Aquinas and Dölpopa, Searching for Foundations

Abstract

This chapter compares how two foundational religious philosophers, medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (c. 1226–74) and Tibetan Buddhist tantric master Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (1292–1361), argue that the world is dependent upon and grounded in a self-existent absolute. We will also examine counterarguments from opposing metaphysical viewpoints developed by modern theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) and Lawrence Krauss (b. 1954) in the case of Aquinas, and by the founder of the Tibetan dGe lugs pa order Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) in the case of Dölpopa. In the course of this comparison, we will see how their arguments for and against foundational thinking align. Finally, we will compare these two parallel arguments with the help of insights from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) who problematized metaphysical assertions. This chapter concludes that both Aquinas and Dölpopa gave surprisingly similar reasons for the metaphysical need of a self-existent absolute upon which all contingent reality depends, even though the systems they constructed remained quite different. Their opponents’ objections, also, exhibited a similarity by ignoring Aquinas’s and Dölpopa’s central argument, rather than rebutting them. Wittgenstein’s insight then helps us to further align these metaphysical debates, revealing more clearly the issues at stake.