Search Results (13)

In discussions of whether Nāgārjuna was an ontological realist or a nihilist, one key concept is omitted from most discussion: the “that-ness” (tattva) of phenomenal reality that is revealed once our conceptual overlay is removed. Once his notion of tattva is understood as a central element in his ontology, the idea that he was a full-blown nihilist disappears. Full article

Jizang (549–623) is regarded as a prominent figure in Sanlun Buddhism (三論宗) and a revitalizer of Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka tradition in China. In this essay, I argue that Jizang’s concept of non-empty Buddha-nature is compatible with the idea of universal emptiness. My argument unfolds in three steps. First, I argue that, for Jizang, Buddha-nature is the Middle Way (zhongdao 中道), which signifies a spiritual state that avoids the extremes of both emptiness and non-emptiness. Next, I explore how and why Jizang believes that Buddha-nature is eternal. I examine Jizang’s notions of intrinsic eternality (dingxing chang 定性常) and conditional eternality (yinyuan chang 因緣常), aiming to demonstrate that his understanding of Buddha-nature as eternal can be framed within the concept of conditional eternality, where Buddha-nature is seen as the objective manifestation of the dharma body. Since this type of eternality aligns with the principle of universal emptiness, Jizang’s assertion that Buddha-nature is eternal is thus compatible with the notion of universal emptiness. Furthermore, I illustrate that Jizang’s theory of eternal Buddha-nature carries practical implications, suggesting that this assertion serves as encouragement rather than being merely an ontological claim. Full article

One recurrent criticism of the Madhyamaka doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā) is its equation with a potential axiological nihilism that undermines, inter alia, the telos of Buddhist practice. Here, I speculate that Madhyamaka non-foundationalism could be compatible with the naturalized teleology of C.S. Peirce. In brief, Peirce argues on pragmatic grounds that the ‘final cause’ of events does not refer to a predetermined finis ultimis or summum bonum with any ‘intrinsic nature’ (‘svabhāva’). Rather, a final cause is a general continuum of lawfulness (‘Third’/future) that mediates between indeterminate possibility (‘First’/present) and determinate actuality (‘Second’/past). Therefore, while a continuum of ‘purposiveness’ is a rational precondition for all temporal events, its futural significance means it can only ever be asymptotically realized; indeed, the constitutively general form of each ‘final’ cause is, practically speaking, fundamentally vague and open-ended to some degree. Finally, I show that the so-called strange attractors of dynamical systems theory provide an imperfect model for this naturalized ‘groundless teleology’. Full article

The character “即 (jí)” in Chinese shares the meaning of “is”, indicating an identity or equivalence between two concepts. In this framework, one might expect the antecedent and the consequent of “即” to be identical in meaning, or at least for a term with a positive connotation not to be paired with one of negative connotation. However, in Tiantai Buddhism, many core propositions follow the structure “x 即 y”, where x is negative and y is positive, or vice versa. This suggests an identity between opposites, creating a paradoxical feature in the system. This essay argues that the paradox within Tiantai Buddhism is a veridical paradox, as defined by Quine, meaning it can be resolved in various ways and does not reflect a genuine contradiction in reality. While Western Buddhist philosophers and logicians have focused primarily on the paradoxes in Nāgārjuna’s thought, this essay demonstrates that Chinese Tiantai Buddhism offers practical resolutions to these paradoxes. The paper first explicates the paradox by examining its roots in Buddhist history, then explores responses to it. Finally, different methods for resolving the paradox are compared and evaluated. Full article

In the classical philosophical landscape of India, the Advaita of Śaṅkara occupies central stage. Besides the Upaniṣadic literature, the Gauḍapāda-kārikā (GK) of Gauḍapāda is the primary text in this school. Relying primarily on the GK, this essay explores the ways the issue of change can be addressed within the Advaita paradigm. For Advaitins, there exists only the singular reality of Brahman, of the character of non-differentiated consciousness. In this paradigm, the attributes of both being and blissfulness never change. Furthermore, the central teaching of Gauḍapāda is the doctrine of ‘non-origination’ (ajāti), that nothing is ever originated. For Advaita, change or deviation is possible only under the spell of illusion, as the absolute is changeless. By comparing the position of Gauḍapāda with other classical, non-dual philosophies, this paper explores arguments for and against change in the classical philosophical school of Advaita. Full article

The present study, primarily of a theoretical nature, endeavors to accomplish two distinct objectives. First and foremost, it endeavors to engage in a thoughtful examination of the metaphysical significance that Anaximander’s philosophy embodies within the context of the nascent Western philosophical tradition. Furthermore, it aims to investigate how it was contemporaneous Buddhist thought, coeval with Anaximander’s era, that more explicitly elucidated the concept of the “void” as an inherent aspect of authentic existence. This elucidation was articulated through aphoristic discourse rather than being reliant on formal logical reasoning or structured arguments. Full article

Tranquil Abiding is an advanced meditative state of mind that is attained through gradual meditative training focusing on the cultivation of mindfulness and meta-awareness. This paper will focus on the eighteenth-century Tibetan scholar Yeshe Gyaltsen’s manual on Tranquil Abiding. It involves introduction and analysis of the themes of Tranquil Abiding, such as the significance and objects of Tranquil Abiding, its relevance to Special Insight, mental hindrances, and factors which counter them. Illustrated will be how Yeshe Gyaltsen’s point of view, which he calls the Ganden tradition, is influenced by exceptional Indian Mahāyāna masters such as Nāgārjuna, Asaṅga, Śāntideva, Kamalaśīla, Atīśa Dipaṃkaraśrijñāna, and Tsongkhapa. Included will be a discussion of his understanding of amanasikāra. Full article

There is no category of thought more deliberately or explicitly relegated to a subordinate role in Plato’s dialogues than Sophists and sophistry. It is due to Plato’s influence that terms “sophist” and “sophistry” handed down to us have unilaterally negative associations—synonymous with lies and deception, obscurantism and false reasoning. There are several reasons to be dubious of this standard view of the Sophists and their practices. The primary reason addressed in this essay is that the surviving fragments of the Sophists do not accord with this standard view, a discrepancy that is particularly acute in the case of the 5th-century sophist Protagoras. This essay attends to Protagoras’s doctrines concerning antilogos, the sophistic practice of contradiction and negation. I contend that sophistic antilogos was a paradoxical practice that embodied metaphysical stakes for language and discourse. I challenge the standard view of Sophists and their antilogos by reconstructing a speculative counter-definition: a method for instantiating through language an ontology of flux and becoming over and against what would come to be a Platonist metaphysics of enduring, pure Being. I do this through a comparative analysis of Protagoras and the second century C.E. South Asian Buddhist thinker, Nāgārjuna. Full article

Contemporary Indian philosophy is a distinct genre of philosophy that draws both on classical Indian philosophical sources and on Western materials, old and new. It is comparative philosophy without borders. In this paper, I attempt to show how contemporary Indian philosophy works through five instances from five of its protagonists: Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (his new interpretation of the old rope-snake parable in his essay “Śaṅkara’s Doctrine of Maya”, 1925); Daya Krishna (I focus on the “moral monadism” that the theory of karma in his reading leads to, drawing on his book Discussion and Debate in Indian Philosophy, 2004); Ramchandra Gandhi (his commentary on the concept of Brahmacharya in correspondence with his grandfather, the Mahatma, in his essay “Brahmacharya”, 1981); Mukund Lath (on identity through—not despite—change, with classical Indian music, Rāga music, as his case-study, in his essay “Identity through Necessary Change”, 2003); and Rajendra Swaroop Bhatnagar (on suffering, in his paper “No Suffering if Human Beings Were Not Sensitive”, 2021). My aim is twofold. First, to introduce five contemporary Indian philosophers; and second, to raise the question of newness and philosophy. Is there anything new in philosophy, or is contemporary philosophy just a footnote—à la Whitehead—to the writings of great thinkers of the past? Is contemporary Indian philosophy, my protagonists included, just a series of footnotes to classical thinkers both in India and Europe? Footnotes to the Upaniṣads, Nāgārjuna, Dharmakīrti and Śaṅkara, as much as (let us not forget colonialism and Macaulay) to Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel? Footnotes can be creative and work almost as a parallel text, interpretive, critical, even subversive. However, my contention is that contemporary Indian philosophy (I leave it to others to plea for contemporary Western philosophy) is not a footnote, it is a text with agency of its own, validity of its own, power of its own. It is wholly and thoroughly a text worth reading. In this paper, I make an attempt to substantiate this claim through the philosophical mosaic I offer, in each instance highlighting both the continuity with classical sources and my protagonists’ courageous transgressions and innovations. Full article

The doctrine of impermanence can be called the most salient feature of the Buddha’s teaching. The early Buddhist doctrine of impermanence can be understood in four different but interrelated contexts: Buddha’s empiricism, the notion of conditioned/constituted objects, the idea of dependent arising, and the practical context of suffering and emancipation. While asserting the impermanence of all phenomena, the Buddha was silent on the questions of the so-called transcendent entities and truths. Moreover, though the Buddha described Nibbāṇa/Nirvāṇa as a ‘deathless state’ (‘amataṃ padam’), it does not imply eternality in a metaphysical sense. Whereas the early Buddhist approach to impermanence can be called ‘phenomenal’, the post-Buddhist approach was concerned with naumena (things in themselves). Hence, Sarvāstivāda (along with Pudgalavāda) is marked by absolutism in the form of the doctrines of substantial continuity, atomism, momentariness, and personalism. The paper also deals with the approaches to impermanence of Dharmakīrti and Nāgārjuna, which can be called naumenal rather than strictly phenomenal. For Dharmakīrti, non-eternality was in fact momentariness and it was not a matter of experience but derivable conceptually or analytically from the concept of real. Nāgārjuna stood not for impermanence, but emptiness (śūnyatā), the concept which transcended both impermanence and permanence, substantiality and non-substantiality. Full article

By the twelfth century, a broad consensus had developed among Tibetan Buddhists: The Middle Way School (Madhyamaka) of Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd century), as interpreted by Candrakīrti (c. 600–650), would be normative in Tibet. However, Tibetans had inherited various trajectories of commentary on Madhyamaka, and schools of thought developed, each with a particular reading. This article will examine some of the major competing philosophical stances, focusing on three figures who represent particularly compelling interpretations, but whose understandings of Madhyamaka are profoundly divergent: Daktsang Sherap Rinchen (1405–1477), Wangchuk Dorjé, the 9th Karmapa (1556–1603), and Purchok Ngawang Jampa (1682–1762). The former two contend that Nāgārjuna’s statement “I have no thesis” (nāsti ca mama pratijñā) means exactly what it says, while the latter advocates what could be termed an “anthropological” approach: Mādhyamikas, when speaking as Mādhyamikas, only report what “the world” says, without taking any stance of their own; but their understanding of Buddhism is based on insight gained through intensive meditation training. This article will focus on how these three philosophers figure in the history of Tibetan Madhyamaka exegesis and how their respective readings of Indic texts incorporate elements of previous work while moving interpretation in new directions. Full article

This article reconstructs the Chinese “practice qua exegesis” which evolved out of the doxographical appropriation of the Indian Buddhist catuṣkoṭi (four edges), a heuristic device for conceptual analysis and a method of assorting linguistic forms to which adherents of Madhyamaka ascribed ambiguous potential. It could conceptually clarify Buddhist doctrine, but also produce deceptive speech. According to the Chinese interpreters, conceptual and linguistic forms continue to be deceptive until the mind realizes that all it holds on or distinguishes itself from is its own fabrication. Liberation from such self-induced deceptions requires awareness of the paradox that the desire to leave them behind is itself a way of clinging to them. Chinese Sanlun and Tiantai masters tried to uncover this paradox and to disclose to practitioners how the application of the catuṣkoṭi, on the basis of such awareness, enables proper conceptual analysis in exegesis. From this approach followed the Chinese habit of construing doxographies in which hermeneutical and soteriological intent coincide. Understanding the inner unity of doctrinal manifoldness in the translated sūtra and śāstra literature from India via exegesis also made it possible to apprehend the ineffable sense of liberation. Full article

This article synthesizes and clarifies the significance of the last half-century’s developments in Bhutan’s politics within the frame of Buddhist political thought. During this time, Bhutan has held a curious position in the international community, both celebrated as a Buddhist Shangri-La defending its culture in the face of globalized modernity, and at times, criticized for defending its heritage too conservatively at the expense of ethnic minorities’ human rights. In other words, Bhutan is praised for being anti-modern and illiberal and denounced for being anti-modern and illiberal. As an alternative to understanding Bhutan vis-à-vis this unhelpful schema, and in order to better grasp what exactly is underway in Bhutan’s political developments, I read Bhutan’s politics from within the tradition of Buddhist political literature. I argue that the theory of governance driving Bhutan’s politics is an example of Buddhist modernism—both ancient and modern, deeply Buddhist and yet manifestly inflected by western liberalism. To elucidate Bhutan’s contiguity with (and occasional departures from) the tradition of Buddhist political thought, I read two politically-themed Buddhist texts, Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland and Mipham’s Treatise on Ethics for Kings, drawing out their most relevant points on Buddhist governance. I then use these themes as a lens for analyzing three significant political developments in Bhutan: its recent transition to constitutional monarchy, its signature policy of Gross National Happiness, and its fraught ethnic politics. Reading Bhutan’s politics in this manner reveals the extent to which Buddhist political thought is underway in this moment. Bhutan’s Buddhist-modernist theory of governance is a hybrid political tradition that evinces a lasting commitment to the core values of Buddhist political thought while at the same time being responsive to modern geopolitical and intellectual influences. Full article