[Marxism] primer on Nagarjuna

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Nagarjuna (c. 150-250)

Often referred to as "the second Buddha" by Tibetan and East Asian  
Mahayana (Great Vehicle) traditions of Buddhism, Nagarjuna proffered  
trenchant criticisms of Brahminical and Buddhist substantialist  
philosophy, theory of knowledge, and approaches to practice.  
Nagarjuna's philosophy represents something of a watershed not only  
in the history of Indian philosophy but in the history of philosophy  
as a whole, as it calls into questions certain philosophical  
assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the  
world.  Among these assumptions are the existence of stable  
substances, the linear and one-directional movement of causation, the  
atomic individuality of persons, the belief in a fixed identity or  
selfhood, and the strict separations between good and bad conduct and  
the blessed and fettered life.  All such assumptions are called into  
fundamental question by Nagarjuna's unique perspective which is  
grounded in the insight of emptiness (sunyata), a concept which does  
not mean "non-existence" or "nihility" (abhava), but rather the lack  
of autonomous existence (nihsvabhava).  Denial of autonomy according  
to Nagarjuna does not leave us with a sense of metaphysical or  
existential privation, a loss of some hoped-for independence and  
freedom, but instead offers us a sense of liberation through  
demonstrating the interconnectedness of all things, including human  
beings and the manner in which human life unfolds in the natural and  
social worlds.  Nagarjuna's central concept of the "emptiness  
(sunyata) of all things (dharmas)," which pointed to the incessantly  
changing and so never fixed nature of all phenomena, served as much  
as the terminological prop of subsequent Buddhist philosophical  
thinking as the vexation of opposed Vedic systems. The concept had  
fundamental implications for Indian philosophical models of  
causation, substance ontology, epistemology, conceptualizations of  
language, ethics and theories of world-liberating salvation, and  
proved seminal even for Buddhist philosophies in India, Tibet, China  
and Japan very different from Nagarjuna's own. Indeed it would not be  
an overstatement to say that Nagarjuna's innovative concept of  
emptiness, though it was hermeneutically appropriated in many  
different ways by subsequent philosophers in both South and East  
Asia, was to profoundly influence the character of Buddhist thought.

Full: http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nagarjun.htm
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