Wood

Position summary

Thomas E. Wood is an American academic philosopher, the author also of a parallel monograph on Vijñānavāda (Mind Only, 1991). His 1994 Nāgārjunian Disputations is the most sustained late-twentieth-century English-language defence of the nihilist interpretation of Madhyamaka. Wood deliberately rehabilitates the early-twentieth-century European nihilist reading (Burnouf, Walleser, Wach, Jacobi, Keith, La Vallée Poussin) against the post-Murti consensus that Madhyamaka is a non-nihilist philosophy. His position is uncompromising. Read consistently, he holds, Nāgārjuna entails that nothing exists whatever: not dharmas, not mind, not appearances, not even the propositions in which the doctrine is stated. Read with care, this is “nihilistic idealism” (Dasgupta’s phrase, which Wood endorses), what pure phenomenology becomes once it is made absolutely consistent.

Wood distinguishes his position sharply from scepticism. Scepticism is the handmaiden of Madhyamaka nihilism, not its substance. The Mādhyamikas use sceptical arguments to dispose of common-sense objections to their nihilist conclusion, but they are not in doubt about the conclusion itself.

Hermeneutical approach

Wood reads Nāgārjuna through twentieth-century formal logic (Routley–Meyer relevant-logic semantics; Buridan–Prior self-reference; Tarski on truth) and through Western philosophical idioms (eliminative materialism, sense-data theory). He treats Indian philosophical disputes as continuous with their Western counterparts, and the laws of logic as universal across both: “nothing — not even an Absolute, if there is such a thing — can violate these fundamental logical laws.”

He does not engage the Mahāyāna hermeneutical framework, and his refusal is sharper than Burton’s. Burton sets the framework aside by methodological exclusion; Wood takes it up in order to reject it. He engages the Two Truths and rejects them as “a literal or philosophical distinction”; he engages the pragmatic, pedagogical reading of the catuṣkoṭi (Jayatilleke) and rejects it as a category mistake. The Mahāyāna commentarial tradition is essentially absent from his bibliography: no Tsongkhapa, Gorampa, Mipham, Karmapas, Atiśa, or Mabja. Wood works almost entirely from MMK chs 1, 13, 15, 24, 25, the Vigrahavyāvartanī, the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, and, for his primary-text nihilist evidence, Bhāvaviveka’s Karatalaratna.

Key claims

• NI vs NNI as the central battleground (wood-nagarjunian-disputations-1994 Ch I §–7) — the choice is exegetical-philosophical at once: the NI fits the texts and is no harder to defend philosophically than the NNI.
• Madhyamaka is not scepticism (Ch III , note 30) — the Mādhyamikas are emphatic in their assertion of sarvam sarvena nāsti; scepticism is the tool, nihilism the conclusion.
• Universal extension of anātman to dharmas (Ch I ) — the Mahāyāna doctrine of universal voidness is “the logical culmination” of the early-Buddhist attack on ātman: what was said of self is now said of dharmas — both unreal, both non-existent.
• Catuṣkoṭi as four denials governed by classical logic (Ch III §–3, ) — prasajya negation respects non-contradiction and excluded middle; the catuṣkoṭi is consistent only on the NI.
• VV 29 (“I have no proposition”) as a special case of global nihilism (Ch III §–27) — not a meta-linguistic stand-alone move but an instance of the doctrine that nothing, including propositions, exists.
• Two Truths cannot defend Madhyamaka against common sense (Ch V ) — “Common sense objections to the Mādhyamika doctrine cannot be met by appealing to the distinction between the two truths”; the asat-khyāti-vāda “does not require or permit a literal or philosophical distinction between two different truths” (Ch IV note 11).
• Pragmatic catuṣkoṭi rejected (Ch II §–4) — the Buddha’s refusal of the avyākata questions is vibhajja-vyākaraṇīya in degree, annihilationist in implication; not pedagogical reserve about a trans-empirical reality.
• MMK 24.18 read provisionally (Ch IV ) — the pratītyasamutpāda = śūnyatā = upādāya-prajñapti equation is conventional only; ultimately, “emptiness is non-origination.”
• Madhyamaka ≠ Advaita (Ch V §–9) — both schools were confused as early as the Āgamaśāstra; the distinction is that Advaita posits a sat substratum and Madhyamaka does not. Madhyamaka is the more radical position, not the more conservative one.
• Asat-khyāti-vāda as “nihilistic idealism” or “pure phenomenalism” (Ch V §–23) — comparison with contemporary eliminative materialism; both deny appearances; both abandon correspondence at the ontological level.
• Reception-history argument (Ch I ; Ch V ) — the unanimous fifteen-hundred-year Indian-philosophical reading of Madhyamaka as nihilism (Mīmāṃsakas, Vedāntins, Naiyāyikas, Jainas, and the Vijñānavādins) is treated as strong external evidence; it is implausible that every other Indian school misunderstood.
• Critique of Ruegg’s FPC (Ch III §–52) — reduces Ruegg’s reading to psychologism and anti-rationalism; presses the incoherence of combining classical logic with admitted contradictory assertions.
• Critique of Matilal (Ch III §–22) — rejects the relevant-logic, speech-act and Buridan–Prior treatments of the catuṣkoṭi and of nāsti ca mama pratijñā.

Related scholars

• Burton — fellow late-1990s nihilist, Abhidharma route; mutual independence.
• Kalupahana — methodological opposite within the same anti-framework programme; deflates the ultimate where Wood collapses both truths.
• Oetke — structurally adjacent; retains formal scaffolding while emptying pedagogical content.
• Ruegg — Wood’s principal NNI target.
• Westerhoff — partial convergence; the 2016 “sophisticated nihilism” descends from Wood-Burton-Oetke but reins in the inference with the equilibrium principle.
• Sprung — predecessor of the deflationary line; Wood treats him as background.