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Buddhist Logic: Why A is not A
Most people find the Diamond Sutra difficult to understand — for a good reason. In this sutra, we often see this syllogism (i.e. line of reasoning):
A is not-A
Therefore, it is called A.
Such kind of logic is absurd to most people. It violates, for one, the Law of Noncontradiction. How can something be its opposite?
But this syllogism is absurd only to the eyes of those who have not been exposed to Buddhist logic. For example, the Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, came up with the Catuṣkoṭi, which is a “four-cornered” system of argumentation that involves the systematic examination of each of the 4 possibilities of a proposition, P:
- P; that is being.
- not P; that is not being.
- P and not P; that is being and that is not being.
- not (P or not P); that is neither being nor that is not being.
These four statements are not only mutually exclusive. They also exhaust all the possibilities. Yet, Nagarjuna did not affirm any one of these statements. He negated all of them. How can this be?
To understand why such logic would make sense, we must go back to Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda). In this philosophical framework, everything in the universe…
