Jan Westerhoff, "Candrakirti's Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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What motivated Jan Westerhoff to write a guide to Candrakīrti’s *Introduction to the Middle Way*?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Malcolm Keating, and today we'll be talking to Jan Westerhoff about Chandrakirti's Introduction to the Middle Way, published by University Press in 2024, as part of the Oxford Guides to Philosophy series. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy, Jan.
Thank you very much, Malcolm, and thank you for having me.
Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. Let's dive in. Your book is, I just said, is a guide to Chandrakirti's introduction to the middle way or the Manjimaka Avatara. Can you start with the motivation for writing this guide? Why this person and why this text?
Sure. Well, perhaps I should first explain a little bit that this book is part of a series with Oxford University Press and the series is called Oxford Guides. And what the series is supposed to do is give students, so it's a series aimed at students, it gives students reading classic philosophical texts some guidance while reading the text or something to read alongside the text to explain. Most of the volumes in this series cover classical canonical texts from the Western tradition, but there is also at least one other non-Western one which has already come out, which is Matthew Dusty's commentary on Vatsyayana's commentary on the Nyaya Sutra. So the whole series tries to have a somewhat global coverage.
Now, for the specific text I'm covering there, so Chandrakirti's introduction to the middle way, there are various reasons why I wanted to include that specific text. On the one hand, it is really already composed by Chandrakirti as an introductory text. So it is an introduction into one of the key streams of Indian Buddhist philosophy, namely Madhyamaka, and it sets out the discussion in a very nice and systematic way while also covering quite a lot of ground. So to that extent, it's a fairly good text to become acquainted with Madhyamaka. But in addition to that, this text was also extremely influential in the development of Buddhist philosophy, in particular in the development of Buddhist philosophy in Tibet.
Because quite a bit of the Tibetan philosophical discussion about Madhyamaka can be understood in terms of different interpretations and different reactions to this text. So it has both a systematic component in giving the students a really good overview about basic ideas in Madhyamaka, but it also has an interesting historical component teaching them about important episodes within the history of the development of Buddhist philosophy.
Wonderful. We'll talk about some of those interpretations, Tibetan interpretations and things as we go along. But first, can we back up and ask how you got interested in Chandrakirti's work. Buddhism is a vast subject area. How did you get to Chandrakirti's text?
Well, my interest in Buddhist philosophy started and is still very much centered around Madhyamaka. which is one of the two main schools of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. Madhyamaka philosophy proper started with Nagarjuna, usually regarded as the founder of that school, who was a first or second century Indian Buddhist scholar and philosopher. Of course, Nagarjuna himself draws on earlier material, in particular the Perfection of Wisdom or Prajnaparamita Sutras. Some of the listeners might be familiar with the Heart Sutra, which is a short version of these texts. And so Nagarjuna is fundamentally trying to spell out the philosophical vision of these Prajnaparamita texts, which of course he equates with the philosophical vision of the Buddha himself.
Now amongst interpreters or commentators on Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti has particular prominence. Much of that is of course due to his prominence in Tibet. um and given that much of what we read in in the western context about madhyamaka is uh comes via the tibetan tradition chandra kitty features very very prominently in it but having said that chandra kitty is also systematically a very interesting commentator on nagarjuna and brings out specific ways of reading his philosophy, which have considerable systematic merit.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What motivated Jan Westerhoff to write a guide to Candrakīrti’s *Introduction to the Middle Way*?
0:01–6:04
2
How does the guide explain the significance of Candrakīrti’s text for Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka?
6:04–12:51
3
What are the central arguments about emptiness of persons and phenomena in the sixth chapter?
12:51–18:35
4
How does the text relate Indian Buddhist philosophy to the Tibetan tradition?
18:35–26:03
5
What philosophical issues does Candrakīrti raise about personal identity and metaphysics?
26:03–33:03
6
How does the guide distinguish conventional truth from ultimate truth in Madhyamaka?
33:03–39:15
7
Why does Chandrakīrti critique other schools, and what role does debate play in his method?
39:15–45:52
8
How should readers use this guide alongside the original text and future commentaries?
45:52–52:13
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