Vaidalyaprakaraṇa

The text's target is the Nyāya school's sixteen padārthas—the logical and epistemological categories that structured Brahmanical philosophical debate in ancient India . This distinguishes it sharply from the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which refutes the svabhāva presupposed by Buddhist Abhidharma categories. The Vaidalyaprakaraṇa turns Madhyamaka dialectic outward, against a non-Buddhist rival system, and focuses specifically on the instruments of knowledge and argumentation themselves: inference, example (dṛṣṭānta), and established doctrine (siddhānta). Jan Westerhoff notes that the text refutes the Naiyāyika categories not as an isolated polemic but as essential to the Madhyamaka path, showing that the logical framework underpinning dogmatic philosophy cannot establish its own foundations .

No Sanskrit original or Chinese translation is known to survive; the text is preserved only in Tibetan translation . This textual situation shapes every aspect of its interpretation. The Sanskrit title itself is a reconstruction, and translators must work through Tibetan renderings of technical Nyāya vocabulary that may not map cleanly onto their Sanskrit equivalents. Jan Westerhoff's 2018 translation explicitly states that it translates from the Tibetan, providing an extensive analytical commentary to navigate the text's difficult passages . Earlier translations, such as Tola and Dragonetti's 1995 edition, also work from Tibetan. The absence of a Sanskrit witness means that textual variants and ambiguities in the Tibetan must be resolved through contextual reasoning, and no modern translation can claim direct access to Nāgārjuna's words.

This is one of the most contested questions in Madhyamaka scholarship. The Tibetan tradition includes the text among Nāgārjuna's yukti-corpus, the set of six logical works canonized as his . However, Ole Holten Pind argued in a 2001 article that the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa cannot be an authentic work of Nāgārjuna . Tola and Dragonetti, while translating the text, concluded that the facts 'may not undoubtedly discard the authorship of Nagarjuna' but provoke a doubt, stronger regarding the commentary than the root text . Jan Westerhoff addresses the question in his introduction without resolving it definitively . The authenticity debate remains open, and readers should treat the attribution to Nāgārjuna as traditional rather than established.

Both texts belong to Nāgārjuna's logical corpus and engage with epistemological and dialectical problems, but they address different opponents and serve different functions. The Vigrahavyāvartanī defends Nāgārjuna's own emptiness doctrine against critics who charge it with self-refutation, introducing the no-thesis position. The Vaidalyaprakaraṇa goes on the offensive against the Nyāya school, systematically refuting its sixteen categories of knowledge and argumentation. Recent scholarship, including a 2023 doctoral dissertation by Wang Nan, has undertaken a comparative study of the two texts, examining their shared arguments and divergences . Wang notes that because both works stand within the Madhyamaka tradition and address logical problems, their arguments overlap substantially, but their rhetorical situations—defensive versus offensive—produce different emphases and strategies.

The text contains a distinctive argument, analyzed in recent Japanese scholarship, that targets the Nyāya concept of dṛṣṭānta—the example used to establish a syllogistic inference . Nāgārjuna analyzes the compound as dṛṣṭa-anta, 'the end of what is seen,' and argues that this analysis negates the possibility of establishing anta (end, conclusion) at all. The same strategy is applied to siddhānta, 'established doctrine,' analyzed as siddha-anta. This etymological deconstruction is not commonly found in Nāgārjuna's other writings and serves to deny the existence of examples and established doctrines as the Nyāya school conceives them. The argument's significance lies in showing that the very instruments by which Nyāya claims to establish knowledge dissolve under analysis, leaving the Naiyāyika unable to ground inference.

A frequent misreading treats the text as a general refutation of logic or reason itself—as though Nāgārjuna were arguing that inference and argumentation are invalid and should be abandoned. In fact, the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa targets specifically the Nyāya school's articulation of logical categories, not logic as such. Nāgārjuna does not reject reasoning; he uses reasoning to expose the incoherence of a rival system's foundational categories. The text's purpose, as Westerhoff describes it, is to investigate how Nāgārjuna's arguments against the Naiyāyika categories are essential to the Madhyamaka path, not to advocate for irrationalism . Reading the text as a wholesale rejection of logic inverts its argumentative strategy and misunderstands its place within Buddhist philosophical practice.