The term ‘Madhyamaka’ means ‘Middle Way’, and Madhyamaka is a philosophical school of Mahayana Buddhism (the second phase of Buddhism that began about 500 years after the Buddha and spread from India into China, Tibet and Japan). If you see the term ‘Middle Way’ highlighted in a Buddhist context, it is most likely to be refer to the thought and influence of this school, particularly its lead thinker Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna, in texts like the Mulamadhyamakakarika (‘Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way’) does a lot to develop and apply Indian Buddhist thought about the Middle Way beyond the base created by the Buddha. It is Mahayana Buddhists influenced by the Madhyamika who are most likely to lay claim to the term ‘Middle Way’, and might even take offence at any attempt to separate it from Buddhist tradition, so an explanation is needed here of how the aims of the Middle Way Society differ from those of Mahayana Buddhism.
Perhaps the most important distinction between the Middle Way in Madhyamaka and the universal Middle Way is that Madhyamaka treats the Middle Way as a way of talking about an ultimate reality of some kind. This ontology is one of the ultimate emptiness of all phenomena, but nevertheless the concern of all the texts is with showing that metaphysical beliefs are ultimately unreal. This can be contrasted with the focus in universal Middle Way Philosophy on the Middle Way as method. Whilst the Madhyamaka does have a practical motive, this practice is focused on realising the truth of emptiness by reflecting on the conditionality of all phenomena, rather than on making incremental practical judgements about all our experiences that use the Middle Way as a principle.
This is an important distinction, because the idea that the Middle Way offers an insight into reality can still be used as the basis of an appeal to authority. Madhyamaka is made compatible with the authority of the Mahayana tradition and its gurus through the idea that its gurus have insights into the nature of emptiness as a sort of subtle reality. These gurus (for example, incarnate lamas or rimpoches in the Tibetan tradition) thus become idealised as individuals, the uneven positive qualities they often possess treated as a basis of authority discontinuous from ordinary experience, and the traditional dogmas of each Buddhist school are passed on through them. If the Middle Way was treated just as an incremental model, this kind of idealisation of teachers and tradition would not be possible, as all spiritual progress would be understood subject to asymmetries and as a matter of degree.
Nagarjuna dealt with the discontinuity between the ultimate emptiness of everything and our experience of things through his doctrine of two truths. This means, in effect, that we have to switch between an ordinary ‘truth’ and an enlightened ‘truth’ like a toggle switch, with the insights provided by ultimate emptiness somehow filtering into our ordinary experience. This is a very unsatisfactory way of thinking about the Middle Way, because it makes it irrelevant to ordinary experience. Even when you’ve supposedly experienced ultimate emptiness, this may or may not change your way of thinking about what you experience in everyday life. This problem arises from a mistaken way of thinking about the Middle Way in the first place. The Middle Way should not involve us in making even very subtle claims about a reality of any kind, but rather be a method we can apply at any level of experience from the grossest everyday life to the subtlest meditation. You don’t need an experience of ultimate emptiness to start applying the Middle Way, but just to recognise metaphysical assumptions and start changing your judgements.
The discontinuity in the Madhyamaka account of the Middle Way also tends to go with an ego-killing view of our goals. If you think there are two discontinuous views of the world, one deluded by an ego (everyday awareness) and the other not (enlightened awareness), the only way forward is to get rid of the ego that is causing the delusion. In Middle Way Philosophy, on the other hand, the ego is seen as the positive basis of all progress. We just need to stretch and integrate that ego rather than kill it in order to make gradual spiritual progress.
It would be quite possible to practise the Middle Way in the universal sense whilst working within the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism and being inspired by the work of philosophers like Nagarjuna. However, as with any other tradition, to make it compatible with the Middle Way it is necessary to decisively avoid the metaphysical beliefs that go with appeals to authority in that tradition, and which tend to follow beliefs about a reality that has been reached by the leading authorities in that tradition. In some ways it might actually be harder to follow the Middle Way decisively when the very same term is constantly understood in an ontological way in all the texts and teachings that people use for inspiration in that tradition. However, Mahayana Buddhism in the West is also open to debate in a way that might raise some hopes that its interpretation of the Middle Way can be reformed.
Your definition of the two truths doctrine was developed after Nagarjuna. His idea was that all phenomena are conditional and empty of any self essence. This is his relative truth. His ultimate truth was that ultimate truth is also empty and therefor the same as conditional truth. The emptiness of emptiness is that the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. Don’t blame Nagarjuna for the later interpretations of the two truths doctrine, which are as you describe above. See Jay Garfield “The Emptiness of Emptiness.”
Hi Carl, I’m happy to take your word for this on a provisional basis, but have no desire to get involved in a scholarly discussion about who actually wrote what, which makes no practical difference to anything.
I find the two truths useful. As I see it, it’s about being very specific about the object of negation: self-existence. Then, emptiness is merely a negation of the false notion of the self-existence of anything, which tends to be created by a natural slippage of the symbolic mind combined with the survival instinct that seeks safety. The ultimate truth is then the universal condition of any specific object, entity or substrate. However this doesn’t negate the relative existence of anything. So these two truths are mutually dependent.
Yes, the problem arises when existence is projected onto a construct of “emptiness” and emptiness becomes somehow ultimately real of itself, as opposed being the universal condition of identified things. Change, transformation and progress could not happen if it were not for the two truths.
Hi Mark,
I’d want to clarify two ideas here. Firstly, what do you mean by ‘negation’? Negation can mean either denial or agnosticism. I don’t think we have any grounds to deny self-existence, but we do have grounds to be rigorously agnostic about both it and its denial.
The other term that needs clarifying is ‘truth’. I’m concerned, not with truth in the abstract, but with the concrete effects of people believing they have it. The two truths may be ‘useful’ as concepts that enable us to think about possibilities, and in that sense I’d agree that they are mutually dependent. ‘Truth’ can be meaningful even though we don’t claim to have it. However, I don’t agree at all if you mean that the two truths can be useful as objects of belief. Our beliefs need to be clearly-focused bases of action, not contradictory abstractions.
I agree that it doesn’t make a practical difference. The two truths doctrine is a very unfortunate development that’s become common in so many schools of Buddhism. It creates a dangerous dualism. I just don’t like to see Nagarjuna take the rap for it, especially when his ideas don’t actually seem to be in conflict with yours. Thanks for the work you’re doing.
Perhaps it’s because Jay Garfield’s work is also my interface to Nagarjuna that I don’t see any major contradictions between N.’s Middle Way and, say, Robert’s Middle Way – particularly if one accounts for the cultural disparity between the two thinkers.
To quote from Garfield’s commentary on his translation, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:
I suppose that begs the question: Where is Garfield’s interpretation of N. coming from, Buddhist-wise? In short, he claims that his work is “situated squarely within a Prasangika-Madhyamika interpretation”, which reflects “Candrakirti’s and Je Tsong Khapa’s commentaries”, but he also claims that he does “not consistently side with any particular faction”, wherever interpretive debates traditionally occur. Of course, his situation as a 20th-21st-Century American philosopher warrants consideration here, as well.
Does any of this make a practical difference?
I can attest that it’s made a practical difference in how I respond to philosophy – that is, from a more skeptical place (in the Madhyamika/Pyrrhonian sense). But that only reveals something about me – in particular, that I sometimes read philosophy (and science and history, as they bears on philosophy), whereas most lay folks whom I know do no such thing and seem to have little or no interest in this pastime.
Hi Jason,
I wouldn’t say that Nagarjuna’s ideas themselves (together with those of Chandrakirti and associated thinkers) haven’t made a difference. They’ve certainly contributed to a chain of Buddhist thinking that has influenced me in some ways. It’s just scholarly disputes which are concerned with who wrote what that I suggested make no practical difference. What I want to get away from is either the idea that Nagarjuna sorted it all out and thus that we only need to study him (in enormous detail, preferably in the original Sanskrit etc.) to find out the truth of the matter, or that if I think otherwise then I must have misinterpreted him etc. At one time I did engage in such conversations, and found them generally to be a quagmire with a sucking appeal to authority lurking at the bottom of it. For the same reason, I’m afraid I’m going to decline to get involved in any discussion of Garfield’s interpretation. If you find it inspiring and useful for its content, then I’m glad.
My way of relating to the two truths, in a practical sense, is that even though there’s no way or reason to attribute any truth-value to a particular position (ultimate truth), I can work within the context of any given narrative or mythos (a conventional truth). By thinking of various worldviews as simply stories about the world, I neither adopt them as true in an absolute sense, nor reject them as false ideologies that need to be denied. The truth or otherwise of a particular point of view is in that way not a matter of contention, so instead I can adopt a pragmatic approach by asking ‘is this point of view useful’? Or ‘what are the limits of the contexts in which this point of view is useful’? For example, science might be a good ‘conventional truth’ or paradigm for certain purposes, while in other circumstances, poetry might be a better platform for exploring or expressing an idea.
Hi Regan, That sounds like a helpful approach. However, within what you call ‘stories about the world’ I’d distinguish meaning and belief, then within beliefs provisional and absolute types. Some ‘stories about the world’ simply provide us with potential symbolic resources, whilst others are practically relied on in some way and thus become beliefs, even if they can still be reviewed. Thus there is a distinction between the function of poetry and that of science which does not have to absolutise scientific beliefs.
If you haven’t looked at them already, you might be interested in the videos listed under Media/MWP introductory videos/5: Agnosticism on the menus above, for development on this area.
Hmmmm… a pretty old “discussion” so maybe I missed the boat…. but, what the heck.
The views we love so much… why do we love them? Do they free us or do they bind us? The Madhdyamika did not arise out of any authority but out of realization of the emptiness of authority and the fullness of phenomena and the freedom to see their potentials and limitations…
I still don’t understand what middle means. Neither conventional nor ultimate nor both nor neither, what’s middle about that?
In brief, the Middle Way is Middle because it finds a way between two opposing absolute beliefs, negative and positive. In traditional Buddhism those views are described in terms of their content, as ‘eternalist’ or ‘nihilist’ type beliefs. I would argue that we need to understand the opposing absolute beliefs more widely and flexibly than that.
How about this: in dependent arising there is neither existence nor nonexistence, therefore neither permanence nor impermanence. This refutes both eternalism and nihilism in this moment. The middle way is not squeezing between two illusions. The middle way is The Great Way. Welcome to Aquarius y’all!
ref: Kaccanagotta Sutta and Hopkins
If there is finding, identity is what is found. Identity is a mental formation. Mental formations cannot be found. Nothing whatever can be found.
The basis of identity is another identity. Or, if you please, another mental formation.
The visible cannot be found, tactile, taste, sound, flavor whatever cannot be found. The chariot, the parts of the chariot, the self of the charioteer and the charioteer cannot be found. Function cannot be found. No convention can be found.
Neither finding nor not-finding can be found.
“This is an important distinction, because the idea that the Middle Way offers an insight into reality can still be used as the basis of an appeal to authority. Madhyamika is made compatible with the authority of the Mahayana tradition and its gurus through the idea that its gurus have insights into the nature of emptiness as a sort of subtle reality. These gurus (for example, incarnate lamas or rimpoches in the Tibetan tradition) thus become idealised as individuals, the uneven positive qualities they often possess treated as a basis of authority discontinuous from ordinary experience, and the traditional dogmas of each Buddhist school are passed on through them. If the Middle Way was treated just as an incremental model, this kind of idealisation of teachers and tradition would not be possible, as all spiritual progress would be understood subject to asymmetries and as a matter of degree.”
Yes, gurus/lama’s job is to pass on traditional Buddhist “dogmas” and, preferably, they have attained some level of realization of emptiness for themselves but it is not necessarily presumed so. In any case, their authority does not derive from their personal level of attainment or insight but from the tradition which they are dedicated to teaching without adding or taking away too much.
“The Middle Way” is an awfully Buddhist concept that you seem to have appropriated and, like so many efforts to secularize Buddhism, you have discarded the elements that you mistakenly presume are superstitious or religious, go to extremes, make metaphysical claims, etc. I mean, I think. I’m not really sure what you’re trying to do here other than create yet another version of Buddhism without Buddhism.
Hi Greg,
No, MWS is not a version of Buddhism. We don’t accept the authority of the Buddhist tradition, but work on the basis of what works for integrated practical judgement. It’s not ‘secular’ either, but challenging the distinctions between religion and secularity. We have lots of people involved who are not Buddhists, including a rabbi and several Christians. There’s also a lot of influence from psychology, systems, embodiment, and the insights of neuroscience in the developing Middle Way Philosophy perspective. We make no apologies for adopting insights and helpful techniques from Buddhism, as well as from other places. ‘Appropriating’ is a pejorative term for that, but a more positive way of putting it is that we engage in critical synthesis. You may not readily understand the approach only from a few minutes’ browsing, but there is lots more explanation available on the site if you’re interested. The introductory videos are an especially good place to start if you want to understand better what we’re about. https://www.middlewaysociety.org/audio/middle-way-philosophy-introductory-videos/.
I know very little about Buddhism so appreciate you sharing this.
Lower truth, all views are relative and ultimately self-contradictory.
Higher truth, reality cannot be captured with a view and reality is not relative.
Nagarjuna clearly knew this. The two truths are not so hard to understand. People seem to go out of their way to be difficult and pedantic about it. Profundity via obscurity.
Ken, I’d suggest that if we took the “higher truth” as you put it here seriously enough, we would not attempt to encapsulate our understanding of this as “truths” at all. That’s not a pedantic position, but one actuated by practical concerns: it’s pure theory that begins with “truths”, whilst practice begins with a recognition of the limitations of our understanding.
And you think these “limitations of our understanding” are not precisely logical-propositional in nature and therefore somehow not truth-dependent? Not TRUTHS of the highest order? No, you don’t mean that, I think. But I seriously doubt that the the people who talk about higher and lower truths are necessarily “hung up” over it. In my experience, sometimes quite the contrary. The higher and lower truths are meta-truths, truth about views. They were never meant to be truths about reality, only truths about views of reality. Even the higher truth is a lower truth.
Nagarjuna is exquisitely clear and correct on this especially in his prajnaparamita sutra. I think it is interesting that both the Buddha and Nagarjuna warned folks that they were human and therefore subject to error. They welcomed folks to correct them. Or add, augment and clarify. If talk about higher and lower truths is a useful tool, then that’s just peachy. If not, then discard it. But there is nothing intrinsically misleading or diabolical or difficult about them. There is nothing intrinsically misleading or diabolical about a hammer and nails.
Traditional Madhyamika regards the term “Middle Way” as simply avoiding dogmatic extremes that entail mistaking views of reality for reality for reality itself. One can avoid particular dogmatic extremes regardless of whether one has experienced reality or not. The method is the same in either case. All views of reality are ultimately self-contradictory and can be shown to be so.
“Middle Way” is a figurative term only. Nagarjuna never meant it in an ontological way and even a cursory reading of the Karikas should make that acutely obvious. It is crystal clear from Nagarjuna’s third moment of his causal dialectic, for example. When two extreme views are both found to be self-contradictory they do not magically add up to something positive nonetheless. Two illusions do not add up to reality. They add up to two illusions. There is no “Middle”. Except figuratively.
I don’t know what would be the difference between a middle that was ‘figurative’ and one that wasn’t. As I understand the way we attribute meaning to the term ‘middle’, it depends on our experience of finding ways between extremes in diirect embodied experience from infancy. Anything beyond that – which is virtually all use of the term – involves some kind of extension through metaphor.
As for whether your interpretation of Nagarjuna is correct, or what is ‘obvious’ from the Karikas, I would make no claims, as I have responded similarly above. You may be correct, or you may not. Either way, the Middle Way in experience stands regardless.
“I don’t know what would be the difference between a middle that was ‘figurative’ and one that wasn’t.”
…..Yes, I thought as much after reading your introduction above. That it why I called the middle way figurative. Nagarjuna’s “emptyness”, relativity, is not an ontology as you claim. Classical Madhyamika does not offer “Pratytyasamupada”, relativity, as an ontology. In fact it roundly and emphatically rejects it as one, over and over in many places. It offers no ontology whatsoever. Of course, you may be correct or you may not be.
Robert, classical Madhyamika does indeed treat with reality in a very unique fashion. Unless I misunderstood you, you don’t. How is it then, that you claim that “YOUR” Madhyamika is more “Universal” than Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika? Seems to me Nagarjuna is ahead of you by one whole reality going into the last chukker. 80% of all original Madhyamika sanskrit texts that have been recovered so far have to do with method, personal conduct, tips on meditation. This seems to conflict with your statement that YOUR Madhyamika is more about method than classical Madhyamika.
It’s not “my Madhyamika”. I don’t use the term Madhyamika, except to refer to the Buddhist school. I use the term ‘Middle Way’ in English. That Middle Way can be found in all sorts of places to varying degrees, hence its universality. I am not the originator of such insights nor have any exclusive claim to them. Whether you find it in a particular place, such as the Madhyamkia School of the Mahayana, or not, depends both on interpretation and practice. I’m glad if you find it there. However, defensively laying exclusive claim to it on behalf of any one school is inconsistent with the insights of the method itself.
Thank you for demonstrating above what your “method” is, Robert.
You made a small yet serious mistake.
‘Madhyamaka’ is a noun that means ‘middle way’ in Sanskrit. It is the name of a school of Buddhist philosophy. The adjective form of Madhyamaka in Sanskrit, Madhyamika, refers to an adherent of the Madhyamaka philosophy. So scholars refer to the school fo Madhyamaka in Buddhist philosophy and have adopted Madhyamika as a noun (or an adjective) in English for an adherent. For example, Nagarjuna created the school of Madhyamaka, and Shantideva was a Madhyamika.
Even a skeptic should be able to distinguish these.
Hi Jason, Thank you for the correction, and I have made amendments. Since it is an entirely formal error, I’m not sure I agree with you that it is ‘serious’. Still, it’s interesting that I’ve managed to study and even teach the subject for a number of years in the past whilst continuing to make the same spelling error, also not noticing the discrepancy from sources. Attention to small details isn’t always my strong point!
Robert