“The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Chapter 2: Madhyamaka” — Westerhoff, Jan, 2018.
Thesis / main argument
Chapter 2 (“Madhyamaka,” pp. 84–146) of Westerhoff’s Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (OUP 2018) is a textbook-register historical survey. It tracks Indian Madhyamaka from the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras through to Atiśa. Where Westerhoff’s 2009 monograph is polemical and systematic, and the 2016 nihilism article is a focused defence, this chapter is a synthetic narrative that sets the school within the wider development of Mahāyāna thought. Its central historiographical claim is that the link between Mahāyāna and Madhyamaka lies not in any specific doctrine but in the broadly illusionistic worldview of the Perfection of Wisdom literature — a worldview whose roots may go back to early Mahāyāna meditative practice (the Pratyutpanna-buddha-saṃmukhāvasthita-samādhi-sūtra). Madhyamaka’s task, on this reading, is to supply philosophical arguments for the Prajñāpāramitā’s earlier, argument-less assertions of universal emptiness.
The chapter’s other distinctive load-bearing claim is that the Prāsaṅgika–Svātantrika split is a doxographic fiction retrojected from Tibet. Westerhoff is unusually direct here. Even the terms, he notes, are retranslations from later Tibetan doxographers, and Avalokitavrata (c. 700 CE), the major Indian sub-commentator on Bhāviveka, “does not appear to draw a distinction between the understanding of the two truths the two authors held.”
Key claims
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Mahāyāna ↔ Madhyamaka link is illusionism, not doctrine (pp. 87–89). The illusionism of the Prajñāpāramitā may be grounded in meditative experience: the Pratyutpanna-samādhi-sūtra teaches direct seeing of Amitāyus “remaining in this very world-system.” This gives both Madhyamaka and Yogācāra their shared conceptual point of contact.
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Walser-following thesis on MMK’s Tripiṭaka-only citations (pp. 105–107). That the MMK names only the Kātyāyanāvavāda (the Sanskrit parallel of the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta) and never quotes Mahāyāna sūtras is strategic, not evidence that the MMK is non-Mahāyāna. Nāgārjuna writes as a Mahāyāna-minority voice arguing to an Ābhidharmika audience, and so confines himself to commonly accepted authorities. Westerhoff names Warder and Kalupahana 1991 (pp. 5–8) on the standalone-MMK side, and Ruegg, Lindtner, and Bronkhorst 2009 (p. 136) as those who “remain unconvinced.”
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Defence of traditional biography as internally coherent (pp. 96–97). The fantastic look of Nāgārjuna’s biographies — magical powers, a 600-year lifespan — only arises “if we consider him to have been an ordinary human being.” Given the prophecy of first-bhūmi attainment in the Laṅkāvatārasūtra, the magical elements become exactly what Buddhist hagiography would predict. Westerhoff recommends “provisionally bracketing our contradicting assumptions, rather than attempting to ‘straighten out’ traditional accounts on the basis of contemporary historiography.”
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The “ontologization of meditative phenomenology” critique (pp. 102–103). The inference from “the world appears X to the trained meditator” to “the world is X” is one Mādhyamikas reject outright. No epistemic instruments lead, by their nature, to ultimate truth, and a theory’s soteriological efficacy does not entail its ultimate truth: “an insubstantial chariot can fulfil its function of carrying wood, so an empty theory can lead to liberation.”
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Three consolidated arguments against svabhāva (pp. 110–115). The causal argument: presentism plus momentariness force one relatum of a causal relation to be mentally supplied, so causation is conceptually constructed. The mereological argument: the dharma-whole is neither identical with nor distinct from its property-parts, and tropes individuated by co-occurrence still depend on other tropes. The change argument: intrinsically natured things cannot change — “a young man does not grow old” (MMK 13:5).
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Bhāviveka’s three motivations for syllogistic exposition (pp. 128–131): (i) to stop students from misreading prasaṅga arguments as reductios and adopting the negation of the rejected thesis; (ii) to take part in Indian debate culture without committing the vitaṇḍā-fault (mere refutation without a defended position); (iii) to place Madhyamaka inside the doxographical genre, which requires ranked positions to be ranked.
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Prāsaṅgika–Svātantrika as doxographic fiction (p. 137). The split into two sub-schools “is certainly a doxographic fiction.” The terms are Tibetan retranslations, never used by Indian Mādhyamikas of themselves. Bhāviveka’s commentator Avalokitavrata draws no distinction between Buddhapālita and Bhāviveka on the two truths; had Bhāviveka perceived a great rift, it would be “peculiar that he mentions them all in the same breath.” The decisive point: “from Candrakīrti’s perspective we do not have two possible interpretations of Madhyamaka, including one that countenances syllogisms and conventionally real intrinsic natures, but only one.” For Candrakīrti, Bhāviveka is no Mādhyamika at all, but a tārkika (logician).
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Two truths as the canonical device for dissolving apparent contradictions (pp. 119–120). The catuṣkoṭi at MMK 22:11 (“It is empty is not to be said, nor non-empty…”) and the closing line of MMK 25 (“no dharma was ever taught by the Buddha to anyone”) are both handled through the two-truths interpolation procedure: “no x” reads as “no ultimately real x.” Westerhoff names Tsongkhapa 2002 vol. 3 pp. 188, 215–223 as the great expositor of this technique, anchored in the Buddha’s address to Mahāmati in the Laṅkāvatārasūtra — “thinking that they are not produced intrinsically, I said that all phenomena are not produced.”
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Critique of over-applied interpolation (p. 120). Generalise the procedure too far and Madhyamaka denials shrink to denials of “scholastic epiphenomena” — ultimately real simulacra rather than the everyday entities the texts seem to be talking about. “Just what is the difference between holding an ultimately real thesis and just holding a thesis?…If there is no ultimately real matter, can mere matter not equally give rise to the kind of attachment the Buddhist path tries to show us to transcend?” Westerhoff cites Lopez 2006 pp. 58–60 for “a modern Tibetan criticism of this ‘interpolation procedure.‘” He does not call Tsongkhapa wrong, but the over-application risk is named openly.
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Asaṅga’s Bodhisattvabhūmi charges Mādhyamikas as pradhāna nāstika (“the most extreme kind of nihilist,” p. 117). This is one of the earliest in-house Buddhist nihilism charges. Asaṅga argues that on the Madhyamaka view “both reality and designation are rejected.” Westerhoff’s later 2016 nihilism-defence answers this two-millennia-old objection.
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Madhyamaka–Nyāya as a methodological as much as a doctrinal dispute (pp. 143–146). Nyāya negation allows only local absence: negating “pot in the house” presupposes pots elsewhere, so a universal niḥsvabhāva claim cannot even be stated in this framework. The Nyāya five-membered syllogism likewise requires a vaidharmya (discordant) example — but for an inference such as “all things are empty because dependently produced,” no discordant example exists. The Mādhyamika’s solution is to borrow Nyāya’s logical machinery without its ontological commitments: prasaṅga method turns the opponent’s tools against him without adopting them. This frames the whole VV / Vaidalyaprakaraṇa / pramāṇa-rejection programme that runs through Atiśa, Gorampa, Mipham, and the Ninth Karmapa.
Methodology
A synthetic-historical chapter pitched at an undergraduate to early-graduate audience. Westerhoff combines analytic philosophical reconstruction — the three svabhāva-arguments are presented with the machinery of analytic trope theory — with sustained engagement with traditional commentarial sources (Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka via Ames 2003, Candrakīrti, Avalokitavrata, Tsongkhapa, Tāranātha, Bu ston) and modern Buddhological scholarship (Walser, Schopen, Conze, Ruegg, MacDonald, Vose). Traditional accounts are treated as philosophically substantive rather than as material to be naturalised away — witness the handling of the multiple-Nāgārjunas question and the Candrakīrti-tantra connection (Vose 2009).
Notable quotes
The split into two sub-schools is certainly a doxographic fiction. (p. 137)
Connections
- Continuous with westerhoff-madhyamaka-2009 (the analytic core), westerhoff-vigrahavyavartani-2010 (the VV primary-text base), westerhoff-candrakirti-2024 (the Candrakīrti follow-up), and westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016 (the polemic). The 2018 chapter is the historical member of the Westerhoff family of works — narrative and synthetic where the others are systematic and constructive.
- Cites and extends Walser 2005 on the MMK’s Tripiṭaka-citation strategy.
- Cites Ames 1995 (ames-prajnapradipa-ch2-1995) and Ames 2003 on Bhāviveka.
- Cites Vose 2009 on Candrakīrti’s rise from obscurity (the Noble Lineage tantric connection).
- Cites Apple-relevant material — Atiśa’s Bodhipathapradīpa lineage list omits Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla — convergent with apple-jewels-middle-way-2018.
- Cites Ruegg 1981a on Atiśa, the geographical spread of Mahāyāna-Madhyamaka, and the avicāramanohara point (cf. ruegg-svat-pras-2006).
- Engages Burton’s nihilism reading through the Asaṅga pradhāna nāstika charge, anticipating Westerhoff’s own 2016 response.
- Cites Lopez 2006 on the modern Tibetan critique of Tsongkhapa’s interpolation procedure.