Comment and Discussion

Interest in Madhyamika continues to increase, and now no Eastern philosopher is receiving more attention than Nagarjuna. Hopefully we have finally reached the point of being able to do more than just "follow" his dialectic-always granting Nagarjuna the benefit of a doubt-and can begin to subject the Midhyamakakdrikd to an impartial critique. Such a "radical criticism" is the intention of L. Stafford Betty's paper "Nagarjuna's Masterpiece-Logical, Mystical, Both, or Neither?" One must be grateful to Professor Betty for the attempt, but his critique does not succeed. Of course I shall argue that he misses the point of Nagarjuna's arguments, but more generally I think it can be shown that Betty, too, falls victim to that perpetual pitfall of all Madhyamika interpretation: seeing Nagarjuna's quite unique approach through a very different set of philosophical spectacles. Usually this has involved viewing Madhyamika through the categories of another system-Stcherbatsky's Kant, Murti's Vedanta, Gudmundsen's Wittgenstein-which (as with earlier interpretations of nirvana) reveals more about the interpreter than the interpreted. Apparently Betty has no such metaphysical ax to grind, but there remain more deep-rooted Western presuppositions about the nature and role of philosophy which are alien to Nagarjuna's enterprise and, not surprisingly, result in incomprehension. One turns to Betty's critique with high hopes but is disappointed to see that it consists of two points, neither of which is new. First, what is admitted to be an inconclusive argument is made that Nagarjuna plays on-or rather withwords, citing two examples from the "Motion and Rest" chapter of the Karikas. Second is the apparently more telling objection that there is "no way of salvaging the Kirikas from the scourge of their own conclusions" 2-that is, the sunyata of all views-and that Nagarjuna is inconsistent because the Kirikas are in fact littered with views. Betty concludes that the Kirikas are logically faulty and therefore (answering his title-question) should be viewed as a mystical manifesto rather than a work of philosophical logic.3 Many contemporary Madhyamikas would, I suspect, be inclined to grant Betty his weaker first point, ameliorating the damage with a reference to Nagarjuna's historical context: that we must take into account the accepted philosophical categories of his time; they would then concentrate on challenging his second point. I propose to do the opposite. First, we shall see that Nagarjuna's argument in the "Motion and Rest" chapter is not a case of wordplay, but points to a serious flaw in our "movement-language"-more precisely, he is demonstrating the unintelligibility of ascribing motion-predicates