Abstract

This study of Candrakirti uses insights gleaned from Tibetan scholarship on Indian texts to expose Western misunderstandings of Madhyamika philosophy as skeptical or mystical and offers a corrective account of it as an ordinary language philosophy meant to refine the therapeutic philosophy of the noble truths and interdisciplinary method of reeducation basic to all Buddhist thought and practice. It shows how Western Madhyamika scholars informed by modern dualistic theories and methods have persistently misread skeptical and mystical intent into the theory of voidness, by isolating the critical concepts and apophatic style of philosophical works from the practical methods and cataphatic style of ethical works written by the same authors. To correct such distortions, this Madhyamika study offers an account of Candrakirti's life and work at Nalanda Mahavihara based on alternative frameworks of comparative history and comparative philosophy more consistent with the historical record and with the Tibetan tradition of Indological scholarship, based on classical Indian nondualism. ;First, this study reviews how the complementarity of the critical and practical aspects of Madhyamika thought has eluded Buddhologists who presuppose the dualistic logic and epistemology of the modern West, arguing that Western Madhyamika studies critically requires a comparative philosophical framework aligning the nondualism of Nagarjuna and Candrakirti with the post-Cartesian, post Kantian epistemology and logic of Western nondualists. Then, Nalanda is located at the epicenter of India's Gangetic civilization and linked to the "axial-age" traditions of rational individualism and social tolerance the region sustained due to its geopolitical stability and socioeconomic abundance. Next, Nagarjuna and Candrakirti's contribution to the "golden age of India" is explored as part of a Mahayana Buddhist move to free Indian linguistics and self-regulation from their religious matrix and revise them for use as the universal language and empirical method of a multidisciplinary human science of mind. Finally, this account of Madhyamika thought is applied to a textual study of the Yuktis&dotbelow;as&dotbelow;t&dotbelow;ikavr&dotbelow;tti , Candrakirti's commentary on the Madhyamika epistemology of Nagarjuna's Yuktis&dotbelow;ast&dotbelow;ika , the textual link between the critical and practical aspects of his thought. An original translation of these two works is appended. ;Contra the consensus that the Madhyamika is a skeptical-mystical school which reflects the supposed "Hindu corruption of Buddhism," it appears in this work as a critical-practical system of epistemological self-correction central to the Mahayana move to extend the Buddhist tradition of universal education in liberative arts and human sciences. This study's nondualistic approach to Madhyamika thought is based on comparative reading of YS/YSV with the writings of Wittgenstein and extended by comparing Candrakirti's centrist solution to the objectivist-constructivist debate in the classical Buddhist academy with Thomas Nagel's centrist approach to the objectivist-constructivist debate dividing the postmodern Western academy