The Continuity of Madhyamaka and Yogacara in Indian Mahayana Buddhism.

• Author: Keenan, John P.

Harris has written a thoughtful and well-argued book. His main theme is that in their initial developments Madhyamaka and Yogacara were not rival schools of Mahayana. This argument is aimed at the last generation of European scholars who often did see Madhyamaka and Yogacara as mutually exclusive schools of thought. There is also perhaps an underlying subtext, for Harris refutes the central tenets of the Tibetan Mahayana tradition with its insistence on reading Nagarjuna through Candrakirti's Prasangika eyes. He even wants to redefine Tsong-kha-pa as "a Svatantrika-Madhyamaka," an identity that will surprise Tibetan scholars indeed.

I agree with the overall argument on the organic relationship between Madhyamika and Yogacara, but would want to formulate it differently, perhaps because I read the Mahayana texts through the lens of modern Japanese scholarship. There have been many Japanese attempts to address the question Harris raises about the relationship between Madhyamika and Yogacara. Nagao Gadjin, and his teacher Yamaguchi Susumu, have argued that Yogacara is a reinterpretation of emptiness that focuses on emptiness in terms of a theory of consciousness.(1) Ui Hakuju argued that, while the Dharmapala to Hsuantsang lineage of Yogacara abandoned the emphasis on emptiness, the Paramartha lineage maintained its faithfulness to that tradition.(2) Harris' argument can, I think, be both strengthened and refined by coming into dialogue with these Japanese efforts.

Nagarjuna's Originality. Harris examines Nagarjuna's logic and concludes that he is not an original thinker. Rather, he sees Nagarjuna as adhering to the traditional doctrine of the inexpressibility of truth and the existence of "an indeterminate truth realm." Harris' intent is to avoid reading Nagarjuna as a nihilist. To this end, he downplays the stress on emptiness and the falsification of viewpoints in Madhyamika, because he apparently sees that to be a source of conflict with the positive thrust of later Yogacara idea. Thus, he says, Nagarjuna "does not stand outside early Buddhist tradition in order to set up an entirely independent school of thought." I suggest that that is certainly the case, yet in no wise does that lessen Nagarjuna's originality as the founder of Madhyamika philosophy. I wonder what "an entirely independent school of thought" would be, for I do not think that one has to stand outside the tradition in order to be an "original thinker." Harris says that "Nagarjuna then, while he places emphasis on the doctrine of sunyata, is not introducing anything new into Buddhist thought." Yet, Nagarjuna was the first to identify emptiness and dependent co-arising, and the first to interpret the four truths within the context of the two truths. These were indeed innovative insights in the doctrinal history of Buddhism. Harris himself admits that Nagarjuna "uses emptiness as a synonym for pratityasamutpada," and that "it is to Nagarjuna we turn for the first rigorous treatment of this particular doctrine," i.e., the two truths. No originality comes out of a vacuum and it seems hardly necessary to argue that Nagarjuna has not "abandoned the whole of early teaching and...