Introduction: Some Current Strategies for Research on Tibetan Madhyamaka

The papers collected here represent a sampling of the ways contemporary scholars approach the Madhyamaka tradition of Tibet. We have come a long way from the days when Tibetan texts were studied only for their utility in editing Indian works and from the old scholarly opinions that Tibetan commentaries and treatises constituted either sterile rehash of Indian innovations or hyper-scholastic hairsplitting of insignificant topics. To be fair, Tibetan authors’ guise of fidelity to Indian authorities, in which innovation (rang bzo) is disavowed, must have influenced these scholars’ assessments. With the work of several pioneers of Tibetan Madhyamaka, we can see through these modest claims of fidelity and appreciate that Tibetans inherited a good number of problems from Indian scholars, many of which may not have been apparent to the latter, and exhibit a high degree of creativity and sophistication of thought in their solutions. As first-rate scholarship expands to investigate the full spectrum of Tibetan schools and time periods, the study of Tibetan Madhyamaka approaches its maturity. This scholarship reveals the range and complexity of Tibetan thinking on topics both of broad importance to the Buddhist tradition and of significant philosophical impact, including the meaning of emptiness, what this claim implies for the status of the everyday world, and how emptiness might be known and demonstrated.

A major strategy for approaching Tibetan Madhyamaka consists of bringing Tibetan thinkers into conversation with the Anglo-American analytic tradition. The growing number of scholars with significant training in both Western and Tibetan philosophical praxis signals an important avenue for understanding and evaluating Tibetan arguments. We have two such undertakings here, by Tom Tillemans and Jonathan Stoltz. Tillemans examines the fourth lemma of the Madhyamaka catuṣkoṭi with the assistance of De Morgan’s Laws, first offering a classic statement of the “four possibilities” from Āryadeva’s Catuḥśataka: “Existent, nonexistent, both existent and nonexistent, neither existent nor nonexistent.” In this widely used form of analysis (here taking the example of “existence”), Madhyamikas reject all four possibilities. While noting that the fourth lemma affords two possible interpretations, Tillemans shows that one must read it as “neither A nor B,” given that the alternative reading—“not both A and B”—would, upon its negation (and the law of double negation elimination), force one to accept the third lemma. That is, “not not both A and B” would force one to accept “both A and B.” However, Tillemans points out that Tibetan authors generally misunderstood the fourth lemma as “not both A and B” and so found themselves in a difficult philosophical spot.

Tillemans explores two Tibetan strategies for dealing with this conundrum. dGe lugs pa authors, most notably Tsong kha pa (1357-1419) and mKhas grub rje (1385-1438), sought to redeem this wrong reading by qualifying the negations in question, limiting the negation of each of the four lemmas to operations more precise than their face values would suggest. Sa skya pa authors, primarily Go rams pa (1429-1489), rejected these qualifications and instead solved the problem by denying that the law of double negation elimination applies in this context, where the denial of each lemma constitutes a “non-implicative negation” (prasajyapratiṣedha). mKhas grub, defending Tsong kha pa from Go rams pa’s critique, preserved the law by reading each lemma as negating true establishment; thus, the negation in the fourth lemma (which he understood as “both A and B is not truly established”) does not force him to accept the third lemma, “both A and B”—the outflow is simply that nothing is truly established.

The importance of Tillemans’s contribution can be seen in two sets of issues. First, despite the confusion surrounding the fourth lemma in Tibet, both dGe lugs pa and Sa skya pa scholars engage significant issues in Madhyamaka, namely, whether the law of double negation elimination applies to Nāgārjuna’s negations and, very much related, whether these negations require some kind of qualifier. While not denying the importance of these concerns, Tillemans points out that these issues need not have been debated in the...