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Beyond the Western frame
The five stances mapped in this bundle are the structure of one inheritance. Construction, critique, disclosure, deflation, genealogy — these recur across the European tradition because they are moves available on a shared set of questions, framed in a shared vocabulary of substance, being, subject, and representation. That shared frame is not metaphysics as such. Other traditions have asked about the most general features of reality through categories the European tradition does not use, and have run their own long internal disputes — which means they are not further branches on this tree but trees of their own.
This page makes that point with one tradition and one figure. It is not a survey of non-Western metaphysics; the Chinese, Japanese, and Islamic philosophical traditions each have their own architecture, and naming only one here is a limit of this page, not a ranking. The single case is chosen because it is the sharpest reminder that the map could have grown differently.
Another tree, with its own branches
Classical Indian philosophy conducted metaphysical argument for well over a millennium, organised into rival schools that defended and attacked positions in sustained technical debate. The realist schools — Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika — built systematic ontologies of substances, qualities, motions, universals, and relations, with theories of perception and inference to support them: a constructive metaphysics as elaborate as any in Europe. Against them, Buddhist thinkers pressed reductive and anti-substantialist arguments, and the schools developed sophisticated accounts of perception, error, the self, time, and universals in answer to one another. The tradition contains, in its own terms, moves that rhyme with construction, with critique, and with deflation — which is the point: it is a complete tree, not a supplement to the European one. Its disputes do not slot into the five stances; they reproduce the same kind of disagreement on a different ground.
Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka
Nagarjuna is the sharpest counter-case because his position resists the European categories most directly. The Madhyamaka (“Middle Way”) doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā) holds that nothing possesses svabhāva — intrinsic, independent existence, a nature a thing has in and of itself. Everything arises only in dependence on conditions and on other things (pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination); to exist is to be empty of own-being. This is not the claim that nothing exists — that would be a metaphysical thesis of its own — but the claim that existence is irreducibly relational, with no self-standing terms at the bottom.
The method matches the doctrine. Nagarjuna argues largely by prasaṅga — drawing out the contradictions internal to each position an opponent might hold, across the four corners of the tetralemma (a thing is, is not, both, neither) — and declines to assert a counter-thesis of his own, on the ground that to assert one would be to claim the very own-being he denies. The apparatus of the two truths — a conventional level at which things and distinctions function ordinarily, and an ultimate level at which all are found empty — lets the everyday world stand while the metaphysics of intrinsic natures is dismantled. It is anti-foundational without being constructive, dissolving without resting on a theory of meaning, and systematic without positing a fundamental ground: a configuration none of the five Western stances quite names.
Where the cross-tradition reading stops
The comparison has a built-in hazard, and it runs in both directions. Read Madhyamaka through European eyes and it is easy to file it as scepticism, or as a mysticism beyond argument, or as a near-relative of some Western deflationism — each of which flattens what the categories of svabhāva, dependent origination, and the two truths are actually doing, and most of which Madhyamaka’s own commentators spent centuries refuting, the charge of nihilism first among them. The tradition’s internal contestation was as fine-grained as anything in the West — the later split between those who would argue only by prasaṅga and those who would advance independent inferences turned on exactly how far the refusal of a thesis could be pushed. The honest conclusion is not that this tree is the same as the other under different names, nor that the two are incommensurable and nothing can be said across them, but that the resemblances are real and partial, and that taking either tradition’s frame as the measure of the other is how the reading goes wrong. The five-stance map orients a reader inside one inheritance; it does not reach to the edge of the subject.