AT a recent Salisbury Democracy Café Trevor Wells talked passionately about a book by T R V Murti looking at the central philosophy of Buddhism. I was so fascinated that I bought a copy.  I wrote the following critique and Trevor has kindly responded.  I have included that response below.  Our dialogue continues…

MANY people in the West are interested in the non-religious Buddhism exemplified by Stephen Batchelor in his book Buddhism Without Belief.  More recently writers have been exploring the ways that Buddhist thinking on how the brain forms a model of the world – rather than perceiving it unmediated – chimes with the discoveries of neuroscience.

So, it was with some trepidation that I bought a copy of T R V Murti’s The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of Madhyamika System after it was mentioned during a recent Democracy Café. This a complex book, and trying to boil it down to its essence is not easy. But, basically, Madhyamika claims that critical analysis reveals the inherent flaws and contradictions in every theory that ‘cannot be remedied by attention and adjustment’.  According to Murti, however, the rejection of every view or theory by using the logical tool reductio ad absurdum does not mean the ‘acceptance of any other view’. Indeed, the rejection of all ‘thought categories and views is the rejection of Reason to apprehend reality.  The Real is transcendent to thought’.

The essence of the Madhyamika attitude, according to Murti, is to ‘observe the nature of things without standpoints’.  Hypotheses are useful in the field of science where they can be verified (or falsified) by sense-experience but, argues Murti, the ‘procedure…carries a necessary limit with it’ and the problem with philosophical systems is that they ‘adopt this procedure, but discard the limitations’.  Philosophy is distinguished from scientific procedures because it ‘claims to give absolute certain knowledge’.

The Madhyamika method is to ‘deconstruct the mind’ which leads to the ‘purification of the intellect’ and, ultimately, Intellectual Intuition devoid of the two extremes of the Excluded Middle ‘Is’ and ‘Is not’. Criticism in Madhyamika is not a means to an end, ‘criticism itself is philosophy’. Murti lays great store by the confusion and mystery of causation, space and time, particularly the first.  He points to western philosophers, particularly David Hume, whose scepticism led to Kant being aroused from his metaphysical slumber to come up Transcendental Idealism.  Indeed, Kant receives special treatment as being quite close to Madhyamika, even though he was not ‘genuinely convinced of the possibility of Intellectual Intuition, pure knowledge without the mediation of categories’.

But what is Intellectual Intuition?  Well, according to Murti, it is ‘unfathomable, immeasurable, too deep for words, too universal for distinctions to apply’.  And: “Intuition is the Absolute.”  Then we discover that the Absolute is equated with the Perfect Being or God, and Buddha is deified as such – although there is no restriction on the number and form of Perfect Beings, and every ‘being is Buddha in the making’.

What to make of all this?  Well, one could point out a number of apparent inconsistencies.  For example, much is made of demolishing all existing rational theories, but to do so Madhyamika uses a highly rational tool – reductio ad absurdum.  Again, the avowed aim is to create the concept less mind, and yet the notion of Intellectual Intuition sounds very much like, well, a concept.  And why should Intellectual Intuition fill the void?  Why not Schopenhauer’s undifferentiated and amoral force, which he calls the Will?  Achieving a state of Intellectual Intuition seems to be impossible for most of us but Murti argues that the Perfect Being is able to have one foot in the nouminal and one in the phenomenal to enlighten the rest of us – but how can he do that if, as we have seen, Intellectual Intuition is, literally, ineffable?

One might also challenge some of Murti’s claims about Western philosophy, in particular that it is all in search of the universal. That certainly isn’t true of Hume or Nietzsche, indeed the latter’s philosophy is based on criticism from which emerges the ubermensch, like the Perfect Being, beyond Good and Evil.  And his categorisation of agnosticism is, arguably, another Straw Man when he describes it as an ‘attitude of doubt and despair’.  In fact, the man who coined the word, T H Huxley, expressed it positively as ‘follow your reason as far as it will take you’ and negatively as ‘do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable’.

This brings us to the heart of the matter.  There is no doubt that Murti would be able to counter all of the criticisms made in this article but perhaps this isn’t the point.  According to Batchelor Buddhism is first and foremost a method – ‘not something to believe in but something to do’.  And we might adopt another logical tool called Biting he Bullet in which one accepts the rather unpalatable consequences of principles which one is unwilling to jettison.  This is exactly what Hume does.  He argued that even if one could not establish a firm foundation of empiricism by using empirical methods without vicious circularity, we nevertheless have a strong intuition (in the everyday sense of the word) that we do live in a world bounded by causation, space and time, even though these categories seem to disappear at the sub-atomic level.  So, given this strong intuition, rather than going down the a priori route, Hume asks how we can be rescued from scepticism.  He should be seen, therefore, not as a sceptical philosopher but as a post-sceptical philosopher.

For myself, I am conflicted by something similar to the duck-rabbit illusion.  One minute I see materialism, the next transcendentalism. For most of the time, however, I try to live my life according to Huxley’s agnosticism and Bite the Bullet with regard to the limitations of reason, seeking an uncomfortable position between the two.

Dickie Bellringer

The essence of the teachings of the Buddha as they present themselves to me are intended to be understood in a non-religious sense. It is important to recognise that the Buddha considered it the height of foolishness and futility to attempt to make either a positive or negative statement with regard to reality.  He therefore disregarded all views as merely views (drsti).

The Buddha makes clear:

To hold that the world is eternal or to hold that it is not, or to agree with any other of the propositions you adduce is the jungle of theorising, the wilderness of theorising, the tangle of theorising, the bondage and shackles of theorising, attended by ill, distress, perturbation and fever; it conduces not to detachment, passionlessness, tranquillity, peace, to knowledge and wisdom of Nirvana.  This is the danger I perceive in these views which makes me discard them all.

The ultimate anti dogmatism.  Views are to be understood as like a raft used to cross the ocean of existence but to be cast away as the useless things they are once having reached the other side.  They have a purpose but are not an end in themselves.  The Buddhist rejects all views as perfunctory. 

This contention also necessarily implies that the criticism of views is not itself a view.  The criticism of all views is the heart of the Madhyamika approach and the basis of its philosophy.  It is recognised and understood that philosophical debate is inescapably circular by its very nature but nevertheless remains purposeful.  As TS Elliot commented:

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began but to know the place for the first time.

Reason and its dialectical mode is functional for everyday subject/object analysis but reality is a priori not subject to anything because it is not objective, it simply is.  Subject and object are one. Whatever reality is it is not subject to analysis by any means reliant on reason to reveal it.  The Buddhist masters were fully aware that language soon fails to provide a meaningful means of exploration. The purpose is to lead the pupil to discover and manifest direct intuitive understanding.  Intuition of the absolute is the absolute.

The master would enter the room of initiates take his position at the head of the class. Hours would pass without a word spoken. The master would finally exit the room turning to the class and uttering ’’Now do you understand’’.

The Excluded Middle is not the result of synthesis as an expression of the resolution of the dialectical approach.  It is not a resolution it is a transcendence of the level of the dilemma and contradiction inherent within reasons function.  The recognition of the inherent conflict in reason itself is the first step to its transcendence.

I like your description of one minute seeing materialism and the next transcendentalism.  Perhaps the momentary glimpse of the transcendent is what is required to give meaning to the material.

Trevor Wells