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position of the Madhyamika, is its difference from the remaining three schools. According to all of them alike, common knowledge contains elements which are superimposed by the mind. Thus general features like cow-ness have no objective reality according to any of them and are entirely due to the nature of thought. In the Yogācāra school, this illusory character is ascribed to the whole of the physical world. That is, scholastic Buddhism as a whole regards the greater part of common knowledge as only conventionally true. The Madhyamika merely extends this principle to all experience. But it may be asked whether the system is altogether devoid of the notion of a positive ultimate. Our object here being chiefly to present later Buddhism as it was understood by Hindu thinkers and is found set forth in their works, it is easy to answer this question; for they all alike agree in holding that the void is the only truth according to the Madhyamika. They describe the school as nihilistic and have no difficulty in refuting that apparently absurd position. Some even go so far as to say that such a view needs no serious refutation, because it stands self-condemned. It may appear to us that the negation of everything is inconceivable without implying a positive ground (avadhi) thereby, and that the ultimate truth cannot therefore be the void. Nothing can be proved false, if nothing is taken as true. That is the very criticism of Hindu philosophers passed on the Madhyamika. So we cannot doubt that in their view the Madhyamika was a nihilist in the literal sense of the term.3 It would seem that 1 Cf. Samkara on VS. II. ii. 31 and on Br. Up. p. 577
See e.g. Bhamati. II. ii. 31. The Madhyamika shows great impatience at this criticism and characterizes the critic as obsessed to an incurable extent in favour of the positive. Candrakirti ridicules him by comparing him to a person who, when told that he would get nothing, expected that 'nothing' would actually be given to him. See com. on Nagarjuna's Kärikā, xiii. 8.
3 The only other conclusion that can be drawn from the references to the doctrine in Hindu philosophical works is that the Madhyamika was concerned solely with showing that the several explanations given of the world by the others were untenable, but that he had no solution of his own to offer about it. This is the significance of the term Vaitandika applied to him sometimes.
