Nagarjunian Disputations: A Philosophical Journey through an Indian Looking-Glass.

• Author: Griffiths, Paul J.
• Position: Review

Nagarjunian Disputations: A Philosophical Journey through an Indian Looking-Glass. By THOMAS E. WOOD. Monographs of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, no. 11. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS, 1994. Pp. xviii + 405. $22 (paper).

Thomas Wood offers here a nihilist interpretation of Madhyamaka thought and a critique of opposed interpretations. He thinks that a nihilist understanding of Madhyamaka was held by most Buddhist and some non-Buddhist thinkers in India; and that the same was true of most Western interpreters until the twentieth century. He further claims that the nihilist reading is both exegetically fitting and philosophically defensible.

The nihilist interpretation defended by Wood is the simple denial of the existence of anything: every object of thought and utterance has, on this view, the ontological status of a nonexistent; this in turn means that all putative existents are placed on an ontological par. This is a thoroughly ontological understanding of Madhyamaka, and Wood is careful to distinguish it from and to engage it with a range of non-nihilist understandings. According to these readings, Madhyamikas claim that neither informal reasoning nor formal logical arguments can get at what there is; the only proper use of argument on such views is to show the limitations of argument, to demonstrate (typically by deriving a contradiction from the argument or claim studied) that all attempts to describe what there is or to offer arguments whose conclusions are about what there is must inevitably fail. Non-nihilist interpretations of Madhyamika thought, in Wood's view, understand it to elucidate and defend a position in epistemology (and per haps also in semantic theory), but not in ontology. For Wood, then, Nagarjuna's thought implies that every proposed existent has the same ontological status as the proverbial son of the barren woman.

Although Wood fairly consistently uses the term Madhyamaka to label the object of his discourse, he in fact limits his discussion almost exclusively to parts of two works by Nagarjuna. The works in question are the Vigrahavyavartani and the Mula madhyamakakarika and as support for his exegesis Wood provides a complete translation of the former work, and a translation of four chapters of the latter. He is not much interested in discussing or assessing the divergent traditions of interpreting these works in India (Candrakirti's comments on Naghrjuna are occasionally treated, but no...