A set of working notes I put together across 2025 while reading through the modern academic interpretations of Nāgārjuna and trying to sort out what the Tibetan tradition does differently. Quotations have been checked against the wiki’s primary sources where possible. The polemical register against Kalupahana is mine.
Extending Siderits’s defence of Śāntideva against Williams
Paul Williams contests Śāntideva’s argument in chapter 8 of the Bodhicaryāvatāra by reading “because persons are ultimately unreal we should show equal concern for all beings’ suffering” as a dilemma that cannot be sustained. The problem is that he assumes Śāntideva must be denying that persons exist conventionally. Siderits has already pointed out that Śāntideva is operating within the two-truths doctrine, and that Williams has missed the fact that chapter 8 deliberately precedes chapter 9 — the Reductionist arguments in 8 are provisional, and the Madhyamaka chapter 9 is the corrective. These arguments aren’t merely philosophical exercises either. They’re practical techniques for developing the compassionate mindset needed for liberation.
I would add the Śūnyatāsaptati to Siderits’s defence. Verses 67 to 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.” And v. 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, then the whole apparatus is therapeutic and not metaphysical.
This is where Williams keeps going wrong. He approaches Śāntideva’s arguments as if they’re making truth-claims about the ultimate nature of reality — do persons really exist or not? — and then complains that the answers are logically inconsistent within a realist framework. But logical consistency within a metaphysical framework isn’t the goal. Therapeutic effectiveness is. Conventional and ultimate aren’t competing descriptions of reality; they’re different modes of discourse for different stages of practice. Williams is applying Western metaphysical realist criteria to a tradition that has explicitly moved beyond that paradigm.
On Mabja, and where I think the Madhyamakāvatāra fits
Reading [[mabja-ornament-of-reason|Mabja’s Ornament of Reason]] I came across a passage where he says that while MMK is almost entirely focused on teaching dependent origination free from conceptual elaboration, “this teaching is taught for the sake of peace, the complete pacification of constructs. Hence, the direct purpose of this teaching is to elicit a precise realisation in those in need of guidance through the insight that arises from study.” He then sets out four elements of the text: subject matter (dependent origination free from the eight constructed extremes), purpose (realisation of that by means of scripture alone), inner purpose (the temporary attainment of the ten grounds and the final attainment of Buddhahood), and relationship (how purpose depends on the treatise).
One small observation that follows from this: Nāgārjuna doesn’t actually go through the ten grounds in MMK. The MMK could in principle be accepted by Theravādins as well. Mabja himself glosses MMK 15:7 by calling the Kātyāyana-avavāda “a scripture that is accepted by all Buddhist schools” — the citation is doing cross-school bridging work, not narrowing MMK to a Pāli commentary.
What I want to draw attention to is Mabja’s treatment of the subject matter of MMK as the nature of the Two Truths. He says that to ascertain this nature we need three things:
- setting forth the characteristics of the two truths,
- identifying the bearers of those characteristics, and
- presenting the means for validly cognising the presence of those characteristics upon their bearers.
He anchors the first on Madhyamakāvatāra 6:028 — “The object of genuine seeing is the ultimate. False perception is taught to be relative truth” — and the second on Bodhicaryāvatāra 9:2 — “The ultimate is not an object of the mind; Mind is held to be relative.” For the third he says: “we must identify the mind, or reliable means of cognition, that ascertains the characteristics of the two truths; and show how the mind ascertains them.” But he doesn’t name a single text for this third step.
My key claim is that Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra (MA) is exactly that text. The MA is structured by the bodhisattva’s progression through the ten bhūmis and culminates in buddhahood. Chapter 1 is the first bhūmi and the Path of Seeing — the first moment the mind glimpses the ultimate truth. Chapter 11 is the eleventh stage, complete buddhahood — the full and direct realisation. The bhūmi-by-bhūmi structure of the MA is the journey the mind takes from the first glimpse to direct perception. The MA isn’t merely a Madhyamaka treatise that happens to include a bhūmi exposition: it’s the textual realisation of Mabja’s third step. Mabja inherits the Candrakīrti–Pa Tshab line, so the candidate is obvious; what I haven’t seen anyone do is read MA specifically as the means of validly cognising the characteristics of the two truths in the sense Mabja’s scheme requires.
My critique of Kalupahana
Kalupahana (kalupahana-mmk-1986) starts his commentary on MMK by accusing Candrakīrti of being influenced by Vedānta and deviating from both Nāgārjuna’s view and the Buddha’s view. The evidence he offers is that some of his colleagues who study Vedānta are comfortable with Candrakīrti — hardly a reason to imply causation. If anything the documented Vedānta-approaching tendency in Indian Buddhism is in Yogācāra, which is precisely the school Candrakīrti is the principal Indian critic of (see glasenapp-westerhoff-vedanta-unification).
He claims that the Sarvāstivāda svabhāva theory and the Mahāyāna conception of bodhicitta are theories contrary to the Buddha’s fundamental tenet of dependent arising. He is unhappy with the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (Lotus Sūtra) for what he reads as condemning the early disciples and downplaying the early discourses. He says that by claiming the Buddha had to teach those discourses because the disciples couldn’t understand the deeper doctrine, the Mahāyāna is implying the Buddha lacked the capacity to teach them. However, we see in many sūtras that those same disciples were present when the Mahāyāna was being taught. Even today Theravādins feel discouraged from following the Bodhisattva path, saying it is much too difficult and long, and unnecessary. Moreover, if the śrāvaka path were really deemed unnecessary or worthy of criticism, monasticism would have disappeared among the Mahāyāna — given that monasticism is at its core a path of self-liberation. Yet Nāgārjuna was himself a monk, most śrāvaka traditions have followed Mahāyāna at some point in history (including the Theravādins in Sri Lanka), and the Tibetan tradition (heavily Tantric in its public appearance) still maintains a very pure Vinaya lineage after more than a millennium. There is some factor or condition that Kalupahana isn’t taking into account.
He then makes the rather bold suggestion that absolute altruism may have emerged as a noble reaction to monastic deviance — quoting the Kāśyapaparivarta’s image of corrupt monks as “a pack of dogs fighting each other for a morsel of food” (Introduction, “Nāgārjuna: The Myth,” p. 8). The claim is essentially psychological-historical: noble Mahāyāna ideals arose, on this hypothesis, as a reaction-formation against bad monks. This is pure speculation without 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.
He also privileges certain sources (Vinaya-piṭaka, Kāśyapaparivarta) while dismissing others as reactive. This is cherry-picking evidence to support a predetermined narrative about “authentic” vs “deviant” Buddhism. But the most egregious issue is his characterisation of Mahāyāna ideals as “contrary to the middle path.” Here he fundamentally misinterprets the Mahāyāna doctrine of skilful means. When the Lotus Sūtra presents the Buddha as teaching different doctrines to different audiences, this isn’t a claim that the Buddha “lacked capacity” — it’s an assertion of pedagogical sophistication. The text presents this as evidence of the Buddha’s supreme skill, not his limitation. It’s like criticising a mathematics professor for teaching basic arithmetic to children rather than advanced calculus, and then claiming this proves the professor doesn’t understand mathematics.
His claim that the Mahāyāna “down-plays” the early discourses is also historically inaccurate — most Mahāyāna texts assume familiarity with the basic Buddhist teachings and build upon them rather than rejecting them. And his charge that the Mahāyāna presents Nāgārjuna as even superior to Śākyamuni misreads the traditional epithet. Calling Nāgārjuna a “second Buddha” (sangs rgyas gnyis pa in the Tibetan) is honouring his exceptional gift as an interpreter of the Buddha’s teachings, not exalting him above the Buddha. Kalupahana is setting up a strawman to knock down.
Kalupahana is essentially arguing that sophisticated hermeneutics and graduated teaching methods represent arrogance rather than pedagogical skill. This allows him to dismiss the entire Mahāyāna interpretive tradition as hubris while positioning his own “return to simplicity” as humble authenticity.
In his commentary itself Kalupahana attempts to prove that MMK is just a commentary on the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta, the Pāli sutta that talks about the Right View in terms of removing the concepts of “existence” and “non-existence.” He uses the fact that this is the only text Nāgārjuna names in MMK as evidence that “Nāgārjuna might not have been a Mahāyānist.” Before refuting this directly it is worth pointing out a basic inconsistency. The Cūḷahatthipadopama Sutta (MN 27) implicitly walks the practitioner through the six perfections in sequence: letting go of the worldly life (dāna), the practice of discipline (śīla), restraint from covetousness and displeasure (kṣānti), bliss in virtue and joyful effort (vīrya), samādhi (dhyāna), and the mind extended toward wisdom (prajñā). The pāramitās are also discussed in the Theravāda tradition as the pāramīs and are still an active topic of study there. Using Kalupahana’s own logic, one could argue that the Mahāyāna sūtras on the six perfections are commentaries on early Pāli suttas like this one rather than later fabrications. His “early Buddhism” bias blinds him to patterns that would support Mahāyāna authenticity using his own criteria, which shows that he is operating from unexamined sectarian assumptions rather than neutral scholarly methodology. The argument is a minor supplement — its purpose is just to de-value the only-named-citation move by symmetry.
Mabja’s gloss of MMK 15:7 is the more important point. The Kātyāyana-avavāda is “a scripture that is accepted by all Buddhist schools.” Nāgārjuna’s citation is grounding Madhyamaka in what was at the time the most widely-accepted corpus of the Buddha’s teachings. This goes hand in hand with Walser’s interpretation that Nāgārjuna was strategically writing in a way that would secure his Mahāyāna sūtras a place within the mainstream non-Mahāyāna monastery he depended on. Jay Garfield closes the question on textual grounds: while the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta is clearly important for Nāgārjuna, the range of topics covered in MMK far exceeds the sutta’s scope, and no other passage from the sutta is cited or alluded to elsewhere in the text. MMK cannot be a commentary on it.
The deeper problem with Kalupahana is that he is missing the Mahāyāna hermeneutical framework — the Two Truths together with the neyārtha / nītārtha distinction — that the text presupposes. The ultimate teachings aim at abandoning conceptual elaboration altogether, and MMK is calling for exactly that. Nāgārjuna isn’t rejecting all metaphysical elaboration; he is teaching how to abandon it within the context of the two truths. Metaphysical elements are necessary in the Mahāyāna context as skilful means — they make the mind pliable enough to break out of conceptual elaboration, which wouldn’t be possible if we took a purely empirical and rational approach. The Vajrayāna does the same thing on a different scale: in creation and completion (bskyed rim / rdzogs rim) one builds a framework to occupy the mind and then dismantles it. MMK is dealing purely with this last step.
We even know from Nāgārjuna’s other works — the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa and the Vaidalyasūtra — that he was actively dismantling foundationalist systems of reasoning and rationalisation. Westerhoff himself, in his 2009 Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka, makes it clear that the framework one uses when analysing MMK changes the meaning and purpose of the text. Modern scholars of the last century may not have broadened their framework enough to include the Mahāyāna framework of the two truths.
“Once neither an entity nor a non-entity remains before the mind, the mind has no other alternative but to rest perfectly without elaboration.” — Bodhicaryāvatāra 9:34.
One last point on Kalupahana. He presents Nāgārjuna as apophatic — dissolving all positions — yet his own interpretive approach is cataphatic. He makes strong positive claims about what MMK really means (empirical pragmatism), what Nāgārjuna’s true project was (therapeutic anti-philosophy), what counts as authentic Buddhism (early empiricism), and how MMK should be read. The position is self-undermining. As Max Müller put it, “to know one is to know none” — knowledge is comparative, and cataphatic engagement with a single text as self-enclosed bypasses the comparative dimension entirely. Kalupahana’s Theravāda background may be driving him to take “Early Buddhism” as the true standard and to treat later developments as corruptions.
On Siderits and the systematisation of the Two Truths
Siderits seems to think that the Buddha didn’t actually teach the two truths as a system — that it was something the later commentators developed. In [[siderits-buddhism-philosophy-2007|Buddhism as Philosophy]] ch. 6 (“Non-Self: Empty Persons”) he writes: “The distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth was developed by commentators on the early Buddhist texts in order to solve an exegetical problem.” The problem he has in mind is that the Buddha appears to contradict himself — sometimes teaching no-self, sometimes teaching karma and rebirth in a way that presupposes a person — and the commentators distinguished neyārtha and nītārtha to resolve the apparent inconsistency.
I think he is partly right and partly wrong. He’s right that the Buddha did not present the two truths as a system; the systematisation is commentarial. He’s wrong if he means the underlying doctrine was absent from the original teachings. If the commentators came up with this method, it isn’t because they invented it but because it was already in the Buddha’s teachings without being systematised yet. The Buddha taught for forty-five years, and every teaching was a response to someone’s specific situation at the moment they were in his presence. He didn’t need to systematise because he could give personalised teachings on the spot. To say the commentators invented the two-truth pedagogy would be like saying that the butter obtained from churning milk came from the milk-churner and not from the milk. The two-truth system is not a made-up method but a carefully crafted method extracted directly from the Buddha’s original teachings.
We’re also talking about incredibly intelligent and committed monks who dedicated their entire lives to the Buddha’s words, exchanging teachings and observations and comments across generations. For someone born in the twentieth century, without a formal monastic education within a living and effective lineage, to say they know more than these great beings is quite bold.
When I say “effective” I mean whether a teaching lineage can lead one to enlightenment, because that is the aim of the Buddha’s teachings. This is hard to measure on individuals (how can you tell whether one person is enlightened?), but we can think about lineages instead. Buddhism is not a religion with strong societal grounding like the other major traditions. The only way it remains alive is whether it is effective at what it says it can do. If people fail to reach enlightenment, Buddhism will cease to be. Someone could say a guru could con her students, but it is difficult for an entire religion to be full of con artists — especially given the hardships needed to reach enlightenment (long periods in isolation, which would drive the inexperienced mad; the humility that comes with enlightened qualities, which is difficult to fake).
A separate piece of evidence: both Śrāvaka and Mahāyāna lineages independently reach a two-truths system, like convergent evolution. Even the only surviving Śrāvaka lineage today, the Theravāda, has reached the same conclusion that the Buddha’s teachings divide into provisional and definitive. I saw this directly during my time in Thailand with the Thai Forest Tradition. Ajahn Teera (Wat Pa Tam Wua, interview recorded 2026-02-07; transcript at raw/interviews/teera-tam-wua-interview.txt) put it this way: “the spoken Dharma is just a tool that we use, just how we use the body in this life but we will have to let go of it. The Dharma will release by itself.” On the ultimate, he said: “the true nature cannot be explained with words, it is beyond concepts.” That is neyārtha / nītārtha expressed from inside the Thai Forest register, and the Madhyamaka prapañca-pacification expressed in a non-Madhyamaka idiom.
One more counterfactual. Even if by some miracle scholars got their hands on the Buddha’s exact teachings, they would still be facing forty-five years of daily teachings addressing different audiences, contexts and spiritual levels. They would inevitably have to systematise this corpus simply due to the volume and complexity, and what they produced would resemble the two-truth methodology and the related frameworks. Systematisation isn’t a corruption of original teachings; it’s the only available mode of comprehending the corpus.
On systematisation and the live teaching lineages
Traditional interpretive methods, developed across generations of scholarly engagement, preserve hermeneutical keys that isolated textual analysis cannot access. The German Indologist Max Müller once wrote “to know one is to know none”: knowledge is comparative, and to know a thing — a text, a practice, a culture — requires seeing how it relates to other things. The nexus of relationships is where knowledge arises. Some scholars seem to approach MMK cataphatically, focusing only on this treatise and treating it as an isolated, self-enclosed subject. Other texts may be referred to but the emphasis is on proof-texts that positively support the position one is trying to defend. Apophatic forms of literary discourse focus on differences — the goal is to get at the thing by contrasting it with what it is not.
Westerhoff makes a parallel methodological point in his 2009 Introduction:
“Indian philosophical texts (unlike their Western counterparts) were generally not intended to provide the reader with a self-contained exposition of the author’s thoughts. Instead their versified form provided the structure of the argument to be memorized, which would then be elaborated on by written commentaries and by a teacher’s oral explanations.”
This adds a strong case for the Tibetan teaching lineages. Because of their publicly Tantric appearance these lineages sometimes don’t receive the recognition they deserve for their authority in explaining philosophical texts like MMK. To counter this, George Dreyfus (Recognizing Reality) highlights that the Tibetan scholastic tradition is heavily commentarial: “any philosophical elaboration must be presented as a commentary on an authoritative text,” and “views could never be presented on their own philosophical merits but only as authoritative commentary.” The Tibetan scholars were operating with a set of rules quite different from modern scholars. Their ground-rule was the validity of the Indian texts — for good reason, because the Tibetans spent four centuries interacting with Indian scholars and translating whatever Indian texts they could lay hands on, with the Indian scholars themselves present. That is plausibly the most accurate cross-language transmission programme that has ever existed.
After this translation period came the polemical period during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the three major players being Gorampa, Tsongkhapa and Dolpopa. One of the major themes was who was truest to the Indian view. Tsongkhapa considered himself a true Prāsaṅgika; Gorampa disagreed. José Cabezón puts it well in his Introduction to Freedom from Extremes (the volume the wiki cites as gorampa-distinguishing-views-1469):
“Go rams pa’s interpretation of Madhyamaka is committed to a more literal reading of the Indian sources than either Dol po pa’s or Tsong kha pa’s, which is to say that it tends to take the Indian texts at face value. … contra Tsong kha pa, existence itself is an object of negation for him, there being no need to add the qualifier ‘ultimate’ … to make this negation palatable.”
For Gorampa, emptiness is of two kinds: the emptiness that is the endpoint of rational analysis, and the emptiness that yogis fathom by means of their own individual gnosis. The first is of two kinds — the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of phenomena — and this rational emptiness is not the real ultimate truth, only an analogue: the ultimate truth in name only (རྗེས་མཐུན་ / རྣམ་གྲངས་པ་). Since the cognition of this quasi-ultimate requires the mind to entertain the empty / non-empty dichotomy, where the first element is privileged, the conceptual understanding of emptiness must eventually be negated in order to achieve the highest form of emptiness — the object of yogic gnosis (དོན་དམ་དངོས་ / དོན་དམ་མཚན་ཉིད་པ་). Being ineffable, the latter cannot be expressed in linguistic terms because it is beyond all proliferative dichotomising. Nonetheless, for Gorampa understanding emptiness rationally is a necessary prerequisite to understanding it in its true, non-analytical form. This is exactly the kind of nuance that survives only when the framework is in place.
A possible broader thesis
If I had to compress everything above into a single sentence, it would be this: Buddhist philosophical texts were designed for transmission through teaching lineages, making traditional interpretive frameworks necessary rather than optional for accurate understanding. The genre of the text — versified memory-structure plus oral elaboration in a transmission lineage — formally requires the framework. To read MMK as a self-contained text in the modern academic sense is to misread the genre. This sharpens framework-absence-yields-nihilism from a contingent pattern (framework-removed readings happen to collapse) into a methodological exclusion (the genre itself excludes the framework-removed reading).
From Padmakara’s Madhyamakāvatāra introduction
The translators of the [Padmakara] Introduction to the Middle Way set the stage for Madhyamaka with the right kind of warning. A first encounter with these texts can be disheartening and worrying. The literary expression is dry and daunting because it often presupposes knowledge the general reader doesn’t possess. Preliminary steps are passed over too hastily, and one finds oneself with answers long before the questions are clear. It’s for this reason that many Western scholars fall into the misconception that Madhyamaka is a kind of nihilism or that it is incompatible with the spiritual path. Madhyamaka, like any Buddhist teaching, is usually best understood not through the reading of texts but by the oral exposition of a qualified teacher.
To understand Madhyamaka one can go back to the time of the Buddha and look at a moment when he exhibited very Madhyamaka-like behaviour — something accepted in every Buddhist tradition. I mean the time when the Buddha kept his silence in the face of certain types of question. These questions are usually given as fourteen in number; they’re of a specifically metaphysical nature, dealing with what lies beyond common experience and empirical verification, and they were most commonly posed by Vacchagotta:
- whether the universe has a beginning, or not, or both, or neither
- whether the universe has an end, or not, or both, or neither
- whether the Buddha exists after death, or not, or both, or neither
- whether the self is identical with the body or different from it
To all these questions the Buddha remained silent. Correctly understood, this is a seminal anticipation of Madhyamaka, in both meaning and method, and the subtle implications were fully elucidated in the writings of Nāgārjuna. Madhyamaka can be understood as the exploration and systematic expression of the Buddha’s silence.
Metaphysics tries to find the reality behind appearances, and the only available course is deduction and reasoning. Since the conclusions cannot be verified empirically, their plausibility relies entirely on the quality of the arguments and their logical coherence. Take the Buddha’s silence and Nāgārjuna’s writings together and what they imply is that the use of pure reason extended beyond empirical analysis leads not to knowledge but to contradiction. A procedure that appears to give us truth in fact produces only theory and opinion. Vacchagotta had posed his question in terms such that no true answer could be returned. When the inquiry itself concerns matters that transcend experience, silence is the only possible response. If further communication is to take place, the first task is to bring the questioner to see that the question itself is faulty and must not be pursued. This is the Buddha’s method and Nāgārjuna’s, respectively. The catuṣkoṭi (the negation of all four extremes) is right there in the Pāli sutta tradition — Vacchagotta’s questions are posed in tetralemma form, and the Buddha’s silence is the response Nāgārjuna later articulates as the negation of all four extremes. This grounds catushkoti-must-negate-all-four-extremes in the Pāli canon itself.
Now one may accuse Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra of metaphysical elaboration. However, like I mentioned before, Candrakīrti is not attempting to establish a metaphysical view of reality but rather presenting the means for validly cognising the characteristics of the two truth and the steps the mind undergoes to realise them. The main body of MA is chapter 6, which is solely dedicated to dismantle every metaphysical view until only the definitive truth remains.
Editorial notes
- Paper sections served: (Two Truths as pedagogy — Mabja’s tripartite scheme plus the MA-Ch-6 reading); (Kaccāyanagotta connection — Mabja’s “accepted by all Buddhist schools” gloss + Cūḷahatthipadopama parallel + Garfield’s range diagnostic); (Candrakīrti — MA-Ch-6 original synthesis); (Mabja — tripartite ascertainment); (Kalupahana — multi-pronged critique with corrected reaction-formation target); (Williams — ŚS vv. 67–71 plus the metaphysical-realism diagnostic); (Siderits — butter-from-milk, convergent evolution, effective lineages); (framework necessity — cataphatic-while-apophatic + the Westerhoff Methodological Considerations grounding); (productive within-framework debate — Cabezón on Gorampa); (Theravāda — Ajahn Teera transcript); (Kaccāyanagotta revisited).
- Original synthesis-claim of the wiki author’s: the MA-Ch-6-fulfils-Mabja-step-3 reading. Not in mabja-ornament-of-reason or Mabja; load-bearing for and .
- Verse-number correction: notebook references “ŚS stanzas 69 to 71” for the emptiness-of-emptiness move; on primary-text check against Śūnyatāsaptati the strict locus is v. 71, with vv. 67–68 supplying the general premise and v. 70 the internal nihilism diagnosis. Body above uses the refined range.
- Pack-of-dogs framing: verbatim quotation verified at kalupahana-mmk-1986 Introduction p. 8 (Indian Edition 1991). The phrase is itself from the Kāśyapaparivarta, quoted by Kalupahana. Kalupahana’s actual causal claim is altruism as reaction-against deviance (reaction-formation hypothesis), not altruism as developed by deviant monks. The body above targets the corrected hypothesis directly.
- Outline-revision flags (for deliberate decision, not auto-applied):
- may warrant a paragraph recording the MA-as-means-of-cognising-step-3 reading.
- may warrant a sub-claim recording the “Buddhist texts designed for lineage transmission” generalisation.
- may warrant a reference to the Thai Forest interview transcript once the broader fieldwork is added (future source page:
tenpa-thai-forest-interview-2026).
- Future addition candidate: the Ajahn Teera interview transcript also contains material on no-self (“only ripples”), on Dukkha as causally-produced mental fabrication, and on Dharma as the mind itself rather than the spoken teaching — relevant for future cross-tradition comparative work but not load-bearing here.