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GEORGE BURCH
consciousness, to awareness of the indefinite which underlies these systems. This leads ultimately to the absolute Indefinite, called prajna-paramita (infinite wisdom), which is the Indefinite in itself, described as knowledge freed from the extremes of being and nonbeing." This is absolute Wisdom, the last word of philosophy. It has no theory of the intrinsic nature of the absolute, like Vedanta or Buddhism, but describes the absolute only in its relation to what is not absolute. It is called Sunyavada, literally, theory of the void (sunya). This means not that reality is non-existent or void, but that phenomena are void and reality is devoid of all conceivable attributes. It transcends all thought, and can be realized only in the "non-dual" knowledge of intuition (prajna), and this intuition is itself the absolute. Reality transcending thought can be known only by denial of the determinations which the various systems ascribe to it. Sunyavada dialectic, consequently, is purely analytic, not synthetic; critical, not speculative. Its negation of all views is the despair of thought but the beginning of wisdom. Sunyavada is not a theory but a critique of all theories, which it rejects as falsification of the real." It is best expressed by silence —but by a silence which results from critical reflection on all speakable theories, not a silence which is mere refusal to consider them.
The classical exemplar of this silence is the Buddha. The three (so-called fourteen) questions which he refused to answer (Is the world limited in time or space? Is the body the self? Does the Buddha exist after death?) are basic metaphysical problems, and his refusal to answer them meant that no answer, that is, no metaphysical theory, can be accepted on the higher level of reflective consciousness which criticizes them all. The historical manifestation of this attitude in all its fullness, however, is the Buddhist school of Madhyamika (the "Middle Way") founded by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna in the second century. Nagarjuna's devastating dialectic disproves, by reductio ad absurdum,
31 Or, to express it in the Indian fashion, freed from the four extremes of is, is-not. both-is-and-is-not, and neither-is-nor-is-not.
32 This is not nihilism. It is a confusion, though a common one, to regard this "no views of the real" attitude as a "no reality" view..
