Abstract
This article looks at the Indian canonical sources for Mādhyamika Buddhist refusals to personally endorse truth claims, even about customary matters. These sources, on a natural reading, seem to suggest that customary truth (saṃvṛtisatya) is only widespread error and that the Buddhist should do little more than duplicate, or acquiesce in, what the common man (or “the world”) recognizes (lokaprasiddha) about it. The combination of those Indian canonical themes probably contributed to frequent Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka positions on truth, i.e., that the customary is no more than surface level truth, mere consensus amongst the mistaken, or, similarly, that there can be no right answers or truth claims to endorse about customary matters, as there are no sources of knowledge (tshad ma = pramāṇa) that have them as objects. Tsong kha pa and the dGe lugs pa, by contrast, adopted what I consider to be a philosophically more promising stance, one that recognized the need for a robust normativity: things customary are not just reduced to accepted errors; there are right answers about them that should be endorsed and may well defy current consensus of opinion. Not surprisingly, however, they needed a quite different and even strained exegesis of that same Indian textual legacy.
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The present article is an elaboration of some themes in Tillemans (2011), reprinted in Tillemans (2016). Much of the discussion on the term saṃvṛti figures in Newland and Tillemans (2011). The direct inspiration for the present discussion of lokaprasiddha was a conversation with Steve Batchelor, who insightfully said to me that the discrepancy between a Pāli sutta text and the Mahāyānist version could be a lot more important than I had initially thought.
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Tillemans, T.J.F. Mādhyamikas Playing Bad Hands: The Case of Customary Truth. J Indian Philos 47, 635–644 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-018-9370-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-018-9370-6