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Concept
Buddhapālita
Summary
Buddhapālita (; , fl. 5th-6th centuries CE) was an Indian Mahayana Buddhist commentator on the works of Nagarjuna and Aryadeva. His Mūlamadhyamaka-vṛtti is an influential commentary to the Mūlamadhyamakakarikā.
Buddhapālita's commentarial approach works was criticised by his contemporary Bhāviveka, and then defended by the later Candrakīrti (c. 600–650).
Later Tibetan scholasticism (11th century onwards) would characterize the two approaches as the prasaṅgika (Buddhapālita-Candrakīrti) and svatantrika (Bhāviveka's) schools of Madhyamaka philosophy (but these terms do not appear in Indian Sanskrit sources).
Little is known about Buddhapālita's life. According to some sources, he is believed to have been born in South India.
Buddhapālita's only work that survives is his Buddhapālita-Mūlamadhyamakavṛtti, a commentary on Nagarjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakarikā (MMK). The commentary survives in Tibetan (not in the original Sanskrit) and contains 27 chapters and divided into ten sections. The Tibetan translation was completed by Jñānagarbha and Klu'i rgyal mtshan in the beginning of the 9th century. According to Taranatha and to the colophon to Buddhapālita's commentary, Buddhapālita composed various other commentaries, but they have not survived.
The Buddhapālita-Mūlamadhyamakavṛtti (Tibetan: dbu ma rtsa ba'i 'grel pa buddhapalita) is closely related to the earlier commentary on Nagarjuna's MMK called the Akutobhayā. Indeed, in various places (particularly the last five chapters), the Tibetan texts are very similar or identical and about a third of Buddhapālita's commentary comes from the Akutobhayā. In this text, Buddhapālita also sometimes quotes Aryadeva.
As noted by Jan Westerhoff, Buddhapālita's method exclusively relies on the prasaṅgavākya (reductio ad absurdum, literally "consequentialist") philosophical method. This method relies on drawing out the necessary but undesired consequences of an opponent's thesis without maintaining any counter thesis or proposition to be established in turn.
Official source
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