ABSTRACT
Many philosophers who speak about nothing make further claim that it is ineffable. In Mlamadhyakamakrik Ngrjuna mounted many arguments to the effect that no thing has self-being. For Yogcra, this ultimate reality is just as ineffable as in Madhyamaka, and for the same reason: the very use of language produces an object of conventional reality. Phenomenal reality is in a constant state of change. Nothing plays a very important role in what is perhaps the most distinctive of Chinese Buddhism's, Chan. A principle of Buddhist logic, the catukoi, allows for the possibility that some contradictions are true. It might be thought that this kind of maneuver, though it be at home in modern logical paradoxes, is alien to Buddhism. In Indian Buddhism, a major function of meditation was to provide a phenomenological experience of tathta, ultimate reality. Non-duality, then, requires that one talk about the ineffable; the techniques of paraconsistent logic show how to make precise sense of this idea.
