  It should first be noted that the axiomatic status of LNC and LEM is as well-established within the logical traditions of India as it is for the Greeks and their  epigones.[7]  Garfield (1995) and Tillemans (1999) convincingly refute the claim that Nāgārjuna was simply an   “irrationalist”.[8]  In the first place, if Nāgārjuna simply rejected LNC, there would be no possibility of reductio arguments, which hinge on the establishment of untenable contradictions, yet such arguments are standardly employed in his logic. In fact, he explicitly prohibits virodha (contradiction). Crucially, it is only in the realm of the Absolute or Transcendent, where we are contemplating the nature of the ultimate, that contradictions are embraced; in the realm of ordinary reality, LNC operates and classical logic holds. (Recall Freud's dichotomy between the LNC-observant conscious mind and the LNC-free unconscious.)  In this sense, the logic of Nāgārjuna and of the Buddhist tradition more generally can be seen not as inconsistent but paraconsistent. Indeed, just as Aristotle ridiculed LNC-skeptical sophists as no better than vegetables (see §1), the Buddhists dismissed the arch-skeptic Sanjaya and his followers, who refused to commit themselves to a definite position on any issue, as “eel-wrigglers” (amarāvikkhepa). Sanjaya himself was notorious for his periodic lapses into the extended silence Aristotle described as the last refuge of the LNC-skeptic (see Raju 1954).  