Boo! That’s like changing the rules of a game so you can win. No fair! Unless they had a good solid justification for interpreting different parts of the tetralemma differently with respect to level of truth.
That’s what I thought the MMK was trying to say, that any view is a poison. Including that one. Emptiness of emptiness. I am on the fence as to whether that ‘works.’ Isn’t it a bit like an alethic relativist saying: There is no absolute truth? If true, it’s false.
Is blocking an option?
Yes, but I agree with the moderator that you should consider carefully before “ignoring.”
Yes - Nagarjuna writes
“It is empty” is not to be said, nor “It is not empty,” nor that it is both, nor that it is neither; [“empty”] is said only for the sake of instruction (MMK 22. 11)
implying that true reality is beyond any conceptual characterisation at all. However, this doesn’t mean that reality has no place at all - it simply means that whatever ‘place’ it has can never be coherently stated in logical propositions. That’s why TRV Murti referred to this position as transcendental - meaning something trans-rational, beyond the horizon of what is capable of being conceptualised. Reality is unborn, un-originated (MMK 18, 7). And:
that [which when dependent or conditioned comes into and goes out of existence, i.e., the world], when not conditioned or dependent [i.e. empty], is called nirvana (MMK 25, 9).
So even though it has no place in the causal scheme of our thinking, it can yet, nevertheless, still be ‘experienced’ as a blissful peace:
This halting of cognising everything… is blissful (MMK 25, 24).
According to this interpretation, Nagarjuna’s ‘negative’ philosophy creates space for the ineffability of the world (i.e. of reality): reality is truly off-limits for the mind, but not - perhaps - for some kind of trans-rational intuition (or insight). Which is where it ties in with some of the things that K has talked about.
This would be no surprise as relativism in the West can be traced back to Pyrrhonism - and there is good evidence that Pyrrho picked up some form of proto-Madhyamaka thought during his travels in northern India (with Alexander the Great’s army). Even though he predates Nagarjuna (and Madhyamaka philosophy), Pyrrho’s views mirror the early Buddhist skepticism which was the prototype for later Madhyamaka.
This Buddhist skepticism was based on the fourteen “metaphysical questions” that the Buddha refused to answer (called avyakrta - “inexpressibles”) - about whether the universe was infinite or finite, whether the Buddha continued to exist at death or was annihilated, and so on, taking the fourfold form that Nagarjuna would later adopt:
It is fascinating that Pyrrho himself writes (with regard to all propositions):
it no more is than it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not
mirroring the fourfold Buddhist scheme (of catuskoti).
Good segue! Did you know that a young HHtDL once said of Krishnamurti: “A Nagarjuna!”
Didn’t know, thanks for sharing!
Wow! And the tetralemma did not play a key role (if any role) in western philosophy, right?
Here’s a link to a paper you might enjoy: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5735
To What Type of Logic Does the “Tetralemma” Belong?
Rafael D. SorkinAbstract
Although the so called tetralemma might seem to be incompatible with any
recognized scheme of logical inference, its four alternatives arise naturally
within the anhomomorphic logics which have been proposed in order to
accommodate certain features of microscopic (i.e. quantum) physics. This
suggests that the possibility of similar, “non-classical” logics might have
been recognized in India at the time when Buddhism arose.
Thanks nobody, I’ll take a look at the link
Although he come along relatively late in the history of western philosophy, Kant employed antimonies for the same purpose as Nagarjuna’s tetra lemma, to show the limits of thought. For example, in the antimony looking at time, one view is to say that time (or the universe) had a beginning - but if it had a beginning in time, the preceding moment (to the universe’s coming into existence) could not have existed, and nothing can occur in empty time: so time could not have had a beginning. But if, on the other hand, we say that time is infinite, an infinity of time must have elapsed before the present moment came into being: but then the present could not have come into being, because it would have taken an infinitely long time to get there: so time cannot be infinite.
Kant’s antinomies show that there are necessary contradictions in logic as soon as space and time are assumed to be (absolute) realities in themselves - which is pretty much what Nagarjuna accomplishes with his more methodical catuskoti.
Yes - although I would argue that Nagarjuna was at heart a logician, and Krishnamurti was at heart an intuitive (or mystic).
Nagarjuna (like Kant) demonstrated that by simply using thought, in the most logical manner possible - to analyse any object in the universe (mental or physical) - thought (and its object) must eventually break down and becomes useless, empty. Thought simply cannot make coherent sense of the world through a rigorously logical application. So you see, in this sense what Nagarjuna accomplishes is similar to the antinomies of Kant: a logical proof that the world (if it exists at all) is transcendental so far as our thinking is concerned.
K on the other hand was not a logician, he seems to have investigated from insight - and rather than being interested in the application of thought ‘externally’ (as logic), he was interested rather in the content of thought (its very ‘internal’ structure).
The content of thought itself is problematic for K, both because it is limited and bound up wholly with past experience - memory - and because it is physically dependent on the brain’s response to experience (and so is itself made of something limited: i.e. matter). Because thought is physical and part of the body, it is part of the emotional response (not detached from it). And because thought is limited and bound to the past (as memory) it can never match up to the reality (which is whole and exists in the present). But perhaps the greatest issue with thought that K pointed to is its psychological significance for us, inasmuch as it creates our experience of a psychological past and future - our experience of psychological time. - Nagarjuna doesn’t really explore these areas, so they are quite dissimilar in that respect.
More like : Our conceptual descriptions of absolute truth are not quite right. Downright wrong in many ways.
@James says :
Anyway, context is important : what is said to whom. Teachings are not absolute truth written in stone.
The thing about the tetralemma is it includes (1-2) and transcends (3-4) conventional logic:
I interpreted HHtDL’s “A Nagarjuna!” as suggesting that Krishnamurti’s full negation (“I am nothing”) was similar to Nagarjuna’s (“Everything is empty”). Lots of Krishnamurti reads like conventional(ish) psychotherapy. But the alternate way of living he pointed to is deeply unconventional. Impossible even!
Yes - although it can be argued that negation of the third and fourth lemmas are already negated implicitly in the negation of the first two.
So, for instance, the negation of ‘existence’ implies non-existence; while the negation of ‘non-existence’ implies existence.
But if I have negated them both, then I cannot add them together (to create ‘both existence and non-existence’ - the third lemma to be negated), because I would be adding together two negations (what isn’t to what isn’t).
And if I cannot add them together, I cannot then negate the negation of what I was not able to add together in the first place (so as to create ‘neither existence nor non-existence’ - the fourth lemma to be negated).
To a large degree the catuskoti is not merely a statement of logic or a tool of analysis (although it is clearly these things too), it is also a piece of startling rhetoric - to make clear to any reader the impossibility of affirmative (positive) thought.
This is why Ruegg - an important scholar of Madhyamaka Buddhism (who was himself inclined to the Gelukpa approach) - nevertheless permitted a reading of Nagarjuna’s writings as fundamentally tending towards “silence”. That is,
a philosophically motivated refraining from the conceptualization and verbalisation that belong to the discursive level of relativity and transactional usage… which is as such inconceivable and inexpressible in terms of discursivity
If I am unable to state a position positively despite being given 4 distinct routes to try out(!), then clearly whatever I say must be empty, and silence becomes the noblest speech.
I don’t think it’s helpful to brand fellow forum members as fools. I appreciate that you get frustrated, however.
The unresolved issue that I was talking about was the following - someone posts a statement which some of us take to mean that the poster has undergone the same transformation as K and now has no ego or self.
For example, let us consider that someone posts (not a real example) the following:
“When there is direct perception, the self is no longer there.”
For some of us, the implication is that the writer must be writing from direct experience. If this weren’t the case, how could the writer be sure of this? This leads to a fellow poster asking if this statement is the result of direct experience of the self not being there. Sometimes, this leads to a situation of conflict as the original poster feels offended. Now, I’m sure the original poster made the statement in good faith. Would re-phrasing the statement to make it a question have avoided conflict? Personally, I don’t fully understand what is going on here but have the following questions:
My goto get out of jail card, when I say something like this, and my interlocuter, asks me whether I think I’m a Buddha for daring to say such a thing - is logic. Meaning that the same statement can be made using a logical syllogism, or can be understood intellectually. (eg. Perception, processed via the veil of self, is not direct perception)
Maybe it’s the degree of certainty that’s the issue then, is it?
Not sure what issue you mean - but conflict/insults usually arise due to lack of “savoir vivre” and pride.
Question : do both sides have to be fighting for there to be conflict?
Why is the self threatened by the ‘other’s’ claims of ‘insight’? Not to analyze but just to be aware of it, attend to it. Do you like it, do you hate it? Do you ‘side’ with it, do you want to ban it etc? There is work to be done. Experimentation. Which can lead to insights into the self. There’s no one to ‘certify’ the ‘validity’ of such seeings. So if you’re not interested in watching, choicelessly, non-judgementaly your own reactions to posts, why not just ignore the posts rather than attack them and form some sort of ‘anti-insight gang’…and leave it to the moderator to decide what is acceptable or not.
I do like to discuss the insight claim with the claimant when I hear one - mainly to see how they have integrated their insight or conclusion - can they make sense?
Things I like to see : people using their own words to explain stuff and no unicorns and spaceships. (actually, not true, I do like hearing people tell me about magical stuff) If they get defensive or aggresive, thats a bad sign - though I will occasionally keep trying to communicate by trying to be as non-threatening as possible in my questioning (usually to no avail)
What really gets my goat is when some angry guru makes personal attacks that are completely non-sensical - and they get a load of 
likes. I usually feel the need to point out fallacies at that point. (I like to point out logical fallacies anyway - but I try to hold back if they risk destroying trust in a dialogue)
But equally, one can also ask, Why is the self threatened when its claims of insight are being questioned?
I think that Sean’s careful post is entirely valid: there is some miscommunication going on that needs to be cleared up - because if someone says that
it is certainly the case that for some of us this means that the person is implicitly claiming no longer to have a self. This is a big claim, not a small claim. It will distort the whole enquiry if this is left hanging.
So if that person really feels that have ended the self, it makes it clearer if they simply come out and say so without endlessly beating about the bush. And if they haven’t ended the self, then there is no shame in admitting this - it does not detract from whatever insight they have had.
I’ll be straight with you. There have been a few moments in my life when I really saw (or felt I saw - I had a genuine insight) that the self is not fundamental, is not real. For 20 mins or so, there was no sense of an ‘I’, a ‘me’ - and one felt that one was looking at the world truly for the first time, with an expanded attention.
However, the sense of self came back each time - so I realised that I had had a partial insight. The implication being that there is more to the background conditioning of my mind that had not been exposed to insight, which meant that it wasn’t what K calls insight (i.e. something singularly transformative, never to go back on, a radical mutation in consciousness).
Now I have a sense, a gut feeling, that what some others are calling insight - involving the cessation of self - is something like what I have explained here above. It is not what K means by total insight, it is a partial insight - something valuable, important, but not the actual thing. One cannot prove this of course, except by observing closely the person who is claiming to have had true insight; but if one has not dumbed down the whole significance of what K was calling radical transformation, it is highly unlikely that it is what the rest of us would call true insight.
The confusion this causes is acute - and it is completely in the power of those people claiming to have had these ‘insights’ to clear it up (if they so wish).
I think the problem is that asking someone if they are talking from personal experience seems a perfectly valid question to some but seems like an attack to others. Surely nobody here is “anti-insight”, are they?
Isn’t the self “anti-insight”? Isn’t that the reason it has persisted these thousands of years?
See! As Charley might say, there’s an ‘insight’ right there. 
Yes, there is some overlap. But K really knew very little about Nagarjuna - he famously didn’t read religious or philosophical books (apart from some poetic Buddhist literature when he was a young man), and so only picked up bits and pieces from others around him. He liked Nagarjuna’s passion for negation, but K’s mind was a million miles away from the rationally ascetic logical mind of Nagarjuna.
For instance, the orthodox way of interpreting Nagarjuna in Tibet (which takes its cue from Tsongkhapa) presents a very different kind of ‘emptiness’ from the more mystical or experiential variety of emptiness that K seems to have talked about. And with respect to their approaches to thought, thinking - as I pointed out earlier - Nagarjuna (like Kant, in this regard) was interested in what (logical) thought does (when faced by its conceptual objects); while Krishnamurti was more interested in what thought is in itself, how it comes about, what it is made of (physically), what it does to us psychologically (creating psychological time, fear, desire, suffering, etc).
In fact, I would argue that K had more in common with an almost completely unknown early Buddhist - called Maha Kaccana - than with Nagarjuna! Listen to the following, and let me know if you see the resemblance.
Evidence for the striking similarity of (parts of) K’s teaching can be found in a passage from the Madhupindika Sutta, which is attributed to a Buddhist teacher called Maha Kaccana (a disciple of the Buddha). It states that, following the contact of the eye with the object seen, “there is sensation”. Then:
what one senses one apperceives, what one apperceives one thinks over, what one thinks over one conceptually proliferates; because of which conceptual proliferation, apperception and reckoning afflict a person, with regard to (all) forms, of the past, future and present.
That is: in this text Maha Kaccana clearly distinguishes sensation (and the feeling it gives rise to in the body) from thinking; and correlates this thinking (“conceptual proliferation”) with the experience of psychological time (“the past, future and present”) - aka what K sometimes called thought-time - which engenders suffering (“affliction”).
Some early Buddhists (and probably most Buddhists even today) believed that the cause of suffering was in the senses (causing tanha, thirst); but here Maha Kaccana very clearly shows how the cause of suffering is rather in our cognitive faculty, our thinking (when it is dominated by avidya, a lack of awareness).
K’s approach is very much in keeping with this perspective (see, for instance, how K describes the coming into being of desire from thought entering into sensation and giving it a temporal continuity, etc which leads to suffering).
I think we are often not the best judges of our own insight or lack of it Dan.
“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.”
Robert Burns, national poet of Scotland