Bibliographic note
Mark Siderits, “The Reality of Altruism: Reconstructing Śāntideva,” Philosophy East and West 50.3 (July 2000): 412–424. A feature review of Paul Williams, Altruism and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (Curzon, 1998). The journal pairs the review with a long response by Williams (pp. 424–453), which is the next addition candidate.
Thesis
Siderits defends Śāntideva’s argument from impartial benevolence (BCA 8.94–103) against Williams’s charge that it either presupposes annihilationism or — if it asserts that persons are conventionally unreal — destroys the bodhisattva path itself (“How Śāntideva Destroyed the Bodhisattva Path,” Williams’s chapter 5 subtitle). Siderits rebuilds Śāntideva as a Buddhist Reductionist: persons are conventionally real but ultimately unreal, conventionally real because they are useful designations for utility-maximising causal series of psychophysical elements, ultimately unreal because only the dharmas (skandha-level constituents) figure in the most explanatory description. The bodhisattva’s altruism follows because once the person-construction is seen as a mere instrument for minimising suffering, it can be re-engineered to minimise all suffering, not just the suffering of any one causal series.
Key claims
- Williams’s dilemma reconstructed (pp. 413–414). Williams takes BCA 8.97–98 to imply either (a) annihilationism — “one [person] dies and another is reborn” — yielding moral nihilism, or (b) orthodox personal identity over rebirth, in which case the opponent can reaffirm self-interest. Either horn defeats Śāntideva.
- Siderits’s reductionist reading (pp. 414–415). Śāntideva is reminding us that “person” is a convenient designation for a causal series of skandhas. Self-interested concern is itself a culturally taught construction (we teach children to anticipate future pleasure and pain, and to feel regret for past acts as their own); the pedagogy can be extended sideways across causal series to ground bodhisattva compassion. The convention has consequentialist, not metaphysical, grounding.
- Williams’s “destroys the bodhisattva path” charge rebutted (pp. 415–417). Williams thinks Śāntideva must deny conventional persons too, which makes it impossible to identify whose pain to relieve. Siderits answers: persons are conventionally real precisely because the construction is consequentially justified — but the same consequentialist warrant shows that the construction is improvable. Once seen as a useful fiction, it ceases to blind us to “the real needs of others.”
- Maximal-causal-connectedness construction (pp. 417–418). Persons are constructed out of sets of psychophysical elements exhibiting maximal causal connectedness. Independent justification for the recipe (rebutting Williams’s question-begging charge): such systems are uniquely well-suited to self-scrutiny, self-control, and self-revision — capacities that maximise overall utility. Allows for fission/branching cases (the Tibetans, Siderits notes, accept branching rebirth).
- Subjectless pains (pp. 418–419). Williams charges that Śāntideva’s argument requires “free-floating” pains. Siderits concedes: the argument requires pains to be ultimately real but persons not. Williams’s competing functional analysis of pain is shown to undermine the intrinsic character (“what-it-is-like-ness”) that he simultaneously wants pains to have — pain “borrows” its essential properties from its neurophysiological realisers and so turns out to be conceptually constructed, not intrinsically natured.
- Mountains and minds (pp. 420–421). Reductionists do not hold that mountains pop into existence with the appearance of sentient beings. The atoms and their relations are mind-independent. What is mind-dependent is the mereological whole — the supposition of an extra entity over and above the parts, with determinate identity across sorites cases. Williams’s reading of Buddhist Reductionism as denying mind-independent existence of the parts is a misreading.
- Graded teaching: BCA 8 is provisional, BCA 9 is the corrective (pp. 421–422). This is the load-bearing claim for the argument of framework necessity. Siderits explicitly invokes the neyārtha / nītārtha structure — without using the Sanskrit — to defend BCA 8: chapter 8 (“Perfection of Meditation”) precedes chapter 9 (“Perfection of Understanding”), “and it is only in the latter chapter that the doctrine of emptiness is established. Śāntideva is, in other words, giving us a ‘graded’ or progressive teaching (cf. MMK XVIII.8).” In the post-emptiness register, the bodhisattva’s compassion can take on a more “personal tone” because everything is equally empty and personhood is no longer subject to invidious comparison with something deeper.
- Madhyamaka’s universal emptiness — Siderits accepts, Williams rejects (fn. 10, p. 423). “Williams finds this Madhyamaka view incoherent, whereas I do not.” Williams explicitly accepts an Abhidharmika-style ultimate (pains have svabhāva, “found under analysis”) but rejects the Madhyamaka extension of niḥsvabhāvavāda to the dharmas themselves. Siderits flags but does not press this disagreement.
Methodology
Hybrid: rational reconstruction (Parfit + Dennett + analytic philosophy of mind) plus close reading of the Sanskrit verses against the Indo-Tibetan commentarial tradition. Siderits’s “Buddhist Reductionism” framework (cf. his 1997 PEW article, named in fn. 2) treats Vaibhāṣika and Theravāda Abhidharma as making essentially the same move as Parfit: persons are conceptual constructions, the dharmas are the explanatorily basic items. Madhyamaka is then a further move that extends the reductionist treatment to the dharmas themselves — but in this paper Siderits defends only the Reductionist core, treating BCA 8 as a Reductionist argument and reserving the Madhyamaka extension for the chapter-9 register.
Notable quotes
- “Williams finds this Madhyamaka view incoherent, whereas I do not. But this difference need not concern us here.” (fn. 10, p. 423)
Extension from the wiki author’s personal notes (2025)
tenpa-personal-notes-2025 adds an Indian primary-text leg to Siderits’s defence of Śāntideva. Śūnyatāsaptati vv. 67–71 close off the move from “all phenomena lack inherent existence” to “therefore Madhyamaka is nihilism” from inside Nāgārjuna’s own text. Verse 71 is the explicit emptiness-of-emptiness statement: “how can that non-inherent existence itself have inherent existence? In fact, that non-inherent existence must definitely not exist inherently.” Verse 70 diagnoses the nihilist misreading by name — those who do not understand the conventional / non-inherent distinction “are frightened by this teaching.” If emptiness is itself empty, the framework is therapeutic, not metaphysical.
This gives Williams’s reading a sharper diagnosis: Williams approaches Śāntideva’s arguments as if they are making truth-claims about the ultimate nature of reality and then complains that the answers are logically inconsistent within a realist framework. But logical consistency within a metaphysical framework is not the goal — therapeutic effectiveness is. Williams is applying Western metaphysical realist criteria to a tradition that has explicitly moved beyond that paradigm. Strengthens the (Williams) and (partial framework-removal) treatment with an Indian primary-text node where Nāgārjuna pre-empts the inference Williams is making in BCA 8.
Connections
- Supports framework-absence-yields-nihilism by supplying an intermediate failure mode (Williams) between full removal (Burton) and full retention (commentarial tradition). Specifically: Williams’s reading of BCA 8.101–103 as path-destroying is the analogue, in altruism-theory, of Burton’s regress-from-universal-prajñaptimātra in metaphysics — both follow from refusing the emptiness-of-emptiness move.
- Cited by westerhoff-candrakirti-2024 approvingly on “semantic insulation” between the two truths (MA 6:031). Siderits and Westerhoff are the two contemporary analytic-philosophical Madhyamikans whom the argument of framework necessity most needs to engage seriously in / .
- Methodologically opposed to kalupahana-mmk-1986: Kalupahana wants Nāgārjuna pre-Mahāyāna and pre-systematic; Siderits wants Madhyamaka rationally reconstructed as a sophisticated philosophical system. Both are framework-revisionist but in opposite directions.
- Shares territory with oetke-remarks-interpretation-1991 on the question of whether Madhyamaka can be rationally reconstructed in analytic-philosophy idiom. Oetke’s “on the level of highest truth there is nothing of any kind” is a more austere version of what Siderits accepts in fn. 10. The two are differently positioned vis-à-vis the framework: Oetke retains the formal scaffolding but empties the pedagogical content; Siderits retains the pedagogical content (graded teaching) and is relaxed about how much formal scaffolding is needed.
- Williams’s monograph Altruism and Reality (Curzon 1998) is the primary source. Williams’s response in the same journal issue (PEW 50.3: 424–453) is the next addition candidate; together with the present review it forms a closed exchange.