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Sextus, Nāgārjuna and Wang Chong within about a century: one sceptical moment, or three projects?

Nima Tsering Gurung Fellow
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SkepticismBuddhistChineseGreek & RomanMadhyamakaSkepticism (Pyrrhonian & Academic)NagarjunaSextus EmpiricusWang Chong#comparative-philosophy#history-of-philosophy#madhyamaka#scepticism
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Between treks I read about the history of philosophy, and I came across a striking claim: that in roughly a century or so, around the second century CE, three traditions with no documented contact each produced a great critic of confident assertion. Sextus Empiricus in the Mediterranean, collecting the modes of Pyrrhonian doubt. Nāgārjuna in India, showing that every position about how things arise undermines itself. Wang Chong in China, a little earlier, attacking the portents and cosmic correspondences that Han scholars used to read Heaven's will.

My Madhyamaka teacher in Manang used to say Nāgārjuna was "not a sceptic but a doctor": he wanted to cure people of clinging to views, not to leave them in doubt. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī Nāgārjuna famously says that if he had a thesis, the fault would be his, but he has none. Sextus, I read, also said his aim was tranquillity, which comes after suspending judgement.

So I wonder if the parallel is real or a trick of the timeline. Sextus and Nāgārjuna both seem to use argument to dissolve belief for the sake of peace. Wang Chong seems different: he wanted better beliefs, based on evidence, not fewer beliefs.

Is it fair to call this a single "sceptical moment"? Or are these three quite different projects that only look alike from a distance, like three mountains that line up from one valley and nowhere else?

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5 replies

  1. Chen Yuting

    Fellow

    Your instinct about Wang Chong is right. He is not a sceptic in the Greek sense at all. The Lunheng attacks what he calls "empty" claims, portents, ghosts, Heaven's anger, by demanding evidence and testing claims against experience. But he holds firm positive views: that Heaven acts spontaneously, without purpose, and that a person's lot is fixed by fate. A critic of superstition with a strong cosmology of his own. Grouping him with Sextus says more about our category "sceptic" than about him.

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  2. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    On Nāgārjuna, many traditional commentators would agree with your teacher. Candrakīrti read the "no thesis" verse as meaning that a Mādhyamika makes no claims about things having intrinsic nature, not that he says nothing at all. And the Naiyāyikas pressed him exactly where Sextus was pressed by the Stoics: isn't "I have no thesis" itself a thesis? Whether refusing all positions is a position is still argued, and I don't think it's settled.

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  3. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Sextus is closer to Nāgārjuna than to Wang Chong, but not as close as it looks. Pyrrhonists live without belief (adoxastōs), following appearances, customs and the arts, and they reach tranquillity, Sextus says, by chance, like the painter who threw his sponge at the canvas in frustration and produced the effect he wanted. The modes, including Agrippa's five, are tools for balancing every argument with an equal one. That is a practice of suspension. Nāgārjuna's goal is liberation from suffering, which is a bigger promise than peace of mind.

  4. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    A note from the Indian sceptical side that's later than your window. The Cārvāka Jayarāśi, probably in the eighth century, wrote a work arguing that no means of knowledge can be established at all, including perception, which most Cārvākas accepted. If you want a sceptic in India who looks like Sextus, he's the better match, and he wasn't a Buddhist.

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  5. Nima Tsering Gurung

    Fellow

    Three projects, then: Wang Chong wanted better beliefs, Sextus wanted peace without beliefs, and Nāgārjuna wanted freedom from clinging to any view. The resemblance is real at the level of method, attacking confident claims, and false at the level of purpose. Three mountains that line up from one valley. I'll look for Jayarāśi in Pokhara, though I doubt the bookshop has him.

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