Buddhist scholars in the West broadly agree with the proposition that Buddhism has a philosophical tradition, in many respects comparable to Western ones, while many claim that it also has a practical or empirical dimension that Western philosophies, especially the analytic tradition, lack. There is also a scholarly consensus that an implicit metaphysical system serves as the foundation for the doctrines and practices of early Buddhism as represented in the Pāli suttas. However, Buddhist scholarship to date has not distinguished clearly (...) between philosophical speculations, on the one hand, and on the other, teachings based on experience and practice. This study explores early Buddhist texts’ concept of “domain” (viṣaya/visaya, 境界), which encompasses both an experiential domain and a linguistic framework; i.e., a word is only valid within its own domain, and fails to refer beyond it. As such, it closely resembles Rudolf Carnap’s ideas of “internal” and “external” questions regarding linguistic frameworks, and his suggestion that metaphysical questions, considered as external questions, are meaningless and cannot be answered. More specifically, the Buddha’s refusal to directly answer the “unanswered” questions may indicate that early Buddhism took an attitude similar to Carnap’s rejection of metaphysics. Moreover, textual evidence suggests that teachings such as impermanence and dependent origination, though they may appear to be “metaphysical” to modern readers, are in fact empirical in the context of the early suttas. (shrink)

In this essay, I investigate how Chinese Yogācāra scholars of the Tang dynasty explicated and supplemented the theory of apoha (exclusion) propounded by the Indian Buddhist epistemologist Dignāga, according to which a nominal word functions by excluding everything other than its own referent. I first present a brief exposition of the theory. Then, I show that although they had very limited access to Dignāga’s theory, Kuiji and Shentai provide constructive and significant explanations that supplement the theory. I also show that (...) the term zhequan has been construed in Chinese Buddhism in at least three different senses to mean: an expression that both excludes and signifies, an expression that merely excludes and does not signify, and a negative expression that merely excludes. The notion of apoha is related to the first two senses but not the third. (shrink)

Some Buddhists claim that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence and thereby endorse a kind of global anti‐realism. Buddhist global fictionalists argue that for these Buddhists, ordinary discourse is best understood in global fictionalist terms. I argue here that these attempts fail because the types of fictionalism that these accounts are modeled after structurally rely on a non‐fictionalist domain of discourse to establish normative constraints within the target fictionalist domain. If the goal of appealing to fictionalism is to help (...) explain how discourse involving reference to entities that are unreal can still be governed by non‐arbitrary norms of acceptance, such that some conventional claims can be meaningfully described as conventionally true in contrast to other such claims that are conventionally false, then Buddhist global fictionalism undermines its own goals. It does so by eliminating the very feature of a fictionalist account – the ability to appeal to a non‐fictionalist domain – that makes possible the norms that fictionalism is invoked to explain in the first place. (shrink)

This paper is a preliminary study of Bhāviveka’s Svātantrika-Mādhyamika justifications for taking non-existent things as the subject of an inference, based on his Dacheng Zhangzhen Lun. Bhāviveka’s treatment of inference is similar to that of Dignāga in that the subject is required to be existent. Bhāviveka also holds that, in a conventional sense, words refer to universals and to the existent entities that possess them, while the two are cognised together. However, in his inference for the unreality of unconditioned things, (...) he likens these things to a sky-flower that never arises and is unreal even conventionally. This paper first demonstrates how taking unconditioned things as the subject of an inference can be problematic for Bhāviveka. Then, it discusses Bhāviveka’s attempts to address the problems by subsuming the unconditioned things under the domain of conventional reality. The paper concludes that these attempts show his flexibility in terms of what is taken as conventionally real. (shrink)

Questions regarding what exists are central to various forms of Buddhist philosophy, as they are to many traditions of philosophy. Interestingly, there is perhaps a clearer consensus in Buddhist thought regarding what does not exist than there may be regarding precisely what does exist, at least insofar as the doctrine of anātman (no self, absence of self) is taken to be a fundamental Buddhist doctrine. It may be noted that many forms of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy in particular are considered to (...) offer a quite austere ontology—a rather ‘empty’ account of what exists. Continuing in this vein of ontological austerity, here I will attempt to lay out a relatively novel approach to Buddhist ontology, viz. Buddhist fictionalism. (shrink)

For Jizang (549−623), a prominent philosophical exponent of Chinese Madhyamaka, all things are empty of determinate form or nature. Given anything X, no linguistic item can truly and conclusively be applied to X in the sense of positing a determinate form or nature therein. This philosophy of ontic indeterminacy is connected closely with his notion of the Way (dao), which seems to indicate a kind of ineffable principle of reality. However, Jizang also equates the Way with nonacquisition as a conscious (...) state of freedom from any attachment and definite understanding whatsoever. The issue then becomes pressing as to how we are to understand Jizang's notion of the Way. Does it indicate some metaphysical principle or reality? Is it actually a skilful expedient to lead one to the consummate state of complete spiritual freedom? How is this issue related to Jizang's conception of ontic indeterminacy? In this book chapter, I examine Jizang's key writings in an attempt to clarify his ontological position. (shrink)

Names name, but there are no individuals who are named by names. This is the key to an elegant and ideologically parsimonious strategy for analyzing the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi. The strategy is ideologically parsimonious, because it appeals to no analytic resources beyond those of standard predicate logic. The strategy is elegant, because it is, in effect, an application of Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions to Buddhist contexts. The strategy imposes some minor adjustments upon Russell's theory. Attention to familiar catuṣkoṭi from (...) Vacchagotta and Nagarjuna as well as more obscure catuṣkoṭi from Khema, Zhi Yi, and Fa Zang motivates the adjustments. The result is a principled structural distinction between affirmative and negative catuṣkoṭi, as well as analyses for each that compare favorably to more recent efforts from Tillemans, Westerhoff, and Priest. (shrink)