The Dialectics of Mādhyamika Buddhism

“The Dialectics of Mādhyamika Buddhism” — Gokhale, Pradeep P., in Buddhist and Jaina Views in Indian Philosophy, Datta Lakshmi Trust, Pune, 1992, pp. 50–75 (pagination derived from the volume’s table of contents, which places the following chapter at p. 76). Affiliation at the time: Department of Philosophy, University of Pune.

Thesis / main argument

The earliest of Gokhale’s four Madhyamaka papers, and the one most critical of the position it expounds. It runs in four parts. First, the sense in which Nāgārjuna is a dialectician: the movement from lokasaṃvṛtisatya to paramārthasatya is a dialectical rather than a logical negation, in that criticising the prima facie truth does not exclude it but develops beyond it, and the movement from thesis to alternative to viewlessness has a Hegelian shape without the Hegelian content. Second, the derivation of śūnyatā by criticising common-sense beliefs about existence, causation, motion, time and the act–agent–object triad. Third, Nāgārjuna’s reconstruction of received Buddhism: a rearrangement of the canon plus a reinterpretation of the four noble truths, avidyā, nirvāṇa and saṃsāra, pratītyasamutpāda, and the Buddha’s silence. Fourth, and shortest, a critical assessment of Madhyamaka method that ends without a verdict.

The core diagnosis is the one Tsongkhapa would recognise. To claim a thing exists is to claim it exists by its own nature, which entails permanence and contradicts experience; to claim it does not exist is to claim essential non-existence, which entails that it could never appear. Hence eternalism from the first horn, annihilationism from the second, and niḥsvabhāva as the only remaining option. Gokhale presents this as a logical extension of anityatā: if everything is impermanent it must also be essenceless, since no impermanent thing can be essentially real or unreal.

Two further claims are stated without qualification. The middle way for Nāgārjuna is theoretical rather than practical: where early Buddhism read śāśvatavāda and ucchedavāda as practical extremes and madhyamā pratipad as a moral-spiritual way of life, Nāgārjuna reads them as theoretical extremes and the middle as a theoretical middle. And, more sharply, “early Buddhism stands for primacy of the practical … Later Buddhism, of which Nāgārjuna is a founder, stands for primacy of the theoretical. The problem of suffering is treated basically as a part of a theoretical, metaphysical problem.” The chapter closes on a dilemma about method and then declines to resolve it, leaving open the question whether “there was nothing basically wrong with the Mādhyamika ontology.”

Key claims

• Two senses of “dialectical”. (a) The saṃvṛti / paramārtha relation is dialectical rather than contradictory: the prima facie truth is “practically foundational” to the philosophical truth, and negating it “does not exclude it completely, but it throws better light on it; it remains a development over it.” MMK 24.8–10 anchors this throughout the chapter. (b) The prasaṅga movement from a view to its alternative and then to viewlessness recalls thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
• The Hegel comparison is drawn in order to be refused — an anti-absolutist datum. Two differences. Hegel’s synthesis includes thesis and antithesis and marks a passage from partial to holistic truth; Nāgārjuna’s śūnyatā “does not include the alternative view points but it excludes them all.” And Hegelian dialectic describes the development of reality as well as of thought, whereas Nāgārjuna’s is restricted to thought, reality being discovered by the reasoning rather than developing through it. Gokhale also notes that the Jainas take the exactly opposite stance to the four koṭis, admitting all of them where Nāgārjuna excludes all.
• The eternalism / annihilationism derivation of essencelessness. Existence claimed of a thing implies existence by its own nature, which implies permanence, which experience contradicts; non-existence claimed of a thing implies essential non-existence, which forbids appearance. Both horns fail, hence niḥsvabhāva. Presented as extending anityatā. No verse locus is given here. The chapter states the derivation without citing MMK 15.10 or anything else; the verse is supplied in gokhale-essentialism-eternalism-1996 (its note 6) and again in gokhale-nagarjuna-skepticism. Do not attribute the 15.10 locus to this chapter.
• Pratītyasamutpāda is conditionality, not causal dependence. Pratyaya is any existential condition, not a cause; the four-pratyaya classification includes adhipati, which need not be causal. Gokhale reads the doctrine “in the negative sense of non-absoluteness” rather than as absolute dependence or connectedness, and notes that a strong reading of dependence would be hard to square with Nāgārjuna’s critique of relational necessity.
• The motion chapter is where he judges the method counterintuitive. In denying “what is being reached is being reached” (gamyamānaṃ gamyate), Nāgārjuna denies a tautology, and so denies the laws of identity and non-contradiction. Gokhale offers a charitable substitute — the statement is redundant, or motion withers away in the time taken to describe it, since motion lacks stable existence and language confers a stability on it that it does not have — and asks the reader to suppose “in fairness to Nāgārjuna” that something of this sort was meant.
• Śūnyatā is not a dṛṣṭi, and the point is made on the right verse. Nāgārjuna calls the essentialist positions views (ལྟ་བ་, dṛṣṭi) and refuses the title to śūnyatā, calling incurable (asādhya) those for whom emptiness is itself a view — MMK 13.8. Gokhale’s comparison is with intuitionistic logic: a proposition that is neither true nor false does not thereby have a third truth-value.
• The reconstruction of Buddhism has two tasks, and the first is hermeneutical. Nāgārjuna had to rearrange the canonical literature so that passages supporting his reconstruction became central and others peripheral, which he does by compiling the Prajñāpāramitā material and “by attributing centrality to kātyāyanāvavādasūtra”; and he had to reinterpret the received doctrines. The four noble truths, avidyā and viparyāsa, nirvāṇa and saṃsāra, pratītyasamutpāda and śūnyatā, and the Buddha’s silence are treated in turn.
• The Viparyāsaparīkṣā extension. Not only believing in ātman where there is anātman is avidyā; believing in anātman is equally avidyā, since anātman has no essential existence. Vidyā is accordingly the knowledge that impermanence, impurity, painfulness and selflessness are not themselves svabhāva of things.
• Nirvāṇa is bipolar and the poles are resolved by level. As prapañcopaśama it transcends worldly existence; at MMK 25.19 it is indistinguishable from saṃsāra. Gokhale resolves this by making the second ontological (both states are equally instances of pratītyasamutpāda) and the first epistemological (the person in saṃsāra is caught in an essentialist standpoint; the one in nirvāṇa holds none). He then distinguishes two dichotomies that look parallel and are not: vyavahāra / paramārtha is a real dichotomy, significant logically and dialectically; saṃsāra / nirvāṇa is not real ontologically, and its distinction is only epistemological.
• Fifteen characteristics of pratītyasamutpāda = śūnyatā, collected from MMK 1.1–2, 18.9 and 24.18, and read as four contrastive pairs (origination / destruction, existence / nothingness, oneness / distinctness, coming / going) plus prapañcopaśama, śiva, aparapratyaya, śānta, nirvikalpa, upādāyaprajñapti and madhyamā pratipad. The pairs give the middle; the middle gives essencelessness; essencelessness gives the identification with śūnyatā.
• The inexpressibility argument, reconstructed in six steps. Things have no essence; thinking and saying use concepts; concepts are fixed and determinate, and every svabhāva is a vikalpa imposed in savikalpaka cognition; so all thinking and saying presuppose essentialism; so in thinking and saying we distort reality rather than capture it; so reality is unthinkable and inexpressible. Gokhale notes this gives scope for a mystical reading, and declines it.
• His preferred conclusion, and he says so: seeing the limits of language rather than suspending it. On MMK 22.11 (nothing is to be called empty, non-empty, both or neither; these are said only to enlighten people), he holds that “the use of language is practically inevitable” and that the inexpressibility of reality can be conveyed only through language. “This suggestion, I think, is the most important contribution of Mādhyamika dialectics.”
• Primacy of the theoretical — the chapter’s direct challenge to framework-as-pedagogy. Early Buddhism gives primacy to the practical, treats the problem of suffering as primary and discards theorisation that does not bear on it. “Later Buddhism, of which Nāgārjuna is a founder, stands for primacy of the theoretical.” The solution is theoretical, or post-theoretical, and theoretical insight is expected to change the practical form of life by itself.
• The post-theoretical qualification, which the previous claim is usually quoted without. “Ultimately the insight should not involve theorisation though it could be a result of theorisation. In this sense it could be called post-theoretical.” Nāgārjuna’s insight is also, on Gokhale’s reading, something one must reach on one’s own rather than by depending on another, since language and communication cannot deliver it (the aparapratyaya characteristic).
• The closing dilemma, left unresolved. Prāsaṅgika method is consistent with Madhyamaka ontology but counterintuitive, since one cannot advance valid arguments without commitment to the laws of thought. Svātantrika method is intuitively sound but its logic forces an ontology in which things are essentially what they are, which is not Madhyamaka. Gokhale then turns the dilemma on the ontology itself — the dilemma may arise “because we assumed that there was nothing basically wrong with the Mādhyamika ontology” — and stops: “I think, I better stop with this question without giving my answer to it.”

Methodology

Analytic philosophy of religion in the Indian university tradition, working from the Sanskrit of the Madhyamakaśāstra and the Vigrahavyāvartanī (Vaidya’s Mithila Institute edition, 1960) with Murti’s Central Philosophy of Buddhism as the only secondary work in the bibliography. Comparative reference points are Hegel and intuitionistic logic. There is no engagement with the Indian commentators as commentators: Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti appear once, in a single sentence naming them alongside Nāgārjuna on the Prāsaṅgika side of the methodological split, and Bhāviveka appears as the Svātantrika. The Pāli material is handled through general characterisations of “early Buddhism” rather than through cited suttas. No Tibetan sources, no neyārtha / nītārtha, no Three Turnings.

Notable quotes

• “Later Buddhism, of which Nāgārjuna is a founder, stands for primacy of the theoretical.”

Connections

• gokhale-ways-of-argumentation-2008 — the same author sixteen years later, answering the method dilemma this chapter leaves open, and replacing the “counterintuitive” verdict on the motion chapter with the open-concept reading. The two should be read as a pair.
• gokhale-essentialism-eternalism-1996 — the immediate successor. The theoretical-middle-path claim gets its argument there, and the dilemma about method is replaced by an account of the negation (Russell’s external negation) that this chapter does not have.
• gokhale-nagarjuna-skepticism — the counterweight in the corpus, and this wiki that partly softens the two-dichotomies claim at note 6.
• Murti — the only secondary source in the bibliography, and the absolutist reading Gokhale does not take. He is now one of three framework-external readers in the wiki who set Murti up and decline him: galloway-logical-issues-1989 refutes Murti’s two counter-examples to the excluded middle directly (pp. 20–22), and hayes-nagarjunas-appeal-1994 reduces Murti’s Madhyamaka to Advaita Vedānta with the śruti-authority and the caste structure removed (p. 337). Three readers with no framework and no shared method converge against the absolutist reading, which is worth more to than one would be.
• hayes-nagarjunas-appeal-1994 — the motion-chapter criticism at note 5 below is the kind of charge Hayes presses systematically, and Hayes’s own version of it (the equivocation on svabhāva and on “exists”) is now held in full.
• Kalupahana / kalupahana-mmk-1986 — opposed on the Kaccāyanagotta question and on the culmination-versus-return framing, though Gokhale does not name him.
• jinpa-tsongkhapa-qualms-1999 — the eternalism / annihilationism derivation is Tsongkhapa’s shared-equation diagnosis reached independently, six centuries later and without the Tibetan material. Jinpa reconstructs the diagnosis from Queries from a Pure Heart and the Lam rim chen mo (p. 12); for Tsongkhapa’s own statement of it on the same verse Gokhale later anchors it to, see tsongkhapa-ocean-of-reasoning-1408 Ch 15 on MMK 15.10–11 (Samten and Garfield 2006, Sarnath ed. pp. 281–282): “as long as one maintains that things exist essentially one cannot escape the views of nihilism and reification… when one eliminates nihilism one has to accept reification; and when one eliminates reification, one has to accept nihilism.” That is the better citation for , since it is Tsongkhapa commenting on the MMK rather than a modern reconstruction of his concerns.
• framework-absence-yields-nihilism — the qualifying case. A framework-light reading that does not yield nihilism, and the reason the argument needs a category for suspended judgement.
• conventional-truth — his vyavahāra / paramārtha against saṃsāra / nirvāṇa distinction, which partly agrees with and partly reverses the wiki’s subject-side reading.
• grasping-emptiness-is-itself-a-form-of-nihilism — his MMK 13.8 gloss (those for whom śūnyatā is a dṛṣṭi are incurable) and the intuitionistic-logic comparison are an independent modern statement of the same point.