Re: [Marxism] primer on Nagarjuna

[Shane Mage <shmage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The indispensable book about Nagarjuna's Madhyamika dialectic is "The  
Central Philosophy of Buddhism" by T. N. Murti.  A crucial concept not  
mentioned in the summary below is "sunyata of sunyata."


Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to  
be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos



On Mar 16, 2008, at 12:43 PM, Greg McDonald wrote:

> 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.





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