Tom Tillemans

University of Lausanne, Dept of Oriental Languages and Cultures, Emeritus

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Is Metaphysics Madness? A Sixth-Century Polemic Unpacked.

H. Matsuoka, S. Moriyama, T. Neill (eds.). To the Heart of Truth. Felicitation Volume for Eli Franco on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Vol. 1., Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 104.1, Vienna, p. 277-309,, 2023

I think almost no one would have predicted that before the end of the millenium-even given some p... more

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Methodology: Meditations of a Philosophical Buddhologist.

K. Marciniak, S. Kania, M. Wielińska-Soltwedel, A. Bareja-Starzyńska (eds). Guruparamparā. Studies on Buddhism, India, Tibet and More in Honour of Professor Marek Mejor. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, 2022, p. 437-450, 2022

There was a famous incident in the 1980s that sent shivers down spines. A prominent Princeton phi... more There was a famous incident in the 1980s that sent shivers down spines. A prominent Princeton philosopher put a notice on his office door that philosophy students should just say “No” to the history of philosophy—Western and Eastern alike, no doubt. I am going to turn the tables and look at some arguments by historians for nay-saying to philosophy, in particular arguments by historians of Asian thought and specialists in Buddhist Studies. Such arguments, too, don’t fare well. I close with an instructive example from another field, i.e., linguistics, and a few morals to the story.

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Reversing Śāntarakṣita’s Argument. Or do Mādhyamikas Derive Part-whole Contradictions in All Things?

A Road Less Traveled. Felicitation Volume in Honor of John Taber. Ed. Vincent Eltschinger, Birgit Kellner, Ethan Mills, Isabelle Ratié. Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 100, Vienna., 2021

John Taber significantly showed us how arguments of Indian Buddhists take on needed depth when we... more John Taber significantly showed us how arguments of Indian Buddhists take on needed depth when we better understand their Brahmanical critics. Mīmāṃsaka arguments against Buddhist philosophy of language and metaphysics, for exam ple, provide the indispensable backdrop to understanding Buddhist logicians' ideas on scripture, meaning, universals, and abstract entities and, indeed, may ultimately remain unanswerable in some of those debates. I have long maintained that In di an Buddhist arguments are also profitably understood via Tibetan critical anal yses, although the context is more complicated as Tibetan Buddhist authors very rarely present themselves as openly opposing major Indian coreligionists but in stead as showing their true intentions. Here is one such thinly disguised Ti betan critique (henceforth called the "quoted passage") of an important Indian ar gu ment about parts and wholes: If it were to be contradictory ('gal ba = viruddha) for any phenomenon (chos de) to have multiple parts and to be a single thing, then singleness would be impossible, and if it [i.e., singleness] were to be nonexistent, multiplicity would be nonexistent too. Then, those two being nonexistent, and given that there is no third alternative (phung = rāśi) apart from those two, there could not be anything at all. Therefore, those two [i.e., having multiple parts and being a single thing] are not contradictory, and thus it was not taught [by Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla] that if one believes that God has multiple temporal stages, He would have to be nonsingle. And [Kamalaśīla] did not mean [that having parts entailed not being single] when he said that [the nonBuddhist opponents] have accepted an antecedent term (khyab bya = vyāpya) implying nonsingleness. (Tsong kha pa, dBu ma rgyan gyi zin bris; see Appendix I, §11.

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Indian and Tibetan Mādhyamikas on Mānasapratyakṣa

The Tibet Journal , Spring 1989, Vol. 14, No. 1, Special Issue : Tibetan Contributions to the Madhyamaka (Spring 1989), pp. 70-85, 1989

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Philosophical Quietism in Nāgārjuna and Early Madhyamaka

In The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, edited by Jonardon Ganeri. New York: Oxford University Press.., 2017

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Why I am a Buddhist

M. Lamport (ed.), The Rowman and Littlefield Handbook of Philosophy and Religion. Lanham ML: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 349-357., 2022

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What Happened to the Third and Fourth Lemmas in Tibet?

Journal of Buddhist Philosophy, 2015

The negation of the disjunction of two statements is logically equivalent to the conjunction of t... more The negation of the disjunction of two statements is logically equivalent to the conjunction of the negations of the two statements; the negation of the conjunction of two statements is logically equivalent to the disjunction of the negations of the two statements.-The laws of logic attributed to Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) and known as "De Morgan's Laws" 1

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"How Do Mādhyamikas Think?" Revisited

Philosophy East and West, 2013

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A Comparative Philosophy Excursus: Deflating the Two Images and the Two Truths

Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy: Freedom from Foundations, edited Jay L. Garfield. Routledge.Studies in American Philosophy. Routledge: New York, p.80-96. The article was published under the title "Deflating the Two Images and the Two Truths. Bons baisers du Tibet", 2019

We all know that straight sticks look bent in water, but aren't. Indian thinkers throughout the a... more We all know that straight sticks look bent in water, but aren't. Indian thinkers throughout the ages have known that people who suffer from the ophthalmic condition of myodesopsia (timira) see falling hairs and other floaters, though there are none. Young Tibetan Buddhist monks' Blo rigs texts tell them that the one unique moon in the sky can appear as two to sense perception (zla gcig zla gnyis su snang ba'i dbang shes) in certain situations (e.g., when they press on their eyes). It's commonplace: things, situations and people are often not, in reality, what they seem to be. Pertinently, these ordinary illusions, shams and scams, are isolated phenomena that sometimes occur in specific situations; people rightly contrast them with specific real states of affairs. Philosophers, however, typically try to extend the illusion-reality contrast to everything across the board, with duly all-encompassing categories. The extension has numerous variants, East and West. But the common thread is that it usually proceeds by analogies with ordinary cases to arrive at a grand scale ontological and epistemological position about how all things are for all human subjects and how they are in themselves. This is the Für Sich-An Sich dichotomy dear to Hegelians and Sartrian phenomenologists, the abhāsa-svabhāva ("[mere] appearance versus intrinsic nature") dichotomy for Indian Buddhists. It is the stuff of so many works of metaphysics that, in one way or another, contrast appearance and reality. The sweeping dichotomies are couched in philosophers' terms of art that bear a strained relation with the relevant ordinary terms. Indeed, Bas van Fraassen 1999 capitalizes all these terms and rejects strongly what they represent.

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Mādhyamikas Playing Bad Hands: The Case of Customary Truth

Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2018

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Tibetan Developments in Buddhist Logic

A Handbook of Logical Thought in China. Ed. by Liu Fenrong, Jeremy Seligman, Zhai Jincheng. Springer Verlag., 2023

Modern writers also regularly use the term "Buddhist epistemology" to capture the use of the word... more Modern writers also regularly use the term "Buddhist epistemology" to capture the use of the words tshad ma / pramāṇ ṇa in the general sense of a theoretical discipline concerning sources of knowledge. 3 It is, however, perhaps less clear why people speak of "logic." Part of what looks recognizably like logic is the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist "science of reasons" (hetuvidyā= gtaṇ tshigs rig pa), a so-called "minor Buddhist science," and the related genre of indigenous Tibetan texts known as rtags rigs "the varieties of reasons" -in them one finds discussions of good and bad reasons, fallacies, implication and consequences. However, Tshad ma certainly is not limited to what we find in hetuvidyā or rtags rigs manuals. It also includes the extensive discussions of philosophy of logic that we find typically in works or chapters on "inference" (rjes su dpag pa = aṇumāṇa), one of the two sources of knowledge, along with perception. In short, besides the "science of reasons," Tshad ma encompasses philosophical accounts of how logical reasoning proceeds and even some ontological issues of what must exist for that reasoning to be grounded in reality.

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An Annotated Translation of the Sūtra of Questions Regarding Death and Transmigration

84000. Translating the Words of the Buddha. http://read.84000.co/translation/toh308.html

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Metaphysics and Metametaphysics with Buddhism: the Lay of the Land

In Buddhist Philosophy: A Comparative Approach. Ed. Steven M. Emmanuel. Hoboken N.J.: Wiley Blackwell., 2018

Metaphysics is ontology, the attempt to find the widest ranging and most fundamental description ... more Metaphysics is ontology, the attempt to find the widest ranging and most fundamental description of what exists and how it exists. Of course, argumentation about that description has a very large place in contemporary analytic philosophy; in Buddhism it does too. And in both the argumentation quite easily moves to the second order matter of whether it is intellectually legitimate to search for such a description and how one should do so if it is. One's answers to those second order questions about metaphysics, then, constitute one's metaontological stance, or ''metametaphysics.'' 2 If metaphysics is concerned with the foundations of reality, metametaphysics deals with the foundations of metaphysics as a whole.

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Yogic Perception, Meditation and Enlightenment. The Epistemological Issues in a Key Debate Between Madhyamaka and Chan Buddhism

A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy. Ed. by Steven Emmanuel. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons,, 2013

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Dharmakirti

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020

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Introduction: Buddhist Argumentation

Argumentation, 2008

The present volume contains ten papers that were initially read at the conference of the Internat... more The present volume contains ten papers that were initially read at the conference of the International Association for the Study of Argumentation in Amsterdam in 2006. The conference convenors had rightly seen the interest that the study of non-Western material should have for a broad-based and informed approach to argumentation in the world and had thus proposed a panel on ''Buddhist Argumentation'', providing an occasion for Buddhist Studies specialists to draw attention to the interest of the material available and contribute to a future dialogue on common interests. Our introduction here is designed to give something of a working idea of the place of argumentation for Buddhists; we will take up the key concepts figuring in the Buddhists' own writings on argumentation, give some historical and bibliographical orientation, and along the way highlight areas of potential theoretical interest. The papers themselves will provide in depth treatments of particular aspects and questions and, we are convinced, show the sophistication and relevance of this non-Western material. Let us say from the outset that we will use the term ''Buddhist argumentation'' to cover both public activities, like debate, and internal reasoning processes, or ''arguments in one's head.'' Taking the term in this wide sense is partly in keeping with prominent Buddhists' own theories, and is brought out by their term anumāna, ''inference'', under which they understand both the internal reasoning processes one has ''for oneself'' (svārtha) as well as the verbal presentations of this reasoning that one formulates ''for others'' (parārtha), i.e., in public argumentation or debate. The details will be developed below. That said, the gravest (and still not uncommon) mistake is to think that there simply is no such thing as Buddhist argumentation and reasoning, or if there is, it is of little significance, because Buddhists (or perhaps genuine Buddhists)-so the oft-repeated story goes-do not value rational thinking and argumentation, being supposedly engaged in another, more non-conceptual,

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Meditation Revisited (co-authored by Andreas Doctor)

Wading into the Stream of Wisdom. Essays in Honor of Leslie Kawamura. Ed. Sarah F. Haynes and Michelle J. Sorensen. Contemporary Issues in Buddhist Studies. Berkeley: BDK America., 2013

T he term bhāvanā/sgom is usually translated as "meditation," but from a philological standpoint ... more T he term bhāvanā/sgom is usually translated as "meditation," but from a philological standpoint it is more rigorously rendered as "cultivation" or "familiarization." It may indeed be that rendering the term bhāvanā as "meditation" is only an approximation and may even be in some ways misleading. That said, we'll stay with this rendering as it is more or less conventionally adopted in Buddhist circles. We'll discuss some of the translational issues below in more detail. The principal question taken up in this paper is what modern non-Asian Buddhists understand meditation to be. Two types of answers interest us here: (1) Many non-Asian Buddhists will maintain that "meditation" refers to a practical activity of sitting calmly, with concentrated nonconceptual, non-analytic awareness. They will also hold that this activity is what most Tibetan monks and other Buddhists do as their fundamental spiritual practice. Being a readily identifiable practical skill, its nature is not considered to be an important subject of philosophical speculation. (2) Others at some point will treat "meditation" as a normative term. Thus for them not everything called "meditation" is equal, as some practices are more effective, faster, more beneficial, deeper, etc., and some are potentially quite antithetical to what meditation should be. What meditation should be and what it achieves thus become a philosophical issue of some urgency. The resolution of these issues may even be seen as necessary precondition for the success of the practice. In the first half of this paper, Andreas Doctor examines some aspects of the first type of response. Based on his experience with Westerners and Tibetans in Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling (bka' rnying shes grub gling) monastery in Nepal, he contrasts how the term "meditation" is in fact used very differently by these two groups, and how in Tibetan usage

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On a Recent Translation of the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra

Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Jun 30, 1997

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Identity and Referential Opacity in Tibetan Buddhist Apoha Theory

Buddhist Logic and Epistemology, Ed. Bimal Matilal, R.D. Evans. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986

La logique boudhique est-elle une logique non-classique ou déviante? Remarques sur le tétralemme (catuskoti)

Les Cahiers de philosophie, Lille, France. (An English translation is available as a chapter in my book Scripture, Logic, Language. See the book section.), 1992

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