Appendix Two　Modern Forms of Madhyamaka: Testing the Verdict Again¶

This volume's verdict on Madhyamaka addresses its classical forms: Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, Candrakīrti, and their Chinese and Tibetan successors. Yet the obligation to “present the strongest form before criticizing” in the preface has no temporal limit. Over the past half-century, Madhyamaka studies in the analytic philosophical tradition have produced several markedly stronger modern forms, each reinforcing one of classical Madhyamaka's most frequently criticized aspects. This appendix sets out four main approaches, asking each the same question: must this volume's verdict change for them? It ends by measuring this book's own theorem form with the same standard.

The semantic reading: raising emptiness to a metalevel

Siderits and Garfield's “semantic reading” treats emptiness as a second-order proposition about truth, not a metaphysical proposition about things. To say all dharmas are empty is to say that nothing bears ultimate truth, not that everything is composed of something called “emptiness.” Its slogan is self-referential: “The ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.”¹ This reading blocks two of the oldest blades. It does not deny conventional efficacy, escaping the charge of nihilism; it refuses to establish emptiness as an entity, escaping reobjectification. This must be acknowledged: half the criticism of reobjectification in the Madhyamaka essay, Part II, Chapter Three, falls away here. This is real philosophical progress.

Yet consider what it does to the verdict's other links. Raising emptiness to a semantic metalevel does not shorten the distance between view and craving; it adds another level. This volume's argument about the migration of suffering says that Madhyamaka moves the site of work from prereflective craving to reflective view (Madhyamaka essay, Part II, Chapters One and Two). The semantic reading moves view one level further, into theory about theory. How does the second-order insight that “no theory has an ultimate guarantee” reach nontheoretical, prereflective craving? The mechanism's gap expands from “between view and feeling” to “between metaview and feeling.” The semantic reading is itself honest: it explains emptiness's use chiefly as therapy for philosophers' metaphysical attachments. Yet those attachments are only a small branch in craving's genealogy. For someone who does no philosophy, metalevel discipline cannot reach the target's level at all. With Volume One complete, this diagnosis has a comparison within the book itself. Essay Eighteen holds the same phenomenon in another framework: ultimate truth's final formalization is an invariant across all frameworks, not something in a higher object-domain (Chapter Seven). Appendix A's final determination of the fourth alternative makes stance notation primary and propositional notation its projection. By this comparison, “The ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth” takes the projection as the original. Removing reobjectification need not cost another ascent to a metalevel. Placement at the level of rules removes it too, without adding to the distance between metaview and feeling. The verdict therefore remains, more precisely stated: the semantic reading saves Madhyamaka's philosophical standing at the cost of further diluting its soteriological content. The migration argument repeats unchanged at the metalevel, in an even purer form.

Defending no position: the cost of consistency

The second approach defends “no position.” Tillemans and Westerhoff each argue that Nāgārjuna's declaration “I have no position” can be consistent. Rejection need not commit to a counterthesis, and saying “dharmas lack own-nature” need not establish a universal proposition endowed with own-nature. Logical and pragmatic tools suffice to remove the oldest blade, self-refutation.² This volume also acknowledges the defense's successful part: no position can be maintained at the level of statements. One addition is needed. This defense now has a version internal to this book. The layered definition of no position, called “no thesis” in Volume One, appears in Essay Eighteen, Chapter Five. Metaphysical theses are distinguished from metalevel statements of conceptual grammar; what Nāgārjuna lacks is the former. Essay Nineteen, Chapters One and Two, retraces the reductio line's practice and self-explanation through transcriptions and critical editions. Candrakīrti's explicit half-sentence—rejecting a proposition does not assert its negation, so there is no thesis to overturn—is the classical awareness expressed in Essay Eighteen's Lemma One. Essay Nineteen, Chapter Seven, also gives a final verdict: taking conceptual grammar as a shared instrument and common ground preserves both positive efficacy and the restrictions governing reductio. Under the theorem form, the dispute between reductio and autonomous inference narrows to a difference in inventories of resources. Removing the blade of self-refutation henceforth has this book's own theorem as its ground; it need no longer borrow victories won elsewhere.

Yet this volume's criticism of having no thesis never concerned logical consistency. It concerned normative content (Madhyamaka essay, Part II, Chapter Five): what can a system successfully maintaining no position use to direct practice? Once the blade is removed, the question remains, sharper still. The more thoroughly no position is maintained, the thinner the practice content the system itself can supply. The path sequence must be borrowed wholesale: meditation methods from Abhidharma, curricula from doctrinal systems. This is isomorphic with Candrakīrti's situation. Systematization is better called the necessary compensation for no position than a betrayal of it. Essay Nineteen, Chapter Two, records Candrakīrti's cost as closure of the gate to dialogue; this section records borrowing the path sequence. The two entries are on opposite sides of one coin. Philosophically defensible quietism is a blank authorization at the truth of the path. Consistency's victory cannot change that judgment.

Perspectivism and the Geluk reading: answering with a curriculum

Garfield represents the third approach. The conventional world is retained in full; emptiness is a way of regarding it, establishing no further reality. Emptiness's own emptiness seals the account, and ethics and practice find their place within a sound conventional truth. This reading has a genealogy that must be recorded: it is a contemporary rewriting of Geluk interpretation. Garfield studied with Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe and cotranslated Tsongkhapa's Ocean of Reasoning with Geshe Ngawang Samten, as the note to the Madhyamaka essay, Part II, Chapter Three, records.³ Genealogy is no offense, just as Candrakīrti's inheritance from Nāgārjuna is no offense. Yet the status of “standard modern reading” must accurately be entered as the extension of a particular tradition of doctrinal classification, not a neutral academic starting point. This entry now has a theoretical name too. Volume One, Essay Nineteen, Chapter Six, concludes that readings of the two truths converge under the theorem form into one reading plus a pedagogical parameter. Taking one doctrinal classification as default mistakes a pedagogical parameter for a principle of the domain; two cases of doctrinal classification are also in Essays Twenty-One and Twenty-Two. The history of this picture's becoming the default in English-language scholarship has a separate section awaiting expansion in Volume One, Essay Twelve, Chapter Three.

As usual, the effect on the verdict has two sides. Retaining the conventional in full is indeed the best answer to the charge of “refuting too much”; the Madhyamaka essay duly recorded Tsongkhapa's work here. Yet mechanism remains unchanged. The Geluk route answers how seeing emptiness leads to greed's exhaustion only with a curriculum—the paths for three kinds of person, sequences of calming and insight, rules for relying on a teacher—not with argument's output. How a change of perspective rewrites prereflective craving still receives a pedagogical arrangement in place of a mechanism's explanation. Verification remains unchanged too, with an observation about its modern situation worth adding: modern Madhyamaka studies test arguments' validity, not cessation's occurrence. This is no failure of scholars' duty; philosophy does not make liberation its business. Only one displacement must be guarded against: using modern Madhyamaka's philosophical flourishing as corroboration that “Madhyamaka's road to liberation works.” These are different achievements. The finer the debating ground's report card, the more one should recall the Madhyamaka essay, Part II, Chapter Six. The drift of criteria from cessation toward debate has been institutionalized precisely in this form as today's professional philosophy.

Dialetheism: treating paradox as discovery

The fourth approach has a prominent voice in the debate. Garfield and Priest read the Middle Treatise together, arguing that there are true contradictions at thought's limits: saying the unsayable is one example, and Nāgārjuna anticipated this discovery. The cost is to alter logic itself, tame the principle of explosion, and redefine negation.⁴ Volume One, Essay Eighteen, Chapter Seven, already records the formal dialogue; only its conclusions are entered here. First, respect it as an opponent that reasons. The pressure it sees is real: statements about limits seem obliged to cross them. Second, the disagreement concerns the solution. Volume One uses levels, combining level clauses with typed rejection while leaving the logical machinery unchanged. Presupposition cancellation is also available, and no verse compels acceptance of true contradiction. Sorting the closing formulas in the Middle Treatise's chapters finds no family ending with “contradictions are true.” Third, dialetheism remains a complete fallback plan, available should the method of levels fail somewhere. No such point has yet appeared.

This volume still asks its two questions. Mechanism: true contradiction is useful only at thought's limits, one level farther away than the semantic reading's metalevel. The semantic reading at least treats philosophers' metaphysical attachments; limit paradoxes stand farther from the consulting room, with no identifiable route to prereflective craving. Priest and Garfield have never presented them as a mechanism of liberation. Verification: their testing ground is within a logical system, testing whether a nonexplosive machine technically works, unrelated to cessation's occurrence. Neither column receives anything new; the verdict stays. This route's value to the volume lies elsewhere. It shows that Madhyamaka's texts exert enough pressure to make contemporary logicians consider rebuilding the machinery. That corroborates the pressure's reality, not the road's viability.

Philology and logical reconstruction: two further entries

Beyond analytic approaches, two scholarly lineages must be recorded, since this volume's citations owe much to them. In Japanese scholarship, Yūichi Kajiyama and Shōryū Katsura have their own monographs, listed in the note. Their titles indicate work on forms of Madhyamaka argument and Buddhist epistemology, and on logic and argumentation theory. The originals could not be obtained, so their particular content is acknowledged without discussion. Katsura and Siderits's new translation of the Middle Treatise, using four ancient commentaries to join philosophical interpretation with philological work, is an actual convergence of these two scholarly approaches.⁵ In Chinese scholarship, Wan Jinchuan's introduction to Madhyamaka thought and Ye Shaoyong's Sanskrit–Tibetan–Chinese critical edition of the Verses of the Middle Treatise establish a new standard of textual precision. These contributions belong to the register of scholarship, separate from the soteriological verdict. Saying that Madhyamaka soteriology has structural gaps does not diminish their value; making its texts and arguments clearer does not fill those gaps.

This book's own form: the same standard

With four approaches recorded, one form remains to be measured by the same ruler: this book's own. Volume One, Essay Eighteen's reconstruction in theorem form—the scope clause, level clauses, preservation theorem, and Appendix A's formal system—is now a modern form too, in the same family as the four preceding ones. The obligation to “present the strongest form before criticizing” applies reflexively; this volume asks it the same two questions. The answer is already written into Volume One's own verdict. On mechanism, Essay Eighteen, Chapter Nine, explicitly says that the theorem's completed form is a state in which it no longer needs to be held, not a conclusion one keeps holding. For the stretch from seeing emptiness to greed's exhaustion, the essay ends by handing over tools. What it hands over is an inventory of tools, not an explanation of mechanism. Chapter Eight also forbids recruiting argument's achievements as corroboration for faith. On verification, the premise audit lists zero items of scriptural testimony; efficacy rests entirely in the court of shared conceptual grammar. What can be tested is therefore only argument's validity, the same statement made above about modern Madhyamaka studies. Volume One never exempted itself. Its difference from the four preceding forms is thus not greater philosophical strength, but writing “philosophical achievement does not guarantee liberation” into the verdict itself. No outside auditor needs to find this distance; it records it first. The volumes' division of work aligns here: Volume One proves and hands over tools; this volume audits promises beyond the tools.

Closing

The four approaches each reinforce a weak side of classical Madhyamaka. The semantic reading blocks nihilism and reification; the no-position defense blocks self-refutation; the Geluk reading restores the conventional and ethics; dialetheism rewrites paradox at the limits from scandal into discovery. Acknowledge all of this and the volume's two questions remain unchanged: mechanism, how view reaches prereflective craving; and verification, what warrants recognition and who grants it. The verdict stays, with one added qualification: modern forms make Madhyamaka harder to refute philosophically and less committed soteriologically. The more accomplished its philosophical form, the more respectably, and the farther, it stands from the original question, “how does suffering cease?” This measure applies equally to this book's own form, with its character reversed: the distance is recorded there, not discovered. Volume One's verdict is this sentence's first signatory.

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