Position summary
Y. Karunadasa is a senior Sri-Lankan Theravāda Abhidhamma scholar (a near-contemporary of Kalupahana, from the same University of Ceylon / Kelaniya milieu, later at the Centre of Buddhist Studies, University of Hong Kong). His The Theravāda Abhidhamma: Its Inquiry into the Nature of Conditioned Reality (2010) is a systematic defence of the Theravāda dhamma theory as a middle ontology that transcends the binaries of pluralism/monism and substantialism/nihilism by combining analysis (bheda) with synthesis (saṅgaha). On the question that matters for the MMK paper, he holds that the two truths (sammuti-sacca / paramattha-sacca) and the provisional/definitive distinction (neyyattha / nītattha) are Abhidhammic developments whose seeds are already in the canonical discourses — not frameworks imposed from outside.
He reads comparatively and is unusually attentive to the mainland Abhidharma schools (Sarvāstivāda, Sautrāntika) and to the Mahāyāna, which he treats as a live interlocutor the Pāli exegetes themselves knew and answered.
Hermeneutical approach
Comparative Abhidharma philology from a confessional Theravāda standpoint. Etymological and doctrinal rather than historical-developmental; explicitly cautious about reading “historical stages” into doctrinal variety. He reads the canonical Abhidhamma through Mahāvihāra commentary and sub-commentary, checking against the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya / Vyākhyā and Sautrāntika positions, with Bhikkhu Bodhi, Nyanaponika, Ñāṇamoli, Gethin, Jayatilleke, Lamotte and La Vallée Poussin as interlocutors.
Unlike a framework-removed modern reader of the MMK, Karunadasa is not reading Nāgārjuna at all — he is reading the Pāli Abhidhamma. His relevance to this wiki is therefore as a Theravāda-internal witness to how a non-Mahāyāna tradition derived the same two-truths / provisional-definitive apparatus from the suttas, and as a sharp statement of the Theravāda claim that its two truths are non-hierarchical.
Key claims
- The sammuti / paramattha two truths are an “Abhidhammic innovation” with antecedents in the suttas; the Aṅguttara nītattha / neyyattha distinction is the principal antecedent, and the Aṅguttara commentary itself correlates that sutta with the two truths (karunadasa-theravada-abhidhamma-2010 Ch 3 p. 64; Introduction p. 10).
- The Theravāda two truths are non-hierarchical: neither sublates the other; both are equally true; they are “two ways of presenting what accords with actuality,” not two degrees of truth (Ch 3 pp. 67–71).
- Pāli sammuti (“convention,” from man) ≠ Sanskrit saṃvṛti (“concealment,” from vṛ); the Mahāyāna’s saṃvṛti term encodes a hierarchy (conceal vs reveal) that the Theravāda term does not (Ch 3 pp. 66, 70). (See Kalupahana and Della Santina for the same move.)
- Sabhāva as a synonym for dhamma signifies “the very absence of sabhāva in any sense that implies a substantial mode of being”; sabhāva ≠ “own-sway” (vasavattitā); a sub-commentary equates sabhāvattho with suññattho (own-nature = emptiness) (Ch 1 pp. 39–40). See Svabhāva.
- The Theravāda dhamma theory is neither pluralism nor monism, neither substantialism nor nihilism (Introduction p. 8; Ch 1 pp. 21–23, 25–26).
- The Sarvāstivāda sabbatthivāda / tritemporality (trai-kālya) is the extreme of realism the suttas reject; the Theravāda Kathāvatthu critique of it is historically early and genuine (Introduction p. 8; Ch 1 pp. 28–35).
Related scholars
- Kalupahana — the closest cousin: same Sri-Lankan-Theravāda milieu, same sammuti/saṃvṛti etymology, same non-hierarchical two-truths reading. Karunadasa argues it from the Abhidhamma; Kalupahana from the MMK.
- Della Santina — converges on “two truths as pedagogical device, not a hierarchy of realities,” from the Indo-Tibetan side.
- Siderits — Karunadasa’s vohāra and Nāgasena material are the Pāli-canonical roots of the Milinda two-truths pedagogy Siderits foregrounds.
- Bhikkhu Bodhi, Nyanaponika, Gethin, Jayatilleke — modern Theravāda/Abhidhamma interlocutors he builds on.