Hi Venerable, thanks for the clarification. That will also help me explain my ideas better next time, to avoid confusion.
Because if I understood you correctly, then I think we’ve just been talking past one another, at least for the most part. You say the Buddha avoided making definite statements about the existence of things that can’t be experienced, and I fully agree with that. Your thoughts help me clarify what I meant from the start.
When I quoted the Buddha as saying, “I declare there is only suffering”, I didn’t mean him to say that everything in the universe is suffering. Rocks and tables are not suffering, for example. I think that goes without saying. Nor did I mean that nothing but suffering exists in the universe. What I meant is that everything that can be experienced is suffering—or in other words, “there is only suffering [to the being/to experience/to life]”. I already assumed that the Buddha was only interested in describing the inner perspective of beings and not in making metaphysical statements about the existence of insentient objects or anything outside of experience. That’s not just my assumption, though, it’s also that of the suttas.
This frame of reference of the individual being is where the Buddha always comes from in these kind of discussions. In SN12.51 it is said, for example, that after the enlightened being dies “only bodily remains will be left”. Well, other beings and things are also still left, we could object. But the description only concerns that one enlightened being, not all other stuff in the universe.
The same applies to the tetralemma on existence, such as in AN4.173. When Koṭṭhika asks whether after the cessation of the six senses something else still exists, he doesn’t mean to ask about rocks or chairs, because it’s clear they still exists. He asks whether something else still exists for that individual to be experienced. The same is true for the statement of Vajirā in SN5.10. She says only suffering arises, exists, and vanishes. That has to be taken in context of Māra’s question about a perceived being or self.
The statements in MN22 and SN22.86 about “I declare only suffering and its cessation” likewise are in context of a being.
Even the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta (SN12.15) is all about the existence of the individual being. It mentions the arising and cessation of ‘the world’, but this is to be understood as the six senses, i.e. the being. See SN35.116, where ‘the world’ is defined as such, showing what the Buddha was concerned with. Even the wrong notions of ‘existence’ and ‘nonexistence’ in the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta are about the being and its experiences, not about entities in general, including entities in the external world. At some point they got understood to describe the latter, probably first by Nāgārjuna. His ideas became very influential, but they go beyond what the Buddha was denying. Siderits and Katsura’s comment on their translation of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā:
The two extreme views the Buddha refers to in ‘The Instructing of Katyāyana’ are also called eternalism and annihilationism. Nāgārjuna here interprets these to refer respectively to the view that things exist having intrinsic nature and the view that the lack of intrinsic nature means that things are utterly unreal. The argument is that the first leads to the conclusion that ultimately real things are eternal, while the second leads to the conclusion that ultimately nothing whatsoever exists. So even if the Buddha did not explicitly claim that his was a middle path between the existence and the nonexistence of entities in general and was instead only discussing the existence or nonexistence of the person [i.e. the eternal existence and annihilation of the person], Nāgārjuna takes this to be a plausible extension of the Buddha’s remarks to Katyāyana.
I don’t think this is a plausible extension even philosophically, let alone textually. The wrong views in the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta are about the eternal existence and annihilation of beings/persons, not about the existence of general entities. Absolute knowledge about the former is within the scope of experience (by seeing that there is no self inside), while absolute knowledge about the latter is not. You can’t ever prove definitely that rocks and chairs truly exist or not, for example, or whether they’re all just figments of imagination. So the Buddha wouldn’t even say such views about the (non)existence of entities are wrong. That’s how much he was concerned only with what can be experienced. Eternalism and annihilationism can be seen to be wrong, though.
Eternalism and annihilationism are also what the first two of the four statements on the Tathāgata after death are about, although they are phrased in such a way that even to deny them would affirm one of them. To say ‘no’ when asked ‘does a tathagata still exist after death?’ will sound like annihilationism, for example, as does saying ‘yes’ to ‘does a tathagata no longer exist after death?’ That is why the Buddha avoids phrasing things in such a way, because they all imply a self. This is indeed something to do with the flaws of language.