Nagarjuna

I decided to go to graduate school I had not studied Buddhism very much, so I thought I would go someplace to get a master's in religious studies and specializing in Buddhism.

And so I went to University of Hawaii because there was a wonderful scholar named David Kalapahana who worked in the philosophy department there, and he was a specialist on the Mahayana philosopher Nagarjuna.

And his orientation to studying Buddhism I really liked.

So that was part of the reason I went there.

And it comes with its own warning label, because a careless version of it is the oldest mistake in the reception of this man.

In the second century of the Common Era, give or take a few decades, the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna founded what became the Madhyamaka, the Middle Way, built around the concept of emptiness, shunyata.

His Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 450 stanzas, spends itself not on building a theory but on dissolving one after another the views that things have svabhva own being an essence they carry independently of causes conditions and the concepts we bring A reader fresh from Chapter 5 should feel the floor move.

Family resemblance was also an attack on own being, on the idea that what makes a game a game is some essence hidden behind the practice.

And the method rhymes, too.

Nagarjuna's refutations do not end in a counter-thesis.

As the reference scholarship puts it, there is no thesis that establishes its conclusion independent of context and audience.

the madhyamaka dialectician uses your premises to walk you out of your premises which is structurally what the latter of tract six point five four does and what the therapies of the investigations do one fly at a time The comparative literature has been saying versions of this for fifty years—Gudmundson's Wittgenstein and Buddhism in 1977, Garfield and Priest observing that Nagarjuna succeeds in saying the unsayable just as much as Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, Smith reading both as essentially therapeutic methods, de Montbiagy finding the textual intersections surprisingly fruitful.

Emptiness is the absence of own being, full stop.

Nagarjuna's MMK, read through Chandrakirti.

Anything more positive than that smells like eternalism, like smuggling an Atman back in through the side door.

Shentong, other emptiness, makes a surgical cut.

The accessible record supports a brief introduction, not a full zero to hero.

Aryadeva is one of the most important figures in Buddhist philosophy, the chief disciple of Nagarjuna, the second founder of the Madhyamaka school, one of four figures compared to suns illuminating the world in Cowell's report of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, alongside Nagarjuna, Ashwagosha, and Kumeralabda.

And yet almost everything we know about his life is legend, and his masterwork has no widely accessible English translation I could read for this course.

So here is what the record actually holds, with every layer labeled.

start with what is solid.

Aryadeva existed.

He was Nagarjuna's principal student and successor.

active probably in the late 2nd or 3rd century CE.

But I also hear in there, the non duality between the divine and the human.

And in Buddhist terms, the non-duality of samsara and nirvana, right, which is most famously associated with the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna.

He's famous for saying samsara, this world of suffering, craving, delusion, is the world of nirvana.

Actually, he never said that, at least I haven't been able to find it.

It's more, okay, what do we need to inform to have an informed decision about that kind of thing? And what we usually use on the Buddhist path is logic and reasoning, right? So everything we're talking about now is about inference because we can't see the past and future lives, right? So we use inference as a way to logically conclude on what's most likely, right? So is it more likely the body and mind just end? We have to have some reasoning to back that up.

Is it more likely the body dies but the continuum keeps going? We have to have some reasoning to back that up, right? So this is kind of probably more than what some of you are interested in, but we can pursue Buddhist logic through wonderful texts by great saints like Dharmakirti and Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti.

These are all like, I would call them like the deep scientist practitioners of Buddhism, not science in the Western sense, but these were people doing deep work on sort of consciousness and existence and phenomena and Dharmakirti himself on sort of logic and epistemology, like how to actually, how can we logically practice prove something is more likely than the other thing, right? So this is important because when we don't have realization yet, we can't see beyond our limitations.

And so we need to use logic.