Position summary
Williams’s principal Madhyamaka work for this wiki’s purposes is Altruism and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (Curzon, 1998), known to the wiki at second hand via siderits-reality-altruism-2000 (Siderits’s feature review in Philosophy East and West 50.3) and at first hand pending addition of Williams’s response (PEW 50.3, pp. 424–453). Across five chapter-length studies of BCA chapters 8–9, Williams subjects key Śāntideva arguments to analytic-philosophical scrutiny and finds them wanting. His chapter 5 (“How Śāntideva Destroyed the Bodhisattva Path”) presses the most aggressive line: Śāntideva’s argument from impartial benevolence (BCA 8.101–103) requires that persons be conventionally as well as ultimately unreal, but that destroys the bodhisattva’s ability to identify whose pain to relieve. Williams’s footnoted remark — “this Madhyamaka view [that nothing bears its own intrinsic nature] is incoherent” — is the wider polemical core: he accepts Abhidharma-style Reductionism (pains have svabhāva, are “found under analysis”) but refuses Madhyamaka’s extension of niḥsvabhāvavāda to the dharmas themselves.
Hermeneutical approach
Partial framework-engagement. Williams retains the Two Truths as a level-distinction and engages the Indo-Tibetan commentators by name (he is a serious Buddhologist, not a parachute philosopher). But he defects on the universal-emptiness step — the move from “persons lack svabhāva” to “everything, including pain itself, lacks svabhāva.” This defection is the structural cousin of Burton’s framework-removal in burton-emptiness-appraised-1999 (Burton was Williams’s doctoral student): both accept Abhidharma’s items as ultimately real, both then read Madhyamaka’s further extension as collapsing into nihilism or incoherence. Williams’s failure mode is intermediate between Burton’s full removal and the commentarial tradition’s full retention: framework-as-formal-scaffolding without framework-as-ontological-content yields a localised collapse on a specific item (pain) rather than the global collapse Burton diagnoses.
Key claims (as reconstructed via Siderits)
- Williams’s dilemma for Śāntideva on rebirth (BCA 8.97–98). Either annihilationism (one person dies, another is reborn — moral nihilism) or orthodox personal identity (then self-interest is reaffirmed). Either horn defeats Śāntideva. (siderits-reality-altruism-2000 pp. 413–414)
- Bodily continuity grounds intra-life self-interest (refraining from smoking now → healthy lungs later, etc.) but cannot ground a “we-construction” that extends concern across distinct causal series. (p. 413)
- Reductionist construction of persons is question-begging. Causal connections “of the right sort” smuggle in the concept of a person we already have. (pp. 416–417)
- Persons are conventionally real, even on the Reductionist view. Śāntideva’s argument cannot deny conventional persons without destroying the path. (pp. 415–416)
- Pains have intrinsic phenomenal character (“what-it-is-like-ness”) and necessarily have a subject. (siderits-reality-altruism-2000 pp. 418–420; Williams quotes Melzack on the functional role of pain)
- Madhyamaka’s claim that nothing bears intrinsic nature is incoherent and “equivalent to metaphysical nihilism.” (Williams Altruism and Reality p. 222 n. 26, cited at siderits-reality-altruism-2000 fn. 10)
- Mountains exist independently of minds; the Buddhist Reductionist denial of wholes is absurd. (Williams 1998 p. 120; rebutted at siderits-reality-altruism-2000 pp. 420–421)
Further note from the wiki author’s personal notes (2025)
tenpa-personal-notes-2025 sharpens the diagnosis of where Williams keeps going wrong: he approaches Śāntideva’s arguments as if they are making truth-claims about the ultimate nature of reality — do persons really exist or not? — and then complains that the answers are logically inconsistent within a realist framework. The point is that logical consistency within a metaphysical framework is not the goal. Therapeutic effectiveness is. Conventional and ultimate are not competing descriptions of reality; they are different modes of discourse for different stages of practice. Williams is applying Western metaphysical realist criteria to a tradition that has explicitly moved beyond that paradigm.
Indian primary-text support for the therapeutic-not-metaphysical reading comes from Śūnyatāsaptati vv. 67–71. Verse 71 is the explicit emptiness-of-emptiness statement; v. 70 is Nāgārjuna’s own diagnosis of why the nihilist misreading recurs (“frightened by this teaching”). If emptiness is itself empty, the whole apparatus is therapeutic and not metaphysical, and Williams’s incoherence-charge against Madhyamaka misfires at the level of genre rather than at the level of any particular BCA argument.
Related scholars
- Siderits — principal interlocutor; Siderits’s feature review and Williams’s response form a tight closed exchange in PEW 50.3.
- Burton — Williams’s doctoral student; institutional descendant of the Williams reading. Burton presses the framework-removal further (full removal, full nihilism); Williams stops at partial removal and partial nihilism.
- Westerhoff — direct counter-witness on the nihilism question. Westerhoff’s westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016 is the principled defence of a framework-engaging sophisticated nihilism that rebuts the Burton-via-Williams line; engages Williams by name.
- Kalupahana — opposite framework-revisionist. Where Williams defects on emptiness and toward nihilism, Kalupahana defects on Mahāyāna systematisation and toward pragmatism. Both are partial framework-removers; this wiki’s uses both as failure modes.