Murti

Position summary

T. R. V. Murti was an Indian philosopher whose The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of the Mādhyamika System (Allen & Unwin, 1955) set the terms of Anglophone Madhyamaka scholarship for a generation. The byline of the one paper held here in full reads “Formerly Banaras Hindu University”. He is the standing exhibit of the absolutist reading in Matrix D and in — the one row whose verdict is neither nihilism nor a deflation.

His position, as stated in murti-samvrti-paramartha-1973, turns on one distinction. Madhyamaka is advaya: non-duality (གཉིས་མེད་) as freedom from the duality of the extremes, a purification of the faculty of knowing, an epistemological programme whose concern is the correctness of our apprehending and not the nature of the apprehended. Advaita is advaita: knowledge of a differenceless entity, an ontological programme. From this he derives the differences he cares about — Madhyamaka has no cosmology, no theory of the ownership or object of ignorance (མ་རིག་པ་), no doctrine of god or soul or matter, because for it the ontologising of the categories of thought is the worst error available; Vedānta has all of these. He is arguing throughout against Radhakrishnan, Stcherbatsky and Dasgupta, who had held the difference between śūnyatā and Brahman to be largely verbal.

What makes him an absolutist nonetheless is the terminus. Reality is accepted, characterised at MMK 18:9 as non-relative, quiescent, non-discursive and non-dual, indicable by an ascribed mark; and it is “something in itself, self-evident and self-existent”. Emptiness is the antidote and not a further view, the disease and the cure both being within phenomena — but something survives the cure. His argument for this is soteriological: if the rejection of everything as relative leaves nothing over as Real, then curing suffering is like curing a headache by removing the head, and “the head would remain”. That argument, not a Kantian mapping, is the load-bearing move.

Hermeneutical approach

• Comparative philosophy on a fixed grid: appearance, illusion, relation, language, freedom, run in parallel across Madhyamaka and Advaita, with Western philosophers used for calibration. Kant supplies the transcendental illusion and the model of a critique claiming exhaustiveness; Hegel the contrast on mutual dependence; Bradley the parallel on relations, quoted twice.
• The primary material is Sanskrit and it is real: the MMK, the Prasannapadā, the Madhyamakāvatāra, Prajñākaramati on Bodhicaryāvatāra 9, the Śikṣāsamuccaya, Atiśa’s Satyadvayāvatāra as quoted in the BCAP, Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya. No Tibetan material.
• The framework is substantially present, which is not what the wiki has been assuming. The Two Truths are here in full — Candrakīrti’s three definitions of the conventional (ཀུན་རྫོབ་), the loka / aloka division at MA 6.24–26, the conventional as means and the ultimate (དོན་དམ་པ་) as end with the ladder image, the Four Noble Truths sorted across the two, the soteriological purpose named, and Nāgārjuna’s own warning against emptiness becoming a view (ལྟ་བ་). The provisional / definitive distinction is named as nītārtha and neyārtha but not worked. Absent: the Three Turnings, any Tibetan source, and any use of the framework to sort the Madhyamaka corpus.
• He reads the two truths subject-side: not two spheres of objects but two manners of apprehension, cited to MA 6.23.

Key claims

From murti-samvrti-paramartha-1973 unless marked otherwise.

• Madhyamaka and Vedānta agree on far more than their partisans admit — a transcendent absolute devoid of empirical determinations, immanent as the reality of appearance, reached in non-discursive intuition, with appearance derived from a beginningless ignorance, non-duality established dialectically rather than positively, and a consequent commitment to two truths and to a provisional / definitive sorting of scripture (p. 9). The differences are nonetheless “deep and pervasive”.
• The two traditions belong to the ātman and anātman lineages respectively, and there has been “borrowing of technique and not of tenets” (p. 11).
• For Madhyamaka the dialectic is the whole of philosophy; after the refutation of all standpoints there is nothing further to know, and prajñā is critical awareness with no object (p. 11). For Vedānta the dialectic is in the service of a knowledge it clears the way for.
• Vedānta argues analogically from an empirical illusion (the rope-snake) to the world-illusion, and builds the sat / mithyā / asat apparatus to do it. Madhyamaka goes directly to the world-illusion, which is presented to it as the interminable conflict of philosophical viewpoints — Kant’s transcendental illusion (pp. 11–13).
• The catuṣkoṭi is a claim to exhaustiveness: all views actual and possible schematised into a four-cornered conspectus of negation, in the strain of Kant’s critique or Hegel’s dialectic. What matters is the daring of the claim to universality, not the soundness of the schematism (pp. 14–15).
• The negation-principle is mutual dependence. Cause and effect, substance and attribute, whole and part, self and states, fire and fuel, agent and act are established neither as identical nor as different, neither together nor separately; what is relative is unreal (pp. 15–16, with Bradley as the parallel).
• Buddhi is saṃvṛti: reason is the principle of falsity, and the ultimate is the utter absence of its function (pp. 16–17).
• The two truths are two manners of apprehension, not two sets of objects (p. 19, citing MA 6.23). There is in the end only one truth, the ultimate; the conventional is “totally false from the absolute standpoint”.
• The conventional is upāyabhūta and the ultimate upeyabhūta — the ladder by which the goal is reached, and reached only negatively, by removing what thought has ascribed (p. 19).
• Ignorance is itself unreal for Madhyamaka — māyā, since if it were real its products would be real and nothing could be negated; for Vedānta it is the quasi-positive creative power of Brahman, with a cosmology attached (pp. 18–19).
• Language is a closed convention with no referent outside itself; the meaning of a term is another term; speech has no revelatory function (p. 21). Vedānta by contrast reaches Brahman through the scriptural word.
• Against Streng: “no views about reality” is not “a no-reality view”; reality is accepted and characterised; “all things are dependently arisen” must be a perception of truth rather than a statement, on pain of regress; and if nothing survives the analysis the soteriological purpose fails — the headache argument (pp. 22–23).
• Reported at second hand, from the 1955 book: see the next section.

The 1955 book, at second hand

The Central Philosophy of Buddhism is not in raw/ and has not been read here. Everything below is another scholar’s report of it and should be treated as such until the book itself is available. The 1973 paper cites the book at its n. 1 as the ground of its opening section, so the two are continuous by Murti’s own account — but the reports and this wiki do not line up cleanly, which is itself the reason to keep them separated.

• Della Santina (della-santina-madhyamaka-western-1986): Murti reads the Two Truths through Kant’s noumenal / phenomenal split, glossing paramārtha as “absolute” and saṃvṛti / vyavahāra as “relative”, and so ontologises what was a pedagogical device. This is the wiki’s warrant for the Matrix D framework-status cell. It does not fit the 1973 paper, which denies that the two truths pick out two spheres of objects and reproduces the pedagogical content at length. Whether 1973 corrects 1955 or clarifies it cannot be settled without the book.
• Hayes (hayes-nagarjunas-appeal-1994, .2): Murti’s Madhyamaka clears the ground for a non-discursive intuition of a transcendent Absolute and ends as Advaita Vedānta with the śruti-authority and the caste structure removed. Also that Murti explains the Buddha’s silence on the fourteen undetermined questions by the antinomies of reason and the Absolute. The 1973 paper is a sustained refusal of the first charge; see the wiki author’s assessment.
• Galloway (galloway-logical-issues-1989): Murti offers two examples of an allegedly suspended excluded middle — an integer between 3 and 4, and the rope-snake — and both fail, since meaninglessness is not a third truth-value and a conflated subject is not a logical anomaly.
• Gokhale (gokhale-madhyamika-dialectics-1992): Murti is the only secondary source in the bibliography and the Hegelian-absolutist reading Gokhale sets up and refuses.
• Westerhoff (westerhoff-madhyamaka-2009): grouped with Stcherbatsky and Dharmapāla as holding an “ineffable substance” view, which fails because positing objects beyond conceptual frameworks still assumes mind-independent entities.
• Wood (wood-nagarjunian-disputations-1994): the “post-Murti consensus” that Madhyamaka is a non-nihilist philosophy is what Wood’s whole book sets out to overturn, in favour of the early European reading (Burnouf, Walleser, Keith, La Vallée Poussin).
• Kalupahana: follows Murti’s structural diagnosis that prasaṅga is disproof rather than apagogic proof, while reversing his positive evaluation of it — for Kalupahana that same feature is the cause of the slide into absolutism.
• Sprung: collaborated with Murti (and U. S. Vyas) on the 1979 Prasannapadā translation, and edited the 1973 volume in which this wiki here appears.

Related scholars

• Della Santina — the wiki’s anchor critic, and the source of the Matrix D framework-status cell that the 1973 paper puts in question. His pedagogical-not-ontological objection is the one Murti is hardest for, since Murti has the pedagogical account in full and is an absolutist anyway.
• Hayes — the Advaita-reduction charge, anticipated and refused in 1973, and standing anyway.
• Galloway — refutes the two excluded-middle examples of the 1955 book; a framework-external voice against the absolutist reading.
• Gokhale — the second framework-external voice, refusing the Hegelian-absolutist reading. With Galloway and Hayes, three independent grounds.
• Wood — the exact opposite verdict from a shared premise. Both take the negation to terminate in something statable; they disagree only about whether it is a Real or a nothing. Wood’s stated target is the post-Murti consensus.
• Streng (no wiki page) — the named opponent of the 1973 conclusion, and the other half of the wiki’s only case of two Matrix D rows arguing with each other.
• Sprung — collaborator, editor, and the deflationary terminus of Murti’s own account of language. Murti empties language of revelatory function and keeps a Real; Sprung extends the deflation to what is arrived at.
• Kalupahana — takes over the structural diagnosis of prasaṅga and reverses the evaluation.
• Candrakīrti — the principal Indian source, used through the Prasannapadā and the Madhyamakāvatāra rather than through any later tradition.