On the Nihilist Interpretation of Madhyamaka

“On the Nihilist Interpretation of Madhyamaka” — Westerhoff, Jan, 2016. Journal of Indian Philosophy 44(2): 337–376.

Thesis / main argument

Westerhoff argues that the persistent characterisation of Madhyamaka as nihilism — by non-Buddhist Indian critics, Buddhist critics (especially Yogācāra), and modern Buddhologists alike — is not simply a two-millennia-long misunderstanding. He constructs a philosophically consistent form of nihilism from two premises (eliminativism about the dependent + non-foundationalism) and argues that this form is compatible with Madhyamaka. Crucially, it differs from the five forms of nihilism that Madhyamaka explicitly rejects. He concludes with an “equilibrium principle”: the best interpretation of Madhyamaka is opponent-relative, and against today’s dominant naturalistic realism, the nihilist reading provides the sharpest philosophical edge.

Catalogue of nihilist interpreters (per Westerhoff’s survey)

Westerhoff’s central historical claim is that the nihilism charge recurs across three independent constituencies. This catalogue records who makes the charge and why — both to underwrite his “two-millennia of misreaders cannot all simply have failed to understand” move (pp. 358, 371–373) and because the specific reasoning each critic gives is itself revealing.

Non-Buddhist Indian critics

• Uddyotakara (Nyāya, Vārttika on Nyāyasūtra 4.1.37, pp. 340–342). Treats sarvābhāvavāda (“all is non-existent”) as the Mādhyamika thesis and presents four reasons it is self-contradictory: (a) asserting any thesis requires pramāṇas that must themselves exist; (b) a meaningful sentence “all is non-existent” must itself exist along with its referent; (c) the debate requires existent speaker and listener; (d) if “exists” and “does-not-exist” differ in meaning, some fact must ground the distinction, which the nihilist also wants to deny. Reason for misreading: equates niḥsvabhāva with sarvābhāva.
• Kumārila (Mīmāṃsāślokavārttika 5.3.14–16, with Sucaritamiśra’s ṭīkā, pp. 342–343). Reads emptiness as non-existence. Yogācārins assert artha-śūnyatva (no external objects, mind alone); Mādhyamikas go further, denying both jñeya (knowable things) and jñāna (cognition), since the verb “to know” grammatically requires an object — if the representata are absent, so must be the representations. Reason for misreading: universal extension of “emptiness of x” as “non-existence of x”.
• Śaṅkara (Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya 2.2.31; Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya 4.3.7, pp. 343–344). Two complementary moves. (1) Mādhyamikas reject not only ultimate but also conventional reality (lokavyavahāra), which together amounts to rejection of everything. (2) Even if there is no pot, the cognition (vijñāna) of the pot is supported by every pramāṇa and cannot be denied; emptiness of everything would have to deny this too. Reason for misreading: reads the Mādhyamika critique of svabhāva as extending to vyavahāra; treats the standpoint of vyavahāra as a foundationalist commitment Madhyamaka would have to share to avoid nihilism.
• Rāmānuja (Śrībhāṣya on Brahmasūtra 2.2.30, pp. 344–345). Qualifies Madhyamaka as tucchatva (“nothingness”). Two points: (1) ordinary talk of bhāva / abhāva is always concerned with the specific local state of an existent (a pot exists in the house, not the kitchen); the Mādhyamika’s universal non-existence is unintelligible in this grammar; (2) the pramāṇa by which emptiness is established must itself be real — if not, “everything would be real” (recapitulating Uddyotakara). Reason for misreading: universal-vs-local conflation; reified epistemic regress.
• Madhva (Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya 2.2.26 with Jayatīrtha’s Nyāyasudhā, p. 345). Causality from a non-existent (asat) thing is unobserved; an asat lacks all viśeṣa like a sky-flower; therefore the Madhyamaka claim that empty causes produce effects contradicts everyday experience. Reason for misreading: reads śūnya as asat.
• Mādhava (Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha, pp. 345–346). Characterises Madhyamaka as sarvasya asattvam. Two arguments: (1) Madhyamaka reasoning against intrinsic existence is fully general and therefore applies indifferently to superimposed object, basis, relation, seeing, seer; (2) since these pairs are mutually existentially dependent, establishing non-existence of one entails non-existence of all → universal emptiness as universal non-existence. Reason for misreading: treats mutual existential dependence as ontological subtraction rather than as relational constitution.

Buddhist critics

• Asaṅga (Bodhisattvabhūmi, Tattvārtha chapter, pp. 346–349). The single most important Buddhist source. Calls the Mādhyamikas pradhāna nāstika (“the most extreme kind of nihilist”) because they accept that all is mere designation (prajñaptimātram eva sarvam) without admitting a basis (prajñapty-adhiṣṭhāna, vastumātra) on which the designation is made. If both prajñapti and the tattva that underlies it are rejected, nothing remains. Asaṅga insists that the teaching of emptiness removes the false superimposition (samāropa) of what is not there, while preserving the āśraya / vastumātra (the basis), whose nature is inexpressible (nirabhilāpya). The whole subsequent discussion of “wrongly grasped emptiness” (durgṛhīta-śūnyatā) descends from this passage. Direct ancestor of the modern Williams-Burton argument (Westerhoff makes this lineage explicit, pp. 354, 356).
• Vasubandhu (Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya ad AKBh 5.19; sole reference to Madhyamaka in his entire corpus, pp. 349–350). Mādhyamikas “deny the existence of all the dharmas” (sarvanāstitā); the identification of “those who hold the grasping of universal non-existence” (sarvanāstigrāha) with the Mādhyamikas is made explicit in Yaśomitra’s Sphuṭārthā-vyākhyā. Reasons are not spelled out but Westerhoff reads him as sharing Asaṅga’s worry: no foundational level + nothing designated is fundamentally real = nothing left. (Related Buddhist exhibits noted: Bhāvaviveka makes the reverse charge against Yogācāra for denying svalakṣaṇa of the imputed nature; Sthiramati, Ratnākaraśānti, and hypothetical Yogācāra opponents in Śāntideva and Kamalaśīla repeat Asaṅga’s argument.)

Modern Buddhologists

• Eugène Burnouf (Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme indien, 1844, p. 352): “nihilisme scholastique” — sets the tone for the nineteenth-century Western reception (per de Jong 1972).
• Hendrik Kern (Manual of Indian Buddhism, 1896, pp. 126–127): “The Mādhyamikas are complete nihilists. […] In their nihilism […] they teach that the whole of the phenomenal world is a mere illusion. […] There is no existence, there is no cessation of being, there is no birth, there is no Nirvāṇa.” (Westerhoff p. 353.)
• Max Walleser (intro to his 1911 Akutobhayā translation, p. iii): characterises Mahāyāna as having advanced “zum Verneinen alles Seienden” (the negation of all being). Walleser is the careful exhibit — he notices that Madhyamaka negates both existence and non-existence, and so prefers “negativism” to “nihilism”.
• Arthur Berriedale Keith (1923, pp. 240–241): Nāgārjuna’s theory is one of “absolute nothingness”; on the strict Buddhapālita/Candrakīrti/Śāntideva line, the phenomenal world has “no existence in absolute truth” and “even no phenomenal existence”.
• Joachim Wach (1924, on the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra, p. 58): Mādhyamikas are “possibly the most radical ‘nihilists’ there have ever been”.
• Theodor Stcherbatsky (1927, p. 43) and de la Vallée Poussin (1932–33a, p. 18) cited as further examples.
• de la Vallée Poussin (entry “Nihilism (Buddhist)” in Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, c. 1908–1926, pp. 352–353): dharmas “do not exist at all, either in reality or apparently”; like the beauty of the daughter of a barren woman, “the object described, the description and the person describing are all similarly nonexistent”. The paramārthasatya of Madhyamaka is “an unqualified negation of the world of appearances, a negation of existence (saṃsāra)“. (Westerhoff records that de la Vallée Poussin later changed his view, per de Jong 1972, p. 7.)
• Wood (Nāgārjunian Disputations, 1994, pp. 266, 269 — cited at Westerhoff p. 354): the most theoretically sophisticated modern version. “Nothing is real”; the Mādhyamika does not affirm appearances (vijñapti) either — “expressions like ‘sense datum’, ‘appearance’, ‘vijñapti’ […] are like the expression ‘the rising of the sun’ […] useful and harmless if understood for what they are. Just as the sun doesn’t really rise and set, so the appearance of an illusory, pink elephant has no more reality than the supposed physical pink elephant that the hallucinator imputes to the external world.”
• Oetke (1991, pp. 57–104): “On the level of the highest truth there is nothing of any kind.” Glosses the paramārtha level by analogy with the theoretical level in physical science (lightning “really is” an electric discharge). Westerhoff notes the analogy only goes so far — Madhyamaka eliminates without supplying a substantial elimination-basis (fn. 62).
• Williams (Altruism and Reality 1998 p. 247 n. 86, with p. 222 n. 26; 2000 p. 439; Williams & Tribe 2000 p. 150) and Burton (Emptiness Appraised 1999 pp. 109–111; 2001 p. 181): the Williams–Burton argument (Westerhoff §“The Williams-Burton Argument”, pp. 354–357). All things being prajñaptisat / niḥsvabhāva is “a straightforward contradiction”: conceptual constructs require an unconstructed basis out of which they are constructed, and an unconstructed agent doing the constructing. Without these, the system collapses into ontological nihilism. Westerhoff makes the genealogy explicit: this is exactly Asaṅga’s point in the Bodhisattvabhūmi recapitulated under analytic conditions (p. 354).

Westerhoff’s structural reply (pp. 356–357)

Dependence-structures need not be hierarchically grounded. Three possibilities are coherent: foundationalist grounding (which the Mādhyamika rejects), infinite descent, or circular / network closure (citing Walser 2005, Priest 2009/2014). The second and third are demonstrably consistent. The Williams–Burton argument therefore does not show that universal niḥsvabhāva entails nothing exists. But Westerhoff does not stop here — he goes on to argue (pp. 357–376) that a different, consistent nihilism, distinct from the five Madhyamaka explicitly rejects, can be defended on its own merits.

What pp. 357–376 actually do (residual-check note, 2026-06-02)

This span was read directly to settle whether Westerhoff anywhere stratifies nihilism along the saṃvṛti / paramārtha axis — the move the nihilism₁/₂ device in nihilism-charge-refuted claims as new. He does not. Structure of the span:

• One “consistent nihilism” (pp. 358–361): eliminativism about the dependent + non-foundationalism ⇒ “nothing exists” tout court. It is anti-realist at both truths — it denies even conventional existence, conceding only appearances (the “hare/hedgehog” regress: an appearance of x is not itself an x). fn. 72 (p. 358) is the sole place he touches conventional-level variation, and only to decline mapping Prāsaṅgika/Svātantrika onto eliminativist/reductionist.
• Five rejected forms (pp. 362–369): extreme-view (denies even appearances); annihilationism/uccheda (MMK 15:8–11, with Candrakīrti on 15:11 quoting Laṅkāvatāra ); denial-of-efficacy (Vigrahavyāvartanī); reified non-existence as a dṛṣṭi (MMK 13.18, emptiness-of-emptiness); moral nihilism (Ratnāvalī 1.43–45, Yuktiṣaṣṭikā 2; the Vasubandhu AKBh ad 5.19 “favourable to liberation” uccheda remark). His consistent nihilism escapes all five.
• Equilibrium principle (pp. 370–373): interpretation is opponent-relative. The two opposed misreadings are error-theory (antidote: “semantic non-dualism… ultimately only one truth, the conventional one,” p. 373, after Siderits 2007) and naïve-realism (antidote: the nihilist reading — objects of negation are everyday pots, not scholastic straw men; with the Gendun Chöpel dgag bya discussion, pp. 370–372). Against today’s dominant naturalistic realist, stress the nihilist aspect.

Finding: the nearest antecedent to the nihilism₁ pole is the fourth rejected form (reified non-existence, p. 365) — but that is a reified-vs-non-reified (dṛṣṭi) cut, not a truth-level cut, and his own accepted nihilism still asserts non-existence. His metaphilosophy collapses toward the conventional (“one truth, the conventional”); it does not stratify nihilism across the two truths, nor identify the conventional-level “no ontology” as a conceded nihilism that preserves transactional validity. So the nihilism₁/₂ device is adjacent-but-distinct, and the priority note in nihilism-charge-refuted now stands on a direct reading rather than a flagged gap.

Key claims

• The five forms of nihilism Madhyamaka explicitly rejects — (1) nihilism as an extreme view, (2) annihilationism (uccheda), (3) denial of functional efficacy, (4) reified non-existence (emptiness as a substantial “view”), (5) moral nihilism (denial of karmic results) — are none of them identical to the “consistent nihilism” he constructs from eliminativism about the dependent + non-foundationalism (pp. 362–369).
• Candrakīrti in the Prasannapadā on MMK 18:7 effectively concedes an “essential identity” (vastutas tulyatā) between the Mādhyamika and the nihilist at the ontological level, while insisting on a vast epistemological and soteriological difference — the “theft” example (pp. 351–352).
• The equilibrium principle (pp. 371–373): the right interpretation of Madhyamaka is opponent-relative. Against naturalistic realists the nihilist reading provides the sharpest alternative; against anything-goes relativists one would stress conventional truth’s stability. Madhyamaka has no master argument; its arguments adapt to specific opponents.
• Gendun Chöpel is cited approvingly (pp. 370–371): the Geluk dgag bya (object of negation) is too narrow; Madhyamaka reasoning should bite on pots and pillars, not just on “inherently existent” straw men. Sensory appearance is what prevents any actual slide into nihilism in practice.

Methodology

Westerhoff combines close textual analysis of Indian sources (Sanskrit and Tibetan, with original-language quotations in the footnotes) with analytic philosophical argumentation. He surveys historical criticisms across non-Buddhist, Buddhist, and modern Buddhological constituencies, constructs a formal argument for consistent nihilism using Western analytic categories (eliminativism, non-foundationalism), and then maps this back onto Madhyamaka texts to test for compatibility. He engages seriously with traditional commentary (Candrakīrti, Asaṅga, Yaśomitra) alongside contemporary analytic work (Siderits, Dennett, Priest, Ladyman & Ross).

Tie-in to the framework-removal thesis

Westerhoff does not himself diagnose his survey in framework-removal terms — but the catalogue above maps onto the wiki author’s thesis (see framework-absence-yields-nihilism) with surprising precision. Three layered observations:

1. The non-Buddhist Indian critics all share Tsongkhapa’s diagnosed equation (cf. jinpa-tsongkhapa-qualms-1999): existence = svabhāva-existence. Therefore niḥsvabhāva = non-existence. This is the inference Madhyamaka’s hermeneutical framework — dependent origination as positive content of emptiness, two truths as level-structure, neyārtha / nītārtha — is designed to break. Uddyotakara, Kumārila, Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, Madhva, and Mādhava all reach the nihilist verdict because they share the very assumption the framework dissolves. They are external readers without access to (or sympathy for) that framework, and they predictably collapse into the conclusion the wiki author’s thesis predicts.
2. The Buddhist critics (Asaṅga, Vasubandhu) operate before — or outside — the Prāsaṅgika framework that Candrakīrti would later develop. Their charge of pradhāna nāstika arises specifically because they read “all is mere designation” as requiring a non-designated basis (a foundationalist assumption the later framework explicitly rejects via dependence-circles / mutual constitution; see Westerhoff p. 357, Walser 2005). The fact that the internal Buddhist nihilism charge has the same structural shape as the Williams–Burton charge — Westerhoff highlights this lineage explicitly — is evidence that the type of move (treat emptiness as ontology rather than as Madhyamaka-internal pedagogy) drives the conclusion, not which side of the Buddhist/non-Buddhist boundary one stands on.
3. The modern Buddhologists all instantiate framework-removal in some form — full removal (Burnouf, Kern, Keith, Wach, de la Vallée Poussin, Wood, Burton), or framework-as-formalism without framework-as-pedagogy (Oetke, on the framework-absence-yields-nihilism page’s diagnosis), or partial removal with localised collapse (Williams). The convergence Westerhoff observes — modern critics arriving at the same conclusion as the ancient Buddhist critics — is exactly what the framework-removal thesis would predict, because the methodological move and the conclusion are the same in both cases.

So Westerhoff’s survey functions as primary evidence for the framework-removal thesis even though Westerhoff himself draws a different conclusion (that the persistence of the misreading shows a real feature of Madhyamaka that a sophisticated nihilism can articulate). the wiki author’s thesis explains why the misreading is structurally recurrent — the same inferential move (svabhāva-equation, foundationalism, reading emptiness as ontology rather than pedagogy) is being made each time — while Westerhoff’s reply explains how to make that move philosophically respectable on its own terms. The two are compatible but answer different questions.

Connections

• Directly responds to: burton-emptiness-appraised-1999 and Williams’s nihilism concerns — the Williams-Burton argument is the main modern target
• Engages with: Candrakīrti extensively (Prasannapadā on MMK 18:7, 24:7, 15:11); Asaṅga’s Bodhisattvabhūmi critique; Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya; Yaśomitra’s Sphuṭārthā
• Cites approvingly: Siderits on eliminativism/reductionism; Cabezón on Prāsaṅgika language; Gendun Chöpel on the object of negation; Walser on dependence-circles; Priest on non-well-founded structures
• Contradicts: any reading that dismisses the nihilism charge as simple misunderstanding — Westerhoff takes the charge seriously as pointing to real features of the system
• Supports (indirectly): this wiki’s thesis that engagement with traditional commentarial sources produces more coherent readings, though by an unexpected route (Westerhoff’s nihilism is coherent because it’s informed by the tradition)
• Provides primary evidence for framework-absence-yields-nihilism: his catalogue of nihilist interpreters, properly mapped, exhibits exactly the structural pattern the wiki author’s thesis predicts