“Nāgārjuna’s Skepticism vis-à-vis those of Jayarāśi and Śrīharṣa” — Gokhale, Pradeep P. Described in its own note 6 as a paper for a symposium on Nāgārjuna. Affiliation given as Department of Philosophy, University of Pune.
Bibliographic gap. No date, venue or pagination. The latest work cited is D. K. Mohanta’s article in the Indian Philosophical Quarterly of January 1997, and the Pune affiliation places it before the move to the Central University of Tibetan Studies, so this wiki falls somewhere between 1997 and the mid-2000s. That is an inference from this wiki’s own apparatus, not a date Gokhale supplies. The citation cannot be completed without asking him.
Thesis / main argument
Indian philosophy is usually ordered by how many pramāṇas a school accepts, and has no recognised place for a school that accepts none. Gokhale argues that three Indian philosophers nevertheless used vitaṇḍā — refutation without any position of one’s own — as a serious method rather than as a debating tactic, and so count as cognitive sceptics: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi and Śrīharṣa. All three hold that no pramāṇa can be established, that no clear line can be drawn between knowledge and non-knowledge, and that no object can be shown to be either real or unreal.
The paper’s organising question is how each answers the charge that scepticism defeats itself, since sceptical argument presupposes the very framework of common belief it destroys. Jayarāśi answers by exempting naive, unexamined practice (avicārita-ramaṇīyāḥ vyavahārāḥ) from the attack and directing it entirely at metaphysical categories. Śrīharṣa answers formally, by treating debate as a set of conventional rules that oblige nobody to believe in pramāṇas, and substantively by keeping a self-evident pure consciousness beyond the pramāṇa-prameya duality. Gokhale judges both half-hearted, in diametrically opposite ways: one leaves common sense untouched, the other leaves Brahman untouched. Nāgārjuna alone is comprehensive. He accepts that his own statement is as empty as everything else, denies himself a thesis, and does not exempt either the world or a transcendent reality from the argument.
Part II sets the three against Western analogues drawn from Richard Popkin’s encyclopaedia article: Jayarāśi beside Hume and Santayana (scepticism and common sense in split coexistence), Śrīharṣa beside the fideists (Erasmus, Montaigne, Bayle, Kierkegaard), and Nāgārjuna beside Sextus Empiricus as a concerned sceptic — one whose scepticism is not merely intellectual but is addressed to the problem of human life and offers a cure for it.
Key claims
- Nāgārjuna’s scepticism is comprehensive rather than fragmentary. He does not, as Jayarāśi does, leave a layer of unreflective practice outside the argument, and he does not, as Śrīharṣa does, keep a reality that survives the refutation of all pramāṇas. The Vigrahavyāvartanī is read as the founding text of the Indian sceptical critique of pramāṇa.
- The self-defeat charge and Nāgārjuna’s two-part answer. The opponents’ objections are that an essenceless sentence can have no force (VV 1) and that a denial of everything must either rest on a pramāṇa, and so concede one, or rest on nothing (VV 5–6). Gokhale’s reconstruction: Nāgārjuna grants that his statement is as empty as any other and declines a language / meta-language distinction (VV 24), because emptiness (སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་) does not mean non-existence; and he claims a different logical status for his statements, since he is proving nothing and has no thesis (VV 29).
- Emptiness explicitly disjoined from non-existence. “Śūnya” is said not to imply non-existence but non-essential or non-absolute existence. Note 7 generalises the point across all three sceptics: none concludes that everything is unreal or that every cognition is false, so the emptiness of the pramāṇas is not their falsity.
- What the different logical status is, is left unspecified. Gokhale notes that Nāgārjuna’s statements share the grammatical structure of his opponents’ and differ in logical structure, then says Nāgārjuna does not make that structure clear, offering only that a śūnyavādin speaks for the sake of illumination (MMK 22.11). The early Wittgenstein’s showing-without-saying is put forward as a way to understand it, with the difference marked that Wittgenstein exempts science and common sense and Nāgārjuna exempts neither.
- Convention is both the condition and the target. For Śrīharṣa and Nāgārjuna alike, convention (ཐ་སྙད་) comprises pramāṇa and prameya; it must be accepted as the condition of any intellectual exercise and refuted as the object of the sceptical argument. Gokhale cites MMK 24.10 for the double role — the ultimate cannot be taught without relying on convention, and nirvāṇa is not reached without the ultimate.
- The ultimate is not somewhere else — the point that separates Nāgārjuna from Śrīharṣa. For Śrīharṣa the ultimate (དོན་དམ་པ་) is an eternal pure consciousness. For Nāgārjuna, Gokhale writes, the ultimate does not ontologically refer to anything beyond convention: realising the emptiness-nature of convention is itself the realisation of the ultimate. Candrakīrti’s comment on MMK 24.11 is cited in support.
- Concerned scepticism — the therapeutic reading, stated as such. Sextus argues in order to bring people to ataraxia and cure them of the dogmatist’s disease. Nāgārjuna is placed in the same class: to judge a thing existent is eternalism and to judge it non-existent is annihilationism (MMK 15.10), both being expressions of essentialism, which is itself an expression of a fundamental craving (སྲེད་པ་) (MMK 25.10); and an essentialist view (ལྟ་བ་) is a disease of which the realisation of emptiness is the cure (MMK 13.8, with Candrakīrti’s commentary).
- Nāgārjuna against the Pyrrhonians — and the point is a soteriological one. Appearance and reality are not his basic pair; conditional and absolute (pratītya / apratītya), essential and non-essential (sasvabhāva / niḥsvabhāva) are. Where the Pyrrhonians answer the charge that scepticism makes life impossible by living undogmatically among appearances, customs and natural inclinations, Nāgārjuna accepts customs and inclinations only provisionally, as lokasaṃvṛtisatya, and the realisation of ultimate truth does affect that acceptance. Pyrrhonism is on this count “split and fragmentary” where his is not.
- Nāgārjuna against Camus. If the goal a person strives for is absurd, Gokhale asks in Nāgārjuna’s voice, how can it have meaning even for that person; the four extremes are then applied to the meaningfulness of human existence. Camus’s struggling man remains self-centred, not yet free in the way anattā frees; Nāgārjuna’s enlightened person is free of self-centredness, at peace, and brings about harmony between self and others through emptiness.
- Jayarāśi and Śrīharṣa, for the contrast. Jayarāśi’s target is every tattva and every pramāṇa used to prove one, including the materialist’s; what survives is naive practice, equally available to the ignorant and the learned, and comparable to Santayana’s animal faith. Śrīharṣa treats debate as rule-governed convention and does not take the paradox seriously, since a refuted world of pramāṇa and prameya would take the rules with it; his practices are not unreal but have an ignorance-based existence (avidyā-vidyamānatvam). Gokhale’s note 16 adds that Śrīharṣa’s appeal to śruti as the authority for non-duality contradicts his own scepticism about pramāṇas.
Methodology
Comparative philosophy in an analytic register, working from Vaidya’s Mithila Institute edition of the Madhyamakaśāstra and Vigrahavyāvartanī, Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha and Śrīharṣa’s Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya. Candrakīrti is cited twice, both times in the notes and both times as corroboration of a verse rather than as an interpreter with a position. There is no other commentarial material, no Tibetan sources, no provisional / definitive distinction, no Three Turnings. Gokhale is candid about the second half’s basis: the Western comparisons rest wholly on Popkin’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, and he marks his account as provisional for that reason.
Notable quotes
- śūnya “does not imply non-existence. It only implies non-essential or non-absolute existence.”
Connections
- gokhale-essentialism-eternalism-1996 — the companion paper and the counterweight. The essentialist derivation of eternalism and annihilationism (MMK 15.10) and the craving transformation (MMK 25.10) appear in both, put to opposite uses: there they show the middle path is theoretical, here they show that the theoretical extremes are a disease with a cure. See note 1.
- gokhale-ways-of-argumentation-2008 — the same VV material worked out. What is a named blank here becomes the performative-negation account there.
- gokhale-madhyamika-dialectics-1992 — the two-dichotomies claim this paper partly softens (note 3), and the source of the “primacy of the theoretical” line.
- Murti / murti-samvrti-paramartha-1973 — the two are on the same side against the Vedāntic assimilation and reach it by opposite means. Murti separates Madhyamaka non-duality from Advaita non-duality while keeping a Real of his own; Gokhale keeps no Real at all and separates them by putting Śrīharṣa’s self-evident consciousness on the far side of the line. His ultimate, which does not refer beyond convention, is the direct denial of Murti’s, which is “something in itself, self-evident and self-existent”.
- Wood / wood-nagarjunian-disputations-1994 — Wood’s reception-history argument runs on the unanimity of the classical Indian verdict of nihilism. This paper is an Indian academic reading of Nāgārjuna as a sceptic and explicitly not as a nihilist, which is not a counter-example to Wood’s historical claim but is a counter-example to the assumption that the Indian reading has only one shape.
- grasping-emptiness-is-itself-a-form-of-nihilism — MMK 13.8 read as disease and cure, with Candrakīrti, from outside the framework.
- Two Truths — the ultimate as the realised emptiness-nature of the conventional, and MMK 24.10 used for convention’s double role.
- Sprung — the nearest structural neighbour among the deflationary readers, and the point where they part. Sprung empties the ultimate along with everything else; Gokhale denies that the ultimate refers beyond convention while holding that its realisation is a cure and changes how the conventional is held.