Seth Auster-Rosen, PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions, University of Chicago
Do We Know Anything? Can We Know If We Don’t Know Anything?’: Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje’s Madhyamaka Critique of Conventional Ways of Knowing”
In his Praise to Dependent Arising (Rten ‘brel stod pa), the Tibetan thinker Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje (1507-1554) rejects the notion that any of our conventional (Skt. saṃvṛti, vyavahāra) claims to knowledge whatsoever can withstand the philosophical analysis of the Madhyamaka (“Middle Way”) Buddhist school of thought. This doesn’t mean, however, that our knowledge of the world is completely useless and unreliable, but that such knowledge holds up only so long as we don’t inquire into its ultimate (paramārtha) nature. In this paper, I discuss Mikyö Dorje’s defense of this position via his critique of Je Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa’s (1357-1419) influential contrary view, and I broach the question of what constitutes true knowledge for Mikyö Dorje given that it cannot involve any of our conventional ways of knowing (pramāṇa).