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When Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis, isn’t that a thesis?

Nima Tsering Gurung Fellow
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SkepticismBuddhistIndianMadhyamakaAdi ShankaraNagarjunaThe Buddha#emptiness#madhyamaka#no-thesis#vigrahavyavartani
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One idea in Nāgārjuna keeps catching on me like a boot on a root.

Nāgārjuna says (I think in a work called the Vigrahavyāvartanī) that if he had a thesis, the fault the opponent points out would apply to him, but since he has no thesis, there is no fault. So he refutes other positions without holding one.

But surely "I have no thesis" is itself a thesis? And "everything is empty" sounds very much like a claim about everything. When I explain this to curious trekkers, the clever ones always say this, and I don't have a good answer. I just say "it's subtle", which is what people say when they don't understand.

Could someone explain how Mādhyamikas answer this? I would like an answer I can give on a mountain to someone with an engineering degree and no patience.

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Meera Kulkarni

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Here is how I would put it on a mountain.

    The kind of thesis Nāgārjuna says he lacks is a claim that something has intrinsic nature (svabhāva), that it exists from its own side, independently. His opponents' positions all need such things: real pramāṇas, real objects, real causes. When he says he has no thesis, he means he is not putting forward any such claim. He still speaks, uses conventional language and argues.

    "Everything is empty" sounds like a claim about everything. But Nāgārjuna is careful to say that emptiness is itself empty. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (chapter 13) he says, in effect, that emptiness is taught to get rid of all views, and that those who turn emptiness into one more view are beyond help. Emptiness is not a superior metaphysical fact replacing the others. It is the absence of the intrinsic nature everyone assumed.

    So your engineer's objection assumes every sentence states a fact about what exists in itself. Nāgārjuna denies that, which is precisely the point at issue. The no-thesis line is not a trick; it is the theory applied to itself.

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Other answers

  1. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    There is an older image from the Pāli discourses that helps. In the sutta of the water snake simile, the Buddha says a teaching grasped wrongly is like grabbing a snake by the tail: it turns and bites. And in the same discourse he says the teaching is like a raft, used to cross the river and then left behind, not carried on your head.

    Mādhyamikas take this very seriously. Emptiness is a raft. Your engineer is asking what the raft is made of, which is a reasonable question, but not the one that matters once you are across.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Nima Tsering Gurung

    Fellow

    Meera, Nirmala, thank you. I think I now have a mountain version: I am not giving you a new map of the mountain, I am showing you that your map isn't the mountain. And then I say, my own words aren't the mountain either. The engineer will still roll his eyes, but at least I will understand why.

  3. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    For completeness, the hostile view. Śaṅkara, in his commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, dismisses the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness quickly, treating it as contradicting all the means of knowledge. Many Advaitins regarded Madhyamaka as nihilism. I think Meera's answer shows why that reading misses the point, but your trekker would be in respectable company with his eye-roll.

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