## 1. Issues in the Madhyamaka school



There a number of points that all Madhyamika thinkers have in
common. In all of them one finds some version of the doctrine of two
truths, according to which there is a level of understanding that
consists of an accurate account of the world as it is experienced in
everyday life and another level of understanding that is conducive to
reaching the ultimate goal (*paramartha*) of Buddhist
practice, namely, nirvana, understood as the absence of attachment,
aversion and delusion with no possibility of their return. There is
also broad agreement that language is limited to the everyday level of
understanding and that the truth of nirvana is beyond the reach of
language and of the conceptualization that makes language
possible.



Where differences arise among Madhyamika thinkers is on the issue
of how these two truths relate to one another. Does careful
verbalization and thinking do any good in bringing one closer to
nirvana, or is it invariably an obstacle? Is there any room within
Madhyamaka for clear thinking and carefully wrought argumentation, or
are all attempts to arrive at clear thought and rigorous argumentation
ultimately delusional and therefore to be abandoned along with more
obvious forms of delusion?



Another area in which Madhyamakas differ from one another is in
their attitude toward the other main school of Mahayana
Buddhism, the Yogacara school, which Madhyamikas
present as advocating a kind of subjective idealism. Early
Madhyamikas tended to refute the Yogacara doctrine that
all the contents within awareness arise out of awareness itself and
are thus ontologically at one with consciousness. Later
Madhyamikas found room for that view, usually by portraying
Yogacara as a philosophy that prepares one intellectually
and emotionally for the difficult truth that all things are lacking in
inherent natures and all that we think of as knowledge is ultimately
without grounding.


## 2. Aryadeva (fl. ca. 225-250 C.E.)



According to traditional accounts preserved in Tibetan and Chinese,
Aryadeva was born into the royal family in what is now Sri Lanka,
renounced his claim to the throne, took monastic vows, studied the
Buddhist scriptures for several years, and travelled to south India.
He reportedly became a direct disciple of Nagarjuna. His
principal writing, the *Catuhsataka*sastra
(Four Hundred Verse Treatise), was regarded as a Madhayamaka text and
was commented on by Candrakirti and by prominent Tibetan
proponents of the Madhyamaka school.



The first hundred verses of the Four Hundred Verse Treatise deal with
four illusions that must be dispelled by someone striving to achieve
liberation from the root causes of dissatisfaction. The four illusions
are the beliefs that there are permanent things in the world that
escape destruction, that impermanent things can provide true
satisfaction, that satisfaction can be derived from intrinsically
impure things, and that satisfaction can be attained by being
preoccupied with oneself. These are standard themes in Buddhist
writings. The second set of one hundred verses also deal with standard
Buddhist themes, namely, cultivating altruistic motivations, ridding
the mind of the afflictions of desire, anger, and delusion, and
developing habits of ethical conduct. While the first half of the
treatise is essentially inspirational in nature, the second half
provides arguments meant to prove that all things are conditioned and
therefore impermanent, that nothing qualifies as an independent and
enduring self, and that there are no uncaused causes. Most of the
verses dealing with these topics are polemical in nature and are aimed
at refuting the doctrines of Brahmanical schools, Jainism and some of
the Buddhist scholastics. As is the case with other Madhyamikas,
Aryadeva focuses most of his attention on showing the
incomprehensibility or absurdity of the doctrines under review. His
motivation for doing this is suggested in 8.10 (the tenth verse in the
eighth set of twenty-five), where he says attachment to one's
own views and disparaging the views of others is an obstacle to
nirvana, and tranquillity is impossible for those who engage in
doctrinal disputes. His exercise in showing the untenability of
various positions, then, is presumably done not for the sake of
refuting others in order to establish his own position, but to help
his readers break the habit of firmly holding tenets.



An example of Aryadeva's demonstrating an inconsistency in
a particular position is his critique of the view that there is a
permanent self. He observes that since a permanent self could not
undergo change, it could not be harmed or destroyed, and therefore it
is inconsistent for those who believe in such a self to promote
ethical guidelines against killing or harming others. While
Aryadeva endeavors in some chapters to show the inconsistencies
in a number of particular doctrines of the Samkhya and
Vaisesika schools, in the fourteenth chapter he provides a
paradigm of an argument that can be applied to any number of doctrinal
positions. That paradigm, which is familiar to readers of
Nagarjuna and other Madhyamikas, consists in showing
that there is a problem in attributing a given predicate to a subject,
and in attributing the negation of that predicate, and in attributing
both the predicate and its negation, and in attributing neither the
predicate nor its negation. For example, he argues that one cannot say
that a pot is single, for it has many characteristics, such as color,
shape, hardness, odor and so forth. It also cannot be said that the
pot is many pots, because none of the individual characteristics is a
pot. It cannot be said that the pot is a single whole with many
characteristics, because some of its components are material and
therefore capable of contact and location, while others, such as color
and odor, are immaterial and have no location; it makes no sense to
say that characteristics that have contrary natures form a coherent
whole. And yet to deny that a pot is either one or many is to deny
that it exists at all, for an existent thing must have either a
property or the absence of that property. Aryadeva's
statements of these arguments in verse is laconic and often difficult
to follow; therefore, most readers who study his text do so with the
help of one of the many commentaries written by later Sanskrit or
Tibetan authors. 


## 3. Buddhapalita



Aside from a commentary entitled *Akutobhaya* (Afraid of
nothing), which is traditionally ascribed to Nagarjuna but
the authorship of which is questioned by modern scholars, the earliest
extant commentary to Nagarjuna's MMK is the
*Madhyamakavrtti* by Buddhapalita (ca 470-ca
540). The original Sanskit of this text is not known to exist, but it
is still extant in Tibetan translation. Buddhapalita's
commentary, like *Akutobhaya* stays close to the text upon
which it is a commentary. The MMK is written in verse, and
Buddhapalita's commentary places the words of the verse
text into standard prose word order and offers glosses to disambiguate
potentially confusing words. Like the MMK itself,
Buddhapalita's commentary does not offer a positive
position but rather shows the untenability of all the apparently
possible solutions to the philosophical questions taken up for
examination. The principal method of examining a position in MMK and
in Buddhapalita's commentary is to show that unwelcome
consequences are entailed by the position under consideration.



An example of the approach used by Nagarjuna and
Buddhapalita is their discussion of the relation between a cause
and its effect, the topic taken up in MMK 1.1. There are only four
possible relationships: the cause is the same as the effect, the cause
is different from the effect, the cause is both the same as and
different from the effect, or the cause is neither the same as nor
different from the effect. This fourth position would be tantamount to
saying that there is no cause, and that an effect therefore arises out
of nothing at all. Each of these four possibilities is rejected in
turn, each for a different reason. Buddhapalita argues that if an
effect were identical to its cause, then it would already exist as the
cause and would have no need of coming into being a second time.
Identity of cause and effect defeats the very idea of causality. If
the effect were different from the cause, on the other hand, then
there would be no constraints on what could arise out of what, so long
as the cause and the effect were different. The third possibility is
untenable, says Buddhapalita, since it is merely the conjunction
of the two hypotheses that have just been shown to be untenable. A
proposition consisting of the conjunction of two false propositions
cannot be true. The fourth possibility, like the first, undermines the
very idea of causality. Moreover, says Buddhapalita, it would
render all practice ineffectual; what he probably had in mind here was
specifically Buddhist religious practice, which is predicated on
identifying the root causes of dissatisfaction and then eliminating
those root causes so that dissatisfaction disappears.



Beyond showing the untenability of each of the relations that were
discussed as possible relations between the relata in a particular
situation, Nagarjuna and Buddhapalita have little to
say. Opponents to the Madhyamaka school were critical of this
approach, saying in effect that there is little value in finding fault
with a philosophical view unless one is prepared to offer a better
view to replace the faulty one. As will become more clear in what
follows, it was precisely this issue--that is, whether there is a
value in simply finding faults in philosophical views--that
became controversial among Madhyamikas.


## 4. Bhavaviveka



The strongest challenge to the commentarial tradition of
Buddhapalita came from Bhavaviveka, whose approach to
Madhyamaka became the basis of what Tibetan Buddhists would many
centuries after the fact consider a subschool of Madhyamaka that
rivallled the subschool comprising those who followed
Buddhapalita.


### 4.1 Life and works



Bhavaviveka, who was also known as Bhavya and Bhaviveka, was
probably active in the middle part of the sixth century. His
commentary on MMK, entitled *Prajnapradipa*
(Lamp of Wisdom), now extant only in Chinese and Tibetan translations,
contains not only his interpretation of Nagarjuna's
thoughts but also critiques of Buddhapalita's approach to
Madhyamaka, about which more will be said below, and critiques of the
Buddhist abhidharma tradition. *Prajnapradipa*
also incorporates critiques of such non-Buddhist schools as
Samkhya, Vaisesika and the Jains.



In addition to his commentary to MMK, Bhavaviveka wrote an
important independent verse treatise on Madhyamaka entitled
*Madhyamakahrdayakarika* (Verses on the Heart
of Centrism) to which he provided a prose commentary called
*Tarkajvala* (Flame of Reasoning). This combination
of works comprises eleven chapters.


1. On cultivating and maintaining *bodhicitta,* that is, the
aspiration to become enlightened in order to work for the benefit and
ultimate liberation of all sentient beings
2. Following the Buddhist vows
3. Striving for a knowledge of reality
4. Reality as understood by the conservative canonical Buddhists
(Sravakas)
5. Reality as understood by the Yogacara school of
Buddhism
6. Reality as understood by the Samkhya school
7. Reality as understood by the Vaisesika school
8. Reality as understood by the Vedanta schools
9. Reality as understood by the Mimamsa
school
10. The realization of omniscience
11. On the characteristics of praise



As the titles of the chapters of this work show, Bhavaviveka was
a student of most of the important movements in Indian philosophy of
his era and sought to stake out the place of the Madhyamaka school
within Buddhism as a whole. His understanding of Madhyamaka was
importantly different from Buddhapalita's. Their different
approaches turned out to define two of the three important sub-schools
of Madhyamaka.


### 4.2 Contributions



A distinguishing characteristic of Bhavaviveka's approach
to Madhyamaka is his conviction that a Madhyamika should put
forward a positive argument for a position rather than merely showing
the inadequacies of other positions. His criticism of
Buddhapalita was focused primarily on that very point;
Buddhapalita offered no statement of what the Madhyamikas
believe but confined himself to pointing out that what other people
believe is untenable in one way or another. To criticize the positions
of others but not to venture to state a position of one's own
was regarded by the Indian debate tradition as a substandard use of
argumentation called *vitanda*, which
literally means making an attack. Bhavaviveka was at pains to
show that Madhyamikas could not legitimately be accused of this
sort of philosophical sniping. He affirmed that Madhyamikas do
have a conviction that they are prepared to state and defend, namely,
that all phenomena are devoid of an inherent nature, that is, a nature
that they have independently. All phenomena are conditioned, and such
natures as they have are natures that they acquire through their
conditions rather than on their own. The concise Madhyamaka way of
saying all this is to say that all phenomena (*dharmas*) are
empty (*sunya*). Since the Madhyamikas believe
that all phenomena are empty, they owe it to their readers to provide
reasons for thinking that that is a reasonable thing to believe.



In providing arguments in favor of the conclusions accepted by
Madhyamikas, Bhavaviveka followed the example set by
Dignaga (fl. ca. 510), a Buddhist whose principal contributions
were in the area of epistemology and logic. Dignaga, following
with some modifications philosophers of the Brahmanical Nyaya
school, had devised a canonical form of presenting arguments, which
consisted in identifying a topic (*paksa*) and reasoning
on the basis of an observed feature of the topic that it also had
another feature not currently available for direct observation. The
stock example given in Indian logic is that if a particular mountain
is the topic, one can reason on the basis of observing smoke
associated with that mountain that there is also a fire associated
with that mountain. Attributing an unobserved feature to a topic on
the basis of an observed feature is legitimate only if one has
previously observed the feature used as evidence together with the
feature being inferred, and if one has never seen the feature used as
evidence in the absence of the feature being inferred.
Dignaga's method of presenting an argument consists, then,
in stating a topic (*paksa*) and a property used as
evidence (*sadhaka-dharma*) for a property to be
established (*sadhya-dharma*). Bhavaviveka followed
this method in arguing for the conclusions of which he claimed
Madhyamikas are convinced; he also criticized Buddhapalita
for failing to follow Dignaga's method.



In his discussion of MMK 1.1, Bhavaviveka makes the general
observation that when Nagarjuna negates a proposition, he is
negating the entire proposition rather than negating just the
predicate. If one negates just a predicate, that leaves open the
possibility that some other predicate can suitably be applied to the
subject in question. Negation of a predicate in a proposition
presupposes the existence of the subject of the proposition, whereas
negation of the entire proposition need not rest on such a
presupposition. So when Nagarjuna says that a phenomenon
does not arise from itself, one should understand that to be a way of
saying "It is not the case that a phenomenon arises from
itself." If one were to construe Nagarjuna's
statement as equivalent to something like "The arising of a
phenomenon is not from the phenomenon itself," then one would
naturally take that to be saying that the arising of a phenomenon is
from something other than itself. Alternatively, one might take it to
be saying that the arising of a phenomenon is not *only* from
itself but rather from something that is partly itself and partly
something other than itself. If one takes Nagarjuna's
proposition to be a series of conjoined propositions of the form
"It is not the case that a phenomenon arises from itself
*and* it is not the case that a phenomenon arises from
something other than itself, *and* it is not the case that a
phenomenon arises from itself in cooperation with something other than
itself, *and* it is not the case that a phenomenon arises from
nothing at all," then there is no paradox involved in negating
both a simple proposition and its contradiction. It is therefore
important to make it clear when Nagarjuna's negations
are sentential negations and when they are term-negations, and this
Buddhapalita failed to do.



Bhavaviveka goes on to explain that Nagarjuna employed
sentential negations in MMK 1.1, because he was trying to establish a
kind of "non-conceptual cognition," that is, an insight
that cannot be expressed in words. The scope of this non-conceptual
insight is everything that is capable of being cognized. In other
words, Nagarjuna's insight was that everything that
one thinks one knows, every explanation one thinks one has to account
for one's experiences, is flawed and must ultimately be
abandoned. In saying this, Bhavaviveka is consistent with a
number of important statements in MMK and VV. Nagarjuna had
laid emphasis on the claim that the Buddha had dealt out two kinds of
truth, a quotidian transactional or conventional truth
(*vyavahara-satya, samvrti-satya*) and a truth
concerning the highest goal (*paramartha-satya*), namely,
nirvana. Of these, only the transactional truth is capable of being
articulated in language. The highest goal, consisting of a silence of
the mind in which there is no conceptual thinking, is naturally
inexpressible in language, since language is necessarily bound up with
concepts. Some form of this view was shared by all Madhyamikas.
Where they differed with one another was on the issue of how the
teachings of Buddhism, which are communicated in language, relate to
the highest goal of Buddhism, which lies outside the scope of
language.



Nagarjuna wrote in MMK 18.9 that the defining
characteristics of reality (*tattva*, literally,
"thatness" or quiddity) are that it is not conditioned by
something other than itself, it is peaceful, it cannot be elaborated
through verbal elaborations, it is non-conceptual, and it is uniform.
In his commentary to that verse, Bhavaviveka expands the meaning
of the verse by saying that anything that is not conceptual in nature
cannot be expressed through verbal elaborations or through any other
kind of sign. In other words, what is non-conceptual in nature cannot
be known indirectly, and knowledge gained through language is always
mediated and indirect. For this reason, reality is entirely outside
the range of language. That notwithstanding, says Bhavaviveka,
what language *can* do is convey something about the general
nature of what is talked about. The statement that phenomena are
lacking in inherent natures, for example, does convey useful general
information about reality. Even though reality itself can be known
only directly through a non-conceptual awareness, language can be
helpful in conveying that very information, namely, that reality can
be apprehended only directly and not through language. That the
Madhyamika has, and defends, the view that reality lacks inherent
nature means that the Madhyamika is not merely engaging in
philosophical sniping of the *vitanda*
variety.



In his *Tarkajvala*, in which Bhavaviveka is
freed from the constraints of following Nagarjuna's
texts and puts forward his own approach to Madhyamaka, he states that
the term "highest goal" (*paramartha-satya*)
has two aspects. One aspect is that it is free from volitional
thought, pure and beyond the reach of verbal elaborations. Another
aspect is that it is volitional in nature, connected with the
accumulation of knowledge and meritorious karma, and connected with
verbal elaborations and with the transactional knowledge of everyday
life. By seeing the ultimate goal in this way, Bhavaviveka claims
to give an account that leaves reality intact as a uniform whole about
which knowledge can be diverse and incremental. This incremental
nature of knowledge makes ample room for the traditional
Mahayana teachings of the gradated bodhisattva path whereby
one moves from the aspiration for enlightenment to the gradual
realization of enlightenment. A metaphor that Bhavaviveka uses
for the Buddhist path is that it follows verbal teachings which are
like a ladder that one slowly ascends until one can climb over the
wall into non-conceptual direct awareness of the peaceful reality of
nirvana in which there is nothing to be wished for, nothing to be
understood and no hypothesis to be defended.


## 5. Candrakirti


#### 5.1 Life and works



As is usual for the majority of Indian philosophers, very little is
known about the life of Candrakirti. Modern scholars place him at
the beginning of the seventh century. His two best-known works are his
commentary to MMK entitled *Prasannapada
Madhyamakavrtti* (Clear-worded Commentary on Centrism),
which survives in Sanskrit as well as in Tibetan translation, and an
independent treatise called *Madhyamakavatara*
(Introduction to Centrism) available only in Tibetan translation.
*Madhyamakavatara* is a verse text to which
Candrakirti provided a prose commentary. It is clearly an earlier
work than his commentary to MMK, since in that commentary he refers
the reader repeatedly to *Madhyamakavatara* for the
full arguments for the positions he endorses. Both
*Prasannapada* and *Madhyamakavatara*
have been studied by modern scholars and a significant number of
passages have been translated into modern European languages. In
addition to those works, Candrakirti wrote a number of
commentaries to relatively short texts by Nagarjuna and
Aryadeva.


#### 5.2 Contributions



At the beginning of his commentary to MMK, Candrakirti offers an
extended criticism of Bhavaviveka and a defense of
Buddhapalita against the criticisms of Bhavaviveka. Many
centuries after he wrote, Buddhist scholastics in Tibet portrayed
Candrakirti as the founder of one of the subschools of the
Madhyamaka that they perceived. Because Bhavaviveka had advocated
for producing independent (*svatantra*) arguments for the view
that all phenomena are empty of inherent natures, the Tibetan
scholastics dubbed his subschool the Svatantrika school; because
Candrakirti criticized that approach and advocated for being
content to show the unwelcome consequences (*prasanga*)
of all possible positions on any given philosophical issue, his
subschool was named by Tibetans the Prasangika school of
Madhyamaka. Although those terms were not used by Indian
Madhyamikas themselves, it has become standard practice in modern
scholarship to portray the Madhyamaka school as comprising at least
two subschools with those names and to see Bhavaviveka and
Candrakirti as the founders of those two subschools.



The earlier of Candrakirti's two principal works,
*Madhyamakavatara*, has ten chapters, one for each of
the ten stages of the path of the bodhisattva. At each of these stages
the bodhisattva focuses attention on one of the virtues that are to be
brought to a stage of perfection (*paramita*). The
virtues to be perfected are generosity; good habits of thought, word
and deed; patience; courage; meditation; wisdom; proselytizing skill;
application of vows; strength of character; and transcendental
knowledge. The chapter dedicated to the sixth stage, at which wisdom
is cultivated to perfection, is the chapter in which Candrakirti
lays out his most detailed exposition of the Madhyamaka school of
philosophy. Candrakirti begins this chapter with the claim that
wisdom is like a sighted person who is capable of leading a group of
blind people safely to a destination; similarly, wisdom guides all the
other virtues to their destination of perfection. As for the content
of wisdom, it is the realization that no phenomena come into being.
Phenomena cannot arise from themselves, since that possibility would
make arising unnecessary or redundant; if a thing already exists, it
has no need to come into being. If, on the other hand, it were allowed
that one being might rise out of a being other than itself, then there
would be nothing to prevent one from saying that pitch darkness arises
out of light. Another way of looking at the issue of production from
causes is that the effect either already exists in the cause or it
does not exist. If it already exists, it has no need or coming into
being. If it does not exist, then it cannot be an agent that does the
action of coming into being; but if there is no agent, then there is
no action.



After showing that there cannot be any intelligible account of the
arising of phenomena, Candrakirti acknowledges that in everyday
experience we encounter phenomena coming into being all the time. This
leads to a discussion of the two truths. The ultimate truth--that
is, truth concerning the highest goal--is that phenomena do not
come into being; the conventional transactional truth, on the other
hand, is that things do come into being and that their arising is
conditioned. This conventional truth can therefore be understood as a
kind of screen, an obstacle that stands in the way of seeing the
ultimate truth. In other words, the putative truths of quotidian life
are actually delusions that, if believed, prevent one from attaining
the wisdom that is capable of leading to the imperturbable peace of
nirvana. The truth of the highest goal cannot be conveyed in language;
it can only be manifested in silence. That notwithstanding, the Buddha
gave many teachings in words, so how is one to understand that? The
Buddha, said Candrakirti, spoke according to the linguistic
conventions of the people to whom he talked. It is conventional to use
pronouns such as "I" and "you" and words like
"self"; without such pronouns, grammatically correct
sentences cannot be formed. It does not follow from grammatical
correctness, however, that those words used in sentences have
referents. The Buddha's insight was that there is no self, and
yet he used the sort of conventional language that is commonly used by
those who do believe that there is a self. Similarly, even though the
Buddha realized that there are no phenomena coming into being and
perishing, he spoke the same kinds of sentences used by those who
believe that phenomena come into being through conditions and then
perish when the conditions that sustain them are no longer operative.
If one is going to use language at all, then one cannot avoid using
words and constructions that apparently commit one to accepting the
presuppositions upon which language rests. It is the task of the
Madhyamika philosopher to expose those presuppositions as
untenable, to see that language is not grounded in realities but is
purely conventional in nature. The Buddha, knowing what kinds of
beliefs his listeners had, gave doctrines that helped people get past
their false beliefs. For example, to those who believed in an enduring
and unified and essentially independent self, says Candrakirti,
the Buddha taught that the self is not to be found in any of the
aspects of being human that might be a candidate for being regarded as
a self; he taught that the self is not the body, the personality,
awareness, thoughts or feelings or anything else that arises through
causes and conditions, nor is there anything outside those things that
counts as a candidate for what people intuitively take to be their
selves. To people who were inclined to a materialistic monism, the
Buddha emphasized the importance of the mind as something that is
independent of the body. (About this, more will be said below.)



As was discussed above
 (section 4.2),
 Bhavaviveka criticized Buddhapalita for failing to state
and defend the thesis of the Madhyamikas. In the first chapter of
his commentary to MMK, Candrakirti comes to
Buddhapalita's defense and offers a sustained criticism of
Bhavaviveka, and of the tradition of Dignaga on whom
Bhavaviveka had based much of his approach.
Bhavaviveka's call for an independent argument in favor of
a conclusion accepted by Madhyamikas, says Candrakirti, is
diametrically opposed to what Nagarjuna and Aryadeva
had written. Nagarjuna had written in VV that he has no
thesis to advance. He had also written that he apprehends no objects
at all and therefore has no need to affirm or deny anything, and since
he neither affirms nor denies any proposition, he need not supply any
reasons to justify his stance. And Aryadeva had written that a
person who makes no claims, either that anything exists or that
something does not exist, cannot be refuted. Candrakirti cites
those passages with the additional comment that Buddhapalita had
understood the spirit of Madhyamaka as set forth by those early
Madhyamikas. The Madhyamika, Candrakirti goes on to
explain, does not put forward counter positions in opposition to the
claims of other philosophers; rather, he shows the problems involved
in the positions of others and argues only until the other
philosophers realize the inadequacy of their positions and become
silent. In the process of bringing others to silence, the
Madhyamika need not construct formal arguments, nor need he be
consistent in what he says. Following Aryadeva's
observation, Candrakirti says that the Madhyamika cannot be
refuted, precisely because he has no position to defend. If
Buddhapalita had put forth arguments, then he would have opened
himself up to endless disputation; since, however, he knew that the
purpose of Madhyamaka is to bring all disputation, and indeed all
kinds of idle chatter, to an end, he wisely avoided putting forth
formal arguments that a persistent opponent might take as an
invitation to debate. If Bhavaviveka had understood the point of
Madhyamaka, concludes Candrakirti, he would not have made the
criticisms he made of Buddhapalita.



After offering his criticisms of Bhavaviveka, Candrakirti
addresses the school of Buddhist logic and epistemology founded by
Dignaga. The followers of this school did not present themselves
as Madhyamikas, so Candrakirti does not accuse them of
having failed to understand Nagarjuna properly. He does,
however, confront them with having failed to supply a convincing
response to the radical critique Nagarjuna had made of the
very enterprise of grounding convictions on indisputable foundations.
He recapitulates a passage of Nagarjuna's VV in which
it is said that any proposition that is supposed to be warranted must
rest upon a foundation of either direct experience or one of three
kinds of reasoning. But the very claim that a proposition is warranted
by a foundation is itself a proposition, and as such it must either
require a warrant of its own or be deemed self-validating. If it
requires a warrant of its own, the result will be an infinite regress
of propositions needing warrants; if it is declared self-validating,
then why not say of all propositions they are self-validating?
Dignaga and his followers went ahead and talked about the
grounding of propositions as if Nagarjuna had never
questioned the enterprise. Unless they provide a clear and convincing
response to what Nagarjuna said, there is no reason for
anyone to take them seriously.



One further Buddhist movement that Candrakirti criticizes is the
Yogacara school, which he presents as advocating a form of
subjective idealism. Their claim that the world of experience is
consciousness only and that the contents of consciousness cannot be
objects external to consciousness itself is supported by several texts
within the Mahayana scriptural tradition. Candrakirti
explains these scriptures as examples of teachings that the Buddha
gave to counter a particular kind of commonly held wrong view. There
are, says Candrakirti, those who mistakenly believe that all
their suffering is due to causes outside themselves; they see
themselves as unfortunate victims of a hostile world. The Buddha,
wishing to make it clear that the predominant factor in
dissatisfaction is the way one thinks about one's experiences,
said, in effect "It's all in the mind." It would be
a mistake to take that statement literally and to conclude that
nothing but consciousness exists and that the world of experience that
feels as though it is external to consciousness is in fact produced by
consciousness or is inseparable from consciousness. The
Yogacara offers good reasons to show that the contents of
consciousness are conditioned and therefore are empty of inherent
existence, but they fail to appreciate that exactly the same can be
said of awareness itself. In other words, says Candrakirti, the
Yogacara philosophers fail to acknowledge that
*everything*, including consciousness itself, is empty.



In making the kinds of criticisms of other philosophers that
Candrakirti makes, he repeatedly advocates for taking ordinary
experience seriously and at face value. In everyday experience, we
feel that things arise and perish because of causes and conditions,
and we feel that we are conscious subjects on whom an external world
is impinging. We communicate with one another in readily
comprehensible language. There is no reason to change any of that, no
reason to replace everyday language with a more precise technical
language that helps avoid misrepresenting the nature of things. At the
same time, it is important to be aware that it cannot be shown that
things have fixed natures and that there is no reason to believe about
any of our beliefs that they are grounded. The task of philosophy for
Candrakirti is not to replace unwarranted beliefs with justified
true beliefs, but to break the habit of forming beliefs, declaring
them to be true, and then becoming attached to them.


## 6. Santideva


### 6.1 Life and works



According to traditional biographies, Santideva was born the
son of a king but abandoned the royal household for life as a Buddhist
monk. Best estimates of the time of his activity place him at the end
of the seventh century. His best-known (and most frequently
translated) work is *Bodhicaryavatara* (Introduction
to the practice of enlightenment), also called
*Bodhisattvacaryavatara* (Introduction to the
practice of the bodhisattva). He also compiled
*Siksasamuccaya*, an annotated collection of
passages from Mahayana scriptures for students, and he
authored a commentary to Vasubandhu's
*Trimsika*, a key text in the
Yogacara tradition. Partly because he was a masterful
stylist and wrote delightfully beautiful Sanskrit verse, and partly
because his work exerted a strong influence on Tibetan Buddhism,
Santideva has been the focus of a considerable amount of modern
scholarship in Japan, Europe and North America. All this makes him a
good access point into Madhyamaka philosophy for those who are not
specialists in Indian philosophy.



*Bodhicaryavatara* is a verse composition divided
into ten chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of the
traditional depiction of the bodhisattva's career. The topics of
the ten chapters are as follows:


1. In praise of *bodhicitta*, the aspiration to become
enlightened for the liberation of all sentient beings
2. A reflection on cultivating good character through the confession
of one's personal shortcomings
3. On acquiring *bodhicitta*
4. On cultivating watchfulness with respect to
*bodhicitta*
5. On the guarding of awareness
6. On the perfection of patience
7. On the perfection of courage
8. On the perfection of meditation
9. On the perfection of wisdom
10. On giving the merits accrued by cultivating virtues to all those
suffering beings in need of merit



As is the case with most philosophical works written in verse,
*Bodhicaryavatara* is usually studied with a prose
commentary. Santideva himself provided no prose commentary
to his work, but a Sanskrit commentary by Prajnakaramati
is still extant and is usually consulted by those who translate the
work into English from the original Sanskrit.
Santideva's work is also preserved in Tibetan
translation and is furnished with several Tibetan commentaries, which
are routinely consulted by those who translate
*Bodhicaryavatara* into English from its Tibetan
translation.


### 6.2 Contributions



Although beautifully written, *Bodhicaryavatara* does
not display much philosophical originality. Its principal contribution
is in offering a concise recapitulation of the currents of Madhyamaka
thought and of Madhyamaka arguments against Yogacara monism,
which portrays consciousness as the ultimate source of all realities.
While that is generally the case, one candidate for novelty occurs in
earlier chapters of *Bodhicaryavatara*, where
Santideva provides a line of argument that became standard
in discussion of Mahayana ethics. His claim is that pain and
unhappiness are by definition that which those who experience them
wish to avoid. But given that there are no inherent natures that
distinguish one person from another, or one kind of person from
another kind, there is no rational basis to prefer one's own
experiences and judgments to those of anyone else or to prefer what
one perceives as one's own kind from other kinds of people. It
is fundamentally irrational to take an interest only in one's
own pain and suffering; the only reasonable approach is to be
concerned with *all* the pain and unhappiness of which one
becomes aware and to try to eradicate all of it without making
artificial distinctions. Since, however, most of what anyone finds
painful and unpleasant arises from the conviction that some objects of
experience are inherently undesirable or impure, the best strategy to
follow in helping oneself and others overcome pain and suffering is to
show that there is no basis for the belief that some objects are
inherently undesirable or impure. That strategy also works, of course,
when unhappiness arises from the frustration of not getting things
that one falsely believes are inherently desirable and pure.



As was the case with Candrakirti's
*Madhyamakavatara*, Santideva's
*Bodhicaryavatara* has the most to say about
Madhyamaka philosophy in the chapter on the perfection of wisdom. A
key verse in this chapter is 9.35, which says "When neither
presence nor absence stands before the mind, the mind, having no
content, calms down because of the absence of cognition." This
recapitulates a point made by both Nagarjuna and
Candrakirti that the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice is
nirvana, a stillness of the mind in which there is no object being
grasped as the focus of awareness, no narratives
(*prapanca*) being told to account for one's
experience, no theorizing and no argumentation. At the outset of the
chapter on wisdom Santideva says that the ultimate truth is
of a reality that is not within range of the intellect; the intellect
operates only at the level of conventional truth. In this world there
are two kinds of human being, which Santideva calls ordinary
people (*prakrta loka*) and meditators
(*yogin*). The ordinary people are those who see the world in
terms of presences and absences, being and non-being, but the
conventional truths in which they trade are set aside by the truths of
the meditators. The principal delusion of those who rely on
conventional truths is that they mistakenly believe that propositions
conventionally accepted as truth are grounded in the natures of
things. Meditators, on the other hand, come to realize that things do
not have inherent natures. That things do not have inherent natures
cannot be established directly, but attempts to show that things do
have inherent natures can be shown to be faulty. One who has
cultivated the intention to become enlightened in order to lead others
out of their delusion-driven suffering uses language to help people
realize the limitations of language and conceptual thinking. In taking
this approach, Santideva is clearly following the lead of
Buddhapalita and Candrakirti.


## 7. Jnanagarbha


### 7.1 Life and works



Jnanagarbha, who was most probably the teacher of
Santaraksita, probably lived in the early eighth
century. Because his presentation of Madhyamaka incorporates much of
the terminology used by Dharmakirti, a member of the
epistemological tradition founded by Dignaga, he is usually
portrayed as a follower of Bhavaviveka's approach to
Madhyamaka. Like his disciple Santaraksita,
Jnanagarbha also incorporates aspects of the
Yogacara philosophy into his presentation of Madhyamaka and
can therefore be seen as a source of inspiration to those who strove
to find a synthesis of the two principal schools of Mahayana
Buddhism. He wrote a commentary to a key Mahayana scripture,
*Sandhinirmocanasutra*, which was one of the principal
sources of the Yogacara philosophy. He is best known for an
independent treatise called
*Satya-dvaya-vibhanga-karika* (Verses on the
distinction between the two truths), on which he also provided a prose
commentary. The verse text along with its commentary can be referred
to together as *Satyadvayavibhanga*.


### 7.2 Contributions



Like all the Madhyamika thinkers who came before him,
Jnanagarbha regards it vitally important to have a clear
understanding of two kinds of truth, the conventional and
transactional truth of everyday life, and the truth that liberates one
from attachment, aversion and delusion, this liberation being the
ultimate goal (*paramartha*) of Buddhism. In talking about
these two truths, Jnanagarbha draws liberally from the
work of Dharmakirti, who had in turn built upon the
epistemological foundations laid by Dignaga. Dharmakirti had
said that successful action is preceded by correct cognitions; what
one deems to be truthful is any cognition that motivates action that
leads to expected results. A true belief, then, is one that does not
deceive one by promising to lead to a desired goal and then failing
somehow to lead to that goal. A more positive way of expressing this,
rather than saying a true belief is non-deceptive, is to say that a
true belief is one that enables the realization of a goal
(*artha-kriya-samartha*). It turns out, said
Dharmakirti, that correct reasoning is instrumental in helping
one form beliefs that motivate successful action. Therefore, one can
say that conceptual thinking, when done carefully, can be of great
value. Even when one's goal is to achieve nirvana by having a
direct experience of a still and peaceful awareness that is not
conceptual and therefore beyond the range of language, one can arrive
at that goal by learning to think carefully and clearly. Clear and
careful thinking has the capacity to identify which of the ideas that
arise in consciousness are ungrounded and delusional and therefore
unlikely to motivate successful action. Clear and careful thinking
about what one hears others say enables one to discard teachings that,
if acted upon, are unlikely to produce expected results and to follow
teachings that, if acted upon, will lead one to a desired goal, even
the goal of the stillness of a mind that is not dealing in narratives
and concepts. Without much modification, Jnanagarbha takes
up Dharmakirti's terminology and the convictions that go
with it. So Jnanagarbha, like Bhavaviveka, sees value
in conceptual thinking and in careful thinking and speaking and sees
less of a need than Candrakirti and Santideva saw in
finding a way to eliminate all conceptual thinking and theorizing.



Jnanagarbha's indebtedness to the epistemological
tradition notwithstanding, he is still very much a Madhyamika in
that much of his approach consists in showing the absurdities that
lurk menacingly inside all constructed theories. His notion of the
ultimate goal, like Candrakirti's, is a wordless and
concept-free lucid awareness, but he sees it as possible to reach that
goal by using words and thoughts intelligently. Moreover, he agrees
with other Madhyamikas in his conviction that all thinking, even
that which can be called verdical because it leads to expected
results, is based on a presupposition that things have inherent
natures--it is, after all, almost impossible to talk without at
least an implicit nod in the direction of inherent natures and
essences--and that that presupposition is demonstrably false. So
according to Jnanagarbha rational thinking is
simultaneously veridical, in that it leads to expected results, and
false, in that it is based upon the demonstrably false presupposition
that things that can be named are namable because they have inherent
natures. While language operates within an ontology of causes and
effects and various other kinds of relationship, such as temporal and
spatial relationships, it can be shown that those relationships are
all untenable if one thinks about them carefully and investigates them
deeply enough.



At the heart of Jnanagarbha's argument against the
tenability of causality is his argument that none of the possible ways
of looking at the relation of conditions and their effects are
workable. There are four possibilities. Either many conditions produce
a single effect, or many conditions produce many effects, or a single
condition produces many effects, or a single condition produces a
single effect. His presentation of an explanation for why each of
these possibilities is untenable is in places terse and difficult to
decipher. A single thing, such as vision, cannot be the effect of many
conditions, such as the eye, visible color, an attentive mind and so
forth, he says, because the effect has the feature of being one, while
the causes are many, but there is nothing to account for what causes
the reduction of many things to one. Without some coherent account of
how a manifold can be reduced to a singularity, this hypothesis ends
up being merely an assertion. If one imagines that a manifold set of
causes produces a complex multiplicity of effects, then one is saying
in effect that each component of the complex cause is producing one
component of the complex effect, and this amounts to saying that there
are many instances of one cause producing one effect. On the other
hand, if one thinks that each aspect of the complex effect is a single
effect of the totality of features within the complex cause, then one
is saying that a single effect has many conditions, which has already
been ruled out. Moreover, one faces the problem of explaining how the
same totality of causes can have many distinct effects, each of which
is a feature of the complex effect putatively arising from the causal
complex. If one imagines that a multiplicity, such as the manifold
universe, arises out of a single cause, such as God or Brahman or
consciousness, then one must provide a coherent account of what causes
the differentiation among the many effects. What one would expect is
that some auxiliary condition combines with the single cause to
produce different effects; but if that is the case, then a single
cause plus an auxiliary condition is not really just a single cause.
Finally, one might imagine that a single cause produces a single
effect, such as when one momentary phenomenon perishes and in the act
of perishing gives rise to a subsequent momentary phenomenon of the
same kind. That, however, is impossible, since the putative cause must
go entirely out of existence before its successor can takes its place,
and once the preceding phenomenon has ceased to exist, there is
nothing to cause its successor to arise. Since none of the possible
ways of explaining causality turns out to survive close analysis, one
can only conclude that the very ideas of causality, and of arising and
perishing, and of unity and multiplicity cannot correspond to reality.
Causality and arising and perishing and all the various relations that
furnish the framework of conventional truth may be indispensable to
conventional truth, but they cannot be features of reality.
Jnanagarbha, like the Madhyamikas who came before
him, sees conventional truth as a kind of screen or obstacle to the
reality that becomes apparent only to an awareness that is
unencumbered by concepts and narratives.


## 8. Santaraksita


### 8.1 Life and works



While it is difficult to find much reliable information about the
lives of most Indian philosophers, quite a bit is known about the
life, especially the later life, of Santaraksita,
details of whose life were recorded by Tibetans when he went to Tibet
in about 763 and became the first abbot of Bsam-yas monastery. He was
reportedly born into the royal family of what is now Bengal and spent
his adult life in various Buddhist monastic universities. It is clear
from his writings that he had studied all branches of Indian
philosophy extensively. He seems to have been a direct disciple of
Jnanagarbha, and his own disciple, Kamalasila,
was also an influential thinker. Together Santaraksita
and Kamalasila, both of whom spent many years in Tibet, set
the tone for Buddhist scholasticism in the eighth century, and their
influence is felt in Tibetan Buddhism to this day. When
Santaraksita died in 788, he was succeeded by
Kamalasila, who lived until 795.



Santaraksita's magnum opus is a composition
entitled *Tattva-samgraha* (Summary of reality), which
contains 3645 verses. The work was provided with a prose commentary by
Kamalasila called
*Tattva-samgraha-panjika.* A modern edition
of the verse work and its commentary together runs to more than 1100
pages. Aside from its contribution to the development of Madhyamaka
thought, the work is also a valuable source of information about the
state of Indian philosophy in the eighth century. The work is divided
into twenty-six chapters, the topics of which are as follows:


1. The Samkhya doctrine of primodial matter
(*prakrti*) as the source of the physical world
2. Various doctrines of God as the source of the world
3. The doctrine of inherent natures (*svabhava*) as the
source of the world
4. Bhartrhari's doctrine of Brahman-as-language as the
source of the world
5. The Samkhya-Yoga doctrine of human spirit
(*purusa*)
6. Examination of the doctrines of the self (*atman*) in
the Nyaya, Mimamsa, Samkhya,
Digambara Jaina, Advaita and Buddhist personalist
(*pudgalavadin*) schools
7. The doctrine of the permanence of things
8. Various doctrines of karma and its ripening
9. A critical examination of substance
10. A critical examination of quality
11. A critical examination of action
12. A critical examination of universals
13. A critical examination of particularity
14. A critical examination of inherence (the relation between
universals and particulars and between substances and qualities)
15. An examination of words and their meanings
16. An examination of sense perception
17. An examination of inference
18. An examination of other means of acquiring knowledge
19. A critical examination of Jaina epistemology
20. An examination of time
21. A critical examination of materialism
22. On the external world (that is, the world external to
consciousness)
23. A critical examination of revelation as a source of knowledge
24. Examination of the idea that some propositions are
self-validating
25. Examination of the notion of supernormal powers



In addition to *Tattvasamgraha*,
Santaraksita wrote commentaries on
Dharmakirti's *Vadanyaya* (Methods of
debate) and Jnanagarbha's
*Satyadvayavibhanga*. His most original contribution to
the development of Madhyamaka philosophy is a verse treatise called
*Madhyamakalamkara* (Ornament of Centrism),
which contains ninety-seven stanzas, to which he also provided a prose
commentary.


### 8.2 Contributions



By the time Santaraksita was active, the philosophy of
the Yogacara school had become so influential that it could not
easily be dismissed. Whereas earlier Madhyamikas wrote
refutations of the Yogacara doctrine, which they presented as a
kind of subjective idealism, Santaraksita embraced it.
Like Bhavaviveka and Jnanagarbha,
Santaraksita adopted much of the terminology and the
logic and epistemology of Dignaga and Dharmakirti and their
later followers. But whereas Bhavaviveka had refrained from
following Dignaga and Dharmakirti's lead into
Yogacara, Santaraksita endorsed a kind of
subjective idealism, albeit as a stage that prepared one for the
Madhyamaka doctrine of the emptiness of all phenomena. Toward the end
of *Madhyamakalamkara*, in verses 92-93,
he writes that by embracing the doctrine of mind only, one stops
taking external objects as real; then by embracing Madhyamaka, one
realizes that no objects at all have substance; then, taking the reins
of reasoning, one rides the chariot of both systems as a single great
vehicle (*mahayana*). The largest part of this
treatise--where the reins of reasoning are taken up--is
devoted to an extended version of the "neither one nor
many" argument that had been presented by
Jnanagarbha.



*Madhyamakalamkara* begins with the observation
that if a phenomenon has an essential nature, then either that nature
is simple or complex, that is, it is either a single thing or many
things; there is no third possibility. This leads to discussions of
doctrines by several schools of Indian philosophy, both Buddhist and
non-Buddhist. Each of the schools examined posits at least one entity
that is completely uniform in nature and therefore has no internal
differentiations. Several schools posit a uniform entity that is said
to be the single source of all multiplicity. Drawing on arguments by
earlier Buddhist thinkers such as Dharmakirti,
Santaraksita argues that if there were a uniform,
permanent and unobstructed singularity, then everything it supposedly
causes would have to exist all the time. A cause is something in the
presence of which an effect arises and in the absence of which the
effect does not arise. But if a cause is permanent, then it is never
absent, so none of its putative effects can ever be absent. In a
theory that posits a single permanent cause of all things, there is no
satisfactory account of all the changes that are experienced in daily
life, nor is there any satisfactory account of temporal sequences or
the fact that things exist in some places but not in others. This
argument is applied to discredit the Samkhya doctrine of
primordial matter, the Nyaya doctrine of God, and the
Vedantin doctrine of Brahman. It is also applied to the
Yogacara doctrine that all things arise from consciousness.
After arguing against the main candidates for singularity nominated by
the various schools, Santaraksita turns his attention
to multiplicity. The very idea of multiplicity, he notes, only makes
sense if one is talking about a collection of singularities. Given,
however, that there are no singularities, there cannot be any
collection of them. This being the case, no inherent nature of any
entity can be either singular or multiple; if an entity has neither a
singular nor a multiple inherent nature, it has no inherent nature at
all. In other words, all phenomena are empty of inherent natures.