[Buddha-l] Madhyamaka & Methodology: online proceedings of a symposium at Smith College

[Jamie Hubbard]

  Hi Everyone,

I wanted to let you know that the videotaped proceedings of "Madhyamaka 
& Methodology: A Symposium on Buddhist Theory and Method," which took 
place at Smith College in Northampton, MA in April 2010, are now 
available online. You can watch them on the site, and you can also 
download them for free and watch them on iTunes.

Here's the link: http://www.smith.edu/buddhism/event-mmsymp.php

The three-day symposium extended a conversation that was begun in 2008 
in two articles in the /Journal of Indian Philosophy -- /one by C. W. 
Huntington of Hartwick College, and the other by Jay Garfield of Smith 
College -- on the question of how to read and interpret Buddhist 
Madhyamaka texts. The crux of the issue is how to make sense of the 
argumentation that we find in these texts, while also taking seriously 
the Madhyamaka critique of all views, theses and propositions. According 
to Madhyamaka proponents, all phenomena are empty of "self nature" or 
"essence," meaning that they have no intrinsic, independent reality 
apart from the causes and conditions from which they arise.

Arguing for a literary reading of Nāgārjuna (the founder of the 
Madhyamaka school in the second century CE), Huntington asserts that 
philosophers who seek to understand Madhyamaka through modern symbolic 
logic end up missing the point of Nāgārjuna's enterprise, for in 
treating Madhyamaka texts as a form of denatured discourse, they fail to 
engage with the metaphorical and affective dimensions of his language. 
Responding to this charge, Garfield holds that not only is Nāgārjuna's 
logic very interesting, but it's also in no way antithetical to his 
rejection of views, theses and positions. Garfield thus defends the use 
of symbolic logic as well as the general approach of reading Nāgārjuna's 
arguments in terms of rational categories familiar to students of 
Anglo-American analytic philosophy.

The symposium featured more than twenty scholars from across America and 
Europe, each of whom had the opportunity to respond to these two papers 
and to present their own ideas on the topic. There were philosophers and 
historians, textualists and ethnographers, specialists in logic, 
literature and tantra as well as India, Tibet and East Asia. These 
scholars espoused a range of viewpoints, with many complementary yet 
opposing perspectives and areas of expertise, hence the proceedings 
functioned as a high level and heated conversation. Presenters spoke 
pointedly for fifteen minutes, addressing pre-circulated questions about 
Madhyamaka and Methodology as well as the original papers by Huntington 
and Garfield. What ensued was a conceptually focused dialogue in which 
people had the opportunity to distill their thinking about method, 
highlight their interests and concerns and respond to others doing the same.

We hope that this symposium will be of interest to a wide variety of 
scholars, whether in Buddhist studies (across discipline and region) or 
in religion or philosophy. The study of Madhyamaka has long been central 
to the study of Buddhism, guiding the methodological orientation for the 
field of Buddhist studies as well its understanding of the relationship 
between text and practice. The question of how best to make sense of 
premodern texts with modern theory is surely one that confronts many 
scholars, and we were fortunate to have some of the best scholars in 
Buddhist studies addressing this problem through a series of brilliant 
texts that thwart any easy answer.

Enjoy!

Andy

Andy Rotman
Religion Department
Smith College
Pierce Hall 203
Northampton, MA 01063

email: arotman at email.smith.edu <mailto:arotman at email.smith.edu>
work phone: (413) 585-3348
cell phone: (646) 734-6824
http://www.smith.edu/religion/fac_arotman.html