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I've been building an interactive digital humanities platform for Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (live demo, GitHub) and have run into a persistent design problem regarding pedagogical analogies.

The platform draws structural parallels between:

  • Dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and relational ontology in Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics
  • Emptiness (śūnyatā) and the absence of intrinsic properties in quantum systems prior to measurement
  • The tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi) and the logical structure of superposition states

Each parallel includes an explicit caveat: "This is a pedagogical tool, not a claim that Nāgārjuna anticipated quantum mechanics."

My question has two parts:

  1. Is there a principled philosophical distinction between a structural analogy (two systems share formal properties) and a historical/causal claim (one tradition influenced or predicted another)? And is that distinction sufficient to make quantum-Madhyamaka analogies epistemically defensible in an educational context?

  2. Are there existing frameworks in philosophy of science or analytic philosophy of religion that govern when cross-domain analogies of this kind are legitimate pedagogical devices vs. misleading conflations?

I'm particularly interested in responses that engage with Jay Garfield's or Mark Siderits's work on Madhyamaka, or with philosophical literature on the limits of analogical reasoning.

References:

  • Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (2nd c. CE)
  • Rovelli, C. (1996). Relational quantum mechanics. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 35, 1637–1678.
  • Garfield, J. (1995). The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Oxford University Press.
  • Platform DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19282735
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  • People sometimes introduce electrical voltage and current by analogy to water pressure and flow because people have some experience with water, but it doesn't get you very far. Why explain something in terms of something completely different, unrelated and unfamiliar? Commented 19 hours ago

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Re. "Emptiness (śūnyatā) and the absence of intrinsic properties in quantum systems prior to measurement"

Since in Madhyamaka, you'd want to avoid intrinsic properties even after measurement you'd find support in Heidegger's framework where entities are only addressed in terms of their involvements, e.g.

When an entity within-the-world has already been proximally freed for its Being [i.e. released into its proper context of intelligibility], that Being is its "involvement". With any such entity as entity, there is some involvement. The fact that it has such an involvement is ontologically definitive for the Being of such an entity, and is not an ontical assertion about it. That in which it is involved is the "towards­-which" of serviceability, and the "for-which" of usability. With the "towards-which" of serviceability there can again be an involvement: with this thing, for instance, which is ready-to-hand, and which we accordingly call a "hammer", there is an involvement in hammering; with hammering, there is an involvement in making something fast; with making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection 'is' for the sake of [um-willen] providing shelter for Dasein—that is to say, for the sake of a possibility of Dasein's Being. Whenever something ready-to-hand has an involvement with it, what involvement this is, has in each case been outlined in advance in terms of the totality of such involvements. Being & Time, H. 84.

This can illustrate the breakdown of observer-independent properties, although Heidegger retains a structured field of disclosure that Madhyamaka ultimately empties.

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