“Nāgārjunian Disputations: A Philosophical Journey through an Indian Looking-Glass” — Wood, Thomas E. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press / Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Monograph No. 11, 1994).
Thesis / main argument
Wood mounts a full-throated defence of the nihilist interpretation (NI) of Madhyamaka against the mid-twentieth-century non-nihilist interpretations (NNI) of Matilal, Ruegg, Murti and Stcherbatsky. The central claim is exegetical and philosophical at once: read consistently, Nāgārjuna’s writings entail that nothing exists whatever — neither dharmas, nor mind, nor appearances, nor even the propositions in which the doctrine is stated. The book’s two-pronged programme is (a) “the NI fits the Madhyamika writings better than the NNI” and (b) “the NI is no more difficult to defend philosophically than the NNI, although in the case of the NI the problems are epistemological, whereas in the case of the NNI, they are primarily logical” (Ch I ). Wood’s headline characterisation, taken from S. N. Dasgupta and endorsed throughout, is that Madhyamaka is “nihilistic idealism or pure phenomenalism” — a non-ontological idealism that, made consistent, terminates in “sheer, unqualified, absolute nothingness” (Ch V ).
Key claims
- Nihilist, not sceptic. Although the Mādhyamikas deploy sceptical arguments, “the Madhyamaka is not scepticism” (Ch III ). Scepticism in Madhyamaka is “the handmaiden of … a nihilistic scholasticism” (Ch III note 30) — a tool exhausted once it has undermined common-sense objections to the doctrine that self and dharmas are equally non-existent. The Mādhyamikas are not in doubt about the anātman doctrine or the universal voidness of dharmas: they assert both (Ch III note 30).
- Universal extension of anātman to dharmas. The Mahāyāna doctrine of universal voidness (sarva-dharma-śūnyatā) is “the logical culmination of the attack undertaken by early Buddhism against the doctrine of the self” (Ch I ). What early Buddhism said only of ātman, Madhyamaka extends to dharmas: both are unreal and non-existent. The reading does not require any special semantic operator for śūnya: it just means non-existent.
- Catuṣkoṭi as four denials, not paradox. The four positions are jointly negated because there is no entity x of which any predicate could hold; the negation is prasajya (sentence-internal) negation obeying non-contradiction and excluded middle (Ch III §–3, , ). Wood rejects Matilal’s relevant-logic and speech-act analyses and rejects Ruegg’s claim that Madhyamika reasoning both uses classical logic and permits some contradictory assertions (Ch III ). The negation is consistent only on the NI.
- VV evidence for global nihilism. Nāgārjuna’s “I have no proposition to assert” (nāsti ca mama pratijñā, VV 29) is “only a special instance of his nihilism” — a global non-existence claim that extends to propositions themselves, not a stand-alone meta-linguistic move (Ch III §–27, ad VV 21–22). VV 22’s equation of dependent existence with lack of self-nature with unorigination is read as confirming that pratītyasamutpāda belongs to vyavahāra-satya alone and is itself dissolved at the ultimate level (Ch III ).
- The Two Truths, addressed and rejected as a literal distinction. “Common sense objections to the Mādhyamika doctrine cannot be met by appealing to the distinction between the two truths” (Ch V ). On Wood’s reading, the asat-khyāti theory of perception “does not require or permit a literal or philosophical distinction between two different truths” (Ch IV note 11). At the ultimate (paramārthika) level even appearance-statements cannot be true or false, because there is nothing for them to be true or false about (Ch III note 48). The Two Truths talk is preserved only as Nāgārjuna’s façon de parler (saṃvyavahāra; Ch III note 43, ad VV 28cd).
- Pedagogical/pragmatic reading of catuṣkoṭi rejected. Wood explicitly takes up and rejects the soteriological-pragmatic interpretation defended by Jayatilleke and others (Ch II §–4): the Buddha’s refusal to answer the avyākata/ṭhapanīya questions is “different in degree but not in kind” from the analytic answer (vibhajja-vyākaraṇīya); the catuṣkoṭi exhausts only the logical possibilities the interlocutor entertained (Ch II ). The Aggi-vacchagotta-sutta implies annihilationism, not a pedagogical reserve about a trans-empirical reality (Ch II §–14).
- Equation of nirvāṇa = saṃsāra read nihilistically. MMK 25.7–8, 25.9 and 25.19–20 are read as denying every mode of nirvāṇic existence, not as identifying two genuine modes (Ch IV §–18). MMK 24.18 (the pratītyasamutpāda = śūnyatā = upādāya-prajñapti = madhyamā-pratipad equation) is “conventional or provisional rather than final”; at the absolute level, “emptiness is non-origination” (Ch IV ). The prajñaptisat / upādāya prajñapti analysis is read structurally as Burton would later read it: as committing Nāgārjuna to global non-existence.
- Bhāvaviveka’s Karatalaratna read as overt nihilism (Ch V ): a Madhyamaka primary-text witness against the NNI.
- Madhyamaka ≠ Advaita Vedānta. The two are routinely confused as early as the Āgamaśāstra (Gauḍapādīya-kārikās), but Advaita posits a substratum of being (sat); Madhyamaka does not (Ch V §–9). Wood thus blocks the kṛyptobrahmavāda charge by making the Mādhyamikas more radical, not less.
- Asat-khyāti-vāda as nihilistic idealism / “pure phenomenalism” (Ch V §–17). Appearances are as unreal and non-existent as the son of a barren woman or the horns of a hare; references to appearances are mere prajñaptisat (Ch V ). Comparison with contemporary eliminative materialism (Ch V §–22): both deny that there are appearances; both, Wood argues, must abandon the correspondence theory of truth at the ontological level (Ch III ).
- Argument from reception history. All other Indian philosophical schools — Mīmāṃsakas, Vedāntins, Naiyāyikas, Jainas, and even the fellow-Mahāyānist Vijñānavādins — interpreted Madhyamaka as nihilism (Ch I ; Ch V ). Wood treats this fifteen-hundred-year near-consensus as strong external evidence: it is implausible to suppose that every other Indian school failed to understand or deliberately misinterpreted the Mādhyamikas on this point.
- Critique of Ruegg’s FPC (Ch III §–52): Wood reconstructs Ruegg’s “Four Positions of the Catuṣkoṭi” reading and presses two principal objections: (a) Ruegg’s appeal to logical vagueness or indeterminability is incompatible with his own admission that Madhyamika reasoning rests on non-contradiction and excluded middle; (b) Ruegg’s reading reduces Madhyamaka to a form of psychologism and ultimately of anti-rationalism (Ch III §–52), aligned (Wood claims) with Kristeva’s and Mall’s continental-philosophy appropriations of Madhyamaka.
- Critique of Matilal (Ch III §–22): rejects the relevant-logic semantics of negation, the speech-act analysis of nāsti ca mama pratijñā, and the Buridan–Prior self-reference reading of “all things are empty.” Wood’s general counter-move: every NNI attempt to evade the contradiction in the catuṣkoṭi either invokes a non-standard logic that “makes no sense” or collapses the difference between denial and non-assertion in a way the Madhyamika texts will not bear.
- Critique of Stcherbatsky’s “relativity” reading of śūnyatā (Ch IV §–22): the pratītyasamutpāda = śūnyatā equation at MMK 24.18 is provisional only; ultimately, emptiness is non-origination, not relativity.
- Anti-foundationalist or “non-ontological idealism” framing (Ch I §–7): the Mādhyamikas accepted the idealist phase of the dispute against the realists, then turned the same arguments on the Vijñānavādin mind itself. The resulting position is not idealism in the standard Berkeleyan sense but a “non-ontological version of idealism” — Dasgupta’s “nihilistic idealism” — that the author finds “philosophically untenable” but “not foolish.”
Methodology
Hard-analytic-Western reconstruction with explicit appeal to twentieth-century formal logic (Routley–Meyer relevant-logic semantics; the Buridan–Prior treatment of self-reference; Tarski on truth) and to Western philosophical idioms (eliminative materialism, sense-data theory, Hume on substance). Wood treats Indian philosophical disputes as continuous with their Western counterparts and the laws of logic as universal: “nothing — not even an Absolute, if there is such a thing — can violate these fundamental logical laws, and … there is no evidence that the Mādhyamikas thought that these logical laws could be violated” (Ch I ). He works almost entirely from MMK chs 1, 13, 15, 24, 25 and the VV (translated in the Appendix) plus the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras; the Tibetan commentarial tradition (Tsongkhapa, Gorampa, Mipham, the Karmapas) is essentially absent from the bibliography, as is most post-Candrakīrti Indian Madhyamaka. The interlocutors are Western academics (Matilal, Ruegg, Stcherbatsky, Murti, Jayatilleke, Schayer, La Vallée Poussin) plus the early-twentieth-century European nihilists (Burnouf, Walleser, Wach, Jacobi, Keith) whose reading Wood is rehabilitating.
Notable quotes
- “Emptiness (śūnyatā) in the Madhyamaka is simply sheer, unqualified, absolute nothingness.” (Ch V , closing)
- “Scepticism in the Madhyamaka is the handmaiden of … a nihilistic scholasticism. There is no scepticism in the Madhyamaka about the anātman doctrine or the doctrine that all dharmas are void.” (Ch III note 30)
- “The asat-khyāti-vāda does not require or permit a literal or philosophical distinction between two different truths.” (Ch IV note 11)
Connections
- Burton — the closest 1990s ally. Both press the universal-prajñaptimātra inference to nihilism; Wood does it via formal logic on the catuṣkoṭi, Burton via the Abhidharma prajñaptisat/dravyasat contrast. The two are mutually unaware in print.
- Kalupahana — methodological opposites in service of the same anti-Mahāyāna-framework programme. Both bracket the Mahāyāna commentarial tradition; Kalupahana deflates the ultimate; Wood collapses both truths into a global nihilism. Distinct sub-patterns within framework-removal.
- Oetke — structurally adjacent; Oetke retains formal Two Truths scaffolding while emptying it of content, Wood denies the literal distinction altogether. Both reach the “highest truth = nothing” verdict.
- Ruegg — Wood’s principal NNI target (Ch III §–52); the Four Positions of the Catuṣkoṭi (1977) is treated as the strongest of the NNI cases and the one Wood works hardest to dismantle.
- Westerhoff — partial convergence. On the Nihilist Interpretation (2016) defends a sophisticated nihilist reading against Burton; Wood’s 1994 nihilism is its 1990s precursor, though Wood reaches the verdict without Westerhoff’s equilibrium-principle restraint.
- Sprung — Wood occasionally cites Lucid Exposition (1979) for translation; the deflationary-Wittgensteinian line is acknowledged but not seriously engaged.
- Bhāviveka — Wood’s primary-text anchor for the NI is the Karatalaratna, supplemented by use of Bhāvaviveka’s MMK 1.3 commentary on paryudāsa vs prasajya negation (Ch III ).
- Nāgārjuna — read with the VV (translated in full in the Appendix) treated as the primary witness for the global-nihilist reading, especially VV 21–22 and VV 28–29.
- Candrakīrti — almost absent; the Prasannapadā is not used as a primary source for the NI.