CFP: Workshop on Catuskoti and Sunyata

Buddha Sakyamuni famously preached Sunyata which was recorded in Prajnaparamita sutra.Also in course of his numerous Dialogical engagements with the contemporary audience, the Buddha used to talk about four possibilities. Given any question, Buddha used to advocate four options - Yes, No, Both, Neither - the celebrated CATUSKOTI (Greek Tetra lemma). Formally, given an object A and a property P there may be four possibilities:

A is P, A is non-P, A is neither P nor non-P, A is both P and non-P.

This stance continued to stir debate about the metaphysical implications behind this.

Queen Mallika of Koshal   famously asked the Buddha a few questions regarding Prithwi (world) and Atman (Soul) –1. Is Prithvi eternal? 2. Is Prithvi non-eternal? 3.  Is Prithvi finite? 4. Is Prithvi Infinite? 5.  Is Body different from Atman? 6. Whether Tathagata can live still after Death?  7. Whether Tathagata cannot live after Death? 8. Whether He can be in a state both living and non-living? 9. Whether He can take rebirth after Death?

Buddha is known to have firmly refused to answer these questions and he declared these questions as irrelevant as they can’t help to attain Nirvana. What messages can we possibly read from the Buddha’s refusal to answer these questions? Was this a strategy to dispense with Metaphysics or did he implicitly advocate a separate category for these types of questions which were considered to be unanswerable?

 Nagarjuna substantiated this position later in terms of self-contradictory nature of all our means of acquiring knowledge.  He famously argued Reality (or no-Reality) as even beyond the framework of four possibilities and hence chatuskotibinirmukto -- Sunya !

Perhaps the logical framework of paraconsistency is one of the most challenging ways to look at this stance of Buddha and Nagarjuna

This workshop is intended to focus on the relationship of Catuskoti and Sunyata in Buddhist literature as well as some modern logical counterparts particularly in relation to the both option in Catuskoti. 

Abstracts (within 600 words) are invited dealing with the following aspects of CATUSKOTI .

·       Use of CATUSKOTI in Indian debates

·       Its connection with SUNYATA

·       Modern logic-systems having similarity with CATUSKOTI

·       It relevance, if any, in modern logical discourse.

Abstracts are to be submitted through Easy Chair and will be published in the proceedings of the conference. One of the authors must register.

Invited speakers (tentative): Umashankar Vyas, Nawang Samten, Madhumita Chattopadhyay, Graham Priest.

Chairs : Mihir K. Chakraborty. Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

             Debajyoti Gangopadhyay, Annda College, V,B,U, Hazaribag, India