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Wood

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Position summary

Thomas E. Wood is an American academic philosopher (with a parallel monograph on Vijñānavāda — Mind Only, 1991) whose 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, 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, endorsed) — what pure phenomenology becomes when 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 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 — not as Burton does (by methodological exclusion), but more aggressively: 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 — Tsongkhapa, Gorampa, Mipham, the Karmapas, Atiśa, Mabja — is essentially absent from his bibliography. Wood works almost entirely from MMK chs 1, 13, 15, 24, 25, the Vigrahavyāvartanī, the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, and (for primary-text NI 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.
  • 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.

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