Within Reason - #165 Buddhist Emptiness Explained - Jan Westerhoff

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.Come to my North American tour this November: https://www.alexoconnor.com/p/tour.Jan Westerhoff is a German philosopher and orientalist with specific interests in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. He is currently Professor of Buddhist Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Oxford.Get Jan Westerhoff's books here.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Nāgārjuna, The “Second Buddha”6:03 The Middle Way9:16 Ontological Nihilism20:00 Are Madhyamaka Buddhists Nihilists?38:56 How Emptiness Escapes Causal Arguments for God45:40 Preempting Immanuel Kant?50:37 Emptiness1:10:07 How to Escape Suffering1:16:54 Visualising Emptiness1:20:30 Is Consciousness Empty?1:34:28 Reality Without SubstanceCONNECT:My Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkepticThe Within Reason Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/16wUbvDT95dxzpG2KEhakK?si=3196e07690bb489dCONTACT:Business email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]

North America, I'm coming for you. We're doing a small tour, just six shows at some really cool venues. We're going to talk about philosophy, we're going to talk about God, about consciousness. We're going to talk about whatever you want to talk about, because there will be an extensive Q&A at every show. The dates are on screen. The ticket link is in the description. Be there. Jan Vesterhoff, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So I get a lot of requests to talk about different religious traditions. and this happened before when people kept asking me, talk about Hinduism.

And I had to say to them, it's not quite as simple as that, because firstly, Hinduism is, of course, an exonym. It's not a word that they even would use to describe themselves. But also, it's too broad of a concept to sort of do an episode on. And I think that the best way of approaching that is to kind of pick a particular tradition and begin to explore it. So, of course, I've had all kinds of requests to talk about Buddhism.

And in researching Buddhism and looking at different Buddhist traditions, It won't take long before you come across a chap called Nagarjuna, who has the quite lofty title, sometimes he's called the Second Buddha. So who is Nagarjuna and why do people call him the Second Buddha? Yeah, so Nagarjuna lived in the first or second century of the common era. We don't know exactly when. He was an Indian Buddhist monk, probably from... southern India. And that is, as much as we know in kind of hard facts about his biography, what we know more about are his works and how influential they were. So he authored one very

central text called the Fundamental Versus on the Middle Way, which really founded a new section you might say or school of thinking about the Buddhist teaching and thinking about reality as a whole that became very popular in India but then became even more popular

later as Buddhism expanded into the rest of Asia particularly in Tibet and constituted more or less the dominant or central form of Buddhist philosophy there. So in terms of it's the place within the Buddhist intellectual worldviews, it has a very, very central role.

And because of this centrality, you know, the epithet, the second Buddha came about. So what was this new school? What was it that was so interesting and revolutionary about his thought? Right. Okay. So that's an interesting point, especially as it differs, whether we look at it from the inside or from the outside. Of course, no Buddhist thinker in the history of Buddhist philosopher ever claimed that they would be doing something original. They would always, at least have the view of themselves, that they were explaining what the Buddha really meant.

Sure. So explaining accurately the thought of the founder of the tradition rather than saying, okay, guys, I've got this completely new theory. Nobody have ever thought of it before. So this is at least a self-view. But of course, what happened throughout the history of Buddhist philosophy is that a lot of thinkers put different emphases on different parts of what the Buddha taught, and that resulted in very, very different views and theories. And this is also true of Madyamaka. So, Madiamika, so the middle-way school of Nagarjuna, sees itself. as explaining in particular, a particular set of teachings of the Buddha,

the so-called Perfection of Wisdom texts, which is a fairly large group of texts. One very famous of these that some people might have heard of is the famous Hat Sutra, the Pranja-Sitra. And all of these Perfection of Wisdom texts focus on at least one key concept, which is the concept of emptiness or shunyata. And they describe it and explain it in various ways

within these sutras, but within these texts, you don't find much in terms of argumentative development for arguments for why things are empty, what that precisely means and so on. And so it is really that Nagarjuna's works, then and those of his followers then take on that

task and say, okay, so we're now going to provide arguments for what the Buddha taught in the perfection of wisdom, Sutras. And this is, this notion of of emptiness is really the key notion that

the Madiamic has developed. That notion existed before. So this is not in any way in a new invention, but it was really given center stage. in this school. Yeah, it's like an emphasis thing. In the same way that there are different branches of Christianity

who don't exactly claim to be doing anything new, but rather properly interpreting or properly emphasizing the right parts of Jesus' teachings, people can do the same thing with Buddhism too. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so that's what you would expect, say, from a scholastic tradition, like the Indian scholastic tradition, that they don't claim to be innovators, but they claim to be explicators of what is,

really perhaps only implicitly there in the teaching. But that shouldn't let us think that, well, therefore they are all saying the same thing, or it is all just the same message produced in different ways. But it's rather the case that there are many different ideas we find in the original teachings of the Buddha. And depending on where you put the emphasis on, and which ones you develop further, you can come up with very, very different perspectives on the teachings themselves. So this concept of Shunata emptiness

is probably the sort of central focus of Mediamika Buddhism, would you say? Yes, I think this is certainly the one concept the Madyamaka is known by and also the concept around which much else revolves. And Madjamaika means kind of middle way. Yeah. This is the school you mentioned earlier that roughly speaking, you could say Nagarjuna

sort of thounds or brings about intentionally or unintentionally. Yeah, that's right. So when we usually talk about Nagarjana's school and its followers, we refer to it by the term Madyamika, which means the middle way. Again, this is an epithet that every Buddhist tradition claims to be the middle way. But it is in Madiamaic, in particular, that this is then elevated into the, actually the name for the school itself. Okay, so then a good place to start.

The middle way between what? Well, yes, that is a very good question. So the Buddha himself, of course, described his teachings as a teaching of the middle way, and that could be regarded as, it could be spelled out in different ways. So it could be the middle way between different forms of practice, so between, you know, hardcore asceticism and a life of indulgence, for example. So you have the middle way which the Buddha himself taught. But also and more pertinently to the present discussion, it can mean the difference or the middle way between two philosophical extremes. and the two philosophical extremes that the

Madiamikas distinguish and where they regard themselves as following the middle path between them are on the one hand kind of absolutism or foundationalism that assumes the ultimate reality of some entities within our ontology that'll be the one, which is sometimes also rather confusingly called eternalism, but perhaps foundationalism is a better term in the present context. And then you have the other extreme, which you might want to label nihilism, and that can have both a kind of a ethical or moral dimension, where the idea is that no...

moral values, or particularly in the Buddhist context, no calmic relation between the actions you do now and the consequences you experience later exists. Or it can be read in a more ontological manner where it just assumes complete non-existence of anything whatsoever. And so the middle way tries to find a position that is somewhat equidistant between the two. So this ontological nihilism, I think people will be familiar with the concept of not believing in morality, not thinking that your behaviours matter, but ontologically, that is ontology, the nature of being, of reality. What does ontological nihilism look like? I mean, you said a second ago, something like that, that nothing really exists or something like that. It seems like a bit of an impossible view to hold. I mean, you could believe that maybe the external world doesn't exist, or something like that. It seems like a bit of an impossible view to hold. I mean, you could believe that maybe the external world doesn't exist, or, or maybe you're in a simulation, but to say that nothing exists, I mean, you're having certain experiences.

You know, René Descartes thinks that he thinks, therefore he is. Maybe he's taken it a step too far and should have said, I think therefore thinking is happening, but something is there, right? But is there this view of ontological nihilism that really does just eliminate everything? Right. So, I mean, the first question is, of course, to which extent the view that there is nothing is immediately, self-defeating because if I say, okay, so assume it's true that there is

nothing, then presumably there is at least a fact that makes it true, that there is nothing, so there is at least one fact, so there is something, so ontological nihilism is false if true, and that's about as good a refutation

as you can get of any philosophical position. So that seems to be a complete non-starter. Okay. So that can't be what is meant by this. I think it's probably more helpful to think of the road to onto knowledgeable nihilism, so to speak, as being the consequence of accepting two distinct philosophical principles. Right.

So the first principle would be to say that if you have, have, say, a collection of entities that form a whole, then it is only the entities that are real and the whole is not, right? So that would be, for example, describing it as a form of Marioological nihilism, where you say, okay, so there is no aggregation. If you've got your Lego bricks and you put them all together to build a Lego car, Then the only thing that's actually real are the bricks and the car is just some sort of mental superimposition on the bricks. Sure.

Right? Okay. So, but this is, you can play it that way, but you can also think of it in a more general way in terms of things depending on other things, right? And so if you say, for example, something depends causally on something else, then it's only the causal basis that is real, but everything that is, the effect is actually just a a super imposition, right? So, for example, if you have a kind of epiphenomenalism, right, where you say,

okay, so you have something happening in your brain that causes mental states, but the only thing that's really real is what is happening in your brain, and the stuff that is hovering over it is just some sort of weird epiphenomenal. Okay, so

you have that as a first principle. Okay, so it's the, the parts are real, but the whole is not, right? And the second principle that you need in order to get the ontological nihilism going is the idea that either this part-out relation or the dependence relation goes all the way down, right? So there's no, nowhere that stops, right? So to be clear, you know, there's a table and it's so far, it's always the table.

Whenever I'm doing a podcast, there's always a table in front of me. I should pick another example. You know, there's a lamp. How about the lamp, you know? And the lamp is made up of different parts. It's made up of the lampshade. It's made up of the bulbs. It's made up of the wires going through it.

And people who've listened to this show should be familiar with the idea that myriological nihilism suggests that the only thing that really exists are kind of the parts. And when we organize them into a different shape, like a lampshade and a bulb, that's not any new material. The thing that really exists is the foundational stuff that we've just arranged. And oftentimes the thought stops. It's like, okay, the parts are real and the whole is not, but what you're saying here is that the parts themselves are made up of parts. Like the bulb is made up of a filament and made up of glass. And then the glass is made up of fundamentally made up of atoms and atoms are made up of subatomic particles.

And at some point, it's usually assumed you get down to what a myriologist might call meriological simples, just whatever happens to be the foundational stuff. But you could suppose, in theory, that actually this just keeps on going forever. this is what Lewis called gunk, right? That it's sort of infinitely divisible all the way down and never-ending. And this gets you a kind of ontological nihilism because the only thing you have all the way down is sort of part, whole relations. It's a little bit like when people argue about God's existence

and say, well, this needed a cause and this needed a cause and some people assume there must be some first cause and some people say, well, maybe it's just sort of turtles all the way down. And that leaves you with this slightly nihilistic view of like there being nothing at the bottom. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So if you look at the meriological case, the problems start to arise once you combine mariological nihilism, so the idea that there are no holds, with a denial of atomism, with the idea that there are no smallest parts. Because then what happens, so you start with your lamp, and then you say, okay, well, the lamp isn't real,

but all the different parts, if you say you take it to a technician and he takes it apart in different parts, those are real, right? And then you say, well, but those parts have parts as well because they're sort of molecules that make up those.

Okay, so you take it apart even further and then you realize there are atoms that make that up. And at every time, the level of the whole is thrown away and said, okay, well, that's not really real. And then because you continue indefinitely, you are never going to reach anything

that is real or exists. So in the end, the whole thing sort of dissipates into thin air, and then you're left with nothing, right? And this is, I mean, this kind of structure doesn't just apply to the case of matter and atoms. It applies much more general in the Madiamika case because they consider various different dependence relations. So the part whole dependent relations is one, and the cause effect. dependent relation is another and then would so dependence probably the most general form of dependence

dependence on a conceptualizing mind right so if I say come up with the concept of the average man the average man has 2.4 children this is simply a mental imputation there is no I can't go out of the streets and say okay so where is the you know where is the average man

and his fractional children this is something which completely depends on conceptualizing enterprise that talks about a ratio between men and children. And so if that is the case, then you get this kind of

disappearance across the board. So whenever something depends on something, if the dependence chain is infinitely downwards, and if whenever you have something dependent on something else, the thing that depends isn't really real,

but only the dependence basis is, then it all dissipates, right? And that is why certainly the opponents, both the Buddhist and the non-Buddhist opponents in ancient India, describe the Madyamaka as a form of nihilism, because you say if they take those things on board, well, in the end, we are left with nothing, right? So how can you say this really is the middle way if it seems to be pretty much close to the extreme on the left, right? So Madiamika sort of did take this view. sort of that objects are kind of like dependent and that dependence goes all the way down. Just to be clear, you said that we were talking about the middle way.

We talked about nihilism. And what was the opposite extreme of this? Like if we looked at the lamp, what would the sort of opposite view be of the nature of the lamp? Well, the opposite extreme would be a kind of foundationalism, right, where you say there is something about the lamp that is ultimately real where the analysis stops and where also the ontological dependence stops, right? So either if you think that the whole is real or that the parts are real or something in between or even that the lamp isn't real and the parts aren't real,

but there is the platonic idea of the lamp in a third realm that is non-material. That is also a kind of foundationalism. It's just that the foundation is somewhere up there in the third realm. Yeah. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, where do you get your news? If you're like me and most people these days, it probably comes from the internet. The internet is, of course, great in many ways.

There is just an abundance of information, but sometimes there's a little bit too much information. It can be really difficult to navigate the online media landscape without constantly bumping up against bias and misrepresentation and misinformation. And of course, bias is something that will never go away, but by using today's sponsor, Ground News, you can help to mitigate that bias and objectively compare the way that different sources are reporting on the same story.

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It could be that the myriological simples are real, or that for some reason, you know, glass is real or whatever. And this other view that it's gunk, that it just sort of dependence all the way down with no basis, which seems to suggest that there could be no reality at all. Mediamika sort of takes on board this second view of dependence all the way down, and therefore gets accused of this ontological nihilism, this sort of baselessness. How do they defend themselves against that charge? Yeah, that's a really good point.

Because they both accept the two principles that I've just mentioned, namely, married law, radical nihilism and dependents all the way down. And they also say, well, we are not nihilists. And what exactly they mean by being not nihilists is actually a fairly interesting point. So one case that is pretty clear is they say, okay, so we're not moral nihilists. And for the Buddhist that always means they don't deny the efficacy of Khartan. So that is very important because another of the accusation is there, okay, so if you say that, you short-circuit the entire notion of karma, which, at least according to some interpretations, the entire Buddhist ethics is founded on, and then people are going to do whatever they like, and then that you have moral chaos. Okay, so that is a fairly straightforward point, so that doesn't touch karma.

but I think this is probably a good place to introduce another one of the key Madyamaic notions apart from the notion of emptiness and that is the distinction between the true truth right again a notion that goes back all the way to the Buddha's own teachings but which is again then interpreted in different ways right so you have there the idea that you have the truth or the way the world appears to unenlightened people like you and me to the ordinary guy on the street and you have the way the world appears to an enlightened mind like a Buddha, right? And then you say, okay, so it is not the case that this is a kind of illusion reality distinction. It's not the case that we only see illusion and the Buddha sees reality. Rather, they are both described as both

two realities or two truths, right? So it's not one truth and one falsity. They are both truth, but they operate quite differently depending on who you are and where you are, right? So as long as I'm not an enlightened Buddha, I live in this world of conventional reality, and therefore the limits and restrictions of that conventional reality apply to me. For example,

the laws of causation and so on. So if I drop this glass on a hard floor, it's going to shatter. So that remains true, even though the Madya Makas will also say that ultimately there is no causation. Because at the level of ultimate reality,

and given that the kind of other arguments we've just went through, we can demonstrate if you regard these arguments as sound that there are no causal powers in the world because again you can run the same thing for causal dependence

right so the effect isn't real only the causes and then the causal power goes down the levels and because there's no there's no bottom level where the causal power comes from it sort of drains away

Yeah, it's like, you know, the cup is being held up by the table and the table's being held up by the ground and the ground is being held up by the earth and so on. And each of those sort of stages in the chain borrows the causal power from the thing below it. Yeah. If you take away the floor, the table isn't going to hold up the cup on its own. Yeah. And so if you sort of say that this just goes on forever, this causal chain of holding things up or like a, like a chain holding up a chandelier. Yeah. link by link that just goes on infinitely. It kind of seems like you've removed the causal power altogether because there's nowhere from which it's all borrowing.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think borrowing is a good term here. Just if you imagine it, another example, if, you know, I owe you some money and I don't give you cash, but I write you a check, and then you go to the bank and the check bounces, and then I'm saying, okay, no problem, I'll just write you another one, right? And then that continues.

And if you then think, well, I mean, you try to cash it at the bank. And the bank gives you another check, hold by another bank and so you go on and on and on and on. And there is never at any point, anywhere, you were getting any rate of real value, right? So it's the same thing there with causation. You get something that looks like it. But if you actually think, okay, so what's the first course of that? It will drains away. But that doesn't mean that if I now drop the glass, it's not going to shatter.

Yeah, so how do we make sense of that, right? Because in other contexts, somebody will say exactly what you've just said as a means to show why there must be some kind of causal principle, why foundationalism must be true, because if this series of causes, like the cup on the table, if that series of causation of the table holding up the floor doesn't have any causal power of its own, just keeps borrowing it, borrowing it, borrowing it, then if that borrowing goes on forever, there is no causal power, and if there's no cause, there should be no effect. And yet the cup is on the table. So in other context, people say what we're showing here is that there must be some kind of foundational cause, some kind of foundational thing upon which everything else depends, right? It's a popular argument for God's existence. But that's not what we're going for here, is it? No.

No. Okay, no, and that is a, that I think brings us right to the core of a, where I, much of the data in Madyamaka connect with much of the debate in contemporary philosophy particularly regarding question of grounding and dependence relations and so on and there

the one question that arises is first of all do we have an argument to show that there is something inherently problematic with non-foundational structures, right? And so by non-foundational structure, I mean a structure where there's no bottom level on which

everything depends, right? Now, we've so far, we've looked basically the idea where it's, turns all the way down, right? So it goes all the way down. But this is not the only model that has been used in order to interpret Madyamika. Another possibility is also that it's turtles all the way round. So sometimes that is described as ontological coherentism. So what that means is that you don't have A depends on B, depends on C, depends on D, infinitely down, but you rather have it set up in some kind of circles. So A depends on B, depends on C, depends on D, depends on A.

Right? And the idea is that if the circles get large enough, it actually, you know, it actually she looks like a straight line because you don't see the end of it. So it's, it's, you know, if you just imagine a really, really large circle in space, if you're standing on it, it might look to you as if it's just a straight line continuing because you don't see the curve. Yeah. So to that extent, you can say, well, it might be the case that we are actually not living in a kind of turrets all the way downworld, but in a turns all the way round world, even though we rarely see the circles link up.

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Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Yeah, we might have been confused before we knew the Earth was a globe to sort of walk in a straight line and end up sort of getting back to where we started. Yeah, so it looks flat to us even though it is spherical, right? And causation could potentially work the same way. Yes, and all the dependence relations could be these kind of structures. They just look flat, by which I mean straight to us, even though they are not. Yeah.

Okay. And so now people have been exploring the sort of formal aspects of both this non-fundationalism in terms of turtles all the way down and also of ontological coherentism in quite a bit more detailed over the last decades or so. and one of the interesting things that have come out of it is the understanding that there is nothing logically wrong with any of these ideas, right? So originally you might have thought, okay, well, this idea that it's dependence all the way down or all the way around at some point in time,

you hit a contradiction. And that shows you that these kind of structures cannot be exemplified in reality if you assume that there are no contradictions exemplified in reality. We'll just make that assumption of all the time being here. otherwise things get get even more complicated um so it's but now it actually it it seems quite clear as i know as far at least as far as things get clear in these these parts of philosophy that the the you can have different consistent internally consistent models of foundational

structures you can either have the the common or garden variety where it stops somewhere and you've got your real stuff and then everything goes upwards from that, or you can have its, you know, dependence all the way down, or you can have dependence all the way around. Now, that of course doesn't yet tell you which one of these is correct, if any of them is, right? But it tells you that all of these are live options or life issues, right? Well, that's what, I think that's where the pressure point's going to exist for some people, because usually this debate is, is, settled by ruling out the possibility of certain options. And like a Thomist, for example, a sort of classical theologian, would just say that, like,

if you have any understanding of what a cause and an effect is, then as long as you posit this infinite chain of causation, especially one that doesn't go back in time, but one that goes sort of, as you say, it's a dependence relation or what a tomist might call a essentially ordered series, that this just can't go on forever or into a loop because there would be nowhere from the causal power which we observe to originate, right? Like, it's, it, we might look for a contradiction and struggle to find one. But of course, you can understand the, the strong intuition that we have, at the very least. I mean, it seems like there might be a way of positing this as a contradiction if you say that

there exists some effect. Effects only exist in so far as there are causes for those effects. And you could define them in various ways to say that if it doesn't have any causal power of its own, there's no cause, yada, yada. But like, is this just something that Mediamika just denies? Like, how can you defend, in other words, the plausibility of an infinite or looping causal chain? When to most people's intuitions, that seems really strange. like if there was a candle, if there was a fire burning. And somebody says, why is that fire burning?

And I say, well, because it was lit by a different fire. And someone said, why was that on fire? And I said, well, it was lit by the original fire. It would just seem as though, firstly, I hadn't explained anything. And secondly, like I was probably missing something. Right, good. Yeah, I think there are two different things to look at here. One is the sort of more historical dimension of the question and one is the more systematic one.

So on the historical side, the, the, the Indians as a whole didn't have great problems with sequences going all the way back. So this idea that, okay, well, it needs to be starting somewhere and you need a first course to get the whole thing going and so on. So that was never regarded as a particular problematic issue. I mean, this is a good question. Why that is the case? I mean, one of the potential explanation is a different understanding. of time where within classical Indian texts you get a kind of a cyclical understanding,

where it is not that you have as you have in Christianity first beginning, you know, the book of Genesis. It starts with let there be light. And then of course the question what happened before, before God created in the world is, of course, not so easy to answer. But so if we assume that there is some kind of starting point, then of course we need. to solve that philosophically but if you assume that there is this kind of theories of world ages or culpas which start out somewhere and then they develop and then then decline and then at the end

of each age then that leads to the beginning of a new age right and then you've got the next world age and the whole thing happens again and this goes back indefinitely so to that extent you can say, okay, well, there is, it's going back all the way. And so this is, I mean, you find a manifestation of the kind of, they refuse to really engage with that question. When you sometimes find the discussion within Buddhism, okay, so where did actually the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth, which is a central problem within Buddhism? is sociology, how did that actually start, right? And then what you would usually find, a Buddhist teacher will say, well, this is

beginningless ignorance, Anadia Vidya, right? So ignorance about the way reality really works is a kind of a core problem, but then the question is, okay, where does the ignorance come from? And I say, you know, it's beginningless, where it says always been there, like samsara. So to that extent, you

don't find it so surprising that within Indian scholastic text, you don't find much engagement with this question that is very central to Western metaphysics, right? Okay, so that's the kind of historical question, yeah? But then the question is, of course,

is that simply a historical artifact, or is there simply nothing the Madiamicus can say? Right. But I think here you need to ask yourself, okay, so on the one hand, if, you know, you look down

these chains of infinitely backwards dependence, and you get this kind of physical vertigo and you think, you know, where the West is all going to go and this sort of looks kind of shifting. But then what's you take into account, there are other cases where it looks comparable,

but you don't get that shift in a say, take the negative numbers, right? The number minus one, the predecessor is the number minus two. I mean, these are all as real as the numbers get, but there's no smallest negative number, right? So they go all the way back, the number line. Yeah. So we don't really have a problem here.

And why is that? Well, presumably because we don't think that each number sort of borrows its existence from the predecessor, right? But then the question is, okay, why do we actually think of existence or causation in that way either, right? So why do we actually think that causation works on this kind of borrowing model where the, the effect only has its own causal power because it's borrowed that from its own cause and that borrowed it for something else and there has to be some sort of metaphysical,

central bank that holds the gold because otherwise all the checks are going to collapse, right? But within Madiamika, you don't have that notion of causation as this kind of substantial real relation at all. And I mean, if you want to, I can explain it a little bit why that is the case. I think it seems like the issue here is one of dependence in that like it's easy enough to say that the number line

stretches on infinitely but I don't think there's a meaningful sense in which like the number minus one depends upon the existence of minus two except maybe conceptually. You might want to say that conceptually you need to have a minus two to make sense of what minus one means. Yeah, I mean definitely yeah. But in that sense you've kind of turned these numbers into concepts rather than like real things in the world, right? And I feel like, as though when you have an existential dependence, that something depends for its existence, not as a concept, but like ontologically, right? Like, I've heard you talk about this before, like, say the existence of Northern England, right? Clearly, the existence of Northern England

depends conceptually on the existence of Southern England. Wouldn't make sense to call it that otherwise. But the thing I'm picking out with the phrase Northern England, which is like a particular landmass, that actual existing mass obviously doesn't depend on the continued existence of Southern England, which could disappear and the north would still exist. And I suppose I want to say that in the former case, conceptually, yeah, that can just be an infinity of sort of groundless, whatever, that's fine. But when you have an existential relation where the existence of a particular landmass really does depend on, say, the rocks that that landmass is made of, and the rocks really do depend on their sort of being gravitationally held together.

That it does seem to me that that seems to me like borrowing. That seems to me like borrowing its ontology, borrowing its existence, you know what I mean? So I would, and I'm saying that as if you don't know that, I'm sure you know that, but for the sake of our audience and for the sake of myself, that's why I would like to ask maybe how the Jiamika would would respond to this. Because I suppose that the sort of functional takeaway from this, because people might be listening to this like, oh, this is cool, interesting Buddhism,

what can I do with this? It's like, all the time, we're having debates on this channel about the existence of God, and so often they collapse into some kind of argument for the non-existence of an infinite regress, of dependency, of causal chains, of time, or whatever it may be. And this is like an interesting escapefruit for many people, it seems, that you're offering a sort of,

you don't need this. And I suppose I really want to pin down how that works. Right. Yeah. Good. There is a whole other chapter to talk about. And these are Buddhist arguments against the notion of a creator god. So that's because they, the Buddhists, of course, they engaged with theists quite a bit within a classical India. And so they also had had to have something to say on that question when the theorists came along and said, no, no, no, this was all created by Yishvara, the great creator. But put that to the side for, the time being because I think what is important

to get clear about is how the Madyamakas think about causation, right? So the sort of intuitive idea presumably would be that causation is a force

out there, mind-independent force that ticks along in the world and does stuff independent of our thinking about it,

wanting it to go a specific way, right so if we you know if i set in motion a certain causal process say i i light one part of a dry field the whole thing starts to blaze up and there is nothing i can do about it even if i said okay i wish i've never started this right okay so it goes goes like that um but in the in the the buddhist conception or particularly in the madiamika conception of causation um is actually quite distinct from that. And one reason it is distinct from that is connected with their specific understanding of time. And the understanding of time that Madyamaka takes on board, and actually take that that on board from an earlier Buddhist school called South Antarctica is a form of presentism,

right? So it's the idea that only the present moment exists, the past. isn't real and the future isn't real, but just the present moment. Yeah, what might be known in sort of modern academia is the A theory of time. That only the present exists. Well, I mean, with the

A theory of time, you have the specific contrast between the A theory and the B theory about whether you've got anything that moves there. Right? So in the B theory, the idea is you just have all these different temporal relations before, after sorry, you have the different relations in terms of temporal distance, you know, one day before, one day after and so on.

And they never change. Whereas if you talk in terms of present, past, and future, what is present now, what was future yesterday and will be passed tomorrow. And so it seems to change its temporal attributes, right? And so this is what is happening in the A theory, whereas in the B theory nothing moves. but well I mean the essential bit here about the the conception of time I've just mentioned is

the ontological idea that it is only the present that exists right so for the opposite picture imagine a kind of block universe right where sort of the

present is sort of in the middle and then And at the left side of the block is everything that happened in the past. And the future somehow frozen is what is going to happen in the future. And we sort of move through that block. Yeah. But you would say, well, even though I can only influence the present, the past and the future, they are still, they still have ontological status. They still exist.

Yeah. Okay. So the Sartranthicas and then also the Madiamikas who follow that, deny that. They say there's only the present moment is real, right? And now you get into an interesting problem when you're talking about causation. because causation is a relation that connects to points in time, right? I mean, there is a whole debate again about whether you can have simultaneous causation, whether cause and effect happen at the same time.

But let's put that to one side at the moment. I think it's much more plausible to think of the cause happening first and the effect happening later. You know, I start smoking at a petrol station, then a second later there is a big explosion. So first, there is... lighting the match, later there is the big boom, right?

So in a causal sequence. Yeah? Okay. So, however, if you believe that only the present moment is real, how can you actually make sense of causation? Because it seems you're always missing one part of the two relata that are related, right? So you're either, if you locate yourself at the time when I light the match,

then the explosion doesn't need exist because that's future or if you say, okay, so now the petrol station blows up, well, now the time when the match doesn't exist anymore because that's past. So, okay, so how can I still, I presumably still want to say

it is my stupid smoking that blew up the petrol station. So, okay, so how can I say that? Well, and the Mariamika says, okay, so you only ever have one real relatum here because only the present is real. And the other one is supplied, either by memory or by anticipation.

So if I'm at the petrol station lighting the match, I should anticipate in my mind what is going to happen next, namely the big explosion. And at the time of the explosion, I can probably remember the stupid thing I just did, namely light a match, right? So that's how I can talk about causation. But now what that means is that we can only talk about causation

at the causal relation because there is some essential mind-made ingredient in here, right? So you can't have the relation without anticipation or memory and so you can't have the idea of causation

ticking along at the background of a world as it is any way independent of mind's handiwork. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Ocean. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high interest savings account. Always earn high

regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit Scotia Bank.com slash H-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Now, I feel like I've heard this before. Well, you might have done. Perhaps from me. I know, I feel like I've heard this kind of thinking before, but in a different context, which is, and I know you've talked about you've talked about this at least a bit as a sort of point of historical interest, but if someone just tuned in, they might think that you were talking about a certain Immanuel Kant. It seems as though a lot of the concepts which are useful for Madiamika philosophy, that is,

the nature of causation, the nature of time, the fact that they're not real features of the world, but rather something we kind of impose onto this sort of external world that kind of is really there, but we don't have great access to it. It sort of begins to sound a little bit like the Kantian conception of there being this numina out there, and that causation and time are things that we map on to that instead. And so, I don't know, is this a sort of preempting of the philosophy of Kant or are there important distinctions, just because that's where people's minds might go, and if there are important differences, I want to make them sort of clear. Sure, sure. So I think two things that might come to mind.

here, you're right. I mean, one is Kant, the second is of costume, right? And his theory of causation. So let's stick with the case of Kant for the time being, because this is quite interesting to the extent that in

the early engagement of Western thinkers with Madiamika, so from the 1920s, 1930s onwards, Kant and Kantianism was often used as a kind of explicatory paradigm in order to explain what the Madiamikas are up to. And so this is historically quite important because it provides a kind of lens through which early interpreters try to understand that.

And of course, it's clear why they want to do that. Their readers would probably know a bit about Kant. they wouldn't know anything about Nagajana if you tell them Nagarjuna is a little bit like come to these respects at least get the general idea yeah okay and I mean

you are perfectly right and they were perfectly right that they are interesting parallels for example the idea that space and time are not features of the world out there

but to certain extend mind-made projections onto it and the other important distinction that they drew between, or the comparison they drew between Madyamaka and Kant is the distinction between the two truths

that I've mentioned earlier on, where they said, okay, so we've got the conventional truth, that looks a little bit like the Kantian phenomena, so the stuff that appears to us, and then there is the ultimate truth, and that's the Kantian numina, and that is sort of we can't really know anything about that unless we are enlightened Buddhas,

and then presumably you can see what the ultimate. ultimate truth is like, not from our perspective. Canne makes this distinction between the phenomena, which is how things sort of appear to you. Like, if you look at an object like the table, there it is again. What I'm really experiencing is not the table, but rather my perception of the table. It's how the table appears to me in sight, in sound, if I tap it, how it might feel. And I can never actually just directly access the table, I suppose, without being the table. Otherwise, it's through perception.

So what I experience is the so-called phenomena, but the thing in itself, the thing that's really there that I don't have any access to, except through my sort of window of perception, is what Kant calls the numina, just to clarify that. Yeah.

So, and of course there has been, since the days of current, there has been an endless debate about what the numina actually are. Yes. From the view, is there actually one numin for every phenomenon? So is there sort of a numinal glass behind there?

Or is it some kind of morphine? first thing behind it or should we think about it in a completely different way. Of course, I mean, that will take us down the root of Kant exegesis. But it's probably worthwhile just to have some brief ideas about where the discontinuities are between the Kantian picture and Nagarjuna. So to see that they are not singing from the same sheet for the whole way, I think it is useful for to illustrate some contexts. But the main, the main thing, the main thing, difference lies with

the Madiamika theory of the emptiness of emptiness. So as I said before, so emptiness is a really sort of key concept for Madiamika. Just before we talk about the emptiness of emptiness,

I feel like we haven't actually really explain what emptiness is. We've kind of talked about the mediamika is the middle way between these two so-called extremes of there being some kind of foundational ontology, let's say, some substance upon which everything else depends, some, if you keep dividing like the cup in half,

you'll get to some foundational stuff. And this other view that it just goes on forever, but Yamaka is the middle way, and it proposes this view called emptiness. Okay, emptiness of what? Like, what are the things that are empty, and what is it that they're empty of, and how does this help solve our problem?

Right, very good. Okay, so I think this is a very important point because when you hear these statements in the Madiamika literature, everything is empty, and also, of course, you'll also find that in the earlier perfection of wisdom texts, of course the question is, you know, empty of what? So the notion, it's not that it's like the glass is empty of water. Right. So it's, of course, emptiness in a metaphysical sense.

And what it is empty of is the technical term that the in its use is svaava. which if you take the term apart, it consists of two-part, swah, meaning something like its own and barver existence or being. So the whole thing is somewhat unhelpfully then translated as own being, but it doesn't really tell you what it is either. So I think a much better translation that has now been adopted is intrinsic nature. And the idea is that something has intrinsic nature if it doesn't borrow its existence,

sorry, if it doesn't bear the existence in itself. So one way of thinking about this is if something is consists of parts, then it cannot exist by Svabava, because what it is is actually not itself, but it's something that is derived from the parts, right? So if I've got the lamp again, the lamp itself can't do anything independent of the power. parts that make it up, right?

So what is really doing the lighting are the parts, not the lamp. And so that is, there is one case where you say, okay, so the lamp itself has no super bother. Another dimension of the same thing is that if you can take something conceptually apart, right? So even if you say have an physically indivisible atom, it presumably is still specific qualities or properties that you can mentally distinguish. And so you can sort of mentally take it apart, apart from even though you can't take it physically apart. That also is something which stops it from having intrinsic nature because its nature depends on all these different properties. Okay.

So when the Madiamika says things are empty, they mean that. They mean things are empty of their intrinsic nature. And they mean that entities depend on other entities for their existence. They borrow it from other things. So that is the key notion. We can see immediately how that connects with the notion of foundationalism and non-foundationalism we talked about early on, right? Because if you think, okay, so the table has no svarva because it consists of parts. And then you say, okay, well, what about the parts?

They surely have svabava, right? and there were earlier Buddhists who thought that. Okay, so if you break it down to the final bits, then those things actually have this intrinsic nature. Like the myriological symbols. They would have... Yeah, like the marionautical symbols. They identified that with particularized properties

or what is sometimes called tropes. So occurrences of properties at specific spatiotemporal instance. I think these are really real. And so the table is just sort of made up of these things like an image on the screen is made up of pixels, right? The pixels are real and they're sort of difficult to make out because they move really fast and they're really small, but they are really there.

And what we see is the table, which is unreal, but the pixels are real, right? And so the, the Madiambicas, of course, object to that and say, no, no, the pixels aren't real either, right? Because they can, again, be either taken apart conceptually or mariologically. But by real, you mean they don't have spherbarba. Exactly. mean they don't have intrinsic nature.

They don't have intrinsic nature. They're real in the sense that the table is there. I can touch it and interact with it, but it doesn't have its own intrinsic nature. Very good. So when we say real, in this context, we'll have to distinguish between conventional real and ultimately real, right? None of these things are ultimately real, right? They are conventionally real insofar as, you know, there is a glass here, and if I tap against it, it makes a sound. So that is all happening.

But if I analyze that in terms of where it all comes from, in terms on what it's based on, I end up with nothing. And that is the fundamental notion of emptiness that we find here. So why not these foundational myriological simples or whatever? Why not like, you know, somebody might say, well, whatever, suppose you're like some kind of atomist and you just posit that there does exist some kind of unbreakable foundational unit of. stuff and it's maybe it's an excitation of the quantum wave field at a particular point in space time or maybe it's a particular string that vibrates in a particular way and that's what gives its essence. Can't we just say that that is a thing, it exists and that is the foundational intrinsic nature of reality? Why does emptiness go all the way down? Why would those things

themselves be empty? Yeah, so you'll have to, of course, you have to look at the specific cases there and say, okay, so if you have your infinite sequence of decomposition, then it's clear that none of these things can have intrinsic nature because they go all the way down.

If you have some more sophisticated notions within modern physics, the meriological thing might not be so much of a problem because you think, okay, well, what it really is is not

reality is not made up of, you know, sort of little billion, bullets that are really small, but say, of a probability distribution of a particle being at that place or that place, right?

And then, of course, what you think about that then depends on the details of, well, what you actually think a probability distribution is, right? So are probabilities, things that are out there in the things, objective probability, or do you actually think that they are in states of information or states of mind?

And once you, if you give the letter, then of course you immediately bring the mind in and then of course you get that dependence of the stuff that you think is fundamentally real on your conceptualization and so on, you can see where this is all going, right? But I think perhaps we should sort of backtrack to because we were talking earlier about content causation, right? So we should probably come back to that. and the, okay, so I think we have now a fairly clear idea of what emptiness means, and now we'll get back to the notion of emptiness of emptiness. And so this is, this is where the, the, the, Madiamikas really extend the notion of emptiness to the entire intellectual system and also argue.

that emptiness itself is empty. Now, what does that mean? Well, as we've discussed earlier on, they reject the existence of ultimately real things, right, the foundations of reality. But the arguments that they use for that can also be easily turned into arguments for rejecting ultimately true theories,

because we'll get problems with those as well. Now, if you think that there are no ultimately true theories, then you also can't say that the theory of emptiness is an ultimately true theory. And that is clear. Now, that is certainly what is the case in Madiamika. and Nagarjuna is extremely explicit about that in saying that those who turn the theory of emptiness

into a metaphysical view, so a view that they think is ultimately real, they are really beyond hope, right? So that is a level of confusion that is particularly problematic. And there you see the important difference, say between the

Kantian picture and the Madiamica picture because for the Kantian, the distinction between the

numin and the phenomenon is the ultimate the ultimately true philosophical theory, right?

So this is, if you think about things rightly and you follow all the arguments of content, you think

there would sound, then you'll end up with that view, but that's it, and then you've reached the truth. Yeah.

And, you've sort of seen the ultimate structure of the world, even though you can't really peek into the numen, at least you know it's there. Yeah. Okay. But in Madiamika, this is not the case, right? So the idea is not that you'll work through all the arguments

and then you'll end up with an ultimately true theory, right? It's rather the case that this entire artifice of, Madiamika is as conventionally real as other conventionally real theories, right? But it's not anything that is ultimately real or ultimately true. And so I think this is an important point to get where they add discontinuities between the Kantian picture and the Madiamika picture. So the theory of emptiness and the school of Madiamika Buddhism

is not true? It's not ultimately true, right? So, okay, so let me perhaps explain that a little bit bit more what is what is meant by all of this so um so we probably shouldn't and shouldn't um forget that buddhism and buddhist philosophy is not just an intellectual enterprise but a kind of sociological project right so it is supposed to it is something that is supposed to help you escape from existential suffering right a cycle of existential suffering of samsara of rebirth and so on. And so that is the ultimate aim and that is the Buddha himself was quite explicit

when he said that all that I teach is suffering and to the end to suffering and that's it, right? So now whether a specific theory is to be regarded as true or not, the focus that the Buddhists put on it, it is to which extent does it facilitate this sociological goal? To which extent does it help you to escape the cycle of subsara? And there they actually, within

Buddhist classification of different philosophical views, they argue that different views are more or less likely to help you succeed in that. So if you look at sort of these classification

of different philosophical positions that you find in Madyamaka takes. Of course, Madiamaica always comes out at top, right? So that's the most sophisticated view you can have. But then below that, there are also various other theories, like, for example, yoga chara idealism and Abidama,

the views of the Abidama and so on, that are also sort of steps in the right direction, right? And so to that extent, none of these theories are ultimately true, including Madiamaica, right? But they provide better and better means for escape from

existential suffering, right? And I think here it's important to be aware of a kind of difference within the Madyamaka project and the project that you often find in a philosophical discussion

and that is the question to whether the aim of philosophy is arriving at an ultimately true theory or whether you regard philosophy or philosophical practice as a kind of medicine or therapy for the diseases of the mind, right? And this is not a particularly Buddhist idea.

You'll also find that within Western philosophy, you know, I find it in, you know, Peronian skepticism. You also find it in the later Wittgenstein, you know, showing the fly, the way out of the fly bottle and so on. So you've got various parallels of that. And if you have that perception, that conception, then of course you wouldn't say, okay,

so which of these therapies is actually ultimately true, right? I mean, that's not the point. The point is which of these work? Right. But then, okay, so, you know, I have various ailments in my life. I've had some chest pain recently

and, okay, I'm looking at the cup. And I think the cup is made out of glass and I kind of think that the glass is made out of atoms of some sort. Maybe, actually, there are no fundamental atoms. maybe it's gunk, maybe it goes all the way down, there's infinite divisibility and nothing has for barbara. Chest pain is still there, you know?

Like how does this sort of revelation about the table or the chair or whatever help me? I mean, if we can't say it's true, we can at least say it's helpful, but how is that supposed to help me escape Samsara? Yeah, good, good point. So what we are talking about here is, of course, the, kind of the sociological dimension of all of this. And the, um, uh,

one notion that we haven't talked about at all is the notion of selflessness or an artman or anata in Buddhism, right? Yes. And I, I'm sure your viewers are probably familiar with some of that. So it's probably not necessarily to go into that much detail. By selflessness, you don't mean kindness there.

No, no. By, by selflessness. I mean that there is no soul pellet, right? So there's no core to the mind or the personality that makes me, me, but it is just a causal connection of physical and psychological parts, right? And of course, that fits in very nicely with the meriological realism, myelogical nihilism that we've talked about early on, because, of course, person is made up of bits,

so there's my body that is made up all that material stuff, and there's my mind with all the ideas and memories and thoughts and so on and they all somehow hanged together, but there's no whole. The parts are real. If anything is real, the parts are real. Of course, the Madyamakas don't think the parts are real, but let's ignore that for the time being. But there is certainly no Atman, no self, no soul pellet, no core to my personality. That makes me me, yeah?

Okay. So we've got there. And that insight is regarded by the Buddhist as absolutely, it's absolutely, essential for escaping existential suffering, right? Because where does existential suffering come from? It comes from the misapprehension of this fact that there is no substantial self or personality core, that we still try to hang on to it as if there was one. And this ability or this mistaken tendency to hang on to something there isn't is, is

cause is fundamentally what causes the suffering, right? Okay. So now you can see how the notion of an utter or selflessness, which you on the one end, you think, okay, well, this is just a theory within philosophy of personal identity, but now you can see how that has a kind of sociological dimension, right? So if you see the world in this way, you might suffer less because you think, well, there isn't actually anybody who suffers. Yeah. I got that idea. Right. Okay. So now when we're turning to all of this metaphysical material, then the

Madiamicus thought, okay, so with philosophical theories, the problem is not that you grasp at a substantial self that isn't there, which is a fairly sort of crude form of grasping or thirst or

Tanha, which is the fundamental one of the fundamental forces that keeps you in samsara, but you can also grasp at theories and use them in a somewhat subtle way as a way

of propping up the illusion of a self that isn't really there. So of course only really philosophers would be people who do that you think, but the idea is that you have this idea, okay, well, so the world decides what is true,

and I figured it out now, and it came down on my side, right? And the theory that you hold is wrong. And so you can use that, of course, to prop up the idea that, you know, there is the me that is right, and use that as a somewhat more subtle, but still potent form of self-grasping that is causing all these problems, right? So to coming back to your chest pain, of course, no amount of thinking about philosophy is going to, you know, alleviate your chest pains and you're probably better see a GP about those, right? But that is not the only notion that the Buddhists are talking about when they're talking about existential suffering, right? I mean, pains and aches and so on are parts of that, physical suffering, but they can sort of cause manifestation of that.

and it goes into a lot more subtle forms of existential, you know, unease and dissatisfaction with the way things go and so on. And it's the suffering in all these forms that this union of philosophical theorizing and a tradition of practice is supposed to alleviate. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, I've got a couple of thoughts. Sure. There's a couple of questions. One is, I can understand how, of course, if everything is empty, then the self is empty.

In fact, sometimes it can be helpful to think of, I found it helpful to think of Mediamika and emptiness as kind of an extension of the well-known Buddhist idea of an atta, of their being no self. You say there appears to be this thing called myself, it has perceptions and memories and all that kind of stuff. But the Buddhists will tell you actually, what's really going on there is just a bunch of concepts that relate to each other, but there's no stuff. There's no like intrinsic essence, I suppose. And then just to say that that's also true of, you know, the table and the chair and the world and everything and then ultimately of emptiness itself. That's fine. But then it's like if this is supposed to be kind of therapeutic, so to speak, you know, and the Buddhist says the way to escape suffering is to recognize that there is no self and there's no one. the suffering is happening too. It's like that's all very well and good. But that doesn't

switch off the suffering, right? So I kind of want to ask in what way it is that a recognition of the non-existence of the self allows you to escape suffering if it doesn't actually get rid of the suffering. It just maybe makes you realize what it actually is. It's almost as if someone's come along and I'm feeling hungry. And they've said, I know you think that you've just got this sort of feeling called hunger, but really what's going on there is your digestive system is connecting to your brain and sending neural signals and that's what's really happening. That's really interesting.

Now, where's the sandwich? You're still hungry, right? So how does that help? Yeah, no, that is, that's a, it's a very good point. And it's just like, you know, saying somebody stole your bicycle and so then I come along and say, well, there wasn't really ever bicycle in the first class because they're only the parts, right? The whole is not real, so don't be sad.

And then you think, that doesn't really help, right? Okay. So, no, that's good. And that is, it would indeed be an unsatisfactory reply. And this is why I tried to mention earlier that we need to take into account that a Buddhist philosophy is part of a kind of practice tradition. And so within Buddhism, you find a common classification

of wisdom or pranja into three different types of increasing sophistication. So the one is the wisdom that you acquire from studying or hearing. This is just learning about philosophical theories. Then the second is the wisdom that results from contemplation. So you make these theories your own and you think about potential countermoves and counter arguments and basically what we've been doing here. So this kind of exploration of a philosophical theory, you think of what it says

and where the breaking points are and you sort of fresh uptest the whole thing and see it does it really work. So that is the kind of wisdom that you acquire from contemplation or thinking. And then there is the final one, which is actually the one that gets you liberated and it helps you to escape essential suffering.

And that is the what is called Bavana, Mayipanya. Bavana is probably the best best translation of that is cultivation. It's sometimes also translated as meditation, but I think here it's probably better understood as cultivation or training.

And so what is meant by that here? Well, one important aspect of all of that is the idea that there is a difference between having a specific philosophical view and seeing the world in that way. And so you'll Thomas Metzinger he came up with this

with this interesting idea of phenomenal correlates so he argued that basically most important philosophical views also have a correlate of the way

the world appears to you if you have that way you have that view right so say if you are on the one end you can believe things like, you know, solipsism, there's only me or idealism, everything is mental and so on. And on the other hand, you can ask yourself, okay, so what would it actually be,

what the world looked like if I actually believed that? And I've actually really thought that this was mental, right? Or if I really thought that you are just a figment in my imagination and this is, I'm real, but you are not. And, okay, so I think most people would agree that there is a difference between that, between just holding a view, being convinced by a view,

and actually seeing the world in this way. Okay, and now the Buddhist believe that you cannot just reason yourself into seeing a world in a specific way, but that requires specific training and practice and sustained practice that sort of sits on top of having a particular view.

And so in a way, what you want to say here is that now coming back to the case of the bicycle, of course it doesn't help me if somebody then just comes up with meriological nihilism to comfort me when my bike has been stolen, right? But that is not the point.

The point is rather that if I were to see the world in that particular way in terms of emptiness and non-self, so on, then that would automatically alleviate or particularly completely annihilate my suffering about the bicycle, right? Of course, in a way, that doesn't really help to somebody who isn't there yet, right? But that is the...

That's like the promise of... Yeah, that is... Yes, let's say, okay, so this is where... This is the goal, right? And you can do all that philosophical reasoning in order to show why that goal would be a good goal to get to, right? But then the next thing is actually getting to that. That is, and I think this is probably one of the key differences between, you know, Buddhist philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy is that that is not the end of the project, right?

It's an important step in the project, but that's not what the aim of the whole thing is. This is why I mentioned earlier the difference between looking for an ultimate literary theory and regarding it as a kind of cure. So then, like, this concept of emptiness then, I mean, we've literally explained what it is and we've helpfully used this concept of myeriology, the relation of parts and holes. and said, okay, emptiness says that there just is no foundational essence to anything. So then, like, just naively, I want to help get, like, a picture of this in my head. Because I understand those words, I get what that means, but it hasn't quite sort of slotted into place for me in that, like, I'm sat on something right now. Like, I'm, what is it that I'm sad on, right?

And I kind of want, like, the best imagery you can think of to help think about this, in that when I explain myriological nihilism, I say to people, well, what you're really sad on is kind of like a bunch of atoms in an arrangement that looks like a chair. And people go, that that makes sense to me. Or maybe for the idealist, they might say that what you call physical matter is really just experiential. You touch it, you feel it, you see it, it arises in mind. And people go, yeah, okay, that kind of makes sense to me. So how would you sort of paint the picture of emptiness to make sense of the phenomena that I'm experiencing right now?

What am I sat on, you know? Yeah. Well, I think the, the, if we think of it in kind of, of metaphorical terms is that in the picture of the world with intrinsic natures

with Svabavabas you've got you with your substantial self and then you've got the world around it and it is permanently creating resistance

to your wishes and desires and you sort of bump into it and that those collisions between the self and the world creates suffering

and now on the picture of emptiness, of course, all the solidity, both of the world and of the self, go away this way. I mean, first of all conceptually, but then hopefully also experientially. And I mean, this is

connected with another key concept that we didn't really have time to talk about today, dependent origination or platyta so the interdependence of things if you might want to turn it that way, right? And then so

metaphorically, you might say, okay, well, in that if you realize that view then you sort of it's no longer the self-hitting the brick wall but it is actually you know the the causes and condition

that create the one passing through it on the other because neither of them has any solidity right now this is of course not meant to be literally passing through walls but I'm trying to come up with the image here of seeing that what is causing the existing the existential suffering

according to these theories is the mistakenly attributed rigidity both to yourself and to your others. And you think, okay, so all of this stuff changes, you know, we get old, we get sick, we lose our faculties, but in fact we want to hold on to this, but the world is sort of conspiring against us, and we can't do anything about that, and that causes a lot of crisis. But then if we realize that, in fact, there isn't anything there there, right? There isn't any core such that we must hold onto it because it is sort of precious and it's me and it makes me me

and if it goes away this is kind of terrible and so on. Once you, not just intellectually let that go, but actually let that go in experience, then you will end up with a position where you're still impermanent, of course, but the suffering dissipates.

So, but I think, you know, I'm just a sort of philosopher. I think these are the kind of the questions that you need to talk to a meditation master about. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. That's why I want to know the philosophical view about like the nature of reality. And I kind of want to say like, why not, why not just, why can't I just posit that there is some foundational stuff?

Like, you know, I, when I speak to, when I speak to a Hindu, right, they will believe in the self. But they'll think that the idea that everyone has an individual self that sort of individuates and is real is a mistake. Like, if you ask me to paint a picture of where I think is like the middle metaphysical way, I would say, well, on the one hand, you've got a bunch of people who think that objects really exist, that the lamp just has intrinsic existence, that you're a self, that I'm a self, that there are billions and billions of selves. On the other hand, you've got these Buddhists who think that kind of like there is no self, like there's literally no such thing as a self at all. And in the Madiamika school, everything is empty. There's no ground whatsoever. And I want to say that like a middleway to me seems like something, you know, I've spoken to Advaita Vedantists on the show and they say, yeah, like there is this thing called the self, but there's only one of them. And what you call your individual self is an illusion. But there is something with intrinsic essence and that is the same thing as Brahman. And I kind of say like, where is it that they're going wrong for the Magi Amika school? At what point in their chain of reasoning in saying there must be some foundational essence and I, I

I know what that essence is because I'm experiencing it. Like, take consciousness or experience itself. The one thing that most people will admit is truly undeniable. That is, I am having an experience right now. Maybe I'm having an experience of redness. I see like a red light and it's shining in my eyes. And that's real. It feels weird to me to say that, say, the experience of redness,

that smooth experience that I have is, empty, that there's no substance, that there's no intrinsic nature, that there's nothing actually really happening there. What would, I suppose I want to break it down to the foundational sort of thing, which I think is consciousness. What is that made out of? What is that dependent on? What is that like, what is non-ultimately real about just the direct experience of redness or pain when you feel the pinch on your hand or something like that? Right. Okay. So, I mean, one step back, I mean, in case of Advaita Vedanta, I mean, Shankara was was, was, was, also, you know, described as a crypto-Buddhist. So the, the, the, where exactly the, the distinction between these schools is, is probably the topic for another podcast.

It's certainly, Shankara was very, very adamant that his view was not Buddhism. and the Buddhists are also very clear that their view is not Advaita Vedanta but depending on how you spell them out it's it's kind of difficult to see where this is going but let's I mean let's put that in a box for the time being

because what you're really interesting I think is in the in the manifest undeniable reality of consciousness yeah sure right okay so you I mean

as you As you know, within the theory of mind, you also have the illusionists, right? Who think that consciousness is an illusion. Yes. And that strikes many people as extremely unintuitive, because, you know, how can I be wrong about being wrong about something? There are interpreters who also interpret yoga chara idealism, so another form of Buddhist philosophy as a form of illusionism,

so particularly the Marx Siduritz he defended that view but so you said okay so we have the experience of red and surely that is real right right

first of all on the one hand you would probably also you know you look at some visual illusion right so two lines looking at the same lengths but they aren't

you look at them they seem to be of the same length but you know that they are not. You cannot deny the fact that they are appearing to you in that way, but you know that the way your visual processing works and mistakes them for this way. So to that extent, just the fact that something is given to you doesn't allow you to say that it's real, right? Because it might be that even though they look the same lengths, they aren't, right?

That's fine. Yeah, yeah. So that's sort of one issue where you should take into account. So just because something appears to you, it doesn't necessarily mean that, therefore, the appearance actually is unmistakably genuine, as you can see from all kinds of illusions. But I think the more important point is that what is wrong with the, from the Madiamika perspective, with the view of taking consciousness is ultimately real? And of course, the Madiamicus argue against other Buddhists who take a very similar view to that, namely the Yogacharians, who some of which are. are interpreted as saying that consciousness is ultimately real, and the Madiamika says, no, no, no, they've taken a wrong turn somewhere. Yeah, the Yogachara is often thought of as an idealist school, whether

that's accurate as, of course. Yeah, that's, again, a debatable, data question, but it's certainly the case that this is the majority interpretation of the school, and it's also that when the Madyamika's character criticized Yoga Chara, they criticize it as a school that things mind is ultimately real. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so why do they think that's a problem? Well, the issue is again that as soon as you've got something ultimately real somewhere, you've got yourself an object of grasping that you can use in order to hang on your process of subjectification of the self by connecting it to something that is ultimately real, right?

So it works in kind of at once removed. Now, the problem is no longer that you sort of believe in an art man, but you've got something else and you think, okay, so that is, that's actually the foundation of the universe and I've got that right. And therefore I sort of have to share some of the ultimate realness of that that is in there. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced delimie-meat products for always 375. And get life brand pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each.

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But also, do you have to do that? I mean, like, I think in Advaita Vedantis would be very careful to say that if you believe that you as an individual are having, as a self, are having an experience of redness, then you're wrong. But in fact, there is just the experience. And I also understand optical illusions. I think they're fascinating, and they prove that the content of our experience can be mistaken. But even the illusionist about consciousness, I just had Keith Frankish on my show. Oh, it was really happy. And he will be the first to tell you.

He's like, I don't think consciousness is an illusion. I don't think that there is no experience happening. I think that what illusionists are really talking about is the self. I think that so much actually of our conversation about consciousness is really about the self without people realizing it. But consciousness itself isn't the redness. I mean, that redness is one of the sort of, is the content of the conscious experience. And even if you're having an illusion, even if there's an obstacle illusion in front of you, there is some kind of experience happening.

And I feel like I can admit of that without admitting of there being this thing called the self, without feeling as though I am using that as a way to grasp onto the sense of Alex that I can't let go of, But just rather to say that it strikes me clearly and distinctly, as it were, that that is a thing with nature, with essence. And if there's anything that I could sort of point to to found my metaphysics of intrinsic existence or whatever, it would be experience, not that particular experience, not that experience of redness or this experience of the chair, but experience itself. the Buddhist emptiness idea would have to say that actually that somehow decoheres, that it's actually still, no matter what you think, it's still dependent on something more foundational, it's still causally or ontologically or meriologically dependent. But I say, like, that experience is happening doesn't seem causally dependent,

because it's not about particular conscious experiences. It's just that there is experience happening. It doesn't seem too made up of parts, so it doesn't seem to have any myriological dependence. An ontological dependence, I wouldn't even know how to begin addressing that. But it certainly feels very real in a way that doesn't seem to decoher like a table or even the self does. So if you think you have an experience of redness or something like that, so you would not think that it depends on causes and conditions?

Well, this is the thing. I feel like that experience of redness must do because there's something which is sort of causing that particular experience. But the thing that I think is real, because of your optical illusions point in part, it is not the redness per se, but that experience is happening. This is the thing, like the, like the, the, um, the Sanctur school within, within Hindu philosophy, which has this kind of dualism, not between mind and body, but between like, the, the seer and the scene, if you like, the sort of the, the self which sees and everything which it sees. and I feel like everything which is seen, which includes internal things, like redness or hunger or whatever, is separable from the thing that sees.

And this is the sort of Hindu intuition, is that all along with all of those experiences, with the sights that you see, with the sounds that you hear, there's some kind of perceiving self. And that's separate from the contents. I guess it's that perceiving self, which I'm pointing to as the thing

which strikes me as maybe having, intrinsic existence that doesn't seem necessarily at least to require decohering into parts or ontological dependence and I feel like that's kind of what someone like an Dividefantist says. They say I totally agree with you that like everything is dependent on something else, everything decoheres, everything is actually sort of ground except for this self, this perceiving self through which everything else that we're talking about, everything, the table, the myriological simples, the concept of myriology, all of like lands upon this this seeing's health. Yeah.

Yeah, I suppose one of the questions is to which extent you think, okay, so you need this as a theoretical posit in order to keep the whole system ticking along, right? You need some fixed point to have everything revolving around it. And that brings us back to the discussion we had earlier on, whether that is necessary and so on. So that's one question. The other question is whether this substantial self that you have in mind here is actually something that is experientially accessible to you in some way, right?

So on the one hand, you could say, well, this is, so the absolute self and whatever that may be is pretty much like the, you know, the cantier numin. We know that it's there for theoretical reasons, but it is not a subject of our experience. Right? And so if you say that that's right, so it is actually not a subject of our experience, then you might wonder, okay, so what is all the fuss about? Because it looks then like an idle wheel

that is not actually doing anything theoretically because we don't need it, presumably if we can have this kind of foundationless metaphysics. And it's also nothing that shows up experientially. so it's not even an appearance. And then the question is, okay, so what is this actually doing here? Right? And I suppose that the, I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, they don't deny that conscious experiences are conventionally real, right?

So, so that, um, so it's not, that it's not the case that they would say that this is not happening, right? but this is all itself dependent on causes and conditions that bring it about and is presumably itself causing other things right causing your further experiences causing experiences of other people and so on so and it's the the the emptiness of the of the conscious experience is not that it's not there but the the emptiness is that there is nothing there than that that stands on its own independent of various dependence relations, parthood relations, causal dependence relations, superimpositions by the mind and what have you, right? So it's this kind of network of interdependence that is conventionally real and that appears to you and it's the inside that it is only conventionally real which is supposed to bring about the kind of sociological effects that we've talked about.

Okay. So, look, there's been a lot here today, and in another sense, there's been nothing because we've hardly scratched the surface as well, as well as there being no intrinsic essence to anything we're saying. But, I mean, I guess the picture I get in my head at the end of this is that, like, when we talk about emptiness, we're saying that reality, whereas most people kind of imagine, like, layers, right? They imagine that you can kind of zoom out or zoom in and you can break stuff down. This is more of a picture of like, I'm kind of picturing a bunch of nodes floating around

in space and they've all got lines between them and that's what reality is. There is no, there's no foundation, there's no totality, there's just a bunch of interrelated sort of stuff that is there but is only defined in relation to the other things that. it sort of connects to and depends upon. I suppose it maybe functions a little bit like language in the way that if you open a dictionary, a dictionary is entirely self-referential, right? Like every single word in the dictionary is defined in terms of other words in the dictionary. If you went looking, if you followed the chain of the dictionary, you could say, well, that word has to be defined by another word, and that word has to be defined by another word and so on and so on. And if you kept

following those words in the dictionary, you'd end up sort of going in a circle, right? There would be no, There's no first word. There's no foundational word. There's no word which just stands on its own as a word. And I suppose reality would have to function a bit like that, that there's no foundational stuff, that there's no foundational substance, there's no foundational cause. It's just a sort of interconnected web of like interdependent stuff.

Something like that. Because it's really difficult, I have to admit, to kind of picture what it is that we're talking about here. And that's sort of the best I've got. Yeah. I mean, what you've mentioned is, it's called the symbol grounding problem in semantics. Which is, I mean, which is,

this is actually a fairly, very controversial issue because you might also think, well, there are certain words that, you know, get their meaning just by direct pointing. Well, yeah,

that's the thing. So, because if you, I mean, if you, I mean, I'm very sympathetic to this, you know,

it's, it all floats in the air idea for obvious reasons. But, I mean, this is also, it has, has, what's so interesting.

interesting implications with all kinds of things. For example, if you think there is something that an LLM is missing in being able to understand language and you think,

well, it's a connection with the things. They know all the connection between the words. That's why they can generate texts, but they don't actually have any sort of direct connection with any of the reference.

If you think that's not necessary, then you would probably think that the speech that is coming out from an LLM is not fundamentally different from the one that comes up from human, right? Okay, let's put that to one side.

What you describe there is, I think, this very kind of ontological coherentism, right? Which is, I think, is a perfectly good model to have for much of what the Madyamakas are saying. I think the important point just to keep in mind here is that you've got this picture in your mind where you've got, you know, it's like the net of Indra or the no, it's connected and hung up in the empty space. space, the important point is to not then get to the conclusion and say, I know I've got the structure of reality, right? So that's what it's really like, because that is exactly the kind of step that the Madyamakas then don't want to make. I can say, okay, so seeing the world in this way is helpful for achieving the effect that this is what's supposed to bring about, namely the eradication of existential suffering and so on. But it is not an ultimately truth.

of the world. It sounds a little suspicious, no? Like if there's someone who's not heard of this before, it sounds a little like there's this idea that I've got, but if you press me on it, I'm going to tell you, no, well, I never said it was true. I only said it's going to help you. And is that, is that where this bottoms out? Would it be no problem for someone of the school to say, like, maybe, I mean, it's not true. I'm not interested in true. I'm just interested in whether it helps you. Is it really, can it really just be a sort of therapeutic thing? In other words, is it even appropriate to call this a metaphysical worldview?

Right. Yeah, I think the differentiation we should not lose sight of here is a differentiation between conventional truth and ultimate truth, right? So at the conventional level, we have all the standards of reasoning and evidence that we use in philosophy and so on. and then we can debate whether Advaita Vedanta or Madyamaka is the preferable viewpoint for all kinds of systematic reasons and so on, right?

But then the none of this has any implications for what is happening at the level of ultimate truth, how the world looks for the enlightened mind, right? So the opponent that you have in mind here is probably not somebody who would say,

no, I never told you it was true, because that's not the point the Madyamika still is able to differentiate between what is conventionally true and what is conventionally false right so that is always that's always the case but there isn't anything there where you would say okay

well this is this this is where the buck stops ultimately yeah it's just difficult to imagine isn't it like like that the world is just groundless it begins to feel like what you're asking me to theoretically do is literally just remove the ground beneath my feet or say that the

the ground beneath my feet is being suspended by the ceiling and the ceiling is being held up by the ground or something like that like there's a big pole connecting the ceiling in the ground and if you ask you know

what is the ground it's the thing that's being held up by the ceiling and what is the ceiling? Well it's the thing that's being held up by the ground they're just connected by this pole or something and it just feels to me that if that's all there is and there's nothing outside

holding the room in place, there's no foundation that we've sort of lost any kind of ontological grounding. Maybe that's the point. That is exactly the point. You get a similar sort of vertigo effect if you ask yourself, coming back to the Kantian numin, right? So what is that actually that supports the phenomena? And you'll find some of the later comments of Kant on that when he said, well,

The numininin is an enz ratione is a thought thing, right? So it's something that is thought up by the mind. Then you think, okay, now hang on a moment. So how can it be both a thought thing and also the support of phenomena? Yeah. And then you get a similar thing. You know, kind of lost your bearings here. Now, I think with Madiamika, this is actually the point.

Yeah. That's why I like Schopenhauer. I love Schopenhauer's sort of response to Kent because he comes along and says, look, I mean, there's one thing which you experience both as a phenomena and a numina, and that's your body. And you know what it's internally like to have this thing which he calls will. And it just becomes this sort of form of idealism of saying that the numina is the same thing that I experience in myself as the numina, which is the will. And again, it seems satisfying to me, like I think you quite right, Kant has this open question, which leaves you with a feeling of vertico,

until someone like Schopenhauer comes along and says, well, you know that thing you've got inside of you called will, that's what everything's made out of. And suddenly, oh, my feet are back on the ground again, you know. Maybe you're more comfortable than I am sort of being suspended. Yeah, I suppose it's a question is whether you need this kind of metaphysical peg you need to hang yourself on, or whether you are, this kind of feeling of suspension is less vertigo-inducing than the idea of having a foundation. Yeah, I must say, at least for the time being, I know this is supposed to relieve me

of suffering. If anything, it's given me a bit of a headache and made me feel like I've got vertigo. but fascinating nonetheless I think the extent to which that's true of me and of course I'm joking I don't really have a headache

but I think it maybe it does just betray how uncomfortable I am letting go of an ontological foundation and maybe if I spoke to some kind of Buddhist meditative expert they would say well there's your problem you need to learn to let go my friend

and maybe I'll get there one day and I'm not sure if it'll be through metaphysics but whatever the case emptiness has been the sort of name of the game today. You've got a couple of books which I point people to, we said before we started. You sort of wrote an exposition on Nagarjuna's work, which I'll link down below. But you've also got a book called the non-existence of the real world, which is not explicitly a Buddhist text, but tries to approach the same issues from a sort of analytic philosophical perspective, which is well worth reading if people want to go deeper on

So thank you so much for your time today And I look forward to seeing what people make of this Because this will be the first time I imagine a lot of our listeners have been introduced to This concept of emptiness and intrinsic nature and whatnot So who knows what they're going to think But thanks for your time Thank you