.

Hermeneutical approach

• Sanskrit philology and analytic logic together, with the grammarians doing the technical work. The ambiguities are derived from Pāṇini and the Kāśikā-vṛtti, not asserted.
• Translations are used as evidence: Appendix A sets Streng, Inada, Sprung and Kalupahana side by side across all eleven verses of MMK 15, and the divergences are read as four different strategies for coping with terms that resist translation.
• The Mahāyāna hermeneutical framework is entirely absent, not rejected. There is no Two Truths discussion anywhere in this wiki, no saṃvṛti / paramārtha, no neyārtha / nītārtha, no Three Turnings, no Prajñāpāramitā, no Tibetan material. MMK 24:8–10 is never treated. MMK 24:18 is used, as a definition of emptiness as derivative designation rather than as the conclusion of a chapter about the two truths.
• The commentators are treated as struggling readers rather than as an elaboration matrix. Candrakīrti on MMK 1:5cd is described as left without a strong argument and reduced to asserting his point firmly.
• Comparativism is opposed on principle, following Robinson and Ruegg: Nāgārjuna should be appraised in the milieu that produced him. Hayes contests Tuck’s claim that all Western interpretation is isogesis by naming Schayer, Robinson, Bhattacharya, Ruegg, Lindtner and Williams as counter-cases.

Key claims

• Nāgārjuna asserts two theorems flatly: no beings exist anywhere (MMK 1:3), and nothing undergoes change (MMK 15:10) (hayes-nagarjunas-appeal-1994 p. 305).
• The central arguments equivocate. MMK 1:5ab is true of svabhāva₂, 1:5cd of svabhāva₁, and the second does not follow from the first (pp. 311–313); MMK 15:1–5 slides between the senses at each step (pp. 316–320).
• A second equivocation runs on “exists”: Nāgārjuna establishes that a condition does not exist as a condition and concludes that it does not exist at all (p. 315).
• Nāgārjuna’s logic is standard. In standard logic it is legitimate to predicate contradictory predicates of a subject provided the subject names nothing existent, and that is what he does throughout; no deviant logic is needed or evidenced (pp. 322–325, 350–351).
• The goal is therapeutic: the starving of dṛṣṭi by dissolving their subject matters, glossed through the grammarians as the abandonment of the desire to speak (pp. 302–308, 353–356).
• The three modern schools each project their own era. Absolutism (Stcherbatsky, Schayer, Murti) supplies a transcendent Absolute; Positivism (Warder, Kalupahana) supplies an empiricist Buddha; Deconstructionism (Magliola, Dilworth, Huntington) requires the deviant logic that is not there (pp. 325–351).
• Murti’s Madhyamaka ends as Advaita Vedānta with the śruti-authority and the caste structure removed (p. 337).
• Kalupahana’s claim that the MMK is a commentary on the Kaccāyanagotta overstates the sūtra’s importance to the text as a whole; and the sūtra does not itself use svabhāva or parabhāva, which are Nāgārjuna’s addition (n. 9).
• The Buddha’s own stated reason for the avyākṛta is better than Murti’s or Kalupahana’s: the questions are not connected to the purpose, and all fourteen presuppose an enduring self. On that reading the Buddha, the ābhidharmikas and Nāgārjuna follow almost the same trajectory (pp. 356–361).
• Whether Nāgārjuna’s target was the ābhidharmikas at all is an open question, not something to be assumed (n. 15).

Related scholars

• Gokhale — answers the equivocation charge with the open-concept reading: Nāgārjuna is not sliding between fixed senses but demonstrating that intrinsic nature (རང་བཞིན་) is an open concept whose diverse implications generate the paradoxes.
• Siderits — answers the same charge incompatibly, by supplying the missing premise that makes the argument valid across the senses (siderits-causation-emptiness-2004). Hayes also reports the Siderits–O’Brien Zeno comparison and quotes Kalupahana’s attack on Siderits.
• Galloway — the predecessor he cites, who had cleared Nāgārjuna of the excluded-middle and contraposition charges. Hayes concedes the logic is standard and adds the charge Galloway never considered.
• Kalupahana — the principal target of , refuted from the analytic side on grounds independent of the wiki’s existing objections.
• Murti — the principal target of , reduced to a de-scripturalised Advaita. Set against Murti’s own statement at murti-samvrti-paramartha-1973, the charge needs one qualification: Murti had refused it twenty-one years earlier, at length, and built the advaya / advaita distinction to block it — Madhyamaka epistemological and concerned with the purification of knowing, Vedānta ontological and concerned with the thing known, the whole paper arguing that the two traditions have exchanged technique and not tenets. The refusal fails, and it fails at a sentence Murti supplies himself (reality as “something in itself, self-evident and self-existent”), which is enough for Hayes’s verdict to stand. What does not stand is any framing of Murti as not having seen the objection coming.
• Wood — same year, same problem, opposite verdict: Wood holds the arguments valid and nihilist, Hayes holds them invalid. Neither cites the other.
• Ruegg — endorsed on the ethnocentrism warning and filed among the exegetes.
• Sprung — criticised for the “self-existence / other-existence” rendering of MMK 1:5, which preserves the Sanskrit’s plausibility with a neologism that carries no English meaning.
• Candrakīrti — treated as a commentator without a strong argument at MMK 1:5cd, which is the framework-absence showing.