Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: The Philosophy of the Middle Way

“Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way” — Kalupahana, David J., 1986.

Thesis / main argument

Kalupahana argues that Nāgārjuna was not an innovator but a “grand commentator” on the Buddha’s teaching, and that the MMK is specifically a commentary on the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta (SN 12.15). Nāgārjuna’s sole aim was to restore the empiricist, pragmatic philosophy of early Buddhism against the substantialist distortions introduced by the Sarvāstivādins and Sautrāntikas. The entire Mahāyāna hermeneutical apparatus — the Two Truths as a hierarchical doctrine, the notion of linguistically transcendent truth, the Prāsaṅgika-Svātantrika distinction, the reading of MMK through Candrakīrti’s lens — is a later imposition that leads Nāgārjuna’s philosophy away from its original intent.

Key claims

• MMK is “a superb commentary on the Buddha’s own Kaccāyanagotta-sutta” (p. 6); the only named citation in MMK (XV.7) is the Kātyāyanāvavāda, pointing to this discourse
• Nāgārjuna was an “empiricist par excellence” (p. 82); the repeated use of na vidyate (“is not evident”) is an appeal to experience, not dialectical reasoning
• Nāgārjuna denies svabhāva not through dialectical argument but on empirical grounds — it is simply “not evident” in experience (pp. 30–31)
• The Kārikā has four structural sections: (I) causality and change (Ch. I–II); (II) dharma-nairātmya (Ch. III–XV); (III) pudgala-nairātmya (Ch. XVI–XXI); (IV) conclusion (Ch. XXVI–XXVII), with Ch. XXII–XXV as a bridge
• The Two Truths (saṃvṛti/paramārtha) are NOT hierarchical — artha (fruit of everyday life) and paramārtha (ultimate fruit) are both truths with equal standing; the former is not sublated by the latter (pp. 69–70)
• Paramārtha means “ultimate fruit” or “ultimate consequence,” NOT “ultimate reality” — it is a pragmatic concept, not a metaphysical one (pp. 68–69)
• Saṃvṛti means “convention” (moral, social, linguistic — not merely “language” as Candrakīrti interprets it), following the early Buddhist usage of sammuti (pp. 16–19)
• Nirvāṇa is NOT an uncreated realm (asaṃskṛta) or Absolute; it is the absence of greed, hatred, and confusion — a transformation of the ordinary human personality, not a transcendence of it (pp. 72–77)
• Saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not identical (contra the standard Mahāyāna reading of XXV.19–20); Nāgārjuna merely denies that an ultimate substance distinguishes them (pp. 77–78)
• Candrakīrti’s interpretation led Nāgārjuna’s philosophy “towards a Vedantic interpretation” that contributed to Buddhism’s disappearance from India (Preface, p. vii)
• Chapters XXVI–XXVII are integral, not “Hīnayānistic appendices” — Ch. XXVI is the positive conclusion of the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta’s teaching on dependent arising (pp. 78–79)
• Nāgārjuna had “no thesis” (pratiñā) is a mistranslation; pratiñā means “commitment,” not “proposition” — Nāgārjuna avoided dogmatic commitment but continued to offer explanations (vyākhyāna) (pp. 92–93)
• The question “Where would a philosopher like Nāgārjuna go in order to discover the Buddha’s teachings?” is historical: no sophisticated Mahāyāna sūtras were available to him, so he turned to the Nikāyas and Āgamas (Preface, pp. viii–ix)

Methodology

Kalupahana reads MMK entirely through early Buddhist sources (Pāli Nikāyas, Chinese Āgamas, early Abhidharma) and rejects the standard practice of reading it through Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā. He compares the Sanskrit text with Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation (Chung-lun), finding the latter a more faithful rendering than Candrakīrti’s commentary. His interpretive method is explicitly anti-commentarial: he treats the traditional Indian and Tibetan commentarial tradition as a progressive distortion of Nāgārjuna’s original empiricist intent. He draws frequent parallels with Western empiricists (Hume) and pragmatists (William James).

Notable quote

“The present work may come as a surprise to many who are familiar with my previous publications, especially because it repudiates many things that I have said about Nāgārjuna.”

Further critique from the wiki author’s personal notes (2025)

Several additional lines of attack on Kalupahana 1986 are developed in tenpa-personal-notes-2025:

• The Kāśyapaparivarta pack-of-dogs / reaction-formation hypothesis (p. 8, Introduction “Nāgārjuna: The Myth,” Indian Edition 1991). Kalupahana’s actual move is to suggest that absolute altruism emerged as a noble reaction to monastic deviance — quoting the Kāśyapaparivarta’s own image of corrupt monks as “a pack of dogs fighting each other for a morsel of food.” The hypothesis is psychological-historical (Mahāyāna ideals as reaction-formation against bad monks), unsupported by textual or historical evidence. Early Mahāyāna texts show sophisticated philosophical engagement with Abhidharma categories and meditation theories — hardly the markers of motivated reaction-formation. The hypothesis tells us more about the kind of explanation Kalupahana is willing to entertain than about how Mahāyāna ideals actually emerged.
• The “Buddha lacked capacity” / Lotus Sūtra misreading. Kalupahana reads the Mahāyāna’s graduated-teaching device as an implicit claim that the Buddha could not teach the deeper doctrine to his immediate disciples. The correct reading is the opposite: the Lotus Sūtra’s skilful-means device asserts the Buddha’s supreme pedagogical sophistication in tailoring teaching to audience capacity. The argument is structurally like criticising a mathematics professor for teaching arithmetic to children rather than calculus, and concluding that the professor therefore does not understand mathematics.
• The “second Buddha” strawman. Kalupahana reads the traditional Tibetan epithet (sangs rgyas gnyis pa) as exalting Nāgārjuna above Śākyamuni. The epithet’s actual function is to mark Nāgārjuna’s exceptional gift as an interpreter of the Buddha’s teaching, not to elevate him as a Buddha-superior. The strawman is set up to be knocked down.
• The Cūḷahatthipadopama Sutta symmetry argument against the only-named-citation move. Kalupahana argues that MMK 15:7’s citation of the Kātyāyana-avavāda makes MMK a commentary on that Pāli sutta. By the same logic, the Mahāyāna pāramitā literature would be reducible to a commentary on the Cūḷahatthipadopama Sutta (MN 27), which can be read as implicitly walking the practitioner through the six perfections in sequence. The pāramitās are an active topic of study in the Theravāda pāramī tradition. This is a minor supplement, intended to de-value the only-named-citation move by symmetry; the substantive rebuttals are Mabja’s “accepted by all Buddhist schools” gloss and Garfield’s textual-range diagnostic.
• The Mabja-mediated reading of MMK 15:7. Per mabja-ornament-of-reason Ch 15 commentary, the Kātyāyana-avavāda is “a scripture that is accepted by all Buddhist schools” — Nāgārjuna’s citation is an appeal to commonly-accepted authority within a Mahāyāna treatise, anchoring the Madhyamaka rejection of “exists” / “does not exist” in a śrāvaka-acceptable text. Twelfth-century Tibetan primary-text confirmation of walser-nagarjuna-2005’s strategic-citation reading.

Connections

• Contradicts Westerhoff: Westerhoff engages seriously with the commentarial tradition and arrives at a sophisticated reading; Kalupahana dismisses the tradition and arrives at a deflationary one. Yet both operate outside the traditional framework to different degrees.
• Contradicts Tsongkhapa: Kalupahana would reject the entire Prāsaṅgika-Svātantrika apparatus, the six-fold negation of intrinsic existence, and the reading of MMK through Candrakīrti’s lens.
• Contradicts Gorampa: Kalupahana’s flat Two Truths directly contradicts Gorampa’s two-level ultimate truth. But they share a suspicion of over-systematisation (Kalupahana of the entire commentarial tradition, Gorampa of Tsongkhapa specifically).
• Contradicts Dolpopa/Tāranātha: The zhentong reading of MMK would be unintelligible from Kalupahana’s standpoint; there is no “truly existent ultimate” in his framework.
• Engages with Murti (Central Philosophy of Buddhism) — Kalupahana explicitly rejects Murti’s dialectical reading
• Engages with Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation — used as evidence for a more “faithful” reading than Candrakīrti’s
• Engages with Moggalīputta-tissa’s Kathāvatthu — presented as the first “reform” movement; Nāgārjuna is the second
• Counter-source for the Vedānta charge: glasenapp-vedanta-buddhism-1950 (structural counter; Yogācāra-not-Madhyamaka location of the Vedānta-approaching tendency, plus the reversed historical direction of influence)