Equivocation in Nāgārjuna

Among the incidental features of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy that have captured my attention over the years, there are two in particular that I wish to discuss in this paper. The first observation is that his philosophical writings seem to have fascinated a large number of modern scholars of Buddhism; this hardly requires demonstration. The second observation is that Nāgārjuna’s writings had relatively little effect on the course of subsequent Indian Buddhist philosophy. Despite his apparent attempts to discredit some of the most fundamental concepts of abhidharma, abhidharma continued to flourish for centuries, without any appreciable attempt on the part of ābhidharmikas to defend their methods of analysis against Nāgārjuna’s criticisms. And despite Nāgārjuna’s radical critique of the very possibility of having grounded knowledge (pramān. a), the epistemological school of Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti dominated Indian Buddhist intellectual circles, again without any explicit attempt to answer Nāgārjuna’s criticisms of their agenda. Aside from a few commentators on Nāgārjuna’s works, who identified themselves as Mādhyamikas, Indian Buddhist intellectual life continued almost as if Nāgārjuna had never existed. Taken together, these two observations may suggest that the interest that modern scholars of Buddhism have in Nāgārjuna may be out of proportion to the influence that Nāgārjuna had on Buddhists themselves. On first consideration, the observation that Nāgārjuna had little impact on classical Buddhists may seem unrelated to the observation that he has had a good deal of impact on modern Buddhologists. On further reflection, however, it seems that a common reason can be found to explain these two observations; the reason could be simply that Nāgārjuna’s arguments, when examined closely, turn out to be fallacious and therefore not very convincing to a logically astute reader. By using faulty argumentation, Nāgārjuna was able to arrive at some spectacularly counterintuitive conclusions. The fallaciousness of his arguments would explain why many generations of Indian Buddhists after Nāgārjuna’s time ignored much of what he had to say; the Indian Buddhist tradition was for the most part quite insistent on sound argumentation. And the counterintuitive conclusions would help explain why some modern readers have assumed that since Nāgārjuna’s conclusions do not follow ∗This paper, made up of excerpts from “Nāgārjuna’s appeal” was prepared to read at University of Chicago.