Essentialism, Eternalism and Buddhism

“Essentialism, Eternalism and Buddhism” — Gokhale, Pradeep P., in Kalpakam Sankarnarayan et al. (eds.), Buddhism in India and Abroad, Somaiya Publications, Mumbai, 1996 (per this wiki’s own note 1). The header affiliation reads Central University of Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, which postdates the institution’s 2009 renaming, so the working copy is a later reprint.

Bibliographic gap. No pagination for either the 1996 printing or the reprint. Page references cannot be given.

Thesis / main argument

Essentialism (svabhāvavāda) is the shared problem, and Nāgārjuna and Dharmakīrti are two opposite Buddhist solutions to it. Part I sets out the doctrine in a deliberately general form — everything that exists has some fixed identifiable nature of its own — and shows two Indian systems drawing eternalist conclusions from it: Gauḍapāda’s ajātivāda, where existence is treated as the intrinsic nature (རང་བཞིན་) of the existent and therefore cannot be lost, and the Vaiśeṣika doctrine of eternal universals (སྤྱི་, sāmānya) and viśeṣas. Part II gives Nāgārjuna’s answer: he does not solve the problem of eternalism but dissolves it, by denying the essentialism from which it is drawn. Part III gives Dharmakīrti’s: accept essentialism in its logical sense (the law of identity and the law of double negation), refuse its metaphysical extension, and derive momentariness instead of permanence from a dynamic conception of existence.

The result Gokhale wants is a three-way classification. Nāgārjuna denies essentialism even in its logical form; Dharmakīrti accepts the logical form and denies the metaphysical; the metaphysical form leads to eternalism. The epilogue declines to adjudicate, saying only that reopening the issues would be success enough.

The paper is the sharpest statement in Gokhale’s corpus of the position framework-necessity has to meet. Nāgārjuna’s middle path, he holds, is ontological rather than moral or practical: it avoids the extremes of śāśvatavāda and ucchedavāda understood as theoretical commitments, not as a way of life. He then presses the point further than the 1992 chapter does, by way of MMK 25.10. Where the Buddha spoke of craving (སྲེད་པ་) for existence and for non-existence (bhavatṛṣṇā / vibhavatṛṣṇā), Nāgārjuna is read as recasting the pair as craving for being and non-being (bhāvatṛṣṇā / abhāvatṛṣṇā) — so that craving is built into thought and language themselves, and the practical craving from which one seeks and avoids becomes secondary, an outcome of the primary theoretical craving.

Key claims

• Essentialism stated generally, then unpacked into five ideas. Not the Cārvāka cosmological svabhāvavāda (the world caused by its own constitutive elements) nor Sāṃkhya prakṛti, but the doctrine that everything existent has a fixed identifiable nature. Its components: the laws of identity and double negation; intrinsic nature as an identifying characteristic; intrinsic nature as what marks a thing off from all others, hence essence; fixity, in that a thing cannot lose its intrinsic nature and remain itself (fire cannot stop burning and remain fire); and extension from individuals to classes.
• The Advaita route to eternalism, and three criticisms of it. Gauḍapāda’s argument runs: if a thing really exists, existence is its intrinsic nature; intrinsic nature cannot be transcended; therefore the existent cannot cease to exist. Gokhale answers it three ways — existence is logically prior to essence rather than one of them; even granted as essence, the claim reduces to the tautology that the existent cannot cease to exist while it exists; and the concept of existence is left unexamined, since a dynamic conception of it points the other way. The second and third he credits to Dharmakīrti.
• The Vaiśeṣika route. Sharable characteristics (sāmānya, jāti) and the peculiarities of extreme particulars (viśeṣa) are abstracted from things and given permanent status. The objection is the same in shape: logical and epistemological fixity does not yield ontological permanence.
• The middle path is theoretical — this wiki’s direct challenge to framework-as-pedagogy. Nāgārjuna identifies the middle path with emptiness (སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་) and dependent origination (MMK 24.18) and avoids the two extremes by refusing both ontological commitments, positive and negative (MMK 15.10). Gokhale’s gloss: the middle path is ontological, “neither moral nor practical, the one which consists in avoiding the two extremes of sensuous enjoyment and self-torture”, and Nāgārjuna in his philosophical presentations is “not primarily” concerned with attachment to pleasure and pain as he is with theoretical attachment to existence and non-existence. Both restrictions are his and both matter: what is denied is that the MMK’s middle is the Dhammacakkappavattana middle, not that the enterprise has no practical bearing at all.
• The craving transformation (MMK 25.10) is the argument behind that gloss. Bhava / vibhava become bhāva / abhāva; craving is thereby located in language and thought, and practical craving is derived from it rather than the reverse.
• The implication from essence to eternality is accepted and run backwards. Gokhale reads Nāgārjuna as granting Gauḍapāda’s inference and using it as a modus tollens: impermanence is never absent from things (MMK 21.4), so permanence is certainly not the case, so the antecedent — essential existence — must fail. Note 8 records that Nāgārjuna does not assert impermanence but denies its opposite, which Gokhale takes as consistent with the method described below.
• The denials are symmetrical, and that is what distinguishes Nāgārjuna from an ordinary anti-essentialist. Impermanence is denied as intrinsic nature no less than permanence (MMK 23.14); anātman no less than ātman (23.22); the essential existence of nirvāṇa no less than that of saṃsāra (25.19). One cannot keep essentialism by making destruction the essence of things.
• The method is external negation, after Russell. The internal negation of “the present king of France is wise” carries the existence of the subject; the external negation does not, so both a statement and its internal negation can be denied without contradiction. Nāgārjuna denies the four alternatives of MMK 1.3 in this way, because he denies that things are produced at all, and denies existence and non-existence together because he denies the presupposition they share.
• And the consistency story has a limit Gokhale states rather than hides. Nāgārjuna is denying every indicative sentence, hence language as a whole and the logic that applies to it. Double external negation ordinarily restores the original; this denial cannot be negated twice, and is instead treated as a limiting case of language indicating a non-linguistic awareness (MMK 22.11, with a Tractatus 6.54 comparison). The difference from Wittgenstein is marked: what the early Wittgenstein says of metaphysical statements and not of scientific ones, Nāgārjuna says of all statements.
• The Buddha’s silence is generalised, and it is inward. The unanswered questions (avyākṛta) are a bounded set; Nāgārjuna extends the response to every question (MMK chs. 22 and 27). The silence is “not supposed to be oral or external, but mental and intellectual”, a refusal of all ontological commitment, supported by a cluster of verses (4.5, 9.12, 15.10, 18.7).
• Dharmakīrti’s logical essentialism — this wiki’s foil. “Everything is what it is” and “everything is other than what it is not” carry no metaphysically fixed nature; statements of self-identity are redundant because self-evident. Nāgārjuna refuses even this, since in the motion chapter he rejects the tautology gamyamānaṃ gamyate on the ground that there is no act of going to be identical with itself.
• How Dharmakīrti blocks the two eternalisms. Against eternal universals: self-identity has two aspects, identity and exclusion, and exclusion is twofold — a fire-particular is excluded from non-fires and from other fire-particulars. Thinking of it as “fire” suppresses the second exclusion; no entity “fireness” is thereby met. Against eternalism about existence: intrinsic nature is caused by the intrinsic natures of a thing’s causes, is not separable from the thing, and perishes with it; and sat is defined as arthakriyākāri, so what is real must be functional, what is functional must change, and what changes cannot retain identity — hence momentariness.

Methodology

Analytic philosophy of religion in the comparative Indian mode, working across four systems at once — Advaita, Vaiśeṣika, Madhyamaka, and the Dharmakīrtian pramāṇa tradition — from the Sanskrit, with the Madhyamakaśāstra, the Pramāṇavārttika and the Hetubindu as the texts cited. Russell’s internal / external negation distinction and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus supply the comparative apparatus. There is no commentarial engagement of any kind: no Indian Mādhyamika is named, no Tibetan material appears, and the Two Truths are not used. Gokhale states his own sympathies (with Dharmakīrti, and against the eternalist developments) and then sets them aside as not this wiki’s business.

Notable quotes

• “So really the middle path of Nāgārjuna is ontological — it is neither moral nor practical, the one which consists in avoiding the two extremes of sensuous enjoyment and self-torture.”

  Quote the sentence whole. The trailing clause restricts the denial to one middle path, the Dhammacakkappavattana middle between indulgence and austerity, and the sentence immediately following adds two further limits in Gokhale’s own words: “Nāgārjuna in his philosophical presentations is not primarily concerned with our practical attachment to pleasure and pain, as he is with the theoretical attachment to existence and non-existence.” Cutting at “practical” makes an already-hedged claim look absolute. Earlier drafts of this page and of gokhale-alignment quoted the truncated form.

Connections

• gokhale-madhyamika-dialectics-1992 — the immediate predecessor and the closest in stance. Both make the middle path theoretical, both derive essencelessness from the eternalism / annihilationism dilemma, both judge the motion chapter a denial of the law of identity. This paper adds the argument from MMK 25.10 that the 1992 chapter asserts without.
• gokhale-ways-of-argumentation-2008 — the successor, and where the external-negation account becomes the performative one. Note 4 above bears directly on the independence question recorded at that page’s note 8.
• gokhale-nagarjuna-skepticism — the companion paper, and the one that pulls the other way. There the same author reads the point of the whole exercise as freedom from a disease, which sits uneasily beside “neither moral nor practical”. The tension is recorded on both pages and is not resolved here.
• Wood / wood-nagarjunian-disputations-1994 — the external-negation reading of MMK 1.3 and 15.10 is a further framework-external denial that the first two extremes exhaust the field, reached before the performative account and by a different route.
• Galloway / galloway-logical-issues-1989 — see note 4. Gokhale’s own use of the shared-presupposition mechanism complicates the claim that he and Galloway supply independent blocks on Wood.
• jinpa-tsongkhapa-qualms-1999 — the shared essentialist–nihilist equation, here approached from the Advaita side.
• Murti / murti-samvrti-paramartha-1973 — the two Indian-academic treatments of Madhyamaka against Vedānta. Murti separates advaya from advaita to keep them apart; Gokhale separates them by making Gauḍapāda’s essentialism the very thing Nāgārjuna denies. Same conclusion, no shared apparatus.
• Svabhāva — the five constitutive ideas and the logical / metaphysical split are the cleanest analytic statement of the negandum the wiki holds from outside the dgag bya literature.