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 proposes an interpretation of metaphysics based on a historical reading to defend but also circumscribe the usage of metaphysics in Buddhist philosophy. A concise historical survey of the term in Greek, Latin Medieval, and modern European philosophies will uncover that metaphysics was structured around two fundamental questions, and that it was also viewed as a spiritual activity transforming the metaphysician to reach the metaphysical truth or reality. Such a historical perspective could help us differentiating among Buddhist texts different ways in which those texts provide a discourse on reality. I will argue that this interpretation allows us to see Mādhyamika texts in particular as providing fitting instances of the metaphysical approach, despite their frequent reputation as anti-metaphysical texts. This should speak to the necessity of clarifying how “metaphysics” is used in Buddhist scholarship.
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.