Source provenance. Mervyn Sprung’s English translation of seventeen of the twenty-seven chapters of Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā (Prajña Press, Boulder, 1979), made in collaboration with T. R. V. Murti and U. S. Vyas from Louis de la Vallée Poussin’s 1903–1913 Sanskrit edition. The text is dual-natured: a primary-text translation of substantial portions of the Prasannapadā (extending the wiki’s primary grounding from MMK 1.1 alone, via candrakirti-prasannapada-mmk1-excerpt, to MMK 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24 and 25 as Candrakīrti reads them) and a secondary 1979 academic interpretation embedded in the 40-page Translator’s Introduction and the translation choices themselves. Sprung’s selection deliberately omits the Buddhapālita–Bhāviveka exchange in Sanskrit Ch I (only Candrakīrti’s prefatory matter is rendered; the methodological controversy is abridged or excised, see Sprung’s Table 1, p. xii), so this source is a clean complement to candrakirti-prasannapada-mmk1-excerpt rather than overlap. Sprung also omits Sanskrit Chs VII, XII, XIV, XVI, XVII, XX, XXI, XXVI, XXVII entirely. Translation chapter numbering does not match Sanskrit chapter numbering — see the correlation table at p. xiii of the translation.
Thesis / main argument
Two distinguishable theses run through this work, and they should not be conflated.
Candrakīrti’s thesis (as Sprung translates it): the Prasannapadā expounds Nāgārjuna’s MMK as a coherent soteriological-philosophical project whose ultimate concern is nirvāṇa understood as “the serene coming to rest of the manifold of named things” (p. 33). The chapters Sprung selects converge on three claims: (i) every category of the Abhidharma — conditions, motion, vision, aggregates, elements, agent, fire/fuel, self, time, the Tathāgata, the four truths, nirvāṇa — is shown by prasaṅga to be incoherent under the assumption of svabhāva; (ii) the Two Truths (saṃvṛti / paramārtha) is the structural framework that makes the negation soteriologically meaningful (Translation Ch XVIII / Sanskrit Ch XXIV); (iii) nirvāṇa is not an ontically distinct realm but the same dependent arising taken non-causally — “there is no specifiable difference whatever between nirvāṇa and the everyday world” (Translation Ch XIX / Sanskrit Ch XXV, MMK 25:19, p. 259).
Sprung’s thesis (his Translator’s Introduction, pp. 1–25): the Prasannapadā is best read as a Wittgensteinian–Heideggerian critique of the cognitive function of language, in which prajñapti is rendered “a guiding, not a cognitive, notion presupposing the everyday.” On this reading, all key Buddhist terms — nirvāṇa, tattva, tathatā, dharmatā, and Buddha himself — are prajñaptis serving to lead beings toward freedom but not describing any reality (pp. 17–18). The Two Truths thus reduces to a language-theoretic distinction between cognitive (delusive) and non-cognitive (guiding, prescriptive) uses of words, with no “rock-bottom layer” of ultimate reality behind the screen of conventions. The translation choices encode this reading, most consequentially at MMK 24:18 (rendered “Absence of being is a guiding, not a cognitive, notion, presupposing the everyday. It is itself the middle way,” p. 238) and at MMK 24:8 (paramārtha rendered “a higher truth which surpasses it” rather than “ultimate truth,” p. 230).
Key claims (Candrakīrti, as translated)
- MMK 24:8 — “The teaching of the Buddhas is wholly based on there being two truths: that of a personal everyday world and a higher truth which surpasses it” (p. 230). Candrakīrti’s commentary glosses saṃvṛti etymologically as “utterly obscured” — ignorance arising from the obscuring of the true nature of things — and as social convention, “the world of ordinary language and of transactions between individuals” (p. 230). He directs readers to the Madhyamakāvatāra for the detailed treatment
- MMK 24:9 — “Those who do not clearly know the due distinction between the two truths cannot clearly know the hidden depths of the Buddha’s teaching” (p. 231). Candrakīrti grounds the necessity of teaching the conventional in MMK 24:10
- MMK 24:10 — “Unless the transactional realm is accepted as a base, the surpassing sense cannot be pointed out; if the surpassing sense is not comprehended nirvāṇa cannot be attained” (p. 232). Candrakīrti’s image: ordinary language is “a container for someone who wants water” — the receptacle that carries the water of wisdom (pp. 17, 232). Direct primary-text grounding for the framework-necessity claim
- MMK 24:18 — Candrakīrti links pratītyasamutpāda, śūnyatā, prajñaptir upādāya, and madhyama pratipad: “We interpret the dependent arising of all things as the absence of being in them. Absence of being is a guiding, not a cognitive, notion, presupposing the everyday. It is itself the middle way” (p. 238). Sprung’s translation of prajñaptir upādāya as “a guiding, not a cognitive, notion presupposing the everyday” is interpretive — it is the basis of his own thesis
- MMK 24:14 — “All things make sense for him for whom the absence of being makes sense. Nothing makes sense for him for whom the absence of being does not make sense” (p. 235). Candrakīrti’s clinching reply to the nihilism objection: emptiness enables the four truths and the entire Buddhist path; the nihilism charge is misdirected at his own meaning
- MMK 24:7 — Candrakīrti’s vyutpatti of the nihilism objection: the opponent equates śūnyatā with nāstitva (non-existence). Candrakīrti’s reply: “śūnyatā has the same meaning as dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda); the meaning of non-existence is not the meaning of absence of being” (p. 234). Establishes the key Madhyamaka distinction the wiki draws on at Emptiness
- MMK 25:19 — “There is no specifiable difference whatever between nirvāṇa and the everyday world” (Sanskrit Ch XXV, MMK 25:19, p. 259). Translation Ch XIX, the Nirvāṇa chapter, is the culminating investigation
- MMK 25:20 — “The ontic range of nirvāṇa is the ontic range of the everyday world” (p. 260). Sprung renders this with a footnoted caveat that nirvāṇa “can have no ontic limitations” — the kāriká must be read as denying that nirvāṇa is an ontic realm at all
- MMK 18:7 (Translation Ch XIV, Self and the Way Things Really Are) — “The way things really are” cannot be “manifested as named things” (p. 183, 9). Candrakīrti’s Ch 18 commentary is the primary source Sprung relies on for the language-limit thesis. The chapter that, on the Geluk biographical tradition, was the locus of Tsongkhapa’s direct insight into emptiness (coghlan-buddhapalita-2021 Introduction n. 21)
- The Dignāga / Bhāviveka epistemological controversy (Translation Ch II) — Sprung separates out Sanskrit 58.14–76 as a discrete chapter on Candrakīrti’s polemic against the Buddhist epistemologist (Dignāga or, on some readings, Bhāviveka). Candrakīrti argues (pp. 59–60) that the very notions of characteristic and what is characterized are reciprocally dependent and therefore mutually unintelligible — this unintelligibility is itself “the mark of saṃvṛti.” Direct primary-text evidence that Candrakīrti uses the breakdown of Abhidharmic-epistemological categories as the entry into the Two Truths
Key claims (Sprung’s interpretation, Translator’s Introduction)
- Madhyamaka aligns with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (pp. 2–3) — the first three named European thinkers who, in Sprung’s view, have made Madhyamaka comprehensible to Western readers. Nietzsche on the limits of reason; Heidegger on trans-objective truth; Wittgenstein on the non-cognitive function of language
- Language is not cognitive — there are no entities to which words refer; “person” rests on putative psycho-physical traits, “chariot” on wheels and axle, and so on. Word-function is prajñapti, “a non-cognitive, guiding term which serves to suggest appropriate ways of coping with the putative realities on which it rests” (p. 17). This is “a kind of nominalism and yet much more”
- All key Buddhist terms become prajñaptis — nirvāṇa (tattva), reality, the truth of things (tathatā), the quintessence of all things (dharmatā), and Buddha himself “become prajñaptis, serving to lead men toward freedom, but not claiming to describe any reality or convey any ultimate truth” (p. 18). This is the maximally deflationary move in the introduction
- Two truths or three? — MMK 24:10 distinguishes saṃvṛti, paramārtha, and nirvāṇa, which “support the view that Madhyamaka worked with three truths, not two.” But Sprung concedes that “Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti are not consistent on this point”; more often śūnyatā and the realisation-of-śūnyatā are not separated (p. 16). This ambiguity is left standing
- The higher truth, in so far as it is a theory, falls within the lower truth (p. 16) — any theory of śūnyatā must use the entitative vocabulary of conventional truth; therefore paramārtha as taught is itself, qua taught, saṃvṛti. Anticipates the Karmapa’s “even the ultimate, presented as opposite to the relative, is itself relative” (karmapa-feast-fortunate-1578) but reaches it from a Wittgensteinian rather than a Mādhyamika starting-point
- Nirvāṇa is “a return to the world following a radical purification” (p. 18) — not the end of life nor the denial of life. Nirvāṇa “lets the world become what it is.” Sprung explicitly rejects Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Max Müller, and Schweitzer’s readings of nirvāṇa as extinction or afterlife
- The translation refuses Stcherbatsky’s “transcendental reality” gloss — Sprung’s prefatory critique of bracketing (p. ix) takes Stcherbatsky’s parenthetical “(transcendental) reality” rendering of paramārtha as the paradigm of bad practice; his own translation substitutes “higher truth which surpasses” precisely to avoid the Kantian reading of Madhyamaka
Methodology
Translation directly from Poussin’s Sanskrit edition, with collaboration on individual chapters with T. R. V. Murti, U. S. Vyas, G. Nagao, N. Aramaki, and Tervyoshi Tangi. Sprung programmatically rejects (i) word-for-word translation, (ii) the bracketing convention, and (iii) the use of technical Western philosophical vocabulary. He omits the Buddhist scriptural quotations (Sūtra citations) Candrakīrti inserts, on the explicit ground that “the sūtras Candrakīrti quotes do not, with only rare exceptions, clarify or advance his argument in any way” (p. xi) — a deliberately de-Mahāyānising editorial choice that is itself a hermeneutical commitment. The Buddhapālita–Bhāviveka–Sāṃkhya controversies in Sanskrit Ch I are abridged for similar reasons (p. xii), on the ground that they make the work “difficult and discouraging” for contemporary readers. The omissions are catalogued at Table 1 (p. xii). The chapter renumbering and the omission of scriptures are reversible by anyone consulting Poussin; the reading lens of the introduction is not.
Notable quote
“The higher truth, in so far as it is a theory, is verbal truth, falls within the lower truth” (p. 16) — Sprung’s reformulation of MMK 24:18 + 24:10.
Connections
- candrakirti-prasannapada-mmk1-excerpt: The Dewar excerpt covers MMK 1.1 (the Buddhapālita–Bhāviveka–Candrakīrti controversy); Sprung covers nearly everything else of the Prasannapadā in English. Together they constitute the wiki’s primary-text witness to Candrakīrti’s MMK commentary
- Prasannapadā: The text page now updated to reflect substantial primary grounding for Chs 1–6, 8–11, 13, 18, 19, 22–25
- Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: Many MMK chapters are now reachable as primary text via Candrakīrti’s commentary in this translation. Most importantly MMK 24 (Two Truths) and MMK 25 (Nirvāṇa)
- Two Truths: The MMK 24:8–10 locus classicus is now primary-grounded
- kalupahana-mmk-1986: Closest comparator. Sprung 1979 anticipates Kalupahana’s deflationary-pragmatist reading by seven years but routes through Wittgenstein/Heidegger rather than the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta. Sprung does not reject the Mahāyāna framework as Kalupahana does — he accepts the Two Truths and the Mahāyāna setting, but reads them through linguistic-philosophical categories. A halfway point between traditional commentarial reading and Kalupahana’s full framework-removal
- burton-emptiness-appraised-1999: Burton’s argument that Madhyamaka entails nihilism stands at the end of the deflationary line that Sprung’s Wittgensteinian reading helped establish. Sprung does not call himself a nihilist, but the moves are visible: language is non-cognitive, key terms are prajñaptis, no rock-bottom reality. The differences from Burton are mostly tonal
- westerhoff-candrakirti-2024: Westerhoff’s 2024 MA commentary recovers Candrakīrti as a coherent metaphysical antirealist with semantic insulation between the two truths and the rejection of any rock-bottom layer. Sprung 1979 reaches a similar architecture — no rock-bottom layer behind the screen of conventions — but via Wittgenstein rather than via analytic antirealism. Westerhoff’s “fire screen” image of conventional truth as constructed-to-conceal (MA 6:028) is visible in nascent form in Sprung’s “language as the receptacle that carries the water of wisdom”
- westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016: The case Westerhoff 2016 makes that Madhyamaka can sustain a sophisticated nihilism is structurally available in Sprung’s 1979 reading, though Sprung does not draw it
- shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara and mipham-introduction-middle-way-2002: The Yogācāra-Madhyamaka tradition reads MMK 24:18 very differently — prajñaptir upādāya as the basis-of-designation that grounds dependent arising, not as a non-cognitive guiding notion. Sprung’s translation choice at this kāriká is hostile to the Mipham reading
- ruegg-svat-pras-2006: Ruegg’s analysis of the Prasannapadā is philological and historical-critical; Sprung’s is hermeneutical. The two are largely complementary — Ruegg attends to the Tibetan reception, Sprung to the philosophical content
- apple-jewels-middle-way-2018: Atiśa’s Kadampa lineage taught the Prasannapadā as the advanced Madhyamaka instruction. The chapters Sprung translates are precisely those that would have been most polemically and pedagogically central in that lineage (Chs 1, 18, 24, 25)