Sprung

Position summary

Mervyn Sprung (Brock University) was a Canadian comparative philosopher of the 1970s. His principal contribution to Madhyamaka studies is the 1979 translation Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way: The Essential Chapters from the Prasannapadā of Candrakīrti (Prajña Press, Boulder), produced in collaboration with T. R. V. Murti and U. S. Vyas. His interpretive position, set out in the 40-page Translator’s Introduction to that volume and built into the translation choices, reads Madhyamaka as a coherent denial of the cognitive function of language. Prajñapti, usually rendered “designation” or “imputation,” Sprung renders “a guiding, not a cognitive, notion presupposing the everyday.” On this reading, all the central terms of the Madhyamaka and Mahāyāna lexicon — nirvāṇa, tattva, tathatā, dharmatā, Buddha — become prajñaptis that lead beings toward freedom without describing or naming any reality. Sprung openly aligns Madhyamaka with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.

His earlier comparative work, including the edited volume The Problem of Two Truths in Buddhism and Vedānta (Reidel, 1973), put the Two Truths at the centre of Buddhist–Vedāntic comparative philosophy. It forms part of the background to the Mahāyāna–Vedānta-influence debates that surface in kalupahana-mmk-1986 and glasenapp-vedanta-buddhism-1950.

Hermeneutical approach

Sprung engages the framework partially, in a Wittgensteinian register. He accepts the Two Truths as central to Madhyamaka and translates the Prasannapadā without trying to extract Madhyamaka from its Mahāyāna setting; in this respect he differs from Kalupahana. He reads MMK 24:8–10 and MMK 24:18 as the architecturally central kārikás of the entire MMK and gives them substantial introductory space. But he reads the framework through Wittgenstein’s denial of cognitive language and Heidegger’s trans-objective truth. The result is that paramārtha becomes a higher truth in the linguistic-functional sense — a different kind of language-use — rather than in the ontological-soteriological sense. His rendering of prajñaptir upādāya at MMK 24:18 as “a guiding, not a cognitive, notion presupposing the everyday” is the choice that most directly encodes this reading.

Editorially, he omits the Buddhist sūtra citations Candrakīrti embeds in the commentary, on the explicit ground that they “do not, with only rare exceptions, clarify or advance his argument” (sprung-lucid-exposition-1979 p. xi). He also omits or abridges most of the Buddhapālita–Bhāviveka controversy material in Sanskrit Ch I. Both decisions are presented as concessions to contemporary readability, but they are themselves hermeneutical commitments. They detach the philosophical core from the scriptural-commentarial matrix that the traditional commentators — Tsongkhapa, Gorampa, the Karmapas, Mipham — treat as integral.

Key claims

• Madhyamaka aligns with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (sprung-lucid-exposition-1979 pp. 2–3) — in Sprung’s framing, these are the European thinkers who made Madhyamaka philosophically tractable for Anglophone readers
• Language is non-cognitive — there are no entities to which words refer; word-function is prajñapti, “a non-cognitive, guiding term which serves to suggest appropriate ways of coping with the putative realities on which it rests for its meaning” (p. 17)
• All key Buddhist terms are prajñaptis — nirvāṇa, tattva, tathatā, dharmatā, and Buddha “become prajñaptis, serving to lead men toward freedom, but not claiming to describe any reality or convey any ultimate truth” (p. 18). His most deflationary move
• The higher truth, in so far as it is a theory, falls within the lower truth (p. 16) — any account of śūnyatā must use the entitative vocabulary of conventional truth and is therefore, qua taught, saṃvṛti. This anticipates the Karmapa-style “even the ultimate, presented as opposite to the relative, is itself relative” (karmapa-feast-fortunate-1578), but reaches it from a Wittgensteinian rather than a Mādhyamika starting-point
• Nirvāṇa is “a return to the world following a radical purification” (p. 18) — Sprung openly rejects the Schopenhauer/Nietzsche/Max Müller/Schweitzer reading of nirvāṇa as extinction. He reads MMK 25:19–20 (no specifiable difference between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra) as denying that nirvāṇa is an ontic domain — a separate region of being
• Two truths or three? — MMK 24:10’s distinction between saṃvṛti, paramārtha, and nirvāṇa “supports the view that Madhyamaka worked with three truths, not two” (p. 16), but Sprung lets the ambiguity stand. He does not pursue the question that Mipham resolves with the approximate-ultimate / actual-ultimate distinction, or that Gorampa resolves with the rnam grangs pa’i don dam / don dam mtshan nyid pa distinction
• The translation refuses Stcherbatsky’s “transcendental reality” gloss of paramārtha (pp. ix–x) — an explicit anti-Kantian move. Sprung chose his “higher truth which surpasses it” rendering to keep the Kantian phenomenon/noumenon framework out of the translation

Related scholars

• Kalupahana — closest substantive comparator. Sprung’s Wittgensteinian deflationary reading prepared the ground for Kalupahana’s pragmatist-Kaccāyanagotta reading. Differences: Sprung accepts the Mahāyāna setting (he does not try to detach MMK from Mahāyāna), Kalupahana actively rejects it; Sprung routes through Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Kalupahana routes through early Buddhist sutta-literature and pragmatism
• Burton — Sprung’s reading does not call itself nihilist but the deflationary moves (no entities behind words, no rock-bottom reality, all key terms as prajñaptis) are exactly the moves Burton later names as entailing nihilism
• Westerhoff — his 2024 MA commentary (westerhoff-candrakirti-2024) reaches a similar architectural position (no rock-bottom layer behind the screen of conventions, semantic insulation between the truths), but via analytic-philosophy antirealism rather than via Wittgenstein, and with much closer attention to the traditional commentarial sources
• Candrakīrti — primary subject of Sprung’s translation. The translated chapters are the principal way Candrakīrti’s MMK commentary on Chs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25 has been available in English
• Mipham — would reject Sprung’s reading of MMK 24:18 directly. Prajñaptir upādāya on the Mipham reading is the basis-of-designation that grounds dependent arising, not a non-cognitive guiding notion that dissolves all reference
• Tsongkhapa — would reject Sprung’s reading of paramārtha as “higher truth in the linguistic-functional sense.” The Tsongkhapa position is that paramārtha is a knowable object, accessible to a specific gnosis, even if not establishable through its own essence
• Della Santina — 1986 contemporaneous Indo-Tibetan-trained voice critiquing Sprung’s translation of prapañca as “manifold of named things” (preferring the Tibetan exegetical reading on which prapañca is the crystallised objective counterpart of vikalpa); also rejects the wider Wittgensteinian-positivist line that Sprung’s introduction places Madhyamaka in. The two share Mahāyāna-respecting comparativism but Della Santina aligns with the Indo-Tibetan exegesis where Sprung aligns with Wittgenstein