Gendun Chöpel on the Status of Madhyamaka: Knowledge, Truth, and Testimony

The Tibetan Philosophical Tradition has long attempted to harmonize the tenets of Nāgārjuna and his followers—members of the Madhyamaka school—with the views developed within the tradition that follows from Dignāga (6th cent.) and Dharmakīrti (7th cent.)—figures we could term Buddhist pramāṇa theorists.¹ Speaking quite loosely, this is an attempt to tie together the largely metaphysical concerns of Mādhyamikas with the predominantly epistemological concerns taken up by pramāṇa theorists.² Although the project of harmonizing these two schools of thought is centuries old, a novel approach to this task has been put forward by the twentieth-century Tibetan scholar Gendun Chöpel³ (1903-1951) in his work The Adornment of Nāgārjuna’s Thought (hereafter abbreviated as “Adornment”) (Dge ’dun chos ’phel 2002).⁴ Gendun Chöpel, whose corpus of works spans many topics, was a rather polarizing figure in Tibetan literary and political history. In this particular work, he poses a number of problems concerning our access to knowledge of the world and provides a response that, in important respects, can be regarded as inspired by Nāgārjuna.⁵

One of the things that makes Gendun Chöpel’s Adornment such an important work is the style of writing and argumentation it contains. Though the themes (and even criticisms) raised in his text were not without historical precedent, it is the manner in which Gendun Chöpel addresses those themes that makes this work so philosophically interesting.⁶ His writing is not in conformity with the basic structure of traditional Buddhist philosophical commentaries. In much the same way that his poetry flaunts Indian and Tibetan stylistic standards, so too Gendun Chöpel leaves behind standard philosophical (commentarial) conventions and instead offers a more free-flowing form of prose that unabashedly addresses his concerns with Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist studies scholar Donald Lopez, who has authored a translation and commentary on Gendun Chöpel’s Adornment, compares the writing style to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations.⁷ While that may be taking things a bit far, there is little question that Gendun Chöpel’s style of writing allows for more unbridled musings on Buddhist philosophy. Yet, to whatever extent his work departs from the orthodox structure of typical Buddhist treatises, we must take care to scrutinize the philosophical content of the claims that Gendun Chöpel makes.

In this paper I will analyze and evaluate the first set of arguments that Gendun Chöpel provides at the beginning of his Adornment.⁸ In the first portion of his work, Gendun Chöpel is seeking to establish the thesis that,

(T) All judgments [thag bcad pa]⁹ by us about what is and is not the case are merely judgments in accord with how things appear to our minds.¹⁰

It is this thesis, or some likeness of it, that gets repeated throughout the first half of his Adornment, and much effort goes into arguing in favor of its truth. In the appendix to this essay I offer a detailed analysis of this thesis and the corollary that Gendun Chöpel initially draws from it. The main topic of this article, however, is an investigation of the initial arguments that are offered in support of the above claim.

Before examining the arguments offered in support of (T), we should first get clear about the content of this claim. It is critical to realize that the claim being made by Gendun Chöpel is an epistemological one. It is a thesis about our judgments and the warrant or basis for those judgments.¹¹ It is not a metaphysical thesis about what exists in the world. Nor is Gendun Chöpel making a pronouncement of any kind about what constitutes truth. Instead, the focus of his arguments is on our judgments about the world. In order to understand Gendun Chöpel’s arguments it is critical that we not conflate the fields of epistemology and metaphysics. Instead we must recognize that his main point is an...