This project aims to make a contribution to the historical and systematic study of Buddhist philosophy by charting its transmission and transformation between India and China in the form of the Madhyamaka-Sanlun school.

The Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy was founded in India by Nāgārjuna (龍樹 c. 150-250), who is generally regarded as second in importance only to the Buddha himself for the historical development of Buddhist philosophy. While a great deal of scholarship has been devoted to elucidating the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical positions of Nāgārjuna and his Mādhyamika heirs in India and Tibet, relatively little attention has been paid to related developments in China. The Chinese intellectual descendant of Indian Madhyamaka came to be known as the Sanlun 三論 or Three Treatise school. Sanlun was indubitably of major importance in the history of Chinese Buddhism over the course of the seminal ‘Period of Disunity’ between the fall of the Han dynasty (220) and the dawn of the Tang (618)—which was to become the unrivalled golden age of Chinese culture and cosmopolitanism. During this period of Sanlun’s efflorescence, Buddhism as a whole was revolutionized—with the rise of the epochally transformative Mahāyāna movement—from newcomer in China to major cultural force. This project aims to be the first comprehensive study of Sanlun philosophy in conversation with its Indian antecedents in the form of the pivotally important Madhyamaka school.

Thus, by investigating diachronically both the inter-cultural transmission of Indian Buddhist thought into China as well as its intra-cultural transformation within China from the early period of cultural assimilation to its full flowering in the Tang dynasty, the project aims to contribute to the theorization of India-China as a globalized sphere of dynamic intellectual interaction within trans-cultural Asian studies. By deliberately integrating modern and pre-modern sources in East-Asian as well as South-Asian and European languages, it aims to redress the exclusion of specifically Chinese perspectives from philosophically-oriented scholarship in Buddhist studies. And by treating the Chinese Buddhist Sanlun school seriously as a coherent system of thought comprising metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ethics, it aims both to add to the scholarly understanding of philosophically valuable non-Western textual traditions and to advance the surge of literature in academic philosophy over recent decades deliberately concerned with countering the prevalence of exclusively Western perspectives in philosophy.

To elaborate on this within the context of philosophy broadly construed, the foreseen outputs issuing from the proposed research will 1) chart new territory in the study of Buddhist philosophy, which is currently dominated by Indian and Tibetan philosophical traditions, by pioneering the systematic study of Chinese Buddhist philosophy; 2) chart new territory in the study of Chinese philosophy, which is currently dominated by the indigenous Chinese philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Daoism, by pioneering the systematic study of Chinese Buddhist philosophy; and 3) chart new territory in the study of philosophy, which is currently dominated by Western philosophical traditions, by pioneering the systematic study of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. For among all the non-Western philosophical traditions currently gaining currency in Western philosophical circles, Buddhist philosophy has exerted by far the greatest impact over recent decades, based in part on the redoubtable analytical sophistication of the arguments its exponents deploy, the sheer quantity and range of its textual canon, and of course the substantial overlaps—and fruitful differences—between Buddhist and Western worldviews. In researching the Chinese Buddhist philosophy of the Sanlun school, and in doing so methodologically by employing my background training in Western philosophy, the hope is to furnish this burgeoning scholarly field with a significant and original contribution.

The research project also aims to contribute to the study of trans-cultural intellectual history, and this within two quite distinct but equally important arenas. On the one hand, given that the Chinese Sanlun school was a self-conscious descendant of Indian Madhyamaka, the linguistic and philosophical means by which Indian Buddhist texts and ideas were translated and transmitted into an identifiably Chinese vocabulary and Weltanschauung will impact our understanding of the mechanisms through which such transfer and transformation between widely disparate cultural worlds did and does take place. On the other, given that the Sanlun school’s full flourishing was coetaneous with the establishment of Buddhism as a major institutionalized religion in China, the means by which adherents of this originally foreign but increasingly sinified system adopted and adapted indigenous Chinese forms of thought and practice from their Confucian and Daoist peers will meaningfully inform scholarly conceptions of inter-religious dialogue, cultural appropriation and assimilation, and enculturation and acculturation—all from the perspective of a distinctly non-Eurocentric case study of indisputably epochal significance for global history.

The project’s aims will be met methodologically through the close study of canonical Sanlun texts. In addition to the three foundational treatises of this Three Treatise school—that is, the Middle Treatise (Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā / Zhong lun 中論) and Twelve Gates Treatise (Shi-er men lun 十二門論) attributed to Nāgārjuna and the Hundred Verse Treatise (Śatakaśastra / Bai lun 百論) of Āryadeva (提婆 3^rd century)—the indigenously Chinese works of Sanlun’s two most prominent exponents—Sengzhao (僧肇 374-414) and Jizang (吉藏 549-623)—will be studied. These include, inter alia, Sengzhao’s Essays (Zhaolun 肇論) and Jizang’s Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises (Sanlun xuanyi 三論玄義). Deliverables of the project will include an edited book—Buddhist Philosophy Between India and China: From Madhyamaka to Sanlun—aimed at better understanding Chinese Sanlun’s distinctive contributions to and elaborations on Indian Madhyamaka, and a monograph—Twelve Gates to the Middle Way: Buddhism Between India and China in Nāgārjuna’s‘Twelve Gates Treatise’ —which will provide a translation of and detailed commentary to one of the school’s foundational texts.

Overall, the project aims to further the goals of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Eurasian Transformations’, and most especially its Research Node in ‘Identities and Religions’ and Transversal Working Group in ‘Strategies of Identification and Distinction’, while falling under the broad umbrella of the European Research Council funded project ‘The Ethics of Empty Beliefs: Chinese Buddhist Philosophy in the ‘Period of Disunity’’ (ERC-2022-StG-101077136), of which Rafal K. Stepien is the Principal Investigator and the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences is the Host Institution.