The Madhyamaka and Modern Western Philosophy

“The Madhyamaka and Modern Western Philosophy” — Della Santina, Peter, 1986.

Thesis / main argument

A 14-page comparative essay (Philosophy East and West 36.1, January 1986, pp. 41–54) arguing that the most common Western philosophical readings of Madhyamaka — T. R. V. Murti’s Kantian “absolutism,” Streng’s and Gudmunsen’s Wittgensteinian “ordinary-language positivism” — fail because they impose Western philosophical categories onto a fundamentally soteriological tradition. Della Santina contends that Madhyamaka, as the systematic expression of the Buddha’s pragmatic anti-metaphysical stance, is neither absolutism nor positivism nor nihilism: emptiness (སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་) is “not an ontological category, but a soteriological therapy” (p. 49). The Two Truths must be read as a pedagogical device, not as a Kantian phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy.

Key claims

• Western philosophy and Indian philosophy occupy non-overlapping universes of discourse (pp. 42–43). The Western descriptive/scientific tradition has, since the rise of Christian orthodoxy, lacked the soteriological-existential dimension that defines Indian philosophy. Comparative work that ignores this asymmetry produces “facile and superficial equations.”
• The rationalism/empiricism conflict does not arise for Madhyamaka (pp. 43–44). Buddhist accounts of vāsanā (impressions, བག་ཆགས་) explain “innate” ideas as the residue of accumulated experience across rebirths — neither a priori rational insight nor merely a posteriori convention. The Western dilemma is dissolved, not solved.
• The realism–idealism trajectory has a Buddhist analogue but Madhyamaka stands outside it (pp. 44–46). Vaibhāṣika (naive realism) → Sautrāntika (representative realism) → Yogācāra (idealism) parallels the Locke–Berkeley sequence. Madhyamaka, by contrast, embodies the Buddha’s prior refusal to ontologise either consciousness or its objects.
• The Buddha was not a Western-style empiricist (pp. 45–46). Sense experience is “essentially and finally mental”; the Buddha rejected the categories of existence and non-existence as ultimately predicable of reality. Calling him a “psychologist” or “ethicist” begs the question by importing a Western philosophy/religion split that does not apply.
• Three key terms of Nāgārjuna’s psychology: vāsanā (impressions), vikalpa (conceptualisation), prapañca (conceptual constructions, སྤྲོས་པ་) (pp. 46–47). Della Santina endorses the Tibetan exegetical reading of prapañca as “the objectively experienced counterpart of vikalpa” — the crystallised, objectified aspect of conceptualisation — over Sprung’s “manifold of named things” rendering, which he finds ambiguous as to whether the emphasis falls on naming or on things.
• Madhyamaka is not Yogācāra (pp. 47). Although the Madhyamaka acknowledges that all experience is mental, it does not ontologise consciousness. The Yogācāra “err insofar as they make consciousness into a real, an existing, thing.” Citing Candrakīrti, Della Santina holds that Madhyamaka can deploy realism, idealism, or any other position as “pedagogical devices, soteriological tools, not ontological assertions.”
• Murti’s Kantian reading is misplaced (pp. 47–50). Della Santina mounts a sustained critique of T. R. V. Murti’s The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (1955). Three principal objections: (a) the etymological translation of paramārtha as “absolute” and saṃvṛti / vyavahāra as “relative” “can scarcely be justified” — the Sanskrit denotes “highest end, purpose, or meaning” and “convention, usage, language” respectively; (b) for Madhyamaka, the division between the two truths is “nothing more than a pedagogical device” and emptiness is “not an ontological category, but a soteriological therapy”; (c) Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal split is itself ontological and dualistic and cannot be mapped onto a non-ontological Madhyamaka. Murti’s “absolutism” label, adopted by “a whole generation of translators,” produces a “somewhat distorted picture.”
• Forms of experience are alterable, unlike Kant’s (pp. 50). Space, time, substance, and causality are for Madhyamaka “objectified concepts” — the result of vikalpa conditioned by vāsanā and corresponding to prapañca. The vāsanā that gives rise to them “can be self-consciously altered, and this indeed is the aim of the Madhyamaka philosophy.” Kant treats them as necessary and unalterable and so, from a Madhyamaka point of view, is “inescapably ontological.”
• The ultimate is knowable both immediately and mediately (pp. 50). Citing Madhyamakālaṅkārakārikā v. 75, Della Santina rejects the Kantian reading on which the ultimate is unknowable: “By the reason that sunders conceptualism, the ultimate is known mediately.” This contrasts directly with Kant’s epistemic closure of the noumenal.
• The Wittgensteinian “leave everything as it is” reading also fails (pp. 51–53). Streng (1967) and Gudmunsen (1977) read Madhyamaka as endorsing the everyday use of language as paradigmatic of truth, with the post-soteriological state being a return to ordinary linguistic convention. Della Santina denies this: the negation of the conventional truth is itself negated, “but the negation of a negation for the Madhyamaka does not entail the reinstatement of the original hypothesis.” Citing the raft simile (Majjhima Nikāya I.135) and RatnāvalT II.104–106, he argues that ordinary language and ordinary experience for Madhyamaka are “neither true nor false” — concessions to a “conventional usage sustained by prevalent illusion,” not a paradigm of truth.
• Madhyamaka unifies what the West fragments (p. 53). “Western philosophy has yet to produce a system of thought that successfully unites the rigour of philosophy with the relevance of religion in an integrated system of soteriology capable of providing access to freedom in its fullest and most comprehensive sense. Such a system is available in the Madhyamaka.”

Methodology

Comparative philosophy executed from the Indian / Indo-Tibetan side. Della Santina trained in Buddhist Studies at the University of Delhi and was at the time a Lecturer at the National University of Singapore; the article is unmistakably a piece of insider comparative work — the Madhyamaka commitments are presupposed and the Western traditions are examined for their fit (or lack of fit) with that prior framework. He cites Cheng (1981) on the San-Lun tradition as independent confirmation of the Tibetan reading of prapañca, and engages Murti, Sprung, Stcherbatsky, Streng, Gudmunsen, and Waldo by name.

Methodologically the article opens with an explicit warning against two pitfalls of comparative philosophy: (a) using comparison to secure “academic philosophical respectability” for a non-Western system, and (b) facile identification that “may do more to engender misunderstanding than to promote comprehension” (p. 41). The hermeneutical posture throughout is anti-impositional: Madhyamaka should not be read through Kant or Wittgenstein but in its own pragmatic, soteriological terms.

Notable quotes

• “Emptiness is not an ontological category, but a soteriological therapy” (p. 49).
• “The division between the ultimate and conventional truths, for the Madhyamaka, is nothing more than a pedagogical device” (p. 49).
• “Western philosophy has yet to produce a system of thought that successfully unites the rigour of philosophy with the relevance of religion” (p. 53).

Connections

• Critiques Sprung on the translation of prapañca as “manifold of named things” (Sprung 1979) — Della Santina prefers the Tibetan exegetical reading on which prapañca is the crystallised objective counterpart of vikalpa. Sprung’s overall Wittgensteinian-deflationary reading is also at odds with Della Santina’s anti-positivism critique of Streng and Gudmunsen, although Della Santina does not name Sprung in that section.
• Aligns with Mipham / Śāntarakṣita structurally on the “all experience is mental but consciousness is not ontologised” architecture, though without naming Yogācāra-Madhyamaka explicitly.
• Aligns with Candrakīrti (cited at p. 47, Prasannapadā on MMK XVIII.5) on the Madhyamaka’s freedom to deploy any philosophical position as a soteriological tool.
• Aligns with the komito-seventy-stanzas-1987 reading of Śūnyatāsaptati vv. 40–42 and v. 70 as the diagnosis-and-correction of the nihilist misreading. Della Santina cites Śūnyatāsaptati v. 50 (Yamaguchi numbering; Komito v. 49) as one of his Nāgārjunian textual anchors for the vikalpa-and-prapañca analysis.
• Cuts against burton-emptiness-appraised-1999 and the deflationary-nihilist line generally, although the article predates Burton by 13 years.
• Cuts against the partial-engagement deflationary line running Sprung 1979 → Kalupahana 1986 → Burton 1999. Della Santina is the contemporaneous (1986) framework-respecting alternative voice.
• Cuts against Murti (The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 1955) — the principal target of the article. Murti is not currently a separate scholar page in the wiki; this article supplies the cleanest single statement of why his Kantian-absolutism reading is rejected by an Indo-Tibetan-trained commentator.