Cessation of Suffering or Cessation of Prapañca? _A Structural Critique of Madhyamaka Soteriology_

This paper offers a structural critique of Madhyamaka soteriology, focusing on epistemic substitution, functional reification, and their reception consequences. Madhyamaka philosophy famously characterizes nirvāṇa as the pacification of conceptual proliferation (prapañca), a reifying elaboration bound up with svabhāva-grasping (MMK 25.24; 18.5–6; 15.1–2).[1] This is often read as continuous with early Buddhist soteriology, where liberation is defined as the cessation of suffering (dukkha-nirodha).[2] I accept the diagnostic affinity, but argue that continuity weakens at the level of criteria of recognition: what communities treat as the primary mark by which liberation is affirmed, taught, and certified. In Nikāya-style presentations, liberation is tracked by irreversible affective cessation: the non-arising of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the absence of afflictive reactivity.[3] Right view and insight are integral, but many speculative metaphysical questions are treated as non-instrumental to the goal; liberation does not hinge on doctrinal completeness or philosophical virtuosity.[4] Later scholastic and institutional receptions of Madhyamaka can make liberation publicly legible through discursive proxies: avoiding reifying commitments, dialectical fluency, and mastery of emptiness idioms.[5] Because the cessation of svabhāva-grasping is accessible mainly through interpretive performance and self-report, these proxies can substitute for experiential cessation. I develop three claims: (1) cognitive conditions for suffering are not automatically usable public criteria for its cessation; (2) even without ontological reification, ultimate truth can function as an untranscendable evaluative framework, yielding functional reification; and (3) shifting criteria generate selection effects that privilege interpretive authority over phenomenological verification. This critique is modest about Nāgārjuna’s intent and about Madhyamaka practice. It is not a rejection of Madhyamaka, but a structural account of how soteriological criteria shift as a discourse is systematized, transmitted, and institutionalized.