This panel proposes to discuss metaphysics as a legitimate category in Buddhist philosophy, contra the assumption that Buddhist anti-essentialism championing the absence of self (śūnyatā) implies the anti-metaphysical nature of Buddhist philosophical thought. All three papers defend a rich and diverse usage of metaphysics to account for texts from different times and regions of the history of Buddhist philosophy: Theravāda thought (Buddhaghosa), Indian Madhyamaka (Nāgārjuna), and Chinese Madhyamaka (Jizang). They also use “metaphysics” variously to describe anti-realism, to highlight an approach opposed to phenomenology or the double structure present in its historical development in Greek and European philosophies. Some papers will lean more heavily on meta-theoretical and methodological considerations regarding metaphysics, others will resort to historical forays in the history of metaphysics in the West to provide a transhistorical and transcultural reflection on metaphysics.
This presentation challenges the interpretation by Maria Heim and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad that Buddhaghosa’s work is purely phenomenological and not metaphysical. Heim and Ram-Prasad argue that Buddhaghosa is not concerned with the nature of existence but with training attention toward experience. In contrast, the presentation contends that Buddhaghosa makes genuine metaphysical claims about what exists.
This paper investigates the heretofore unstudied arguments marshalled by the Sui-Dynasty Sino-Parthian Madhyamika master Jizang 吉藏 (549–623 C.E.) to shore up the doctrine of mereological anti-realism – the position that nothing ever instantiates mereological properties or relations – for the Sinitic Madhyamaka or Sanlun 三論 tradition in which he is embedded. In his argumentation in support of mereological anti-realism, Jizang denies the intrinsic reality of mereological sums, the composites (Skt.: avayavin; Chi.: youfen有分), posited by rival Brāhmaṇical metaphysical theories, but also rejects the mereological reductionist doctrine – upheld by the earlier Abhidharma traditions of mainstream Buddhism – which postulates the fundamental reality of ontologically-simple parts upon which composites are conceptually constructed. An examination of Jizang’s Madhyamaka-oriented critique of Vaiśeṣika realism concerning composite substances brings to light the coherence of Madhyamaka Buddhist global anti-realism denying both the intrinsic reality of wholes and the parts upon which they are built.