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The Buddhists

The Buddha taught around 450 BCE, when public debate was common. His discourses survive in the Pāli canon; the later authors named here wrote in Sanskrit: Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) and Dharmakīrti (sixth or seventh century), of the logical school of Dignāga (c. 480–540).

In the Cūḷamālukya Sutta (MN 63) the monk Māluṅkyaputta brings the Buddha the questions he has left undeclared: whether the world is eternal, whether it is finite, whether the soul and the body are one, whether a realised one exists after death. The Buddha leaves them undeclared “because they aren’t beneficial or relevant to the fundamentals of the spiritual life. They don’t lead to disillusionment, dispassion, cessation, peace, insight, awakening, and extinguishment”. What he declares instead is “this is suffering”, its origin, its cessation and the practice that leads to its cessation (tr. Sujato). Whatever view one holds of the world, “there is rebirth, there is old age, there is death, and there is sorrow … And it is the defeat of these things in this very life that I advocate”. The inquiry is bounded by its end: it takes up what leads to the cessation of suffering and sets the rest aside.

The image for setting the rest aside is the poisoned arrow. A man struck by an arrow “thickly smeared with poison” will not have it drawn until he knows who shot it, of what caste and clan, with what bow; “that man would still not have learned these things, and meanwhile they’d die”. To the Kālāmas, unsure which of the teachers who visit them to believe, the Buddha gives a test: “don’t go by oral transmission, don’t go by lineage … don’t go by canonical authority, don’t rely on logic, don’t rely on inference … But when you know for yourselves: ‘These things are unskillful, blameworthy, criticized by sensible people, and when you undertake them, they lead to harm and suffering’, then you should give them up” (AN 3.65). The test is for conduct, for what to take up and what to give up.

The Milindapañha sets terms for discussion itself. The monk Nāgasena tells King Milinda: “If your Majesty will discuss as a scholar, well; but if you will discuss as a king, no.” When scholars talk a matter over, “one or other is convicted of error, and he then acknowledges his mistake; distinctions are drawn, and contra-distinctions; and yet thereby they are not angered”; kings fine whoever differs with them. The king answers: “It is as a scholar, not as a king, that I will discuss” (tr. Rhys Davids).

For Nāgārjuna the point is the relinquishing of views. “The victors have said that emptiness is the relinquishing of all views; those for whom emptiness is a view, they called incurable” (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13.8), and his work closes in homage to Gautama, the Buddha, “who taught the true dharma for the abandoning of all views” (27.30). Pressed by a critic to state his thesis and defend it by the means of knowing, he replies: “If I had any thesis, this fault would be mine; but I have no thesis, so the fault is not mine” (Vigrahavyāvartanī 29). How that method works, and how his commentators split over it, is on Madhyamaka.

The logicians took the means of knowing as their subject. For Dharmakīrti, right knowledge is the ground of every human aim (puruṣārtha), and “right knowledge is twofold”: perception and inference (Nyāyabindu 1.2–3, tr. Stcherbatsky), against Nyāya’s four. A means of knowing is cognition that does not deceive, and its reliability shows in what it lets one do (Pramāṇavārttika).