Abstract
Canonical defenders of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), such as Leibniz and Spinoza, are metaphysical foundationalists of one stripe or another. This is curious since the PSR—which says that everything has a ground, cause, or explanation—in effect, denies fundamental entities. In this paper, I explore the apparent inconsistency between metaphysical foundationalism and approaches to metaphysical system building that are driven by a commitment to the PSR. I do so by analyzing how Indian Buddhist philosophers arrive at foundationalist and anti-foundationalist positions motivated by implicit commitments to different versions of the PSR. I begin by introducing the Buddhist principle of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) as a proto-PSR that is restricted to causal explanation. Next, I show how Vasubandhu’s Sautrāntika Abhidharma metaphysics is shaped by a qualified commitment to both causal and metaphysical grounding versions of the PSR. I then reveal how Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka metaphysics is driven by an unrestricted and exceptionless commitment to causal and metaphysical grounding versions of the PSR. Finally, I consider how Nāgārjuna’s account may put him in a unique position to respond to a common contemporary objection to the PSR from necessitarianism. I conclude by addressing a competing interpretation on which Nāgārjuna is best understood as an anti-rationalist rather than an uber-rationalist, as I characterize him.
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Notes
I consider these authors non-chronologically to illustrate representative pictures within Sanskrit Buddhist philosophy instantiating first a limited commitment to the PSR and then an unrestricted commitment. I thus use Vasubandhu’s Sautrāntika Abhidharma as a useful, though anachronistic, point of contrast to help reveal the implicit role of the PSR in Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka. Still, Nāgārjuna’s project may in many respects be understood as a response to diverse Ābhidharmikas among his own contemporaries—even though these did not include an account mapping precisely onto Vasubandhu’s.
In Buddhist texts, one frequently encounters claims about the preeminence of perception (pratyakṣa) as a source of knowledge. This is related to the commonsense notion that seeing is ordinarily a more reliable guide to the knowledge of the existence of particular things in the world than is inference. Moreover, among many Buddhist schools of thought (notably excluding Madhyamaka), perception is thought to directly acquaint us with ultimately real particulars, while inferential cognition necessarily involves concepts that distort the way things exist. It is also important to note that when it comes to realizing the truth of claims such as selflessness and momentariness, it is a special sort of non-conceptual mental/intellectual perception—yogic perception (yogipratyakṣa)—which is the kind of knowledge-event that has soteriological efficacy. Nevertheless, Buddhists are primarily concerned with truths about the nature of things that are utterly at odds with ordinary perception, and a sound inference yielding knowledge of such truths (e.g., selflessness and momentariness) is commonly held to be instrumentally indispensable for achieving a yogic perception of them.
AKBh 9; 461,3–5: kathaṃ punar idaṃ gamyate skandhasaṃtāna evedam ātmābhidhānaṃ vartate nānyasmin nabhidheya iti | pratyakṣānumānābhāvāt |; “But how is it known that there exists no referent of the designation ‘self’ apart from the continuum of bundles alone? Because there is no perception or inference [that yields knowledge of the existence of such an entity]” (translation mine unless otherwise noted). It is worth noting that, in addition to perception and inference, Vasubandhu also accepts testimony (śabda) as a source of knowledge, but in seeking to prove a Buddhist principle to a non-Buddhist audience, guidelines for debate prohibit the citation of a source of testimony that is not accepted by all parties. Vasubandhu uses this same strategy to reject the ultimate reality of unconditioned (asaṃskṛta) dharmas, each of which he understands to be a mere negation (pratiśedhamātra) or non-existence (abhūta) (AKBh ad 2.55d). See Kellner (2017) for an analysis of this line of reasoning in AKBh 9 as an argument from ignorance, where she argues that this same strategy is operative in Vasubandhu’s case for idealism in the Viṃśikā. Siderits (2021) has argued, lines of reasoning of this sort might more charitably be characterized as “arguments from lightness,” insofar as they are driven by an implicit commitment to a principle of parsimony.
Siderits (2021), for instance, has emphasized the importance of this “principle of lightness” in driving the system-building in Buddhist philosophy in general, as particularly evident in the Sautrāntika Abhidharma tradition represented by Vasubandhu’s AKBh.
While this principle plays a central, though implicit, role in arguments denying the existence of a substantial self, one might also observe it at work in other Buddhist arguments aimed at ruling out a range of entities, such as real universals, real relations, real substances, mind-independent matter, and a creator God. There are, of course, a great many things accepted by Buddhists that do not look to be ordinarily perceptible or inferable. To accommodate such commitments, Dharmakīrti would later distinguish between two sorts of imperceptible things that require different kinds of inferences to establish: (i) things that are imperceptible (parokṣa) due to certain obstructing factors, which are knowable from an inference that operates through the force of actual objects (vastubalapravṛttānumāna); and (ii) things that are “radically imperceptible” (atyantaparokṣa) to ordinary cognizers, which are knowable from an inference based on testimony (āgamāśritānumāna). For a recent discussion of this, see Eltschinger (2020).
To my knowledge, Carpenter (2014: 13) makes the only mention of the resemblance between the Buddhist commitment to dependent origination and what European philosophers would later call the PSR.
See Cox (1993) for an account of the development in early suttas of the doctrine of dependent origination from referring to the twelve links into a more general theory of causation. See also Schulman (2008) who argues that the concept of dependent origination in the earliest Buddhist sources relates only to mental processes and implies that all things are conditioned by consciousness.
As cited in Vasubandhu’s AKBh: asmin satīdaṃ bhavati asyotpādād idam utpadyate iti | (AKBh ad AKK 3.28ab; 139,1). Cf. the Pāli of this formulation in the Dasabala Sutta of the Nidānasaṃyutta which includes what might be characterized as the inverse formulation: “When this is, that is. Once this arises, that arises. When this is not, that is not. Once this ceases, that ceases” (trans. Shulman 2008: 298); imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti, imass’ uppādā idaṃ uppajjati. imasmiṃ asati, idaṃ na hoti, imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati (Samyutta Nikāya 12.61).
Vasubandhu, for instance, clarifies that, in sūtras such as these, the reason that the Buddha focuses on dependent origination as it applies to living beings—when in fact it applies to both animate (sattva) and inanimate (asattva) things—was in order to instruct individuals on how to overcome ignorance given its role in their own cyclic existence (AKBh ad AKK 3.25). He cites other sūtras wherein the Buddha explains (i) dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) as well as (ii) dependently originated (pratītyasamutpanna) dharmas as referring to all conditioned things (AKBh ad 3.28ab).
Fragment B8 9–10; trans. J. Barnes (1987: 82–83).
Timaeus 28a; trans. Zeyl (2000: 13).
In Abhidharma lists of ultimately real things, such as the seventy-five dharmas of the Sarvāstivāda, there are commonly three unconditioned dharmas: (i) space (ākāśa) understood as the absence of obstruction, (ii) the cessation of contaminated dharmas and rebirth, which is attained through analysis (pratisaṃkhyā-nirodha), and (iii) the cessation of the arising of future dharmas, which is not attained through analysis, but can be said to exist by virtue of the absence of the causes for their arising (apratisaṃkhyā-nirodha). Vasubandhu (AKBh ad 2.55d) explains that, according to Sarvāstivādins, unconditioned things cannot have causes or results since they exist outside of time, but one of them—cessation attained through analysis—can be an effect of a sort. And all of them can be causes of a sort; specifically, Sarvāstivādins hold that unconditioned things can be efficient causes (kāraṇa-hetu) insofar as they do not obstruct the arising of any other dharma.
sarvam evāsaṃskṛtam adravyam iti sautrāntikāḥ | (AKBh ad 2.55d; 82,4).
nāsti kasyacit svātantryam | pratyayaparatantrā hi sarve bhāvāḥ pravartante | (AKBh 9; 477,3).
In fact, Vasubandhu insists that all things are both (i) caused, i.e., they are “dependently originated” (pratītyasamutpanna), and that they themselves are also (ii) causes for other things, i.e., they are implicated by the phrase “dependent origination” (pratītyasamutāda) (AKBh ad 3.28ab).
See AKBh ad 3.28ab; 138,25–139,6. This is one of several explanations that Vasubandhu considers.
On the class of “co-existent cause” (sahabhū-hetu), see AKK 2.50. The four elements are also said to stand in this sort of causal relation with one another. Vasubandhu rejects this kind of cause (AKBh ad 2.51d) and argues that one can only figuratively say that any cause produces its result in the present moment, when in fact, at the time that the result occurs, the cause has already ceased to exist (AKBh ad 2.59c). The Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika acceptance of symmetrical causal relations would preclude such relations being transitive, as causal relations are often supposed to be. While Vasubandhu may be committed to the transitivity of causal relations, this property is not explicitly discussed.
See AKBh ad 2.64d for Vasubandhu’s argument against the possibility of a creator God as the single cause of the world.
See Vasubandhu’s presentation of the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika enumeration of six kinds of causes and four kinds of conditions in AKBh ad 2.49–73. There is a partial overlap in these lists: while all causes are also conditions, not all conditions are causes: the immediately preceding condition (samanantara-pratyaya) and cognitive object condition (ālambana-pratyaya) are not causes, and these two sorts of conditions are restricted to explaining cognitions and mental states. While Vasubandhu recognizes all four kinds of conditions, he does not accept all six kinds of causes; for instance, he rejects the co-existent cause as noted above.
For a discussion of causal pluralism in Vasubandhu vis-à-vis Plato, see Kamtekar (forthcoming), where she identifies a helpful respect in which the two varieties of the efficient cause (kāraṇahetu) might be understood as causes in the productive sense and causes in the dependence sense. These two varieties of kāraṇahetu when understood as a cause in the most general sense are (i) a cause that is a primary reason for something’s existence (pradhānaḥ kāraṇahetuḥ), as a seed is to a sprout, and (ii) a cause that is a subordinate reason for something’s existence by virtue of not obstructing (anāvaraṇa) its origination, as is the damp soil that does not obstruct the growth of a spout (AKBh ad 2.50a). Interestingly, Sarvāstivādins do not even require that a cause in this second non-obstructive sense be in principle capable of obstructing the origination of the result, precluding a counterfactual account of this sort of causation. The outcome is that for any given thing (x) that originates, every non-x thing is a non-obstructive cause for the origination of x. And since Sarvāstivādins accept the reality of dharmas in the three times, this includes not only past and present things, but even future things, which have themselves yet to originate. This also includes unconditioned things that are said to exist outside of time. Since Vasubandhu denies the ultimate reality of non-present and unconditioned things, these things could not be causes in this—or any—sense on his view (AKBh ad 2.55d).
ity anādibhavacakrakam | [AKK 3.19d] … ādau hi parikalpyamāne tasyāhetukatvam eteṣu sajyeta sati cāhetukatve sarvam evedam ahetukaṃ prāduḥsyāt | dṛṣṭaṃ cāṅkurādiṣu bījādīnāṃ sāmarthyaṃ deśakālapratiniyamād agnyādīnāṃ ca pākajādiṣv iti nāsti nirhetukaḥ prādurbhāvaḥ | nityakāraṇāstitvavādaś ca prāg eva paryudastaḥ | tasmān nasty eva saṃsārasyādiḥ | antas tu hetukṣayāt yuktaḥ | hetvadhīnatvājjanmano bījakṣayādivāṅkurasyeti | (AKBh ad 3.19; 130.20–131.2). While the succession of births may end for an individual, it is a more contentious question whether cyclic existence can/will end for all sentient beings, who are often said to be numberless, or limitless. Nāgārjuna, for instance, claims that cyclic existence has no beginning or end (MMK 11.1).
Whether conventional reality constitutes an ontological status proper or is instead a mere negation of something’s ultimate reality has been a topic of recent dispute; see, for instance, McDaniel's (2019a, 2019b) interpretation of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharma as a kind of ontological pluralism, with responses from Brenner (2020) and Guerrero (2022).
See, e.g., Goodman (2004).
AKBh ad 6.4: yasmin navayavaśo bhinne na tadbuddhir bhavati tat saṃvṛtisat / tadyathā ghaṭaḥ / tatra hi kapālaśo bhinne ghaṭabuddhir na bhavati / tatra cānyānapohya dharmān buddhyā tadbuddhirna bhavati taccāpi saṃvṛtisad veditavyam / tadyathāmbu / tatra hi buddhyā rūpādīndharmān apohyāmbubuddhir na bhavati /… tatra bhinne’pi tadbuddhir bhavaty eva / anyadharmāpohe’pi buddhyā tat paramārthasat / tadyathā rūpam / tatra hi paramāṇuśo bhinne vastuni rasārhān api ca dharmān apohya buddhyā rūpasya svabhāvabuddhir bhavaty eva / evaṃ vedanādayo’pi draṣṭavyāḥ / (334,3–6; 8–10).
Perhaps the most important at least apparently relational property ascribed to ultimate reals is causal efficacy. While each ultimate real’s particular sort of causal efficacy is supposed to follow from its intrinsic nature, it would seem that it must also be grounded in the intrinsic nature(s) of the kind(s) of ultimate real(s) that it is capable of causing.
Its existence might be further explained by the ultimately real causes of m, n, etc.
As Loss (2016) sums up, the grounding relation is one of two prevailing accounts of the relation between the whole and its parts, with the other being the “composition as identity,” on which the whole is nothing over and above its parts but is identical with the parts that compose it taken collectively. This second view is based on the intuition that, as Lewis (1999: 83) puts it, mereology is “ontologically innocent.” There is a case to be made that Vasubandhu’s understanding of the relation between conventionally real wholes and ultimately real parts is better understood on the composition as identity model. However, those inclined to take the conventionally real category seriously and read Vasubandhu as an ontological pluralist (e.g., McDaniel, 2019a) may opt for the grounding model, as suggested here.
Here, I draw on Vasubandhu’s debate with the Vātsīputrīyas in AKBh 9 on the status of the conceptual construct (prajñapti) ⟨person⟩ (pudgala) and the precise manner in which it depends on the psychophysical aggregates (skandhānupādāya). While these two ways of explaining the dependence relation are presented as a dilemma for the Vātsīputrīyas, Vasubandhu ultimately claims that both these interpretations of the relation amount to his own view.
kim idam upādāyeti | yady ayam arthaḥ skandhānāṃ lakṣyate teṣv eva pudgalaprajñaptiḥ prāpnoti | yathā rūpādīnālambya teṣv eva kṣīraprajñaptiḥ | (AKBh 9, 461,22–23).
When explaining this dependence relation using the example of the person and the aggregates, Vasubandhu states that the aggregates are the cause of (the mental act of) conceptually constructing ⟨person⟩: skandhānāṃ pudgalaprajñaptikāraṇatvāt | (AKBh 9, 461,24–5). While Vasubandhu does not elaborate on the meaning of kāraṇa (cause) in this context, when laying out the taxonomy of six kinds of causes in his AKBh, this term is used to refer to the primary cause (kāraṇahetu) responsible for bringing something into existence. On Vasubandhu’s account of the kāraṇa-hetu, see AKBh ad 2.50a; when understood as one of the four kinds of conditions, the kāraṇa-hetu is classified as the dominant condition (adhipati-pratyaya) (see AKBh ad 62d).
Here, I take it that the intrinsic nature of an ultimate real is self-grounding, though it might instead be characterized as ungrounded.
The demand for plural grounding, incidentally, rules out any sort of priority monism.
Attributing claims concerning existential modality to authors such as Vasubandhu and Nāgārjuna is not uncontroversial, and the place of metaphysical modality in this intellectual context merits further research. See note 53 below for more detailed discussion on this point.
In response, Vasubandhu might appeal to a strategy like that proposed by Dasgupta (2016), on which only substantive facts are beholden to the PSR, but what he calls “autonomous facts,” such as definitions or essential facts like “x has such and such intrinsic nature” are not apt for grounding/explanation. Of course, since Nāgārjuna rejects the existence of essences, or intrinsic natures, he would deny that there are any autonomous facts; there can be no category of facts that is not apt for explanation. And even if one maintained that definitions are not grounded in real essences, Nāgārjuna would insist that there will always be extrinsic grounds that explain why something is the way that it is.
na cāsty arthaḥ kaścid ahetukaḥ kvacit (Ye, 2011: 68).
rgyu med par smra ba dag kho bo’i phyogs ni thams cad rgyu med pa las’grub par’dod la | bsgrub par bya ba ni gtan tshigs kyis’grub par’dod na ni phyogs snga ma dang’gal lo || (PP 919).
Nāgārjuna makes this claim in MMK 1.1 as well as MMK 4.2, and his commentors supply similar explanations when commenting on both these stanzas. In what follows, I draw from both contexts. Of course, in MMK 1.1, Nāgārjuna also denies that something could originate from a cause that is either the identical to or distinct from it. However, he rejects these possibilities for things that purportedly have an intrinsic nature. As he makes clear, particularly in MMK 24, he does not deny dependent origination in general as it applies to conventionally real things, all of which necessarily lack an intrinsic nature. Bhāviveka likewise clarifies in MHK 3.159ab that, from the conventional standpoint, things do arise from causes that are distinct from them.
rgyu med pa las kyang skye ba med de | rtag tu thams cad las thams cad skye bar thal bar’gyur ba’i phyir dang | rtsom pa thams cad don med pa nyid kyi skyon du’gyur ba’i phyir ro || (BP ad MMK 1.1, 10,21–23); Sanskrit as preserved in PsP (195,5–6): ahetuto notpadyante bhāvāḥ sadā ca sarvataś ca sarvasambhavaprasaṅgāt ||. Buddhapālita provides the same argument in support of Nāgārjuna’s claim in MMK 4.2 (cited above): don gang yang rgyu med pa can ni / ma mthong zhing [Saito: zhin] gang du yang ma bstan te | rtag tu thams cad las thams cad’byung bar thal bar’gyur ba’i phyir dang rtsom pa thams cad don med pa nyid kyi skyon du’gyur ba’i phyir ro || (BP ad MMK 4.2, 60,9–12).
dngos po gang dag gang na yang || skyes pa nam yang yod ma yin || zhes bya ba’i skabs yin no || ci’i phyir zhe na | de ston pa’i rjes su dpag pa med pa’i phyir dang || rjes su dpag pa dang || grags pa’i gnod par’gyur ba’i skyon yod pa’i phyir yang ngo zhes bya bar dgongs so || (PP 918). Cf. Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā 3.194–195.
grags pa’i gnod pa ni’jig rten’di na yod pa dang de ni rgyu las skye ba grags te | dper na rgyu spun dag las snam bu dang | rtsi rkyang dag las sab ma skye ba la sogs pa bzhin no || (PP 918).
In classical Indian philosophy, causal accounts of constitution are not uncommon. For instance, according to Naiyāyikas and Vaiśeṣikas, whose ontology in general is regarded as commonsensical for the intellectual context, wholes (avayavin) inhere in their parts (avayava), and parts, such as eternal atoms, are the “inhered-in causes” (samavāyi-kāraṇa) of wholes, such as ordinary material objects. Similarly, Sarvāstivādin Ābhidharmikas claim that the four great elements (mahābhūta) are the cause (hetu) of all the derivative forms of matter which have the great elements as their intrinsic nature (MVŚ 663a; Dhammajoti, 2009: 197).
See MMK 24.18, where Nāgārjuna identifies dependent origination with emptiness, and in turn identifies emptiness with dependent designation: yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe | sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā || (Ye, 2011: 426). And see, for instance, Salvini (2011) for an argument based on grammatical analysis in support of reading Nāgārjuna as equating upādāyaprajñapti with pratītyasamutpāda, as Candrakīrti does in his PsP ad MMK 24.18.
apratītyasamutpanno dharmaḥ kaścin na vidyate | yasmāt tasmād aśūnyo’pi dharmaḥ kaścin na vidyate || (Ye, 2011: 426).
MMK 24.18ab, trans. Siderits and Katsura (2013: 277); yaḥ pratītyasamutpāda śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe | (Ye, 2011: 426).
rten cing’brel par’byung ba zhes bya ba don dam pa’i bden pa mchog tu zab pa | (BP 1,23–2,1).
See MMK 1, 24, etc.
Mādhyamikas who accept the existence of unconditioned things would instead endorse the following version of this principle restricted to conditioned things: Necessarily, if x exists and x is a conditioned thing, then the fact that x exists is partially due to, or explained by, some causes (y, z, etc.).
See MMK 7.13 for an explicit rejection of reflexivity in the context of dependent origination.
There could in principle be an infinity that were mind-dependent and nonetheless actual and quantitative, so long as the mind in question could conceive of an actual infinite—perhaps the mind of an omniscient God or a Buddha. Nevertheless, the mind-dependent feature of Nāgārjuna’s world is generally discussed with respect to ordinary, non-omniscient minds, and so the sort of infinite implicated here must conform with the capacities of such minds.
This means that the world is not mind-independently gunky (or junky). See Aitken (2021) and (2023) for an account of the Madhyamaka structure of reality as a kind of metaphysical indefinitism. Cf. Bliss and Priest (2018: 70–71) and Priest (2018) who argue that Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka is a kind of metaphysical infinitism. Westerhoff (2016: 356) has suggested that both coherentism and infinitism are defensible accounts of Madhyamaka.
See, e.g., Ratnāvalī 1.71 and Śūnyatāsaptati 32, where Nāgārjuna argues that since there are no simples, neither can there be a determinate multiplicity.
See Westerhoff (2020) on the impossibility of absolutely general quantification on a Madhyamaka-inspired picture which he calls “irrealism.”.
For Nāgārjuna, there are, however, necessary non-existents; e.g., since having an intrinsic nature is incoherent, and thus metaphysically impossible, anything that has an intrinsic nature is a necessary non-existent. It should be emphasized that attributing metaphysical modal claims to Sanskrit Buddhist philosophers is not uncontroversial. It is commonly observed that classical Indian philosophy in general lacks a clear account of logical or metaphysical modality. As Jan Westerhoff (personal correspondence) as helpfully pointed out, Sanskrit Buddhist philosophers regularly use stock examples of necessary non-existents (e.g., the child of a barren woman) interchangeably with stock examples of contingent non-existents (e.g., sky flowers), which indicates a lack of attention to the distinction between contingent and necessary non-existence. Nevertheless, while these philosophers did not categorize these sorts of examples differently, it is not altogether obvious that they would not regard examples of apparently contingent non-existents like a sky flower as in fact involving some sort of conceptual inconsistency that might deem them necessary non-existents. For instance, if ⟨flower⟩ includes among its defining criteria that it is something that grows on the earth (i.e., if a necessary part of what it means to be a flower is to be something that grows on the earth), and if ⟨earth⟩ and ⟨sky⟩ are definitionally mutually exclusive loci, then ⟨sky flower⟩ may look like an incoherent concept, and thus a necessary nonexistent. Regardless of the status of these sorts of examples, just because these thinkers did not draw an explicit distinction between contingent and necessary truths/entities does not mean that they did not take themselves to be making claims that carried the force of existential necessity and/or possibility; some notion of existential modality is, I suggest, at least implicitly operative in this intellectual context. For instance, one frequently finds existential claims affirmed or denied with universal qualifiers and supported by mutually exclusive and exhaustive destructive dilemmas/tetralemmas, which might be understood to entail that the claim is taken to hold universally and necessarily. One might even look to MMK 1.1 for such an example, where Nāgārjuna negates the possibility of the origination of any existing thing possessing an intrinsic nature, qualified by temporal and locational universality (MMK 1.1 na… jātu vidyante bhāvāḥ kvacana kecana), which is supported by a destructive tetralemma that is taken to be exhaustive. I propose that, were we to present Nāgārjuna with the contingent vs. necessary distinction, he would agree that, for example, the universal absence of an intrinsic nature—and thus the universal absence of violations of the PSR—is a necessary truth, and that the very purpose of demonstrating the logical inconsistency of some existent thing possessing an intrinsic nature is to rule out the metaphysical possibility of any such thing.
See also Walters (2022) for a response to Levey’s argument from the indefinite extensibility of contingent truths.
For instance, Kris McDaniel (2019b: 235) has pointed out that the indefinite extensibility response to the Bennett-van Inwagen argument would yield a hierarchy of increasingly more fundamental facts, and comments that, “if this is the price one must pay for salvaging the PSR, better to consign the PSR to the wrecking yard.”.
For example, the metaphysical possibility of infinite chains of grounding or ontological dependence has been defended in one way or another by Schaffer (2003), Cameron (2008, 2022), Bohn (2009, 2018), Bliss (2013), Tahko (2014), and Morganti (2014, 2015). Both E. Barnes (2018) and Thompson (2018) argue that ontological dependence is non-symmetric rather than asymmetric and that it can hold symmetrically, with Thompson making a case for what she calls “metaphysical interdependence,” Morganti (2018) defends a kind of metaphysical coherentism, and Cameron (2022) argues for a kind of holism involving circular dependence chains.
For instance, one passage from the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra in Ten-thousand Lines (Daśasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā) reads: “This sacred doctrine is groundless, owing to the non-apprehension of the ground of physical forms, and similarly, owing to the non-apprehension of the ground of feelings, perceptions, formative predispositions, and consciousness, and in the same vein, owing to the imperceptibility of the ground of [all other attributes and attainments], up to and including omniscience” (trans. Padmakara Translation Group 2023, 23.30).
See MMK 18.9 for these two features listed among five characteristics of (the realization of) tattva. In PP ad MMK 24.8, Bhāviveka identifies tattva with the ultimate truth, explaining that, etymologically, (i) it is “ultimate” since it is the ultimate object (paramārtha) of non-conceptual cognition (nirvikalpajñāna), and (ii) it is a “truth” since it obtains universally.
For helpful comments and discussion, I would like to thank Michael Della Rocca, Jay Garfield, Mark Siderits, and Jan Westerhoff, audiences at the Columbia Philosophy Faculty Works-in-Progress Workshop and Method, Theory, and Reality, as well as an anonymous referee.
Abbreviations
- AKK:
-
Abhidharmakośa of Vasubandhu in Pradhan (1975)
- AKBh:
-
Abhidharmakośabhāṣya of Vasubandhu in Pradhan (1975)
- BP:
-
Buddhapālita Madhyamakavṛtti of Buddhapālita in Saito, vol. 2 (1984)
- MMK:
-
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna in Ye (2011)
- PP:
-
Prajñāpradīpamūlamadhyamakavṛtti of Bhāviveka in Bstan’gyur dpe bsdur ma, text no. 3080, vol. 57, 905–1486
- PsP:
-
Prasannapadā of Candrakīrti, in MacDonald (2015)
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Aitken, A. Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu on the principle of sufficient reason. AJPH 3, 19 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-024-00142-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-024-00142-1