dle; it steers between the previous camps of the philosophical world, realism
and nihilism, or rather rises above them. In one respect its philosophical
content is traditionalistic, with nothing of Mahayana avant-garde theology
about it. One of its implications, however, is taken to justify the Mahayana
stance. Since everything is void, nirvana is not different from samsara; the
world of phenomena is itself the realm of enlightenment. One does not have
to leave, to transcend in meditation, to do anything special to reach freedom
from attachments. Madhyamika omni-negation revives the world of phenom-
ena and allows them to be interpreted as part of the cosmic Buddha—who is
after all void as well. This line of argument was emphasized by later Mad-
hyamika thinkers. Chandrakirti (600s) explains that the negativity of shunyata
is the negation of the “essential nature” or “thing-in-itself” of the Sarvastivad-
ins, not the negation of life-as-lived. This brings Madhyamika into line with
the theology of the Boddhisattvas remaining on earth to bring salvation to all
sentient beings; in true recognition, they already have it.
An omni-skeptical position like Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika was designed to
end philosophical debate. Nevertheless, Nagarjuna was just the beginning of
the great period of Buddhist philosophy. Far from fading, the Hinayana posi-
tions acquired their most famous representatives. Mahayana philosophers as
well found additional slots in the attention space besides Nagarjuna’s. The
Yogacara school emerged in the 300s c.e., coinciding with the last big output
of Mahayana sutras and their attacks on the Hinayana. There is a chain of
famous thinkers: Maitreyanatha, the founder, who acquired such a reputation
that he was later turned into a mythological figure, the Buddha Maitreya; his
pupil Asanga; and the latter’s half-brother Vasubandhu I.^35
Yogacara built upon epistemological disputes in its sectarian lineage. The
Sarvastivadins held that consciousness always implies an object because the
knower cannot know itself but only something else (Guenther, 1972: 16, 66,
92). They had set out to formalize the Buddhist doctrine of taking apart
ordinary objects into underlying elements; but their reductionism and anti-
mentalism landed them in a similar problem as the logical positivists of the
Vienna Circle: the difficulty of defining all meaningful expressions in restrict-
edly objective terms (Griffiths, 1986: 50–51). In both cases a bifurcation
developed, in which logical realities were recognized alongside elementary
substances; the Sautrantikas posited a level of logical abstractions, although
allowing them only nominal existence. Yogacara extended further this non-ref-
erential consciousness by accepting pure mental experience. One cognizes
patches of color and shapes of objects; cognitions do not disclose independently
existing objects but only reveal object-like mental images. It is only the relation
of externality, supplied by consciousness, which makes objects appear as if they
exist. In a reversal of the Sarvastivadin position, there is in fact nothing but222 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths