Chapter 1: Buddhapalita and Bhaviveka — Consequence or Independent Inference¶

With the proof of Part 18 completed, the first domestic quarrel that proof met with in India was a quarrel over the legitimacy of warrant. Put in the notation of Part 18: the unified authorization, ⊢¬π — can it be obtained only by reductio, or can it also be established positively by an independent inference? The consequence camp and the independent-inference camp each held to one end of the question, and each took itself to be keeping house for Nāgārjuna. This chapter assembles what the two parties actually said and translates the point at issue into the shape of the theorem; the ruling comes in the next chapter.

One fact about the materials must be set out first. Buddhapālita's commentary on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā has no ancient Chinese translation, and his words entered Chinese by one road only: transcription by a critic. The Prajñāpradīpa, in order to refute Buddhapālita, had first to quote him, so that it was under Bhāviveka's knife that Buddhapālita's own words came to be preserved. Every utterance of Buddhapālita's cited below comes from a transcription of that kind; and that the transcription is an adversary's work carries a further advantage of its own, for these are words that both parties acknowledge as evidence.

Buddhapālita's syntax can be seen plainly in the transcription. Glossing the corner of arising from another, he says only this: "Production by another likewise is not so. Why? Because it would follow that in every place everything arises."¹ The sense is that if arising from another can be established, and whatever differs from the fruit counts as another, then anything may be produced out of anything, everything arising in every place. No thesis, no reason, no example: the whole passage does one thing only, which is to drive the opponent's proposition out to its own absurd consequence. This is exactly the kind of pure rejection that Lemma 1 of Part 18 licenses: it performs ⊣ alone, and undertakes no duty of ⊢. But Buddhapālita never says that second half of the matter himself, and the absence of that second half became Bhāviveka's face of attack.

Bhāviveka's criticism stands immediately beside the transcription, and both of its heads became classical reproaches for the ages that followed. The first: he produces nothing that establishes. "You state neither reason nor example, but merely lay down a position and charge the other side with a fault."¹ To enter a black mark against the opponent while producing no reason and no example for one's own position is, in the court of Buddhist logic, to have no standing to bring suit at all. The second: the danger of inversion. Buddhapālita says of arising from another that it entails a universal arising; Bhāviveka answers that if the fault is stated in that manner, "then what is to be established and what establishes it are turned about."¹ Let a reductio be read as laying something down, and its thesis and its reason may be inverted just as they stand and turned back for the opponent's own use. The two reproaches come to a single demand: either put forward a positive inference, or explain why a reductio is exempt from the duty of putting one forward.

Bhāviveka's own programme is given in a banner verse of the Karatalaratna: "In true nature the conditioned is empty, since like an illusion it arises from conditions; the unconditioned has no reality, for it does not arise, and is like a flower of the sky."² Thesis, reason and example are all present: it is a standard independent inference. The crux lies in the two words that stand at its head. The treatise glosses them itself: the thesis is so framed "so as not to contravene what our own school admits"; "therefore the thesis is set up with the qualifier in true nature"; "it is with respect to ultimate truth that the conditioned is declared empty, and not with respect to the conventional." The qualifier in true nature nails the striking surface down upon the reading in terms of real nature, and the conditioned things of the conventional world, eyes and the rest, which the cowherd knows and admits along with everyone else, are left untouched throughout. A reader of Part 18 ought to find this procedure familiar: it does the same work as the range clause, placing E1 and E2 assertions outside the scope. Only the manner differs — the range clause draws its boundary by type, while the qualifier marks each sentence with a modifier as it goes. The likeness and the difference between the two are audited in Chapter 6.

Translated into the shape of the theorem, the point at issue takes one sentence. Bhāviveka's demand: ⊢¬π must have a positive establishment, and that establishment must be checkable in a public court. Buddhapālita's practice: ⊣ dispensed everywhere and ⊢ never produced, the warrant held and not declared. The danger of inversion falls precisely within the jurisdiction of Lemma 1: ⊣A does not entail ⊢¬A, and once that second half of the matter has been spoken out, a reductio has no thesis left to invert. What Buddhapālita lacked was not force but that second half of self-understanding; the man who supplied it was Candrakīrti. One further transcription deserves to be filed on its own. Answering the question of making within conditions, Buddhapālita says: "How is there making in conventional truth? There is making because self and other, the whole assembly of conditions, are established each in dependence on the rest" — making stands at the conventional truth, and is established by mutual dependence.¹ That half-sentence is the classical prototype of direction (a) of the Preservation Theorem, and it shows besides that the consequence camp never had any intention of cancelling the everyday level; what the two camps hold in common is more than what they contest.

The verdict in one sentence: both camps keep the body of the theorem and its face of preservation, and the whole of their disagreement lies in the route of warrant and in the capacity for dialogue. Which programme holds up is a question that must wait upon what is still missing once the consequence line has been completed; Chapter 2 opens court.

References¶