Chapter 6. Argumentative slippages in Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka texts¶

The preceding chapters examined Madhyamaka's methods, the Svātantrika–Prāsaṅgika distinction, and Candrakīrti's systematization. This chapter addresses an often overlooked problem in argumentative form. Several structural problems appear both in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras and in later uses of Madhyamaka arguments. This group of sūtras includes the Heart Sūtra (Hṛdaya-sūtra), Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra), and the various larger Prajñāpāramitā sūtras. These influential scriptures' literary styles and argumentative habits deeply shaped the writing of the whole Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka tradition. Slippages in their arguments therefore have effects across the tradition, beyond local textual problems.

The chapter identifies three main kinds of slippage, each with concrete scriptural examples. The object of analysis is argumentative form, rather than the value of the doctrines themselves. Identifying a slippage does not show the conclusion to be false; it shows that the argument cited does not actually support it.

Section 1. Confusing the two truths: from nonduality to identity

Madhyamaka's standard position on the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa (saṃsāra-nirvāṇa advaya) has a clear two-truth context. Their ultimate nonduality means that the assertions of intrinsic nature about both are refuted in the same way. A strict opposition between saṃsāra as an intrinsically existent realm of suffering and nirvāṇa as an intrinsically existent pure realm holds only within a framework of intrinsic nature. Once that framework is refuted, this one kind of opposition loses its support. What loses its support is the ground for this one kind of distinction, not every distinction. Identity set up through intrinsic nature is refuted for the same reason; the eight negations of the treatise's verse of homage already contain the pair "neither identical nor different."¹

The claim of nonduality has an internal basis at the ultimate level. Later reading and quotation repeatedly turn it, however, into the conventional identity claim that saṃsāra is nirvāṇa. Several passages of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa-sūtra approach this boundary, while later tantric literature and Chan more frequently appropriate statements across levels. The circulating Chan formula "afflictions are awakening; birth and death are nirvāṇa" can be interpreted as an expedient pointing to ultimate nonduality. In actual quotation and transmission, it easily comes to mean that afflictions themselves are already awakening conventionally.² In practice, that conventional reading makes cultivation, ending afflictions, and renunciation meaningless, because saṃsāra is already nirvāṇa.

These slippages follow the same structure. An ultimate statement is implicitly moved into a conventional context once its level of truth is left unspecified. It then produces a conclusion that shocks within that context. This is appropriation of words after a change of context, not logical inference. The two truths were established precisely to prevent such movement. Yet some Prajñāpāramitā literary styles, with paradoxical statements and deliberate semantic shock, actively use its effects. Shock can effectively convey the breaking of ordinary attachments, but its force comes from appropriating a context rather than from argument. Rhetorical effect is doing argumentative work.

Leaving the level of truth unspecified can be analyzed formally into two substitutions. First, the ultimate-level rejection of difference in intrinsic nature is written as a negation, that the two are without distinction; this step has already set up the two sides again as objects available for comparison. Then this negation is moved from the level of intrinsic nature to the conventional level and read as saying that the two do not differ in everyday terms either; at the conventional level, having no difference is, in classical logic, identity. Neither step is an inference; the criterion is the corollary in Chapter 6 of Essay 18 in Part II. Chinese adds a further cover: 分别 translates both the mind's act of discriminating and a difference between two things, so the passage from not discriminating to there being no distinction shows no change of word on the surface. Indian commentary already offers a precedent for this step: the anānārtha of 18.9, the "not different" of the eight negations, is explained by Bhāviveka as undivided in meaning because dharmatā is of one taste.³

Section 2. The rhetoric of falsity: value judgments enter ultimate analysis

One of the Diamond Sūtra's most quoted passages says, "All appearances are false and deceptive; seeing all appearances as non-appearances, one sees the Tathāgata."⁴ In its intended meaning, calling appearances false and deceptive (虚妄, xuwang) should be a statement against reification. All phenomena, or appearances (lakṣaṇa), lack fixed intrinsic nature. No appearance can be grasped as intrinsically real. This is philosophically equivalent to saying that all phenomena are empty.

Yet the Chinese expression xuwang is not philosophically neutral. It corresponds to Sanskrit mṛṣā, meaning false or unreal. In Chinese and Chinese Buddhist usage, the word carries strong evaluative and emotional force. It says more than the analytic statement that something lacks intrinsic nature. It also makes an emotionally charged normative statement that the thing is deceptive and should be rejected with aversion. The rhetoric gives an epistemological proposition the emotional coloring of hostility and disgust. Calling appearances deceptive provokes more than an updated understanding of their lack of intrinsic nature. It also provokes the feeling that they deceive me and deserve rejection.

The rhetoric of falsity contrasts sharply with early Buddhism's account of liberation. Early Buddhist scriptures use impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and no-self (anattā) as their central terms for sensory experience, rather than falsity. The aim is dispassion (virāga), not hostile aversion. Dispassion relinquishes grasping without hating the object. Practitioners draw away because they see its impermanence and inability to satisfy, ceasing to invest all their mental resources in holding it fast. They do not do so because sensory experience is false or bad. The emotional quality is release that opens, rather than rejection that closes.

The rhetoric of falsity quietly shifts liberation's emotional structure from dispassion toward justifying aversion. If appearances are false and deceiving, hostility toward them seems an emotionally reasonable response. For an individual this may be only a verbal habit, but accumulated across a tradition it can systematically affect practice. Practitioners train aversion toward sensory experience instead of observing it as it is and relinquishing it.

A further effect can be observed. The rhetoric changes the emotional structure and also prompts the mind to imagine an opposite to what it calls false. The Diamond Sūtra's closing verse says that all conditioned phenomena are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows. When such statements become emotionally charged convictions, their counterpart begins to appear. If what is false is impermanent and conditioned, what is not false would seem to be permanent and unconditioned. Devaluing one pole quietly accumulates value for its opposite. Hostility toward the false becomes longing for the truly permanent. Grasping is transferred and refined rather than reduced, moving from appearances to the belief in something nondeceptive beyond the conditioned, a subtler attachment to permanence.

Contemporary psychology offers indirect corroboration. Experiments in terror management theory repeatedly show that making impermanence and death salient does not loosen investment in permanence. It strengthens belief in immortality and transcendent realities. Mortality reminders can significantly increase belief in gods, an afterlife, and even supernatural agents from unfamiliar traditions.⁵ In the direction suggested by this evidence, emotionally emphasizing the world's falsity strengthens the psychological demand for something nondeceptive rather than dissolving it.

Early Buddhist language shows its precision here. "All formations are suffering" (sabbe saṅkhārā dukkhā) also concerns conditioned fabrication, yet establishes no counterpart beyond the conditioned for grasping. Nirvāṇa, the sole unconditioned, receives no positive description. Emotionally aversive discourse about falsity remains bondage because aversion needs an opposite in which to place longing. The statement that all formations are suffering sets up no such opposite and thus also excludes that alternative object of attachment. Volume 2's discussion of the suffering of formations develops its implications for liberation.

Section 3. Emptiness and the Four Truths: from condition to foundation

The argument in Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, on the Four Truths, has already been outlined in this volume. Its logic now needs closer analysis. Nāgārjuna's imagined opponent claims that if everything is empty, the Four Truths fail, and there is no path, fruit, saṃgha, or Dharma. The challenge is serious. Accepting emptiness seems to dismantle the entire framework of practice.

Nāgārjuna responds in two steps. First, he points out that the opponent has not understood emptiness and has mistaken it for nihilism. Second, he positively argues that "because there is emptiness, all phenomena can be established."⁶ The Four Truths can stand precisely because phenomena are dependently arisen and empty. Fixed intrinsic nature would prevent causation. What is fixed cannot be affected and changed by conditions. Suffering would have no conditions for arising, cessation could not occur, and the path would lose causal efficacy. Dependent origination and emptiness are therefore conditions for causation, practice, and liberation to be possible.

The argument is stronger than compatibility. Part II, Essay 18, Chapter 6 establishes it as direction B of the preservation theorem, the only-if direction. Intrinsic nature's definition directly entails that anything possessing it neither arises, ceases, changes, nor relates to other phenomena. It is wholly functionally inert. By contraposition, whatever acts, arises, ceases, changes, or relates lacks intrinsic nature. The Four Truths therefore require absence of intrinsic nature, beyond merely being compatible with emptiness. Nāgārjuna expresses this positively and negatively: "Because there is emptiness, all phenomena can be established"; "if the world's various appearances had a fixed nature, they would neither arise nor cease, abiding permanently without destruction." Qingmu adds the empirical side. Things are visibly diverse in their changes, arising and ceasing, so they can have no fixed nature. The charge of nihilism is reversed. What leaves no place for arising, ceasing, practice, and removal of afflictions is the premise of intrinsic nature, not emptiness.⁷

The type of argument still needs to be clear. Nāgārjuna supplies a condition under which the Four Truths can be established, a necessary condition concerning the framework. They cannot stand in a framework where all phenomena have intrinsic nature; they can stand in one where phenomena are dependently arisen and empty.

Later citations repeatedly transform the argument into the structurally different claim that emptiness is the foundation of the Four Truths. Practice of the Four Truths must rest on the view of emptiness; without understanding emptiness one cannot truly understand them, and their practical efficacy depends on establishing that view. The two claims differ structurally. "Condition" here is an ontological necessity constraining the world's constitution. If phenomena had intrinsic nature, the Four Truths could stand in no framework. "Foundation" is an epistemological prerequisite constraining practitioners' qualifications. They must first master the view of emptiness for practice of the Four Truths to be effective.

Nāgārjuna makes the former claim. Without an emptiness framework the Four Truths cannot stand; within it they can. Later accounts make the latter claim. Practice of the Four Truths essentially rests on the view of emptiness. The consequences are substantial. Under Nāgārjuna's argument, practice of the Four Truths can stand independently within a framework of dependent origination. Emptiness explains why the practice is possible, without requiring practitioners to master Madhyamaka philosophy first. Under the later foundation claim, without understanding emptiness one does not truly understand the Four Truths, whose practice must rest on mastery of Madhyamaka. The Four Truths, eightfold path, and thirty-seven factors of awakening form a path capable of standing independently. The later claim makes its effective operation dependent on Madhyamaka doctrine. The theory imposes this dependency without argument, weakening or even canceling the independent validity of early Buddhist practice.

The shared structure of the three slippages

All three share a deeper structure. A statement valid in a particular context is used in another, producing an additional claim for which no argument has been given. Moving nonduality from ultimate to conventional truth produces an identity claim. Wrapping the analytic statement of no intrinsic nature in the emotional rhetoric of falsity produces an affective orientation of practice toward aversion. Turning an argument about a necessary condition for the Four Truths to hold into a claim that practice must depend on a view of emptiness produces a theoretical arrangement that subordinates early practice to Madhyamaka doctrine.

These transfers are persuasive because they retain the original argument's words on the surface, changing only their context or the type of relation involved. The change is not always obvious. That is why the slippages circulate within the tradition and gradually become standard expressions. Identifying them does not deny the overall value of Madhyamaka or the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures. It recognizes their achievements while precisely marking what their arguments establish, so that rhetoric does not replace philosophical reasoning. Volume 2 separately examines their further consequences for liberation.

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