PhD candidate, the Dep. of Religious Studies, the University of Calgary, Canada=加拿大卡加利大學博士候選人；Sessional instructor, Mount Royal University, Canada=加拿大皇家山大學約聘講師
Catuskoti is one of the popular topics that many scholars like to investigate in regard to Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Some Buddhist scholar such as T. R.V. Murti, Richard H. Robinson and Kajiyama Yuichi have adopted Hegel’s Dialectic towards the interpretation of Nagarjuna’s Catuskoti after discovering that it is impossible to apply the formulas of ordinary logic to explain the theory. Under the paradigm of the dialectic, the four propositions of Catuskoti are interpreted hierarchically and hence, can be considered as a structural interpretation. However, their dialectic constructional interpretation is very controversial. On the basis of Zhon Lun Shi (中論釋), Prajbapradipa and Prasannapada as primary sources, this paper adopts Derrida’s deconstructionist concept to provide another possible interpretation to Catuskoti. That is, according to those commentaries of Mulamadhyamakakarika, the propositions of Catuskoti are to interpret the same object from four different perspectives, and thus, they are equally true. Therefore, Catuskoti neither contradicts the ordinary logic nor has a hierarchical structure, and owing to the absence of hierarchies, the constructional interpretation of Catuskoti is deconstructed.
