[GinaGomesz]

The Law of Contradiction, Otherness and Excluded Middle – A Buddhist Perspective

by Aik Theng Chong

Singapore -- In Buddhist logic, the origin of every judgment and concept from data of our senses starts with the act of running through the manifold of undetermined pure sensations first before we fasten upon one point of that series of pure sensations, a point with regard to which the rest will be divided in two.

On the one side we have a comparatively limited number of similar things, on the other the less limited number of dissimilar ones. Both parts mutually represent the absence of each other. Therefore, every of our conscious thought or cognition thus represents a division into two parts. Thus, our cognition begins with an act of dichotomy.

As soon as our intellectual eye begins to ‘see’, our thought is already beset with contradiction. Once our thought has stopped running and has fixed upon an external point, to produce a judgment said, ‘this is blue’, we have already separated the universe of discourse into two unequal halves, the part that is blue and the infinite part that is non-blue.

Both parts are relative to each other. There is actually nothing blue in itself. The Law of Contradiction is an expression of the fact that all cognition is dichotomizing and relative. We can only cognize or determine a thing by opposing it to what it is not. If this is "Buddhist logic", please show in the Nikayas where the Buddha taught this.