Part II, Chapter 5: The Truth of the Path II: The Tension Between Having No Thesis and Practice¶

Part I, Chapter 3 anticipated the problem: Prāsaṅgika grounds practice in conventional valid cognition, but gives only a preliminary answer to “If Madhyamaka has no thesis of its own, on what basis should practitioners follow it?” The preceding chapter examined the direction of effort in the truth of the path. This chapter examines the source of its normativity, addressing that question directly.¹

Madhyamaka's declaration of “no thesis”

In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, Nāgārjuna makes a programmatic statement: he claims to have no thesis whatever (pratijñā, a claim). This is a central methodological position, not a modest disclaimer. Madhyamaka argues by reductio, deriving internal contradictions from an opponent's presuppositions, rather than positively establishing a proposition that requires proof. If a Mādhyamika establishes a proposition of his own, he must provide independently valid support for it. Any such support would presuppose some context-independent means of valid cognition (pramāṇa), thereby moving epistemology toward a doctrine of intrinsic nature. The methodology of “no thesis” is thus an internal requirement of Madhyamaka's entire project, not an incidental expression of modesty.²

Candrakīrti further develops this position in the Madhyamakāvatāra and the Prasannapadā. The core Prāsaṅgika claim is that a Mādhyamika does not need autonomous inference: reductio is methodologically sufficient in itself. At the practical level, Candrakīrti likewise declares that conventional valid cognition alone—valid cognition at the level of conventional truth—suffices as the foundation of practice; a Mādhyamika need make no claim at the level of ultimate truth.³

The resulting tension

This position has considerable philosophical clarity, but creates a serious difficulty for the theory of practice: if Madhyamaka truly has no position whatever, what exactly is a practitioner doing in “following Madhyamaka's directions”?

Practice needs direction. A practitioner chooses to cultivate the view of emptiness, to arouse bodhicitta, and to use reductio to break self-view. These choices presuppose some judgment about “which direction is right.” Even if a Mādhyamika calls it “a judgment at the level of conventional truth alone,” it remains a judgment. It asserts that cultivating the view of emptiness leads closer to liberation than cultivating self-reinforcement; that bodhicitta accords better with the direction of the path than indifference; and that reductio is better able to break self-view than dogmatic argument. These assertions are not wholly neutral. They are substantive normative claims, and do not qualify as “no thesis.”

In other words, “no thesis” may be sustainable at the level of ultimate truth. But a theory of practice is essentially normative: it says that some directions of practice are better than others. However carefully normative claims are wrapped in the framework of “conventional truth,” their normative content does not automatically disappear.

The Gelug response: the power of conventional valid cognition

Tsongkhapa recognized this tension and offered its most systematic treatment in the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Awakening and the Essence of True Eloquence: Distinguishing the Definitive and the Interpretable.⁴ His core position is that, at the conventional level, conventional valid cognition is truly valid. Knowledge and norms established through it have objective validity within conventional truth and need no endorsement from ultimate truth. A practitioner “following Madhyamaka's directions” follows, conventionally, the direction of practice disclosed by conventional valid cognition, rather than executing an absolute command at the ultimate level. Within the framework of conventional truth, this direction has sufficient epistemological support and is therefore practicable.

Tsongkhapa further distinguishes two senses of “claim.” Claims at the ultimate level, which assert that something has intrinsic nature, are what Madhyamaka denies. Claims at the conventional level, which judge the direction of practice within the scope of conventional valid cognition, are entirely legitimate. When Candrakīrti says “no thesis,” he means the former, not the latter. Practitioners can fully “make claims” at the conventional level, provided these do not cross into the domain of ultimate truth.

Is Tsongkhapa's response sufficient?

Tsongkhapa's response is the most refined treatment of this tension within the Madhyamaka tradition to date. This book nevertheless considers it insufficient, for the following reasons.

First, the definition of “conventional valid cognition” itself needs explanation. Tsongkhapa claims that conventional valid cognition is valid, but on what basis is it “valid”? If we say that “judgments of everyday experience are guaranteed by conventional valid cognition,” how do we distinguish “everyday experience supports cultivating the view of emptiness” from “everyday experience supports belief in a permanent self”? At the level of everyday experience, one intuitively feels that there is a persisting “I.” Is this not precisely what conventional valid cognition most naturally indicates? Tsongkhapa of course has a way of distinguishing them: the “conventional self” within conventional valid cognition differs from the non-Buddhist “permanent self”; the former has no intrinsic nature, the latter does. Yet making this distinction already requires introducing the perspective of ultimate truth, because at the conventional level the two are difficult to distinguish in how they appear.

One premise behind this objection must be brought out: it assumes that the distinction between two levels is the distinction between the two truths. Volume 1, Part II, Essay 18, Chapter 5 instead distinguishes the object level from the metalevel. The thesis that is absent belongs to the object level: an assertion that something really has intrinsic nature. The metalevel uses definitions, logic, and a relational premise, and these are instruments of lexical rules. On this division, the sentence “there is no thesis” adds no entry either: it reports on a list of commitments and reports that the list is empty. That essay also judges the distinction between the two levels to come from the Vigrahavyāvartanī itself, rather than being a later rescue. The objection above therefore reaches the division by two truths, but not the division by metalevel. This chapter's tension must accordingly be restated elsewhere. The question is not “How can someone with no thesis make distinctions?” but whether the metalevel's list can supply the normativity required by a theory of the path. The list contains definitions, logic, and a relational premise. Not one entry says where a person ought to go.

Second, it is doubtful whether conventional valid cognition alone can support an entire theory of the path. Such a theory is more than “choosing the right direction of practice.” It also involves assessing progress, certifying realization, and judging practitioners' internal states. To have objective validity, these judgments need an epistemological foundation more precise than “conventional valid cognition at the level of conventional truth.” They must distinguish actual progress in practice from an illusion of progress, and actual direct realization of emptiness from a conceptual simulation of it. Yet this distinction is extremely difficult at the level of conventional valid cognition alone, because conceptual simulation and actual direct realization can be almost identical in verbal expression.

The testimony of reception history: two outbreaks

This tension repeatedly erupted in Madhyamaka's Tibetan reception; two outbreaks deserve recording. The first occurred in the twelfth century. The line of the translator Patsab Nyimadrak, who brought Candrakīrti into Tibetan, read Prāsaṅgika as pure reductio. Within it, Khu Dodebar's branch read it outright as having no thesis whatever, whereas Patsab himself allowed only negative theses. The attribution of these two readings to the two men was made retrospectively by later authors. Chapa Chökyi Senggé of Sangpu monastery opposed them directly, defending conventional institutions through the theory of valid cognition and charging that the reading that allowed no position undermined its own discourse. At its very first step onto Tibetan ground, the Prāsaṅgika tradition split into these two irreconcilable readings. The second outbreak came in the fifteenth century. After Tsongkhapa had settled the problem through conventional valid cognition, the translator Taktsang Sherab Rinchen accused him of “eighteen great self-contradictions.” A central charge was precisely that following Prāsaṅgika in having no thesis of one's own while adopting the theory of valid cognition in full at the conventional level contradicts oneself. Gelug authors wrote in his defense, and the polemic continued into modern times.⁵ The two disputes have a strikingly identical form: one side, defending “no thesis” to the end, cannot preserve the institutions of practice and discourse; the other, building those institutions, is accused of abandoning no thesis. Intermediate positions repeatedly appeared within the tradition, but never coalesced into a stable line. In the twelfth century, Mabja Jangchub Tsöndrü allowed positive claims at the conventional level while denying objectively gained valid cognition; Taktsang revived this approach in the fifteenth century. In the interval, Mabja's works had ceased to be widely studied, and the Gelug side even attributed to him a view contrary to his actual position. This corroborates the judgment of this chapter. That judgment needs a qualification: the absence of a third position refers to what occurred within the tradition. Volume 1, Part II, Essay 19, Chapter 7 supplies one. It moves common consent onto lexical rules as a shared public resource. By Candrakīrti's criterion, this is autonomous valid cognition; by the components of its basis for the thesis, it lies wholly outside his prohibited domain. The dispute between the schools thus reduces to a dispute over the inventory of resources. The pendulum swung through two rounds precisely because neither side thought of moving common consent there. The existence of a third position does not dissolve the tension identified in this chapter: lexical rules as a shared public resource can supply common consent for argument, but cannot supply normativity for the direction of the path. What changes is the tense of the judgment: from “irreconcilable” to “not reconciled at the time.”

Chapa's defense is through the theory of valid cognition (量论), rendered more broadly as “logic” in the figure. Taktsang's charge is of “eighteen great self-contradictions.”

Practical differences: Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika practitioners

From the standpoint of actual practice, have the differences between Prāsaṅgika (Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa) and Svātantrika (Bhāvaviveka and Kamalaśīla) produced observable differences in practice? This question is harder to answer than the philosophical discussion, but equally important.

In theory, Svātantrika practitioners must first establish an independent inferential argument for emptiness and then meditate on that basis. Prāsaṅgika practitioners need not establish an independent argument beforehand: they can directly break self-view through reductio and then abide in the resulting state of “nothing grasped.” The historical record gives no clear answer to how much these two paths actually differ in the conduct of meditation. In fact, a considerable gray area separates Tibetan Gelug practice as carried out from its doctrinal declaration of “Prāsaṅgika as our position.” The techniques practitioners actually use in meditation—body scanning, the union of calming and insight, Mahāmudrā, and Dzogchen—are difficult to distribute neatly along the philosophical divide between Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika.⁶

One qualification is needed. The gray area belongs to the side of calming and to the Mahāmudrā lineage; on the side of insight, the sectarian line is drawn inside the meditation instruction itself. In the Gelug four key points for meditating on the selflessness of the person (the procedure is set out in Part II, Chapter 4), the object to be identified in the first step is an intrinsic nature that is "not posited by the force of one's own mind" but exists from the object's own side, and this definition is the outcome of the Prāsaṅgika refutation of Bhāvaviveka. The insight chapter of the Great Treatise spends nearly a fifth of its length on the Svātantrika–Prāsaṅgika dispute precisely because this step decides what the meditator looks for in the session. The Svātantrika accept intrinsic character conventionally; under their definition, the same practitioner in the same session would have something different to negate. The difference between Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika is thus invisible in the techniques of calming, but it is written into the object of insight in the practice manuals.⁷

On the side of calming and of the techniques absorbed into it, this gray area is itself evidence: the distinction between “no thesis” and “having a thesis” as philosophical positions is much less clear in its implementation in meditation than doctrinal polemics make it appear.

The deeper significance of the tension

The tension between “no thesis” and practice ultimately points to a more fundamental question. Is Madhyamaka's theory of practice an internally self-sufficient soteriological system, or a philosophical framework that needs embedding in a broader tradition of practice to function fully? If the former, it must provide a complete account of the direction of practice within its own methodology, and the position of “no thesis” makes this logically very difficult. If the latter, Madhyamaka philosophy's central contribution is to provide a more correct epistemological foundation for existing practice, rather than independently supplying the entire path of liberation. The latter understanding of its role is more modest and perhaps more honest, but stands in tension with the soteriological claim Madhyamaka frequently makes: “Right view is the root of liberation, and the view of emptiness is the core of right view.”

This book holds that traces of shifting between these two roles appear at different times and among different representatives of the Madhyamaka tradition. The theoretical cost of that shifting is what this chapter seeks to expose.

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