Practicing Buddhist Metaphysics: the relevance of metaphysics in Indian texts from a historical approach

This paper proposes an interpretation of metaphysics based on a historical reading of its usage in philosophy that could help adjudicate a nuanced and differentiated use on Buddhist materials. An argument will be developed to defend but also circumscribe the usage of metaphysics in Buddhist philosophy. 

The term “metaphysics” has been highly contentious in Buddhist scholarship in the past sixty years. It has been reproved or claimed, often with little attention to the specific historical context in which this term emerged. The paper proposes to provide a very concise history of metaphysics in Greek, Latin, and modern Western philosophy, an aspect often ignored by Buddhist scholars, to show that metaphysics is not only a very vague term meaning something like “a general discourse about reality in general,” but has specific questions, concepts, and has showcased in its history a specific conceptual structure. In particular, I will highlight the “double gesture” at work in the history of metaphysics that represented a problem for most metaphysicians: is metaphysics about being in general, a property shared by all beings? Or is metaphysics about what being is in its purest form, in other words the being that is most being (like God for the Medievals)? The two possibilities are already present in Aristotle and are explored by different philosophers and theologians in the Middle Ages until metaphysics achieves its classical form in the 18th-19th centuries where it is divided into “general metaphysics” (metaphysics about the property of being in general) and “special metaphysic” investigating special entities that have metaphysical significance (God, the soul, and the world). A third strand of the history of metaphysics I will showcase is the spiritual strand, which strengthened with Neoplatonist philosophy and continued in the Islamic, Jewish, and Latin Middle Ages. This strand saw metaphysics as a kind of activity that transforms the philosopher to attain the metaphysical reality aimed at. From this perspective, metaphysics is not an abstract discourse but a sort of “experience” and a transformative practice.

I will suggest to keep together the first two strands that are in tension in the history of Western metaphysics to argue that the proper metaphysical approach consists in both taking into account the specificity of entities in what they are and the shared nature that make them exist or “be.” Doing metaphysics does not just consist in cataloging what exists nor to move away from particular entities to “go beyond them” so as to reach a transcendent nature (often the meaning given to the word meta-physics, "to go beyond nature"), but to attend to the two questions of what counts as being and why it can be said to be. 

This perspective, I will argue, allows us to parse different approaches in Buddhist texts regarding discourses on reality and distinguish (at least for this paper) between ontology, which is the endeavor to establish an exhaustive catalog of what exists, and metaphysics, which in addition to this ontological approach gets to the question of what justifies such cataloging. Multiple Ābhidharmika texts could be interpreted as proposing an ontological project of cataloging all that counts as dharma, and then as other categories dependent on it (prajñapti, etc.). Certain Mādhyamika texts (Nāgārjuna in particular), with their emphasis on the two truths, would be interpreted in this perspective as proposing a metaphysical project, in the sense of not only providing a catalog of what counts as an accepted category in Buddhist philosophy (the various contentions for saṃvr̥ti) but also a rationale for what counts as existent due its interdependence and empty nature (existent in a sense and non-existent in another – that is also the proper metaphysical move of Madhyamaka).

Finally, the paper will argue that the third strand of metaphysics, metaphysics as a kind of activity, is valuable when interpreting some Buddhist texts as it can bridge the gap often seen between theoretical discourse and practical discourse. I will argue that Mādhyamika metaphysics can be seen as an activity because it responds to a deep-seated tendency in human beings to interpret the world in essentialist terms, which leads to their suffering. Metaphysics is then seen as a sort of a therapeutic, spiritual exercise to practice “in situ” an anti-essentialism that should pervade our lives if we want to truly access a form of liberation. This is how I will interpret Nāgārjuna’s statement “I have no thesis,” as a commitment to constantly undo essentialist tendencies, even those creeping on Madhyamaka’s own positions and arguments.

The talk will conclude on summarizing the form of metaphysics instantiated by some Mādhyamika texts as non-essentialist (against the usual accusations of metaphysics being necessarily essentialist) and anti-foundationalist (against the usual assumption that metaphysics has to be foundationalist) using the double gesture of the two truths, and a form of activity. I hope to address one important question regarding whether the historical approach offered here is problematic due to its seeming Western-centric perspective. The response will highlight that, first, if the term used has a Western origin (rather, in fact, a Greek origin in this case), one has a historical and philological responsibility to be clear about its origin. Second, it will highlight the comparative method used here as striving to illuminate both sets of texts by pushing the attention to their details, which allows for a greater appreciation of their particularity, which is at the service of thinking through the question we have been asking – what is it that we call metaphysics?