Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna (flourished 2nd century ce) was an Indian Buddhist philosopher who articulated the doctrine of emptiness (shunyata) and is traditionally regarded as the founder of the Madhyamika (“Middle Way”) school, an important tradition of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy.

Life and works

Very little can be said concerning his life. Scholars generally place him in South India during the 2nd century ce. Traditional accounts state that he lived 400 years after the Buddha passed into nirvana (c. 5th–4th century bce). Some biographies also state, however, that he lived for 600 years, apparently identifying him with a second Nagarjuna known for his Tantric (esoteric) writings. Two of the works attributed to Nagarjuna are verses of advice to a king, which suggests that he achieved some fame during his lifetime. Other sources indicate that he also served as abbot of a monastery and that he was the teacher of Aryadeva, the author of important Madhyamika texts. Numerous commentaries on Nagarjuna’s works were composed in India, China, and Tibet.

Although he is best known in the West for his writings on emptiness, especially as set forth in his most famous work, the Mulamadhyamakakarika (“Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”), Nagarjuna wrote many other works on a wide range of topics (even when questions of attribution are taken into account). It is only from a broad assessment of these works that an adequate understanding of his thought can be gained.

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Philosophy 101

Nagarjuna wrote as a Buddhist monk and as a proponent of the Mahayana (Sanskrit: “Greater Vehicle”) school, which emphasized the idea of the bodhisattva, or one who seeks to become a buddha; in several of his works he defended the Mahayana sutras as the authentic word of the Buddha. He compiled an anthology, entitled the Sutrasamuccaya (“Compendium of Sutras”), consisting of passages from 68 sutras, most of which were Mahayana texts. Nagarjuna is particularly associated with the Prajnaparamita (“Perfection of Wisdom”) sutras in this corpus. According to legend, he retrieved from the bottom of the sea a perfection-of-wisdom sutra that the Buddha had entrusted to the king of the nagas (water deities) for safekeeping. Nagarjuna also composed hymns of praise to the Buddha and expositions of Buddhist ethical practice.

Despite his monastic background, Nagarjuna addressed his works to a variety of audiences. His philosophical texts were sometimes directed against logicians of non-Buddhist schools, but most often they offered critiques of the doctrines and assumptions of the non-Mahayana Buddhist schools, especially the Sarvastivada (literally, “Asserting Everything That Exists”). Nagarjuna’s overriding theme, however, is the bodhisattva’s path to buddhahood and the merit and wisdom that the bodhisattva must accumulate in order to achieve enlightenment. By wisdom, Nagarjuna meant the perfection of wisdom, declared in the sutras to be the knowledge of emptiness. Nagarjuna is credited with transforming the sutras’ poetic and sometimes paradoxical declarations on emptiness into a philosophical system.

Philosophy

In his first sermon, the Buddha prescribed a “middle way” between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Nagarjuna, citing an early sutra, expanded the notion of the middle way into the philosophical sphere, identifying a middle way between existence and nonexistence, or between permanence and annihilation. For Nagarjuna, the ignorance that is the source of all suffering is the belief in svabhava, a term that literally means “own being” and has been rendered as “intrinsic existence” and “self nature.” It is the belief that things exist autonomously, independently, and permanently. To hold this belief is to succumb to the extreme of permanence. It is equally mistaken, however, to believe that nothing exists; this is the extreme of annihilation. Emptiness, which for Nagarjuna is the true nature of reality, is not the absence of existence but the absence of intrinsic existence.

Nagarjuna developed his doctrine of emptiness in the Mulamadhyamakakarika, a thoroughgoing analysis of a wide range of topics. Examining, among other things, the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, and nirvana, Nagarjuna demonstrates that each lacks the autonomy and independence that is falsely ascribed to it. His approach generally is to consider the various ways in which a given entity could exist and then to show that none of them is tenable because of the absurdities that would be entailed. In the case of something that is regarded to be the effect of a cause, he shows that it cannot be produced from itself (because an effect is the product of a cause), from something other than itself (because there must be a link between cause and effect), from something that is both the same as and different from itself (because the former two options are not possible), or from something that is neither the same as nor different from itself (because no such thing exists). For Nagarjuna, the impossibility of such production is confirmed in the Prajnaparamita sutras by the claim that all phenomena are anutpada (“unproduced”). The purpose of Nagarjuna’s analysis is to destroy vikalpa (“misconceptions”) and point the way toward the abandonment of all philosophical views (drishti).

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In the chapter on motion, for example, Nagarjuna asks whether gatam (“going”) is to be found on the path already traversed, the path being currently traversed, or the path ahead. After considerable reflection, he finds going to be absent in each of these places and concludes that going is therefore not to be found. It is this “not finding” that is the emptiness of motion. Nagarjuna does not claim that motion does not occur but rather considers that it does not exist as it is typically conceived.

Nagarjuna defined emptiness in terms of the doctrine of pratitya-samutpada (“dependent origination”), which holds that things are not self-arisen but produced in dependence on causes and conditions. Adopting this view allowed him to avoid the charge of nihilism, which he addressed directly in his writings and which his followers would confront over the centuries. Nagarjuna employs the doctrine of the two truths, paramartha satya (“ultimate truth”) and samvriti satya (“conventional truth”), explaining that everything that exists is ultimately empty of any intrinsic nature but does exist conventionally. The conventional is the necessary means for understanding the ultimate, and it is the ultimate that makes the conventional possible. As Nagarjuna wrote, “For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.”

Nagarjuna is the most famous thinker in the history of Buddhism after the Buddha himself. This fame was certainly present in the Buddhist cultures of Asia but was enhanced in the West by the preservation of his Mulamadhyamakakarika in Sanskrit and its early study by Orientalists. European scholars initially condemned his philosophy as nihilistic, but succeeding generations have regarded Nagarjuna as a sophisticated philosopher whose views parallel those of a variety of European thinkers. As more works of Nagarjuna were studied, he came to be understood more clearly within the philosophical and religious milieu in which he lived.