Truth or Consequences: A Buddhist Debate over Epistemology without Foundations?

Dr. Douglas Duckworth joins the University of Calgary for the Kawamura Memorial Lecture and Seminar Series.
For the first of two talks Dr. Douglas Duckworth discusses in the first chapter of his Prasannapadā, Candrakīrti famously defended Buddhapālita against Bhāviveka’s criticism that he had failed to formulate Nāgārjuna’s critique of causality in terms of probative arguments, but rather left the arguments in the form of reductios. This debate is well known to be the starting point of the “Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka” interpretation in Tibet. Indeed, Tsongkhapa (1357-1419) has said that “an autonomous probative argument is not suitable to generate the view of reality in an opponent” in the context of explaining Candrakīrti’s Prāsaṅgika. In his critique of Tsongkhapa’s synthesis of Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka and epistemology (pramāṇa), the fifteenth-century Sakya scholar, Daktsang (stag tshang shes rab rin chen), accused Tsongkhapa of “eighteen great contradictions,” including a contradiction that “the presence of inference contradicts the absence of probative arguments.” That is, Daktsang argued that a robust notion of inference - that is, inference qua pramāṇa - is antithetical to the “logic” behind Candrakīrti’s denial of probative arguments in this context. This seminar will discuss some of the issues driving this debate, and shed some light on the place of epistemology in an anti-foundationalist interpretation of Madhyamaka.
Douglas Duckworth, Ph.D. (Virginia, 2005) is Professor at Temple University and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion. His papers on Buddhist thought and cross-cultural philosophy have appeared in numerous journals and books, including the Blackwell Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, Sophia, Philosophy East & West, the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Asian Philosophy, and the Journal of Contemporary Buddhism. Duckworth is the author of Mipam on Buddha-Nature: The Ground of the Nyingma Tradition (SUNY 2008) and Jamgön Mipam: His Life and Teachings (Shambhala 2011). He also introduced and translated Distinguishing the Views and Philosophies: Illuminating Emptiness in a Twentieth-Century Tibetan Buddhist Classic by Bötrül (SUNY 2011). He is a co-author of Dignāga’s Investigation of the Percept: A Philosophical Legacy in India and Tibet (Oxford 2016) and co-editor of Buddhist Reponses to Religious Diversity: Theravāda and Tibetan Perspectives (Equinox 2020). He also is the co-editor, with Jonathan Gold, of Readings of Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra) (CUP 2019). His latest works include Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature (OUP 2019) and a translation of an overview of the Wisdom Chapter of the Way of the Bodhisattva by Künzang Sönam, entitled The Profound Reality of Interdependence (OUP 2019).