23 Facts About Chandrakirti

Chandrakirti wrote two influential works on madhyamaka, the Prasannapada and the Madhyamakavatara.

Over time, Chandrakirti became a major source for the study of madhyamaka philosophy in Tibetan Buddhism.

Tibetan sources like Bu ston and Taranatha state that Chandrakirti was active at Nalanda University, where he is said to have become an abbot.

Chandrakirti is said to have debated the yogacara philosopher Chandragomin.

Chandrakirti took a special interest in Nagarjuna's treatises and studied them with the disciples of two rival interpreters, Bhavaviveka and Buddhapalita.

Chandrakirti preferred Buddhapalita's interpretations of Madhyamaka teachings and defended them in a famous debate with the grammarian Candragomin, who supported the idealist position of the Vijnanavada school.

Chandrakirti was a philosopher of the madhyamaka school of Nagarjuna.

Indeed, Chandrakirti explains that conventional phenomena are illusory and unreal and can be compared to a mirage.

Chandrakirti introduced the concept of mere convention to refer to how noble ones experience conventionality, which is quite different to what is held to be conventionally real or conventional true.

Chandrakirti provides various arguments to show that persons, phenomena and emptiness itself are all unreal and empty.

Just like Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti refutes all positions regarding the arising of phenomena, summing up his position as follows:.

Chandrakirti defended Buddhapalita and his madhyamaka method against the views of Bhaviveka.

Chandrakirti critiqued Bhaviveka on this point and argued that madhyamaka thinkers should instead only rely on prasanga arguments, which mainly refers to reductio arguments that seek to show how an opponents views lead to absurd or unwanted consequences.

Chandrakirti argues that the idea that one must use the syllogistic arguments commits one to the acceptance of inherent natures or some other form of foundationalism or essentialism.

Chandrakirti understood this tradition as positing a kind of subjective idealism.

However, according to Chandrakirti, both are equally empty and neither have any ontological primacy or ultimate existence.

Chandrakirti cites the Lankavatara Sutra in order to argue that the storehouse consciousness is a provisional teaching of indirect meaning.

Furthermore, Chandrakirti interprets the various statements in the Mahayana sutras which seem to promote idealism in a different way than the yogacara school.

Chandrakirti argues that it is a mistake to take this literally as an ontological statement and to conclude that only consciousness exists.

Only one Indian commentary on Chandrakirti exists, a 12th-century commentary to the Madhyamakavatara by the Kashmiri pandit Jayananda.

The work of Atisha, particularly his Introduction to the Two Truths, cites Chandrakirti and defends his view which rejects the applicability of valid cognition to ultimate truth.

The logician Chapa Chokyi Senge is known for discussing the views of Chandrakirti and composing refutations of them in his defense of the epistemological tradition of Dharmakirti.

Chandrakirti was categorized by Tibetans as part of the Uma Thelgyur school, an approach to the interpretation of Madhyamaka philosophy typically back-translated into Sanskrit as or rendered in English as the "Consequentialist" or "Dialecticist" school.