Late modern scholars of Madhyamaka Buddhism have called Nagarjuna’s dialectical negation of conceptual opposites (and other widely deployed Madhyamaka techniques such as the neither-one-nor-many argument) a “bi-negation” which negates both a thesis and its negation (and by implication, any possible combination of the two). Critically, the Madhyamaka bi-negation…
In Buddhism we have the idea of the Two Truths: conventional truth and ultimate truth. In Process Buddhism, in contrast, there is only one truth. Conventional truths (saṃvṛtisatya) are what is true in terms of everyday ordinary experience, which ranges from truths about the most basic things of…
Here are some random thoughts I’m having while I’m finishing up an essay on the same topic: Part of the merit of a Process-Buddhist synthesis is that it can help resolve some deep aporias or internal inconsistencies in each of the traditions when they are considered in isolation.…
At face value, Alfred North Whitehead’s Process thought and the view of Madhyamaka Buddhists seem to characterize reality in diametrically opposed manners. Whitehead’s view, that all events go through a process of “concrescence” culminating in a final satisfaction that passes into objective immortality, seems to contradict the Buddha’s…
In order to disclose the nature of the actual world (equivalent to the settled facts of the immediate past) as openly-empty (meaning, being empty or without an ultimate foundation) we deploy the method of negative dialectics whereby presuppositions of an inherently existent entity, process or relation that could…
The Principle of Inclusive Transcendence is the governing principle that the manifold diversity of experiences which constitute a given, shared reality come together and coalesce into a new occasion that integrates the preceding ones as part of its own internal constitution and which is brought about by a…