Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka This page intentionally left blank Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka A Philosophical Introduction jan westerhoff 1 2009 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Westerhoff, Jan. Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka: a philosophical introduction / Jan Westerhoff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-537521-3; 978-0-19-538496-3 (pbk.) 1. Nagarjuna, 2nd cent. 2. Madhyamika (Buddhism) I. Title. BQ7479.8.N347W48 2008 294.3'92092—dc22 2008024577 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper to DSR “Don’t you mind dying, sir?” the consul asked. “Forgive me a little lofty talk,” van Gulik said, “but all movement is illusory. From Seoul to Kobe. From life to death.” Janwillem van de Wetering, Robert van Gulik: His Life, His Work Acknowledgments This book owes many different things to many different people. My greatest debt of gratitude is to David Seyfort Ruegg, who spent many hours with me talking through various incarnations of these pages and generously shared his encyclopedic knowledge of the Indian and Tibetan philosophical traditions. Ulrich Pagel provided invaluable support in academic as well as in administrative matters. On the linguistic side I have to thank Alexandra Leduc for organ- izing a splendid Sanskrit-Tibetan translation seminar in London (despite only narrowly avoiding appeal to the rule tres faciunt colle- gium), as well as Ulrike Roesler for attempting to arrange something similar at Oxford. Mattia Salvini acted as a guide to the perplexed concerning various points of Sanskrit grammar and, apart from being an excellent Sanskritist, showed himself to be a similarly excel- lent thinker and provided me with many very useful suggestions for understanding Nāgārjuna’s arguments. Geshe Sherab Gyatso kindly offered his help in trying to make sense of a rather terse passage in a Tibetan commentary on Nāgārjuna. Jay Garfield and Tom Tillemans read through previous versions of this material and made many useful suggestions which helped me to improve the discussion considerably. Ralf Kramer, former Tibetan librarian at the Indian Institute in Oxford, tracked down the most obscure texts in the shortest possible time and gave me countless fascinating Tibetological references. Support in various forms was viii acknowledgments provided by the Spalding Trust, the Society for South Asian Studies, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, thanks are due to Yuka Kobayashi for keeping the sun shining. J.C.W. New York City First day of the Male Earth Rat Year of the 17th Cycle Contents Abbreviations, xi 1. Introduction, 3 1.1 Nāgārjuna the Philosopher, 4 1.2 Nāgārjuna‘s Works, 5 1.3 Methodological Considerations, 6 1.4 The Philosophical Study of Nāgārjuna in the West, 9 1.5 Overview, 12 2. Interpretations of Svabhāva, 19 2.1 The Ontological Dimension, 20 2.2 The Cognitive Dimension, 46 3. The Role of Negation in Nāgārjuna’s Arguments, 53 3.1 Nyāya Theory of Negation, 54 3.2 Negation and Nondenoting Terms, 56 3.3 Negation and Temporal Relations, 64 4. The Catus.kot.i or Tetralemma, 67 4.1 Two Kinds of Negation, 68 4.2 Rejection of Two Alternatives, 70 4.3 Rejection of Four Alternatives, 73 4.4 Affirming Four Alternatives: The Positive Tetralemma, 89 x contents 5. Causation, 91 5.1 Causation: Preliminary Remarks, 92 5.2 Interdependence of Cause and Effect, 94 5.3 The Four Ways of Causal Production, 99 5.4 Temporal Relations between Cause and Effect, 113 5.5 Analysis of Time, 124 6. Motion, 129 6.1 Arguments Concerning Motion, 130 6.2 The Beginning of Motion, 142 6.3 The Interdependence of Mover and Motion, 147 6.4 The Second Chapter of the MMK in Its Argumentative Context, 150 7. The Self, 153 7.1 The Self and Its Parts, 154 7.2 The Self and Its Properties, 158 7.3 Epistemology of the Self, 160 7.4 The Madhyamaka View of the Self, 162 8. Epistemology, 165 8.1 Means of Knowledge as Self-established, 167 8.2 Means of Knowledge and Their Objects as Mutually Established, 173 8.3 Temporal Relations between Means and Objects of Knowledge, 177 8.4 The Aim of Nāgārjuna’s Arguments, 179 9. Language, 183 9.1 Nāgārjuna’s View of Language and the “No-Thesis” View, 183 9.2 VV 29 in Context, 184 9.3 The Semantic Interpretation, 188 9.4 The Specific Role of Verse 29, 194 1 0. Conclusion: Nāgārjuna’s Philosophical Project, 199 10.1 Metaphysics, 199 10.2 Personal Identity, 208 10.3 Ethics, 212 10.4 Epistemology, 216 10.5 Language and Truth, 219 Bibliography, 225 Index, 239 Abbreviations References to works in verse give the number of the chapter and verse or half-verse (e.g., MMK 24:18, RĀ 1:49a), apart from works not usually subdivided into chapters, such as the YS., ŚS, VV, and VP, where only the number of the verse is given. References to works in prose give the page and line of the editions cited below (e.g. VV(S) 82:3–7). works by nāgārjuna MMK Mūlamadhyamakakārikā J.W. De Jong, Christian Lindtner (eds.), Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā Prajn˜ā Nāma. Adyar Library, Adyar, Chennai, 2004. YS. Yuktis.as.t.ikā Cristina Anna Scherrer-Schaub: Yuktis.as..tikāvr. tti: Commentaire `a la soixantaine sur le raisonnement, ou, du vrai enseignement de la causalité. Institut belge des hautes études chinoises, Brussels, 1991. ŚS Śūnyatāsaptati “The Śūnyatāsaptati of Nāgārjuna,” chapter 3 of Fernando Tola and Carmen Dragonetti, On Voidness. A Study of Buddhist Nihilism, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2002, 53–99. xii abbreviations VV Vigrahavyāvartanī VV(S) Svavr. tti on the Vigrahavyāvartanī Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, E. H. Johnston, and Arnold Kunst (eds.), The Dialectical Method of Nāgārjuna. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1998. VP Vaidalyaprakaran. a VP(S) Svavr. tti on the Vaidalyaprakaran. a Fernando Tola and Carmen Dragonetti, Nāgārjuna’s Refutation of Logic. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1995. RĀ Ratnāvalī Michael Hahn: Nāgārjuna’s Ratnāvalī. The Basic Texts (Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese). Indica et Tibetica, Bonn, 1982. works by other authors PP Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā Louis de la Vallée Poussin (ed.), Prasannapadā Mūlamadhyamakavr. ttih. Bibliotheca Buddhica IV, St Petersburg, 1903–1913. J. W. De Jong: “Textcritical notes on the Prasannapadā,” Indo-Iranian Journal 20, 1978, 25–59, 217–252. (Corrections of the above edition.) MA Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra MAB Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatārabhās.ya Louis de la Vallée Poussin (ed.), Madhyamakāvatāra par Candrakīrti Bibliotheca Buddhica IX, St. Petersburg, 1907–1912. CŚ Āryadeva’s Catuh. śataka Karen Lang (ed.), Āryadeva’s Catuh. śataka. On the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge. Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1986. BCA Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra Louis de la Vallée Poussin (ed.), Bodhicaryāvatāra of Çāntideva, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, 1907. abbreviations xiii NS Nyāyasūtra Taranatha Nyaya-Tarkatirtha and Amarendramohan Tarkatirtha (eds.), Nyāyadarśanam with Vātsyāyana’s Bhās.ya, Uddyotakara’s Vārtika, Vācaspati Miśra’s Tātparyat.īkā and Viśvanātha’s Vr. tti, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, 1985. This page intentionally left blank Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction The following pages contain an investigation of Nāgārjuna’s philo- sophy from a systematic perspective. Considering Nāgārjuna’s impor- tant place in Buddhist philosophy as well as in Indian thought more generally, it is not surprising that his works have given rise to an enor- mous number of commentaries, studies, and analyses in Asia, and, more recently, also in the West. A large amount of these take the form of commentaries on specific texts, following their structure and analyz- ing individual passages in considerable detail. While the importance and usefulness of such commentaries is beyond dispute, the present work sets out to approach Nāgārjuna’s philosophy from a different perspective. The idea is to present a synoptic overview of Nāgārjuna’s arguments concerning different philosophical problems in order to present an account of the whole of his philosophy, showing how its in- dividual parts fit together as elements of a single philosophical project. In order to achieve this goal, it is not sufficient to give a mere para- phrase of Nāgārjuna’s arguments (as is frequently found in the sec- ondary literature). We will have to analyze their philosophical contents, examine actual as well as possible objections, determine whether the arguments can in fact be made to work, and, if so, what kind of philo- sophical conclusion they support. Comparatively little work has been done in this direction. Since a great part of the contemporary Western studies of Nāgārjuna are interested primarily in philological, historical, or religious aspects of his works, genuinely philosophical studies have been rare. The aim of the present study is to help close this gap. 4 nāgārjuna’s madhyamaka The following pages should be of interest both to philosophers looking for a systematic account of Nāgārjuna’s philosophical position, and to Indolo- gists and scholars of Buddhist studies interested primarily in the philosophical aspects of Nāgārjuna’s works.