The Tree of Enlightenment - Major Traditions of Buddhism by Peter Della Santina

Author:Peter Della Santina
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

The Development of Mahayana Philosophy

In this chapter I would like to consider the further development of Mahayana philosophy in India, the relationship between the Middle Way philosophy and the Mind Only philosophy, and how these two influence the religious and practical traditions of Buddhism. We have discussed the Middle Way and Mind Only philosophies in Chapters 18 and 19, but have merely sketched the outlines of Mahayana philosophy. The philosophy of the Middle Way, as presented by Nargarjuna, and that of Mind Only, as presented by Asanga and Vasubandhu, are the twofold basis of the Mahayana tradition, forming its general foundation as it evolved during the first four centuries of the common era. This period was followed by another eight hundred years of philosophical development of the Mahayana tradition in India, not to mention its continuing development in the other countries of Asia to which Buddhism traveled--China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Mongolia. To gain a comprehensive picture of this development in India, I would like to trace the interaction between the Middle Way and Mind Only schools from the fourth century C.E. to the end of the first millennium. Let us look first at what took place in the Middle Way school. The principles set forth by Nargarjuna were elaborated by his disciples and successors, beginning with Aryadeva. Whereas Nargarjuna’s primary concern had been to establish the authenticity of the philosophy of emptiness in opposition to the earlier schools of Buddhist philosophy, Aryadeva's was to demonstrate that the philosophy of emptiness was equally valid in the case of the non-Buddhist Brahmanical and Vedantic schools. The works of Nargarjuna and Aryadeva fall within the formative and fundamental period of the philosophy of the Middle Way. The period after Nargarjuna saw the emergence of two Middle Way sub-schools, the Prasangika and the Svatantrika. The division between these two schools is based on how they present the philosophy of emptiness. When we discussed the philosophy of emptiness in Chapter 18, we spoke about a characteristic method of argument, the reductio ad absurdum, that Middle Way philosophers used to reject the positions advanced by their opponents. In Sanskrit this form of argument is called prasanga, and it was from this term that the Prasangika school took its name. Arguments ad absurdum are designed to expose contradictions and absurdities in opponents' positions. For example, the theory of self-production (i.e., that entities originate from existent things) was advocated by a rival of the Prasangikas, the Sankhya philosophical school. Self-production can be refuted by the argument that if entities originated from themselves, then they would go on originating indefinitely and we would have an endless series of reproductions of the same existing entities. In other words, there would be nothing new under the sun. The prasanga argument is that entities do not originate from themselves because they already exist, and the origination of something that already exists is plainly absurd. Besides, if existent entities do originate, then they will go on reproducing themselves ad infinitum. Alternatively, one might reject the Sankhya theory of self-production by means of a syllogism.

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