Madhyamaka
A dialectic that undoes every thesis, its own included, to free the mind from the grip of views.
c. 150 – c. 1419 · living tradition
Madhyamaka (the ) is the school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by around the second century, built on his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. It radicalizes the Buddhist teaching of into a doctrine of . Nāgārjuna defends it mainly by reducing opposing positions to absurdity; reintroduced autonomous arguments, which contested, hence the distinction, worked out in Tibet, between "Svātantrika" and "Prāsaṅgika" readings. With , the last great renewer recorded here, it became the summit of the monastic curriculum of the Gelug school, which it remains today. Its controversy with over the shaped Indian epistemology. In the twentieth century it was received in diverse ways, in the 's dialogue with Western philosophy as well as in part of analytic philosophy.
Nothing exists by itself: to be is to depend, and it is because everything is that everything can change.
There are , and the higher one cannot be stated as a fact.
is not an elsewhere: ultimately it does not differ from , of which it is the stilling.
Justification
The doctrine of the distinguishes a , that of usage, language and worldly transactions, from an , emptiness, which cannot be stated as a fact. Without conventional truth the ultimate cannot be taught. Conventional truth rests on worldly conventions and on conventionally reliable cognition, which accepts at that level; it does not presuppose things endowed with an intrinsic nature to correspond to, hence the small share of correspondence and the weight of coherence with practices and of their effectiveness.
Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, XXIV.8-10 · Candrakīrti, Madhyamakāvatāra (Introduction to the Middle Way), VI
2 more
Justification
The Madhyamaka dialectic aims at the (): undoing attachment to views, a source of suffering, rather than building a doctrine of the world. Analysis is a therapy here, hence the share of clarification.
Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, dedication and XXVII.30
Neither dogmatic nor sceptical in the Greek sense: declares he has no thesis to defend and turns the demand for grounding back on the , while accepts them at the conventional level. The axis does not capture this position.
Justification
Nothing has an (), that is, an existence depending on nothing else. A thing endowed with such a nature could neither arise, nor change, nor act; yet everything arises, changes and acts. To say that things are is not to say that they do not exist, but that they exist only in dependence. This emptiness is not nothingness, and warns against anyone who would grasp it as a new thesis.
Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, XV and XXIV.18
Justification
The self is neither identical to the () that make it up nor distinct from them: it is a conventional designation, just as the chariot is nothing apart from its parts and yet is none of them. Madhyamaka further denies the aggregates themselves any ultimate existence, which sets it apart from the Buddhist schools that took them as the real constituents: the bundle itself is only a designation.
Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, XVIII · Candrakīrti, Madhyamakāvatāra, VI.150-165 (the sevenfold analysis of the chariot)
Justification
For , there is ultimately not the slightest difference between and : both are empty of intrinsic nature. Nirvāṇa is therefore not another place to escape to, but the stilling of the grasping that makes saṃsāra. The distinction nonetheless remains at the conventional level, where the path and liberation keep their full meaning. This radical immanence would be taken up, in diverse ways, by Zen and by the .
Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, XXV.19-20
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
↓ Influence exerted
- challenged byNyāyaNyāya defends the means of knowledge against the Madhyamaka objection: they establish themselves, as a lamp lights itself in lighting up objects, and denying all valid knowledge undermines the denial itself.Read
- reinterpreted byKyoto SchoolNishitani makes the emptiness of Madhyamaka the "field" where Western nihilism, as diagnosed by Nietzsche and Heidegger, is passed through and overcome: a Buddhist notion becomes the answer to a crisis of European mod…Read