Everyday reality as fiction — A Mādhyamika interpetation
✍ Scribed by Charles Crittenden
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 1981
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 718 KB
- Volume
- 9
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-1791
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
FICTION -A MADHYAMIKA INTERPETATION
Certain Buddhists 'put all objects over which our thoughts and other psychological activities range at the same level' -that is, they held that there were no ultimate distinctions between things which now exist, past and future thing, fictional and imaginary entities, and logically impossible things.' The claim is, briefly put, that everything is fictional; Matilal calls this the 'pan-fictional' view and I shall adopt his terminology.2 To common sense, this is of course an absurd position on the face of it; to anyone with the least logical sophistication objections immediately spring to mind (fictional as contrasted with what?, e.g.). Yet the doctrine is central to an important intellectual and religious tradition which! apart from its intrinsic interest, has much to offer Western thought. So it is well worth while trying to understand what lies behind this apparently paradoxical view. Several preliminary comments are in order. First, although the panfictional theory was not held only by Madhyamikas but by others in the Buddhist tradition, and perhaps by Indian philosophers who were not Buddhists at all,3 I will be offering an interpretation which is most in keeping with the Madhyamika position as I understand it. Still it will be intelligible how one might, given the reading I shall propose, adopt other views -the --Yogacara, for example. Secondly, the kind of interpretations I shall offer has sometimes been called an 'explication' or 'reconstruction': an attempt to provide a clear and in some sense plausible rendering of a concept or thesis. Thus I shall not be offering scholarly or historical analysis; in particular I will not be concerned with whether the formulation of the pan-fictional outlook provided was actually suggested by Midhyamikas. Rather this reading is Madhyamika in the sense that it offers an interpretation of this outlook which makes it intelligible and perhaps even plausible given certain other commitments. and in addition corresponds naturally to characteristic Mrldhyamika views in ethics, theory of language, and metaphysics. Although not quite all the typical Madhyamika doctrines are dealt with here,4 in effect a reconstruction of the Madhyamika position as a whole will be suggested from the viewpoint of certain semantical notions discussed in Western