What Does the Law of Non-Contradiction Tell Us, If Anything? Paradox, Parameterization, and Truth in Tiantai Buddhism

Abstract

This paper takes up the question of how to understand the paradoxical or self-contradictory statements often found in Mahayana Buddhist literature, partially as a response to recent works by Graham Priest, Jay Garfield and Yasuo Deguchi which assert, on the basis of Priest’s work on ”paraconsistent logic,” that at least some of these paradoxes be taken not as merely heuristic or conventional truths, used for pedagogical and soteriological purposes, but rather are full-fl edged absolute truths, in the sense of accurate descriptions of real facts about the world. I argue, on the basis of the doctrinal resources of Tiantai Buddhism, where these paradoxes are if anything more than central than in the Mahayana as a whole, that this way of addressing the problem is fundamentally wrong-headed and misleading. In one sense, we may say that not only some, but indeed all, paradoxical statements are, from a Tiantai perspective ”true”-but true here in the distinctive sense of leading precisely to self-contradiction and thus to self-overcoming: all statements (not just some) are contradictions, and by contradicting themselves they lead beyond themselves, in a structure analogous to the self-referential ”raft” parable that frames all Buddhist doctrine. This is, however, obviously a thoroughgoingly pragmatic notion of truth, rather than a logical realist or correspondence notion of truth. These truths do not describe states of affairs about the world; they have no ontological referent. The paper examines the sources of these Tiantai epistemological ideas in both Buddhist thought and indigenous Chinese philosophical traditions, and along the way show how these considerations reveal the purely transcendental character (in Kant’s sense) of the Law of Non-Contradiction itself, which can be shown to be circular and to have no bearing of any kind on ontology.

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