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The Other Chandrakīrti: A Corrective, Contextual, Textual Study

1. Overview

Chandrakīrti is known to Western scholars primarily for his articulation of the distinction between what Tibetan scholars later identified as the two main schools of Central Philosophy—Dialecticist and Dogmaticist¹⁰—in his definitive commentary on Nāgārjuna’s Wisdom (Prajñā),¹¹ the Lucid Exposition (Prasannapadā). Yet Tibetan scholars know him primarily through another of his works, Central Way Introduction (Madhyamakāvatāra), still the required text for the introductory Centrist studies course in the core curricula of Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Geluk orders’ monastic colleges. In contrast to the Lucid Exposition and its critical, hermeneutical concerns, the Introduction concerns itself with the practical application of Centrist thought, as a philosophical language therapy crucial to the Universalist (Mahayana) ethos of compassion that aims to produce enlightened altruists (bodhisattva) and fully enlightened beings (saṁbuddha).¹² One would expect the discrepancy between the Chandrakīrtis known to modern Western and Tibetan scholars to have been resolved when, after a decades-long lull since the pioneering work on the Lucid Exposition, a 4recent revival in Chandrakīrti scholarship has yielded several fine translation studies of others of his texts, including three of the Introduction.¹³ Not so. The two main Introduction studies by Western scholars focused exclusively on the philosophical sixth chapter and Chandrakīrti the Centrist philosopher, while the one translation study by a Tibetan scholar focused on the entire work and Chandrakīrti the Universalist.

Is this discrepancy simply a reflection of the divergent interests and methods of “modern scientific” (i.e., supposedly “objective,” “culture-neutral”) scholarship versus “traditional religious” (i.e., supposedly “relative,” “culture-bound”) scholarship? Or does it reflect a divergence between two equally objective yet culturally distinct scientific perspectives, which reveal two complementary aspects of Chandrakīrti’s lifework? If we entertain the latter alternative, it is possible that a major aspect of a major Buddhist thinker’s contribution has been systematically overlooked or distorted by Western scholarship as a result of conceptual biases and methodological limits assumed with the received consensus of modern scientific Indology. Perhaps more importantly, it is also possible that these Euro-ethnocentric biases and limits may be overcome in part by a critical exploration of the received consensus of Indo-Tibetan Buddhological Indology.¹⁴

Here, I outline the argument that, in fact, such a systematic distortion has occurred, hindering the advancement of Western Chandrakīrti studies. Although some Western academics have begun to reverse the received bias against Tibetan scholars that considers them “native informants,” and recognize them as “Indologists avant la lettre,”¹⁵ the very idea that “traditional” Buddhist theories and methods may meet some current criteria of “objectivity” or “science” challenges the consensus of Western Indology; challenges the modern use of those terms in any Western language;¹⁶ and, in another direction, challenges the postmodern mania for “deconstructing” 5the modern scientific ideal that human knowledge can/should be judged by such universal standards.¹⁷ Obviously, I cannot here fully address these complex challenges. Instead, I offer in outline some suggestions of how to meet the three challenges, to provide a philosophical context for understanding my translation.

First, I offer a brief sketch of the key works of Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti in order to clarify the significance of The Sixty Verses on Reason (or The Reason Sixty, or Reason for short) and its Commentary. I then provide a summary of what I consider to be the problems of interpretation and translation that have marred Western study of these two texts, to illustrate the way in which the dualistic bias of European scholarship has limited Western Centrism (Mādhyamika) studies. I also attempt to elaborate briefly both the extent and intent of Chandrakīrti’s contribution and to show its broader relevance to modern Indology as well as to current debates in the philosophy of science and objectivity. I introduce Chandrakīrti’s Commentary on the Sixty Verses on Reason (Yuktiṣaṣṭikāvṛtti, or The Reason Sixty Commentary, or the Commentary for short) as a major work on epistemological agency bridging the critical concerns of the Lucid Exposition and the practical concerns of the Introduction.

From the standpoint of modern historiography, traditional biographies¹⁸ give us little on which to base a factual account of Nāgārjuna’s life. Nāgārjuna is celebrated by Tibetan historians as the Savior (Nātha), founding Champion (Mahāratha), and Noble Father (Āryapitā) of the Universal Vehicle philosophers, as well as the Great Master (Mahācārya) of its Central Philosophy.¹⁹ As for the oeuvre that must serve as frame of reference for reconstructing his life, one recent study gives a conservative list of fifty-two works attributed to Nāgārjuna by traditional sources, crediting thirteen 6philosophical and religious texts as genuine,²⁰ and fifteen more—including works on ethics, medicine, and biochemistry—as possibly authentic.²¹

Among the uncontested works, we take three as defining our Nāgārjuna: the Wisdom, the Jewel Rosary—these two generally acknowledged as his masterpieces on philosophy and religion, respectively—and The Reason Sixty, because, as I understand it, it stands midway between those two masterpieces. Bridging from the rigorous critiques of the Wisdom toward the elaboration of the ethos of compassion in the Jewel Rosary, it underlines the central thrust of Nāgārjuna’s therapeutic philosophy of language—namely, the elimination of cognitive and affective resistances to nondualistic wisdom and compassion. Thus our philosophical sketch of the man who composed the Reason presents the product of his prolific genius as an oeuvre defined by the intersection of the three spheres of concern he addresses in the Wisdom, Reason, and Rosary, respectively, as follows: (1) applying the methods of Indian linguistics and analytic contemplation to a critique of the self-limiting reifications and habitual misuse of binary conceptuality;²² (2) applying the dereifying, philosophical, language therapy of voidness to correct the dualistic cognitive and affective resistances to wisdom’s attainment of omniscience, or epistemological objectivity; and (3) formulating a communicative ethics of voidness-compassion as a nondualistic standard of enlightened agency. The key point of intersection of these three spheres is the theory and practice of nondualism (advaya-vāda), the reconciliation of dichotomies caused by reification of dualistic constructs in the philosophical, cognitive-perceptual, and practical domains. Thus the interpretive key 7to the biographical legends surrounding Nāgārjuna must be his singular focus as author of the Central Philosophy: to treat therapeutically the reification of dualistic constructs limiting human reason’s realization of personal, social, and cultural aims.

The unity and enduring impact of the Wisdom, the Reason, and the Jewel Rosary lie in their formulations of nonduality (advayatā) in terms of a series of three equations—voidness = relativity; voidness = omniscience, or epistemological objectivity (sarvajñatā); and voidness = compassion—the three designed to guide the dereification of biases and resistances limiting the development of enlightened conceptuality, objective knowledge, and altruistic action. Nāgārjuna’s elegant system of formulating and reproducing the relativistic insight of nonduality—in terms of the voidness of intrinsic reality, of intrinsic objectivity, and of intrinsic identity (svabhāva-svarūpa-svalakṣaṇa-śūnyatā)—stands as the backbone of the Universal Vehicle, which sustained the Asian Buddhist experiment in civilization. In this sense, the legendary longevity and impact of Nāgārjuna is the longevity and impact of his Centrist system. It is this system whose critical edge refined the logic of Vedic reflection, inspiring the nondualism of Gauḍapāda and Shaṅkara;²³ it is this system whose nondual formula of transcendent insight reached to East Asia, earning Nāgārjuna recognition as the fourteenth patriarch of the Ch’an/Zen tradition;²⁴ and it is this system whose art of self-conquering wisdom and compassion helped “tame” the fierce warriors of Tibet and Mongolia. The life of Nāgārjuna’s systematization of Indian nondualism in this sense may be as perennial as the network of humanity’s binary symbols; its therapeutic impact is as protean as the symbolic mind’s self-deceptive demon of reification.²⁵

Among Chandrakīrti’s uncontested works,²⁶ we focus here on his Lucid 8Exposition (PPMMV),²⁷ Central Way Introduction (MA), and The Reason Sixty Commentary (YṢV) translated below. We rank the Commentary with Chandrakīrti’s two more well-known masterpieces because it serves a transitional role in his system, linking the critical hermeneutical pedagogy of his Lucid Exposition with the practical, therapeutic anthropology of his Introduction, just as Nāgārjuna’s Reason links his own Wisdom and Jewel Rosary. This contextual reference frame is consistent with the modern Western and Tibetan views of Chandrakīrti as the supreme interpreter of Nāgārjuna’s system, in the context of the intellectual climate of sixth- and seventh-century Nālandā University. Based on the three works of Nāgārjuna, the concerns of the Lucid Exposition, the Commentary, and the Introduction, respectively, can be defined as follows: (1) to articulate Nāgārjuna’s conventionalist method as a therapeutic philosophy of language, in which the ultimate reality of voidness serves as a second-order sign and dereifying reminder of the antifoundationalist, antiessentialist insight that the social consensual reality we construct is based on mere conventional language use (upādāya-prajñaptimātra) and is viable only as critically unexamined in ultimate terms (aparamārthika-vicaryamānasiddha*); (2) to apply his language therapeutic method to define the epistemology of Centrism, based on privileging a deobjectifying (nirālambana)²⁸ rational mode in which the pure nonfinding of any essentialist self or world counters cognitive bias in, and affective resistance to, objective self-knowledge and rational action; and (3) to translate this social epistemology into a Centrist anthropology, combining philosophical language therapy and communicative ethics in a self-corrective practice meant to produce enlightened altruists (bodhisattva) as ideal epistemological and social agents.

The point of intersection of these three concerns is deobjectifying wisdom and compassion (anopalambha-prajñā-karuṇā*), the self-critical, communicative competence at the heart of Centrist method, which aims to free the practitioner to see through and artfully master the spell of linguistic convention on which the cooperative construction of all human life-9cycles depends.²⁹ Hence, the hermeneutical reference point in the following discussion and translation will be Chandrakīrti’s deobjectifying method, his therapy for the disease of the reification of philosophical, scientific, and mundane conventions of language that limits human reason’s realization of personal, social, and cultural aims.³⁰

2. Previous Studies of The Reason Sixty

It has long been a commonplace of cross-cultural research in intellectual history that the methods of philology cannot convey the truth of a work independent of the hermeneutical reference frame of the translation. Yet there are few areas in Indology or Buddhology where the interdependence of philological method and philosophical clarity are as critical as in Centrist studies. Christian Lindtner’s 1982 study of Nāgārjuna’s works seeks “the solid foundation required for real progress in these studies” in the objective tools of philology, rightly pointing out that modern translations suffer from their “insufficient philological outfit.”³¹ Yet the translations Lindtner 10mentions³² suffer equally from inadequate hermeneutical frames of reference, and this remains a fundamental problem limiting progress in the field, despite the philological gains that have so benefited recent efforts. Most recently, another group of scholars, including de Jong, Ruegg, Thurman, Huntington, and Fenner,³³ has argued cogently for a methodology combining philological and hermeneutical rigor in equal measure. The overview below outlines the concepts and methods presupposed as the framework of this translation, in an effort to address remaining critical limitations in recent Centrist studies in general and Chandrakīrti studies in particular.

Previous translations of The Reason Sixty exemplify the importance of combining philological with hermeneutical rigor. The first modern language version, Philipp Schaeffer’s German translation, suffers equally from its neo-Kantian interpretive framework and from its reliance on the Chinese text: “Die Madhyamaka-Schule steht auf dem Standpunkt, das man selbst diese Attribute dem absoluten Wesen, das den dharma zu Grunde liegt, nicht zuschrieben kann, da sie auf der Empirie basieren.”³⁴ Unlike Stcherbatsky’s felicitous comparison of the critical epistemology and logic of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti with those of Kant,³⁵ Schaeffer’s comparative approach to Nāgārjuna obscures rather than clarifies the thrust of Centrist philosophy, whose critique is directed against precisely the kind of reified terms on which Kantian critique is based, especially against dualistic constructs of persons and things “in themselves” (an sich = svabhāvatā).

One measure of the depth of this obstacle is how persistently subsequent translations of the Reason and its Commentary have been marred by similar misunderstandings. Despite their successive gains in philological precision, most of the recent Western language versions of our texts apply a hermeneutical dualism to Nāgārjuna’s nondualistic message.³⁶ These and earlier 11modern misreadings fall into two basic classes, depending on whether they misidentify the ultimate reality of voidness as an ineffable something or as a tautological nothing. The former class tacitly assumes an idealist or mystical form of modern foundationalist-essentialist (i.e., neo-Kantian) critique in which reason dialectically approximates or intuitively leaps toward a direct experience of the ineffable particularity of things-in-themselves; the latter class tacitly assumes a skeptical, pragmatist, or materialist form of modern critique in which reason knows its truths and itself as objective nonentities, intrinsically empty constructions devoid of all concrete sense or meaning.³⁷ Exemplifying the former, we read in the introduction to Scherrer-Schaub’s recent translation of the Commentary:

La connaissance de la réalité (tattva-jñāna) est un savoir pratique que la sage réalise par une vue immédiate, un fait d’expérience personnelle. Si les chemins sont divers et représente autant d’instruments d’entrée dans la réalité, cette dernière et sa connaissance sont de nature unique. Pour rendre compte de cet état, le langage utilise des expressions apparemment paradoxales, ultime recours de l’expression verbale pour sortir d’elle-même.³⁸

Exemplifying the latter, we read in Lindtner’s recent “summary” of Nāgārjuna’s epistemology, “The ultimate truth (tattva) is the object of a cognition without an object (advayajñāna), thus only an object metaphorically speaking (upādāya-prajñapti).”³⁹

Reflecting two views of the same dualistic framework, the pervasiveness of these misreadings is no accident but a historical consequence of the tacit assumption of nineteenth-century neo-Kantian epistemology as the philosophical foundation of modern text-critical disciplines and their methods.⁴⁰ Not until the (antifoundationalist) perspectival relativism of Nietzsche and the (antiessentialist) linguistic conventionalism of the later Wittgenstein has the West produced nondualistic conceptual frameworks and critical methods adequate to translate Buddhist Centrist insight and method accurately.

Given this comparative philosophical reference frame, discussed at length elsewhere,⁴¹ the present textual study assumes a hermeneutic based on the antifoundationalist, antiessentialist (i.e., post-Kantian) critique of knowledge and language in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. The cross-cultural validity of this comparative framework is supported by the basic structure and argument of Nāgārjuna’s Reason Sixty root text and Chandrakīrti’s Commentary, especially when these are viewed in the context of these authors’ other main works. This thesis is threefold: (1) the dualistic read13ings of voidness that have obscured modern translations are precisely those already critiqued as the “(absolutized) view of voidness” (śūnyatādṛṣṭi) by Centrists from Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti to Tsong Khapa; (2) the prime intent of the Reason and its Commentary, and the social-epistemological pivot of Nāgārjuna’s and Chandrakīrti’s systems, is to prescribe a method to treat the reifying mental habit (gro ’dogs pa’i ’dzin stang, adhyāropa-grahabandha*) that underlies both absolutistic and nihilistic malignant views; and (3) that the insight and method of social-epistemological self-correction (buddhiviśodhana) these texts prescribe are best understood as part of a linguistic anthropology whose closest analogs in the West are the language-therapeutic philosophies of Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and especially Wittgenstein and certain of his heirs.

Some may object that translation of an ancient Sanskrit/Tibetan philosophical text should not use any contemporary philosophical method as a comparative lens through which to understand and articulate the original philosophy. I certainly see merit in such an objection, and I would recommend that those who hold such views should limit themselves to restoring Tibetan translations such as the YṢ and YṢV back into facsimiles of Nāgārjuna’s and Chandrakīrti’s original Sanskrit texts.⁴² If translation into English or another modern language is the object, however, we have no choice but to be as self-conscious and self-critical as possible in weighing the philosophical reference frames that influence our choices of translation terminologies.

Given my view that the Reason and its Commentary formulate the self-corrective heart of Centrism as a human scientific method, and acknowledging that the choice of hermeneutical framework is key in any attempt to understand and translate that method, I offer here a comparative reference frame from which I believe its intent may be more clearly interpreted and expressed. The reference frame in the final section of this introduction, “Self-Correction in The Reason Sixty Commentary,” centers on the comparative matching between the nondualism of Nāgārjuna as refined by Chandrakīrti, and the critical philology of Nietzsche as refined in the language philosophy of Wittgenstein. Given the above critique of the Kantian 14comparative reference frame of modern Indology, comparisons of Centrist philosophers with Wittgenstein have been viewed by many as basic to a coherent postmodern reference frame for Centrist studies.⁴³ The challenge posed by such comparisons, however, is that unlike Kant, whose critique of reason the West has had centuries to assimilate, Wittgenstein is newer to modern scholarship than Nāgārjuna. One response to this challenge has been a recent tendency to avoid an in-depth comparative study of Wittgenstein, and to rely primarily on more familiar or recent Western thinkers.⁴⁴ The problem with this is that the more familiar or recent thinkers are typically less critical of the reifying habit than Wittgenstein, and so translating through their reference frame perpetuates subtle forms of the dualistic biases that tend to obscure modern views of Nāgārjuna. Two thoughtful recent efforts in Centrist studies, both based on Chandrakīrti’s Introduction, illustrate this problem.

Relying on Richard Rorty’s view of Wittgenstein, Huntington’s excellent study makes a sophisticated attempt to offer a Dialecticist reading of Nāgārjuna, which yet seems to turn out to be closer to Bhāvaviveka’s Dogmaticism than Chandrakīrti’s Dialecticism.⁴⁵ He assumes Rorty’s claim that Wittgenstein maintained a pragmatic contextualism of language and so reads Nāgārjuna as holding things to lack “existence grounded outside the context of everyday experience” but to have “an intrinsic nature which accounts for their existence in the world”—that is, within the “context” or “nexus of cause and effect which defines our shared sociolinguistic experience.”⁴⁶ As in Bhāvaviveka, this appears to be a clear reification of a relative or conventional “intrinsic nature” (svalakṣaṇa), which is posited as a pragmatic ground of shared knowledge and language. This move of course consigns 15“ultimate reality” to the status of an empty abstraction absolutely devoid of experiential sense or linguistic reference.⁴⁷ Given this doubly misplaced comparative rationale, Huntington asserts that Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti join Wittgenstein in avoiding what Rorty critiques as the “ocular metaphor” (i.e., the image of the mind as a giant “mirror of nature” filled with representations of the world). Though this insight of Rorty, followed by Huntington, is certainly a striking way of expressing the three philosophers’ avoidance of a naïvely absolutist metaphysic, it should be reconciled with the fact that all three do subscribe to a conventionalist metaphysic and routinely describe the effect of their therapeutic philosophies with analogies between dereifying insight and key conventions of visual perception.⁴⁸ 16Finally, comparing Rorty’s view of Wittgenstein’s “edifying” philosophy with a Dogmaticist reading of Nāgārjuna, Huntington describes Centrism as “propaganda” for a Buddhist form of life,⁴⁹ without grounding his argument in any direct interpretation of Wittgenstein’s major works, where he distances himself from pragmatism and rhetorical persuasion⁵⁰ and offers his method as “therapy” for compulsive habits of mind⁵¹ and illnesses of language.⁵² In sum, Huntington’s use of Rorty’s interpretation of Wittgenstein leads him to interpret Centrism as more consistent with Bhāvaviveka’s Dogmaticism than Chandrakīrti’s Dialecticism.⁵³

Fenner’s fine recent study of Chandrakīrti also seems to arrive at an equally subtle misreading, albeit opposite in sense, by assuming Gangadean’s comparative critique of language. Interestingly, the study abandons the insight of Fenner’s own previous work on the “therapeutic contextualization”⁵⁴ of Centrist philosophy, presumably in the conviction that Gangadean’s logical formalism, reminiscent of the early rather than late Wittgenstein, explicitly defines the “structural foundations”⁵⁵ of Centrist method. Following Gangadean’s account of Centrist analysis as a “transformational dialectic” meant “to move consciousness beyond any and all con17ceptual structures,”⁵⁶ Fenner reads Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti as offering a deconstructive training for a “realization of voidness” defined as “like most mystical experiences . . . ineffable . . . inconceivable . . . inexpressible”⁵⁷ and “indefinable.”⁵⁸

In contrast to Huntington’s subtly skeptical pragmatist view (à la Bhāvaviveka), this subtly mystical study arrives at an Idealist-Dogmaticist reading of Nāgārjuna, like that of Shāntarakṣhita and Kamalashīla, whose integration of the systems of Sthiramati, Bhāvaviveka, and Dharmakīrti so influenced Tibet. After offering a cogent account of how and why Centrist “bi-negations” confront the mind with the relativity of language’s “predicate structure,” Fenner obscures the therapeutic point of the consequent “destructuring of conceptuality,” defining the aim of dereifying insight as a voidness “necessar[il]y . . . beyond conventions” of language.⁵⁹ As a consequence of the dichotomous way in which he dissociates the conventional realm of “predicate structure” from the “ineffable” realm of “śūnya consciousness,”⁶⁰ Fenner has problems explaining the subtle therapeutics of the voidness insight that are very similar to the problems encountered by the proponents of Idealist-Dogmaticist Centrism.⁶¹ The first problem is that of how realization of a “necessarily” nonlinguistic voidness results 18from the Centrist system of “bi-negative” rational analysis, a problem only compounded by the Idealist-Dogmaticist strategy of locating the “dialectical transformation” from linguistic to nonlinguistic experience within “consciousness,” linguistically reified as a subtly ineffable something outside the conventions of speech. The second problem is the inverse of the first: explaining how the nonlinguistic content of that negative insight can ever “translate” into the new freedom brought about by illusion-like insight (māyopama-jñāna*) into the usage of conventions of language. If, in Gangadean’s terms, the content of the negative insight is “an unintelligible flux,” how are “the utterances of natural language . . . seen to be figurative and metaphorical”⁶² in the subsequent virtuality insight where “the world is regained by reconstituting the predicative structure?”⁶³ A final, more serious problem with locating voidness outside the world of everyday communication is explaining how the voidness insight opens the way to developing empathy rather than fostering withdrawal into “śūnya consciousness.” Hence this study’s “more tentative . . . conclusions”⁶⁴ about the linkage between wisdom and compassion are limited to speculations about how voidness can buffer rather than heighten empathic sensitivity, “nullify[ing] the potential for the problems of others to personally affect and disturb” the practitioner by exposing them as “creatures of fiction . . . nothing more than a verbal denotation.”⁶⁵

While these, in my opinion, subtly dualistic misreadings of Chandrakīrti are analogous to Traditionist-Centrist and Idealist-Centrist⁶⁶ readings of Nāgārjuna, their currency in Western scholarship is not a random event occurring within an intellectual-historical vacuum. In fact, these misreadings reflect the conflicting positions of objectivist and constructivist camps in the postmodern debate over the objectivity of scientific knowledge and method, a debate sparked by the relativistic turn in modern physics and the linguistic turn in Western philosophy. Although such subtly dualistic camps are evident in the current schools of thought on the radical nondualism of Wittgenstein, their positions are more widely known in connection with the debate between the objectivist and constructivist approaches 19to knowledge advocated by the physical and social scientific communities of the Western academy. Therefore I have attempted to show the family resemblance between the nondualisms of Chandrakīrti and Wittgenstein by couching my discussion of the Traditionist-Idealist-Centrist debate that took place in the classical Buddhist academy in the more accessible language of the postmodern debate over objectivity. In this context, the closest match to the nondualisms of Wittgenstein and Chandrakīrti I have found is the approach to “objectivity” developed by legal philosopher Thomas Nagel.⁶⁷ While he admits to many of the doubts that plague the essentialist alter ego in Wittgenstein’s Investigations, Nagel seems to me to be clearly on the trail of a radical centrist theory of objective knowledge and responsible agency (analogous to Buddhist “omniscience” and “omnicompassion”). Critiquing the prevalent objectivist defense of objective knowledge as “scientistic,” he also unequivocally breaks with the subjectivist, antiscientific conclusions of constructivism and historicism. Instead, he insists on a radical, nondualistic conclusion in striking sympathy with the program of Buddhist human science: not only is the scientific pursuit of objective knowledge inexorably relative to the philosophical pursuit of self-knowledge but at bottom the two are synergistic and inseparable. Avoiding both modern dualistic extremes—scientistic objectivism and antiscientific subjectivism—Nagel insists in The View from Nowhere,

These errors are connected; they both stem from an insufficiently robust sense of reality and of its independence of any particular form of human understanding. (5)

. . . What really happens in the pursuit of objectivity is that a certain element of oneself, the impersonal or objective self, which can escape from the specific contingencies of one’s creaturely point of view, is allowed to predominate. Withdrawing into this element one detaches from the rest and develops an impersonal conception of the world and, so far as possible, of the elements of the self from which one has detached. (9)

. . . We are in a sense trying to climb outside of our own minds, an effort that some would regard as insane and that I regard as philosophically fundamental. (11)

Given this radical centrist approach, Nagel can effectively link objectivity with intersubjective agreement and the pursuit of objective knowledge with a rigorous process of epistemological self-correction:

Because a centerless view of the world is one on which different persons can converge, there is a close connection between objectivity and intersubjectivity. . . . The pursuit of objectivity requires the cultivation of a rather austere universal objective self. (63)

This linkage finally compels him to explore the post-Cartesian connection between epistemological self-correction and ethical self-development, which he describes in terms of the cultivation of an increasingly impartial and altruistic “objective will,” dependent in part on the development of self-regulation:

This involves the idea of an unlimited hypothetical development on the path of self-knowledge and self-criticism. . . . We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed, short of omniscience. . . . What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action. (128–129)

. . . In a sense, I am agreeing with Kant’s view that there is an internal connection between ethics and freedom. . . . We cannot act on the world from outside, but we can in a sense act from both inside and outside our particular position in it. Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will—extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom, reducing the gap between explanation and justification. (135)

Nagel’s vision of a gradual, nondualistic path toward embodied cognitive-practical objectivity bears a striking resemblance to Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti’s gradualism, aimed at “the enlightened performance whose essence is voidness-compassion” (bodhisādhanaṁ śūnyatākaruṇāgarbhaṁ). In particular, his centrist ethics, like theirs, involves marrying a linguistic analysis of self with a pragmatic discipline of self-regulation. Hence, like Wittgenstein and Chandrakīrti, Nagel subordinates objectivist standards of objectivity to a nondualistic cognitive-practical ideal of objectivity as the self-transcendent potential natural to all humans as social-epistemological agents; and like them, he aligns that potential with the nondualistic attitude of non-egocentrism:

Our objectivity is simply a development of our humanity and doesn’t allow us to break free of it. It must serve our humanity and to the extent that it does not we can forget about it. . . . The objective self is a vital part of us, and to ignore its quasi-independent operation is to be cut off from oneself as much as of one were to abandon one’s subjective individuality. . . . Finally, there is an attitude which cuts through the opposition between transcendent universality and parochial self-absorption, and that is the attitude of nonegocentric respect for the particular. (221–22)

These brief excerpts should suffice to illustrate the family resemblance between Nagel’s Wittgensteinian approach to objectivity and Chandrakīrti’s approach to transcendent wisdom. This resemblance serves to introduce the comparative philosophical framework presented below, based on matching the contexts of non-egocentrist thinkers in classical Buddhist India and the postmodern scientific West. It should come as no surprise that Nagel is unaware of the existence of a twenty-five-century tradition of non-egocentrist philosophy and self-corrective anthropology, despite his reading of Parfit. While he is to be congratulated on his challenge to “the bizarre view that we, at this point in history, are in possession of the basic forms of understanding needed to comprehend anything,” the findings of our study of The Reason Sixty and its Dialecticist elaboration pose a similar challenge to his belief “that the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist” (10). Leaving aside his blanket dismissal of the modern West’s human scientific tradition from psychoanalysis to cognitive science, Nagel is repre22sentative of the Western academic consensus that all religious approaches to human life are dismissible as “precritical,” “premodern,” or “prescientific,” because they are all theistic and hence “antihumanist.” Indeed, such dismissal is quite correct when “religious” is defined as attitudes derived from “nonrational,” “blind” faith:

The wish to live so far as possible in full recognition of the fact that one’s position in the universe is not central has an element of the religious impulse about it, or at least an acknowledgement of the question to which religion purports to supply an answer. A religious solution gives us a borrowed centrality through the concern of a supreme being. (210)

However, the intellectual history of Buddhism suggests that Nagel’s common conception of “religious” does not apply to the Buddhist tradition. To the contrary, this study offers a fresh look at Buddhism as a spiritual and scientific civilization committed to the pursuit of objective self-knowledge and self-regulation along the non-egocentrist lines Wittgenstein, Nagel, and others prescribe. Not surprisingly, the self-corrective insights and methods of Buddhism stubbornly defy categorization in terms of the mechanistic-science-versus-theistic-religion dichotomy that has polarized the discourse of the modern West and continues to split the Western academy into objectivist and constructivist camps. Instead, I will argue that the self-corrective insights and methods explored below reflect a religious tradition of scien