Chapter Two: Candrakīrti—The Completed Form of the Reductio Approach¶

Candrakīrti takes over the dispute from Chapter One, rules in Buddhapālita's favor, and supplies the half-sentence Buddhapālita left unstated. Neither of his principal works, the Clear Words and the Entry into the Middle Way, has a premodern Chinese translation. This chapter paraphrases their main structure entirely from edited texts and modern translations, without giving quotations.¹

His case against autonomous inference can be reconstructed as follows. For an autonomous inference to hold, the basis of the thesis and the property adduced as its reason must be accepted by both parties. Yet in the domain of ultimate discourse, what the realist accepts is precisely what is under examination, while what the Mādhyamika accepts is precisely what the opponent lacks. There is no place to establish a basis of common acceptance. If Bhāviveka's inference applies its qualification strictly, the conditioned things in its thesis are already conditioned things qualified with respect to true reality, a term the opponent does not recognize. If it omits the qualification, the position established is not his own. In this domain, therefore, the very admission ticket for positive inference cannot be issued. The shape of this criticism deserves notice: it is isomorphic to the discipline of authorization in Chapter Two of Essay Eighteen. That discipline says that the opponent must themselves establish what is to be refuted for the proof to have force against them. Candrakīrti turns the same discipline back upon one's own thesis: common acceptance is authorization; without it, one has no right to establish a thesis.

Why is reductio exempt from the obligation to establish an inference? Candrakīrti makes explicit what Buddhapālita left unsaid: one who uses reductio asserts no counterthesis; finding a fault by taking the words as such an assertion is the opponent's misreading. In notation, this is precisely Lemma 1: ⊣A does not entail ⊢¬A. Rejecting your proposition does not mean asserting its negation. There is therefore no thesis to reverse, and the danger of reversal dissolves of itself. Only now is the reductio approach complete in its self-understanding: Buddhapālita supplied the practice; Candrakīrti supplied its instructions for use.

The sevenfold investigation in the Entry into the Middle Way is a standard exhibit of this approach. A chariot and its parts are examined in seven relations—identity, difference, dependence on this, dependence on that, possession, aggregation, and shape—and no chariot is found. Yet within conventional discourse the chariot takes to the road as usual: call for it and it comes; mount it and it goes. This has the same form as the two examples in Chapter Four of Essay Eighteen. A goer is individuated by going; a chariot by its parts and uses. The E3 reading is emptied by sevenfold inquiry, while the E2 level loses nothing.¹

Candrakīrti's stance toward the conventional thereby takes shape. It may be called a clause of adherence to ordinary conventions: ultimate analysis does not enter the court of the conventional; worldly discourse operates by the world's own standards of acceptance, and the Mādhyamika follows the world in conventional discourse. This corresponds almost point for point to direction (a) of the preservation theorem. Rejection carries a type marker and applies only to propositions of type D3; the truth conditions of everyday assertions remain wholly untouched. The difference must also be recorded. Part (a) of the preservation theorem has been proved. In Candrakīrti, the adherence clause is a methodological stance, whose proof is indirectly supplied by the overall success of reductio.

The judgment has two parts. First, the completed form: authorization is reduced to a single source, with ⊢¬π obtained only through reductio. Paired with an account of itself in the form of Lemma 1, the approach has no internal breach left. Second, the cost: relying on a single source closes the gateway to dialogue with the community of Buddhist logicians. The public testability Bhāviveka wanted remains unprovided for. Whether this is a real gap depends on whether common acceptance can be supplied in another way. Essay Eighteen's inventory of resources bears directly on this; the account is left for Chapter Seven.

References¶