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.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. Nagarjuna's Life, Legend and Works
Precious little is known about the actual life of the
historical Nagarjuna. The two most extensive biographies of Nagarjuna, one in
Chinese and the other in Tibetan, were written many centuries after his life
and incorporate much lively but historically unreliable material which
sometimes reaches mythic proportions. However, from the sketches of historical
detail and the legend meant to be pedagogical in nature, combined with the
texts reasonably attributed to him, some sense may be gained of his place in
the Indian Buddhist and philosophical traditions.
Nagarjuna was born a "Hindu," which in his time connoted
religious allegiance to the Vedas, probably into an upper-caste Brahmin family
and probably in the southern Andhra region of India. The dates of his life are
just as amorphous, but two texts which may well have been authored by him offer
some help. These are in the form of epistles and were addressed to the
historical king of the northern Satvahana dynasty Gautamiputra Satakarni (ruled
c. 166-196 CE), whose steadfast Brahminical patronage, constant battles against
powerful northern Shaka Satrap rulers and whose ambitious but ultimately
unsuccessful attempts at expansion seem to indicate that he could not manage to
follow Nagarjuna's advice to adopt Buddhist pacifism and maintain a peaceful
realm. At any rate, the imperial correspondence would place the significant
years of Nagarjuna's life sometime between 150 and 200 CE. Tibetan sources
then may well be basically accurate in portraying Nagarjuna's emigration from
Andhra to study Buddhism at Nalanda in present-day Bihar, the future site of
the greatest Buddhist monastery of scholastic learning in that tradition's
proud history in India. This emigration to the north perhaps followed the path
of the Shaka kings themselves. In the vibrant intellectual life of a not very
tranquil north India then, Nagarjuna came into his own as a philosopher.
The occasion for Nagarjuna's "conversion" to Buddhism is
uncertain. According to the Tibetan account, it had been predicted that Nagarjuna
would die at an early age, so his parents decided to head off this terrible
fate by entering him in the Buddhist order, after which his health promptly
improved. He then moved to the north and began his tutelage. The other, more
colorful Chinese legend, portrays a devilish young adolescent using magical
yogic powers to sneak, with a few friends, into the king's harem and seduce his
mistresses. Nagarjuna was able to escape when they were detected, but his
friends were all apprehended and executed, and, realizing what a precarious
business the pursuit of desires was, Nagarjuna renounced the world and sought
enlightenment. After having been converted, Nagarjuna's adroitness at magic
and meditation earned him an invitation to the bottom of the ocean, the home of
the serpent kingdom. While there, the prodigy initiate "discovered" the
"wisdom literature" of the Buddhist tradition, known as the Prajnaparamita
Sutras, and on the credit of his great merit, returned them to the world,
and thereafter was known by the name Nagarjuna, the "noble serpent."
Despite the tradition's insistence that immersion into the
scriptural texts of the competing movements of classical Theravada and emerging
"Great Vehicle" (Mahayana) Buddhism was what spurred Nagarjuna's writings,
there is rare extended reference to the early and voluminous classical Buddhist
sutras and to the Mahayana texts which were then being composed in Nagarjuna's
own language of choice, Sanskrit. It is much more likely that Nagarjuna
thrived on the exciting new scholastic philosophical debates that were
spreading throughout north India among and between Brahminical and Buddhist
thinkers. Buddhism by this time had perhaps the oldest competing systematic
worldview on the scene, but by then Vedic schools such as Samkhya, which
divided the cosmos into spiritual and material entities, Yoga, the discipline
of meditation, and Vaisesika, or atomism were probably well-established. But
new and exciting things were happening in the debate halls. A new Vedic school
of Logic (Nyaya) was making its literary debut, positing an elaborate realism
which categorized the types of basic knowable things in the world, formulated a
theory of knowledge which was to serve as the basis for all claims to truth,
and drew out a full-blown theory of correct and fallacious logical
argumentation. Alongside it, within the Buddhist camp, sects of metaphysicians
emerged with their own doctrines of atomism and fundamental categories of
substance. Nagarjuna was to undertake a forceful engagement of both these new Brahminical
and Buddhist movements, an intellectual endeavor till then unheard of.
Nagarjuna saw in the concept sunya, a concept which
connoted in the early Pali Buddhist literature the lack of a stable, inherent
existence in persons, but which since the third century BCE had also denoted
the newly formulated number "zero," the interpretive key to the heart of
Buddhist teaching, and the undoing of all the metaphysical schools of
philosophy which were at the time flourishing around him. Indeed, Nagarjuna's
philosophy can be seen as an attempt to deconstruct all systems of thought
which analyzed the world in terms of fixed substances and essences. Things in
fact lack essence, according to Nagarjuna, they have no fixed nature, and
indeed it is only because of this lack of essential, immutable being that
change is possible, that one thing can transform into another. Each thing can
only have its existence through its lack (sunyata) of inherent, eternal
essence. With this new concept of "emptiness," "voidness," "lack" of essence,
"zeroness," this somewhat unlikely prodigy was to help mold the vocabulary and
character of Buddhist thought forever.
Armed with the notion of the "emptiness" of all things, Nagarjuna
built his literary corpus. While argument still persists over which of the
texts bearing his name can be reliably attributed to Nagarjuna, a general
agreement seems to have been reached in the scholarly literature. Since it is
not known in what chronological order his writings were produced, the best that
can be done is to arrange them thematically according to works on Buddhist
topics, Brahminical topics and finally ethics Addressing the schools of what
he considered metaphysically wayward Buddhism, Nagarjuna wrote Fundamental
Verses on the Middle Way (Mulamadhyamakakarika), and then, in order
to further refine his newly coined and revolutionary concept, the Seventy
Verses on Emptiness (Sunyatasaptati), followed by a treatise on
Buddhist philosophical method, the Sixty Verses on Reasoning (Yuktisastika)..
Included in the works addressed to Buddhists may have been a further treatise
on the shared empirical world and its establishment through social custom,
called Proof of Convention (Vyavaharasiddhi), though save for a
few cited verses, this is lost to us, as well as an instructional book on practice,
cited by one Indian and a number of Chinese commentators, the Preparation
for Enlightenment (Bodhisambaraka). Finally is a didactic work on
the causal theory of Buddhism, the Constituents of Dependent Arising (Pratityasumutpadahrdaya).
Next came a series of works on philosophical method, which for the most part
were reactionary critiques of Brahminical substantialist and epistemological
categories, The End of Disputes (Vigrahavyavartani) and the
not-too-subtly titled Pulverizing the Categories (Vaidalyaprakarana).
Finally are a pair of religious and ethical treatises addressed to the king Gautamiputra,
entitled To a Good Friend (Suhrlekha) and Precious Garland
(Ratnavali). Nagarjuna then was a fairly active author, addressing the
most pressing philosophical issues in the Buddhism and Brahmanism of his time,
and more than that, carrying his Buddhist ideas into the fields of social,
ethical and political philosophy.
It is again not known precisely how long Nagarjuna lived.
But the legendary story of his death once again is a tribute to his status in
the Buddhist tradition. Tibetan biographies tell us that, when Gautamiputra's
successor was about to ascend to the throne, he was anxious to find a
replacement as a spiritual advisor to better suit his Brahmanical preferences,
and unsure of how to delicately or diplomatically deal with Nagarjuna, he
forthrightly requested the sage to accommodate and show compassion for his
predicament by committing suicide. Nagarjuna assented, and was decapitated
with a blade of holy grass which he himself had some time previously
accidentally uprooted while looking for materials for his meditation cushion.
The indomitable logician could only be brought down by his own will and his own
weapon. Whether true or not, this master of skeptical method would well have
appreciated the irony.
2. Nagarjuna's Skeptical Method and its Targets
At the heart of what is called skepticism is doubt, a
suspension of judgment about some states of affairs or the correctness of some
assertion. There are of course many things, both in the world and in the
claims people make about the world, which can be doubted, questioned, rejected,
or left in skeptical abeyance. But in addition to the many different things
which can be doubted, there are also different ways of doubting. Doubt can be
haphazard, as when a person sees another person at night and is unsure of
whether that other person is his friend; it can be principled, as when a
scientist refuses to take into account non-material or divine causes in a
physical process she is investigating; it can be systematic, as when a
philosopher doubts conventional explanations of the world, only in search of a
more fundamental, all-inclusive explanation of experience, a la Socrates,
Descartes or Husserl (Nagarjuna was for the most part a skeptic of this sort).
It can also be all-inclusive and self-reflective, an attitude demonstrated by
the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who doubted all claims including his own claim to
doubt all claims. Consequently, there are as many different kinds of skeptics
as there can be found different kinds or ways of doubting. Nagarjuna was
considered a skeptic in his own philosophical tradition, both by Brahmanical
opponents and Buddhist readers, and this because he called into question the
basic categorical presuppositions and criteria of proof assumed by almost
everyone in the Indian tradition to be axiomatic. HiBut
despite this skepticism, Nagarjuna did believe that doubt should not be
haphazard, it requires a method. This idea that doubt should be methodical, an
idea born in early Buddhism, was a revolutionary innovation for philosophy in India.
Nagarjuna carries the novelty of this idea even further by suggesting that the
method of doubt of choice should not even be one's own, but rather ought to be
temporarily borrowed from the very person with whom one is arguing! But in the
end, Nagarjuna was convinced that such disciplined, methodical skepticism led
somewhere, led namely to the ultimate wisdom which was at the core of the
teachings of the Buddha.
The standard philosophical interpretation of doubt in
Indian thought was explained in the Vedic school of logic (Nyaya). Gautama Aksapada,
the author of the fundamental text of the Brahminical Logicians, was probably a
contemporary of Nagarjuna. He formulated what by then must have been a
traditional distinction between two kinds of doubt. The first kind is the
haphazard doubt about an object all people experience in their everyday lives,
when something is encountered in one's environment and for various reasons
mistaken for something else because of uncertainty of what precisely the object
is. The stock examples used in Indian texts are seeing a rope and mistaking it
as a snake, or seeing conch in the sand and mistaking it as silver. The doubt
that can arise as a result of realizing one is mistaken or unsure about a
particular object can be corrected by a subsequent cognition, getting a closer
look at the rope for instance, or having a companion tell you the object in the
sand is conch and not silver. The correcting cognition removes doubt by
offering some sort of conclusive evidence about what the object in question
happens to be. The other kind of doubt is roughly categorical doubt,
exemplified specifically by a philosopher who may wonder about or doubt various
categories of being, such as God's existence, the types of existing physical
substance or the nature of time. In order to resolve this latter kind of
philosophical doubt, the preferred method of the Logicians was a formal
debate. Debates provided a space wherein judges presided, established rules
for argument and counter-argument, recognized logical fallacies and correct
forms of inference and two interlocutors seeking truth all played their roles
in the establishment of the correct position. The point is that, according to
traditional Brahminical thinking, certain and correct objective knowledge of
the world was possible; one could in principle know whatever one sought to
know, from what that object lying in darkness is to the types of causation that
operated in the world to God's existence and will for human beings.
Skepticism, though a natural attitude and a fundamental aid to human beings in
both their everyday and reflective lives, can be overcome provided one arms
oneself with the methods of proof supplied by common-sense logic. For Nyaya,
while anything and everything can be doubted, any and every doubt can be
resolved. The Brahminical Logician, the Naiyayika, is a cagey and realistic but
staunch philosophical optimist.
The early Buddhists were not nearly so sure about the
possibility of ultimate knowledge of the world. Indeed, the founder of the
tradition, Siddhartha Gautama Sakyamuni (the "Buddha" or "awakened one"),
famously refused to answer questions about such airy metaphysical ponderings
like "Does the world have a beginning or not?", "Does God exist?" and "Does the
soul perish after death or not?" Convinced that human knowledge was best
suited and most usefully devoted to the diagnosis and cure of human beings' own
self-destructive psychological obsessions and attachments, the Buddha compared
a person convinced he could find the answers to such ultimate questions to a
mortally wounded soldier on a battlefield who, dying from arrow-delivered
poison, demanded to know everything about his shooter before being taken to a
doctor. Ultimate knowledge cannot be attained, at least cannot be attained
before the follies and frailties of human life bring one to despair. Unless
human beings attain self-reflective, meditative enlightenment, ignorance will
always have the upper hand over knowledge in their lives, and this is the
predicament they must solve in order to alleviate their poorly understood
suffering. The early traditional texts show how the Buddha developed a method
for refusing to answer such questions in pursuit of ultimate, metaphysical
knowledge, a method which came to be dubbed the "four error" denial (catuskoti).
When asked, for example, whether the world has a beginning or not, a Buddhist
should respond by denying all the logically alternative answers to the query;
"No, the world does not have a beginning, it does not fail to have a beginning,
it does not have and not have a beginning, nor does it neither have nor not have
a beginning." This denial is not seen to be logically defective in the sense
that it violates the law of excluded middle (A cannot have both B and not-B),
because this denial is more a principled refusal to answer than a
counter-thesis, it is more a decision than a proposition. That is to say that
one cannot object to this "four error" denial by simply saying "the world
either has a beginning or it does not" because the Buddha is recommending to
his followers that they should take no position on the matter (this is in
modern propositional logic known as illocution). This denial was recommended
because wondering about such questions was seen by the Buddha as a waste of
valuable time, time that should be spent on the much more important and doable
task of psychological self-mastery. The early Buddhists, unlike their Brahminical
philosophical counterparts, were skeptics. But in their own view, their
skepticism did not make the Buddhists pessimists, but on the contrary,
optimists, for even though the human mind could not answer ultimate questions,
it could diagnose and cure its own must basic maladies, and that surely was
enough.
But in the intervening four to six centuries between the
lives of Siddartha Gautama and Nagarjuna, Buddhists, feeling a need to explain
their worldview in an ever burgeoning north Indian philosophical environment,
traded in their skepticism for theory. Basic Buddhist doctrinal commitments,
such as the teaching of the impermanence of all things, the Buddhist rejection
of a persistent personal identity and the refusal to admit natural universals
such as "treeness," "redness" and the like, were challenged by Brahminical
philosophers. How, Vedic opponents would ask, does one defend the idea that
causation governs the phenomenal world while simultaneously holding that there
is no measurable temporal transition from cause to effect, as the Buddhists
appeared to hold? How, if the Buddhists are right in supposing that no
enduring ego persists through our experienced lives, do all of my experiences
and cognitions seem to be owned by me as a unitary subject? Why, if all things
can be reduced to the Buddhist universe of an ever-changing flux of atoms, do
stable, whole objects seem to surround me in my lived environment? Faced with
these challenges, the monk-scholars enthusiastically entered into the debates
in order to make the Buddhist worldview explicable. A number of prominent
schools of Buddhist thought developed as a result of these exchanges, the two
most notable of which were the Sarvastivada ("Universal Existence") and Sautrantika
("True Doctrine"). In various fashions, they posited theories which depicted
causal efficacy as either present in all dimensions of time or instantaneous,
of personal identity being the psychological product of complex and
interrelated mental states, and perhaps most importantly, of the apparently
stable objects of our lived experience as being mere compounds of elementary,
irreducible substances with their "own nature" (svabhava). Through the
needs these schools sought to fulfill, Buddhism entered the world of
philosophy, debate, thesis and verification, world-representation. The
Buddhist monks became not only theoreticians, but some of the most
sophisticated theoreticians in the Indian intellectual world.
Debate has raged for centuries about how to place Nagarjuna
in this philosophical context. Ought he to be seen as a conservative,
traditional Buddhist, defending the Buddha's own council to avoid theory?
Should he be understood as a "Great Vehicle" Buddhist, settling disputes which
did not exist in traditional Buddhism at all but only comprehensible to a
Mahayanist? Might he even be a radical skeptic, as his first Brahminical
readers appeared to take him, who despite his own flaunting of philosophy espoused
positions only a philosopher could appreciate? Nagarjuna appears to have
understood himself to be a reformer, primarily a Buddhist reformer to be sure,
but one suspicious that his own beloved religious tradition had been enticed,
against its founder's own advice, into the games of metaphysics and
epistemology by old yet still seductive Brahminical intellectual habits.
Theory was not, as the Brahmins thought, the condition of practice, and neither
was it, as the Buddhists were beginning to believe, the justification of
practice. Theory, in Nagarjuna's view, was the enemy of all forms of
legitimate practice, social, ethical and religious. Theory must be undone
through the demonstration that its Buddhist metaphysical conclusions and the Brahminical
reasoning processes which lead to them are counterfeit, of no real value to
genuinely human pursuits. But in order to demonstrate such a commitment, doubt
had to be methodical, just as the philosophy it was meant to undermine was
methodical.
The method Nagarjuna suggested for carrying out the
undoing of theory was, curiously, not a method of his own invention. He held
it more pragmatic to borrow philosophical methods of reasoning, particularly
those designed to expose faulty argument, to refute the claims and assumptions
of his philosophical adversaries. This was the strategy of choice because, if
one provisionally accepts the concepts and verification rules of the opponent,
the refutation of the opponent's position will be all the more convincing to
the opponent than if one simply rejects the opponent's system out of hand.
This provisional, temporary acceptance of the opponent's categories and methods
of proof is demonstrated in how Nagarjuna employs different argumentative
styles and approaches depending on whether he is writing against the Brahmins
or Buddhists. However, he slightly and subtly adapts each of their respective
systems to suit his own argumentative purposes.
For the Brahminical metaphysicians and epistemologists, Nagarjuna
accepts the forms of logical fallacies outlined by the Logicians and assents to
enter into their own debate format. But he picks a variation on a debate
format which, while acknowledged as a viable form of discourse, was not most to
the Nyaya liking. The standard Nyaya debate, styled vada or "truth"
debate, pits two interlocutors against one another who bring to the debate
opposing theses (pratijna or paksa) on a given topic, for
instance a Nyaya propoenet defending the thesis that authoritative verbal
testimony is an acceptable form of proof and a Buddhist proponent arguing that
such testimony is not a self-standing verification but can be reduced to a kind
of inference. Each of these opposed positions will then serve as the
hypothesis of a logical argument to be proven or disproven, and the person who
refutes the adversary's argument and establishes his own will win the debate.
However, there was a variety of this kind of standard format called by the
Logicians the vitanda or "destructive" debate. In vitanda, the
proponent of a thesis attempts to establish it against an opponent who merely
strives to refute the proponent's view, without establishing or even implying
his own. If the opponent of the proffered thesis cannot refute it, he will
lose; but he will also lose if in refuting the opponent's thesis, he is found
to be asserting or implying a counter-thesis. Now, while the Brahminical Naiyayikas
considered this format good logical practice as it were for the student, they
did not consider vitanda to be the ideal form of philosophical
discourse, for while it could possibly expose false theses as false, it could
not, indeed was not designed to, establish truth, and what good is reason or
philosophical analysis if they do not or cannot pursue and attain truth?
For his own part, Nagarjuna would only assent to enter a
philosophical debate as a vaitandika, committed to destroying the Brahminical
proponents' metaphysical and epistemological positions without thereby
necessitating a contrapositive. In order to accomplish this, Nagarjuna armed
himself with the full battery of accepted rejoinders to fallacious arguments
the Logicians had long since authorized, such as infinite regress (anavastha),
circularity (karanasya asiddhi) and vacuous principle (vihiyate vadah)
to assail the metaphysical and epistemological positions he found problematic.
It should be noted that later, very popular and influential schools of Indian
Buddhist thought, namely the schools of Cognition (Vijnanavada) and Buddhist
Logic (Yogacara-Sautranta) rejected this purely skeptical stance of Nagarjuna
and went on to establish their own positive doctrines of consciousness and
knowledge, and it was only with later, more synthetic schools of Buddhism in
Tibet and East Asia where Nagarjuna's anti-metaphysical and anti-cognitivist
approaches gained sympathy. There was no doubt however that among his Vedic
opponents and later Madhyamika commentators, Nagarjuna's "refutation-only"
strategy was highly provocative and sparked continued controversy. But, in his
own estimation, only by employing Brahminical method against Brahminical
practice could one show up Vedic society and religion for what he believed they
were, authoritarian legitimations of caste society which used the myths of God,
divine revelation and the soul as rationalizations, and not the justified
reasons which they were purported to be.
Against Buddhist substantialism, Nagarjuna revived the
Buddha's own "four error" (catuskoti) denial, but gave to it a more
definitively logical edge than the earlier practical employment of Suddhartha Gautama.
Up to this point in the Indian Buddhist tradition, there had been two skeptics
of note, one of them the Buddha himself and the other a third century sage
named Moggaliputta-tissa, who had won several pivotal debates against a number
of traditional sectarian groups at the request of the Mauryan emperor Asoka and
had as a result written the first great debate manual of the tradition. While
the Buddha had provided the "four error" method to discourage the advocacy of
traditional metaphysical and religious positions, Moggaliputta-tissa
constructed a discussion format which examined various doctrinal disputes in
early Buddhism, which, in his finding, represented positions which were equally
logically invalid, and therefore should not be asserted (no ca vattabhe).
Perhaps inspired by this logically sharpened skeptical approach, Nagarjuna
refined the "four errors" method from the strictly illocutionary and pragmatic
tool it had been in early Buddhism into a logic machine that dissolved Buddhist
metaphysical positions which had been growing in influence. The major schools
of Buddhism had accepted by Nagarjuna's time that things in the world must be
constituted by metaphysically fundamental elements which had their own fixed
essence (svabhava), for otherwise there would be no way to account for
persons, natural phenomena, or the causal and karmic process which determined
both. Without assuming, for instance, that people had fundamentally fixed
natures, one could not say that any particular individual was undergoing
suffering, and neither could one say that any particular monk who had perfected
his discipline and wisdom underwent enlightenment and release from rebirth in nirvana.
Without some notion of essence that is, thought Nagarjuna's contemporaries,
Buddhist claims could not make sense, and Buddhist practice could do no good,
could effect no real change of the human character.
Nagarjuna's response was to "catch" this metaphysical
position of Buddhist practice in the coils of the "four errors," demonstrating
that the change Buddhism was after was only really possible if people did not
have fixed essences. For if one really examines change, one finds that,
according to the catuskoti, change cannot produce itself, nor can it be
introduced by an extrinsic influence, nor can it result from both itself and an
extrinsic influence, nor from no influence at all. All the logical
alternatives of a given position are tested and flunked by the "four error"
method. There are basic logical reasons why all these positions fail. It
would first of all be incoherent (no papadyate) to assume that anything
with a fixed nature or essence (svabhava) could change, for that change
would violate its fixed nature and so destroy the original premise. In
addition, we do not experience anything empirically which does not change, and
so never know of (na vidyate) fixed essences in the world about us.
Once again, the proponent's method has been taken up in an ingenious way to
undermine his conclusions. The rules of the philosophical game have been
observed, but not in this case for earning victory, but for the purpose of
showing all the players that the game had all along had been just that, merely
a game which had no tenable real-life consequences.
And so, Nagarjuna has rightly merited the label of
skeptic, for he undertakes the dismantling of theoretical positions wherever he
finds them, and does so in a methodically logical manner. Like the skeptics of
the classical Greek tradition, who thought that resolved doubt about dogmatic
assertions in both philosophy and social life could lead the individual to
peace of mind, however, it is not the case that for Nagarjuna skepticism leads
nowhere. On the contrary, it is the very key to insight. For in the process
of dismantling all metaphysical and epistemological positions, one is led to
the only viable conclusion for Nagarjuna, namely that all things, concepts and
persons lack a fixed essence, and this lack of a fixed essence is precisely why
and how they can be amenable to change, transformation and evolution. Change
is precisely why people live, die, are reborn, suffer and can be enlightened
and liberated. And change is only possible if entities and the way in which we
conceptualize them are void or empty (sunya) of any eternal, fixed and
immutable essence. Indeed, Nagarjuna even on occasion refers to his special
use of the "four error" approach as the "refuting and explaining with the
method of emptying" (vigraheca vyakhyane krte sunyataya vadet) concepts
and things of essence. And like all properly Buddhist methods, once this
logical foil has served its purpose, it can be discarded, traded in as it were
for the wisdom it has conferred. Pretense of knowledge leads to ruin, while
genuine skepsis can lead human being to ultimate knowledge. Only the method of
skepticism has to conform to the rules of conventional knowing, for as Nagarjuna
famously asserts: "Without depending on convention, the ultimate truth cannot
be taught, and if the ultimate truth is not attained, nirvana will not
be attained."
3. Against Worldly and Ultimate Substantialism
By Nagarjuna's lifetime, scholastic Buddhism had become
much more than merely an institution which charged itself with the handing on
of received scripture, tradition and council-established orthodoxy; it had
grown into a highly variegated, inwardly and outwardly engaged set of
philosophical positions. These schools took it upon themselves not merely to
represent Buddhist teaching or make the benefits of its practice available, but
also to explain Buddhism, to make it not only a reasonable philosophical
discourse, but the most supremely reasonable of them all. The ultimate goal of
life, liberation from rebirth, though in general shared by all soteriologies in
Brahmanism, Jainism and Buddhism, was represented uniquely by Buddhists as the
pacification of all psychological attachments through the extinguishing (nirvana)
of desires, which would lead to a consequent extinguishing of karma and
the prevention of rebirth. One particularly unique doctrine of Buddhism in its
attempt to thematize these issues was the theory of no-self or no-soul (anatman)
and what implications it carried. In the empirical sense, the idea of no-self
meant that not only persons, but also what are normally considered the stable
substances of nature are not in fact fixed and continuous, that everything from
one's sense of personal identity to the forms of objects could be analyzed
away, as it were, into the atomic parts which were their bases. In the
ultimate metaphysical sense, it meant that no one, upon release from rebirth,
will live eternally as a spiritual, self-conscious entity (atman), but
that the series of births caused by inherited karma will simply
terminate, reducing, as its cash-value, the total amount of suffering in the
world. These theories prompted sharp and deep questions and criticisms, such
as, "if the things and persons of the world are nothing more than atoms in
constant flux, how can a person have an orderly experience of a world of
apparent substances?", "if there is no enduring identity or self, who is it
that practices Buddhism and is liberated?", and "how should we account for the
differences between enlightened beings like the Buddha and unenlightened ones,
like ourselves?" Answering such questions intelligibly for the inquiring minds
of the philosophical community were a number of distinct schools which came
collectively to be known as schools involved with the "analysis of elements" (abhidharma).
Nagarjuna received his philosophical training in the texts, vocabulary and
debates of the Abhidharmikas.
The two most prevalent schools of Abhidharma were the
school of "Universal Existence" (Sarvastivada) and the "True Doctrine" school (Sautrantika).
These schools held in common a theory of substantialism which served as an
explanation to both worldly and ultimate metaphysical questions. This theory
of substantialism, formulated in slightly different ways by each school, had
two fundamental linchpins. The first was a theory of causality, or the strict
necessity of one event following from another event. The theory of causal
necessity was essential for all Buddhist thought, for Gautama Siddhartha
himself had firmly asserted that all suffering or psychological pain had a
distinct cause, namely attachment or desire (tanha), and the key to
removing suffering from one's life and attaining the "tranquility of mind" or
contentment (upeksa) of nirvana was to cut out its causal
condition. Suffering was brought about by a definite cause, but that cause is
contingent upon the human behaviors and practices of any given individual, and
if attachment could be exorcized from these behaviors and practices, then the
individual could live a life which would no longer experience impermanence and
loss as painful, but accept the world for what it in fact is. Buddhist theory
and practice had always been based on the notion that, not just psychological
attachment, but all phenomena are causally interdependent, that all things and
events which come to pass in the world arise out of a causal chain (pratityasamutpada).
Buddhism is inconceivable without this causal theory, for it opens the door to
the diagnosis and removal of suffering. For the Universal Existence and True
Doctrine schools however, the second linchpin was a theory of fundamental
elements, a theory which had to follow from any coherent causal theory.
Causes, their philosophical exponents figured, are not merely arbitrary, but
are regular and predictable, and their regularity must be due to the fact the
things or phenomena have fixed natures of their own (svabhava), which
determine and limit the kinds of causal powers they can and cannot exert on
other things. Water, for example, can quench thirst and fire can burn other
things, but water cannot cause a fire, just as fire cannot quench thirst. The
pattern and limits of particular causal powers and their effects are therefore
rooted in what kind of a thing a thing happens to be; its nature defines what
it can and can't do to other things. Now in their theoretical models, causal
efficacy was contained not in any whole, unified object, but rather in the
parts, qualities and atomic elements of which any object happened to be
constituted, so in their formulation, it was not fire which burnt but the heat
produced by its fire molecules, and it was not water which quenched thirst but
the correspondence of its molecules to the receptivity of molecules in the
body. Indeed, fire in these systems was only fire because of its molecular
qualities, and the same with water. But these qualities, molecules and
elements had fixed natures, and thus could emit or receive certain causal
powers and not others.
The basic difference between the Universal Existence and
True Doctrine schools in their advocacy of both Buddhist causal and fundamental
elements theories were their respective descriptions of how such causes
operated. For the Universal Existence school, the effect of a cause was
already inherent in the nature of the cause (satkaryavada). My thirst
is quenched not by any fundamental change in my condition, but because the
water that I drank had the power to quench my thirst, and this power does not
rest in me, but in what I am trying to drink; this is why fire cannot quench
thirst. Change here is only an apparent transformation already potential in
the actors who are interrelating. For the True Doctrine school, on the other
hand, any effect by definition must be a change in the condition of the
receptor of the causal power, and as such, causal potential only becomes actual
where it can effect a real change in something else (asatkaryavada).
Again, using water as an illustration, the properties of water effect a change
in the properties of my body, transforming my condition from a condition of
thirst to one of having my thirst quenched. Change is change of what is effected,
otherwise it would be silly to speak of change.
This seemingly abstract or inconsequential difference
turns out in these two opposed systems however to be quite relevant, for the substantialist
ideas of fixed nature and essence provide the basis not only for
conceptualizing the material, empirical world, but also for conceiving the
knowledge and attainment of ultimate reality. For just as only metaphysical
analysis could distinguish between phenomena and their ultimate causal
constituents, such analysis was also the only reliable guide for purifying
experience of attachments. Those causes which lead to enmeshment in the
worldly cycle of rebirth (samsara) cannot be the same as those which
lead to peace (nirvana). These states of existence are just as
different as fire and water, samsara will quench thirst just as little
as nirvana will lead to the fires of passion. And so, it is the Buddha's
words, for those who advocated the theory of the effect as pre-existent in the
cause, which had the potential to purify consciousness, as opposed to the words
of any unorthodox teacher; it was the practices of Buddhists, for those who
championed the notion of external causal efficacy, which could liberate one
from rebirth, and not the practices of those who perpetuated the ambitions of
the everyday, workaday world. These schools were, each in their uniquely
Buddhist turns, true exemplars of the age-old assumptions of the karma worldview
in which a person is what he or she does, and what one does proceeds from what
type of fundamental makeup one has inherited from previous lives of deeds, a
worldview that is which intimately marries essence, existence and ethics. To
be a Buddhist means precisely to distinguish between Buddhist and non-Buddhist
acts, between ignorance and enlightenment, between the suffering world of samsara
and the purified attainment of nirvana.
In his revolutionary tract of The Fundamental Verses on
the Middle Way, Nagarjuna abjectly throws this elementary distinction
between samsara and nirvana out the door, and does so in the very
name of the Buddha. "There is not the slightest distinction," he declares in
the work, "between samsara and nirvana. The limit of the one is
the limit of the other." Now how can such a thing be posited, that is, the
identity of samsara and nirvana, without totally undermining the
theoretical basis and practical goals of Buddhism as such? For if there is no
difference between the world of suffering and the attainment of peace, then
what sort of work is a Buddhist to do as one who seeks to end suffering? Nagarjuna
counters by reminding the Buddhist philosophers that, just as Gautama Sakyamuni
had rejected both metaphysical and empirical substantialism through the
teaching of "no-soul" (anatman) and causal interdependence (pratityasamputpada),
so Scholastic Buddhism had to remain faithful to this non-substantialist stance
through a rejection of the causal theories which necessitated notions of fixed
nature (svabhava), theories which metaphysically reified the difference
between samsara and nirvana. This later rejection could be based
on Nagarjuna's newly coined notion of the "emptiness," "zeroness" or "voidness"
(sunyata) of all things.
Recapitulating a logical analysis of the causal theories
of the Universal Existence and True Doctrine schools, Nagarjuna rejects the
premises of their theories. The basic claim these schools shared was that
causal efficacy could only be accounted for through the fundamental nature of
an object; fire caused the burning of objects because fire was made of fire
elements and not water elements, the regularity and predictability of its
causal powers consistent with its essential material basis. Reviving and
logically sharpening the early Buddhist "four errors" (catuskoti)
method, Nagarjuna attempts to dismantle this trenchant philosophical
assumption. Contrary to the Scholastic Buddhist views, Nagarjuna finds that,
were objects to have a stable, fixed essence, the changes brought about by
causes would not be logically intelligible or materially possible. Let us say,
along with the school of Universal Existence, that the effect pre-exists in the
cause, or for example, that the burning of fire and the thirst-quenching of
water are inherent in the kinds of substances fire and water are. But if the
effects already exist in the cause, then it would be nonsensical to speak of
effects in the first place, because in their interaction with other phenomena
the pre-existent causes would not produce anything new, they would merely be
manifesting the potential powers already exhibited. That is, if the potential
to burn is conceived to exist within fire and the potential to quench thirst already
inhered in water, then, Nagarjuna thinks, burning and thirst-quenching would be
but appearances of the causal powers of fire and water substances, and this
would make the notion of an effect, the production of a novel change,
meaningless. If, on the other hand, we side with the True Doctrine school in
supposing that the effect does not pre-exist in the cause, but is a novel
change in the world, then the category of substance breaks down. Why? Because
if fire and water are stable substances which possess fixed natures or
essences, then what sort of relation could they bear to other objects which
have entirely different fixed natures? How could fire be thought to effect a
human being when the latter possesses a nature and thus takes on a form that is
entirely dissimilar to fire? For the person to be effected by fire, his nature
would have to change, would have to be destructible, and this vitiates the
supposition that the person's nature is fixed. Stable, fixed essences (svabhava)
which are conceived to be entirely heterogeneous could have no way of relating
without their initially supposed fixed essences being compromised. The
conclusion is that neither of these two proffered substantialist Buddhist
explanations of causal efficacy can survive logical examination.
We may be tempted, faced with these failures, to adopt
alternative theories of causality advocated outside the Buddhist tradition in
order to save the intelligibility of substance. We may suppose, along with Jaina
philosophers, the effects somehow proceed both from inherent powers of
substances as well as the vulnerabilities of objects with which these
substances interact. This obviously will not do for Nagarjuna the logician,
for it would be tantamount to suggesting that things and events arise or come
about due both to their own causal powers and as effected by other things, that
event A, such as burning or thirst-quenching is caused both by itself and by
other things. This violates the law of excluded middle outright, since a thing
cannot be characterized by both A and not-A, and so will not serve as an
explanation. Exhausted by the search for a viable substantialist principle of
causality, we may wish to opt for the completely anti-metaphysical stance of
the Indian Materialist school, which denies both that events are brought about
through the inherent causal powers of their relata and are caused by extraneous
powers. This thorough denial would have us believe that no cause-and-effect
relationship exists between phenomena, and Buddhists may not resort to this
conclusion because it militates against the basic teachings of the Buddha that
all empirical phenomena arise out of interdependence. This was the teaching of
the Buddha himself, and so no Buddhist can allow that events are not caused.
What are we to draw from all this abstract logical
critique? Are we to infer that Nagarjuna's philosophy boils down to some
strange paradoxical mysticism in which there is some ambiguous sense in which
things should be considered causally interdependent but interdependent in some
utterly unexplainable and inscrutable way? Not at all! Nagarjuna has not
refuted all available theories of cause and effect, he has only rejected all substantialist
theories of cause and effect. He thinks he has shown that, if we maintain the
philosophical assumption that things in the world derive from some unique
material and essential basis, then we shall come away empty-handed in a search
to explain how things could possibly relate to one another, and so would have no
way of describing how changes happen. But since both our eminently common
sense and the words of the Buddha affirm unremittingly that changes do indeed
happen, and happen constantly, we must assume that they happen somehow,
through some other fact or circumstance of existence. For his own part, Nagarjuna
concludes that, since things do not arise because phenomena relate through
fixed essences, then they must arise because phenomena lack fixed essences.
Phenomena are malleable, they are susceptible to alteration, addition and
destruction. This lack of fixed nature (nihsvabhava), this alterability
of things then means that their physical and empirical forms are built not upon
essence, as both the Universal Existence and True Doctrine schools posit, but
upon the fact that nothing (sunya) ever defines and characterizes them
eternally and unconditionally. It is not that things are in themselves
nothing, nor that things possess a positive absence (abhava) of
essence. Change is possible because a radical indeterminancy (sunyata)
permeates all forms. Burning happens because conditions can arise where
temperatures become incindiary and singe flesh, just as thirst can be quenched
when the process of ingestion transforms water into body. Beings relate to one
another not because of their heterogeneous forms, but because their interaction
makes them susceptible to ongoing transformation.
The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is a tour
de force through the entire categorical system of the Buddhist metaphysical
analysis (abhidharma) which had given birth to its scholastic
movements. Nagarjuna attacks all the concepts of these traditions which were thematized
according to substantialist, essentialist metaphysics, using at every turn the
logically revised "four errors" method. But perhaps most revolutionary was Nagarjuna's
extension of this doctrine of the "emptiness" of all phenomena to the
discussion of the relationship between the Buddha and the world, between the cycle
of pain-inflicted rebirth (samsara) and contented, desire-less freedom (nirvana).
The Buddha, colloquially known as "the one who came and went" (Tathagata),
cannot properly be thought of for Nagarjuna in the way the Buddhist scholastics
have, that is, as the eternally pure seed of the true teachings of peace which
puts to rest the delusions of the otherwise defiled world. The name and person
of "Buddha" should not serve as the theoretical basis and justification of
distinguishing between the ordinary, ignorant world and perfected
enlightenment. After all, Nagarjuna reminds his readers, all change in the
world, including the transformations which lead to enlightenment, are only
possible because of interdependent causality (pratityasamutpada), and
interdependent causality in turn is only possible because things, phenomena,
lack any fixed nature and so are open (sunya) to being transformed. The
Buddha himself was only transformed because of interdependence and emptiness,
and so, Nagarjuna infers, "the nature of Tathagata is the very nature of
the world/" It stands to reason then that no essential delimitations can be
made between the world of suffering and the practices which can lead to peace,
for both are merely alternative outcomes in the nexus of worldly
interdependence. The words and labels which attach to both the world and the
experience of nirvana are not the means of separating the wheat of life
from its chaff, nor true cultivators of the soil of experience from the
over-ambitious "everyday" rabble. Rather, samsara and nirvana
signify nothing but the lack of guarantees in a life of desire and the
possibility of change and hope. "We assert," Nagarjuna proffers to say on
behalf of the Buddhists, "that whatever arises dependently is as such empty.
This manner of designating things is exactly the middle path." A Buddhist oath
to avoid suffering cannot be taken as a denunciation of the world, but only as
a commitment to harness the possibilities which already are entailed within it
for peace. Talk about the Buddha and practices inspired by the Buddha are not
tantamount to the raising of a religious or ideological flag which marks off
one country from another; rather, the world of suffering and the world of peace
have the same extension and boundary, and talk about suffering and the Buddha
is only there to make us aware of the possibilities of the world, and how our
realization of these possibilities depends precisely on what we do and how we
interact.
4. Against Proof
The apparently anti-theoretical stance occupied by Nagarjuna
did not win him many philosophical friends either among his contemporary
Buddhist readers or the circles of Brahminical thought. While it was certainly
the case that, over the next seven centuries of Buddhist scholastic thought,
the concept of emptiness was more forcefully articlulated, it was also
hermeneutically appropriated into other systems in ways of which Nagarjuna
would not necessarily have approved. Sunyata was soon made to carry
theoretical meanings unrelated to causal theory in various Buddhists sects,
serving as the support of a philosophy of consciousness for the later
illustrious Vijnanavada or Cognition School and as the explication of the
nature of both epistemology and ontology in the precise school of Buddhist
Logic (Yogacara-Sautrantika). These schools, deriding Nagarjuna's
skepticism, retained their commitment to a style of philosophizing in India
which allowed intellectual stands to be taken only on the basis of commitments
to thesis, counter-thesis, rules of argument and standards of proof, that is,
schools which equated philosophical reflection with competing doctrines of
knowledge and metaphysics. This is all the more ironic given the overt attempt
Nagarjuna made to head off the possibility that the idea of emptiness would be
refuted or co-opted by this style of philosophizing, an attempt still preserved
in the pages of his work The End of Disputes (Vigrahavyavartani).
The End of Disputes was in large measure a
reactionary work, written only when philosophical objections were brought
against Nagarjuna's non-essentialist, anti-metaphysical approach to
philosophy. The work was addressed to a relatively new school of Brahminical
thought, the school of Logic (Nyaya) Philosophical debate, conducted in
formalized fashions in generally court settings, had persisted in India for
perhaps as much as eight hundred years before the time of the first literary systematizer
of the school of logic, Gautama Aksapada. Several attempts had been made by
Buddhist and Jaina schools before Nyaya to compose handbooks for formal
debate. But Nyaya brought to the Indian philosophical scene a full-blown
doctrine not only of the rules and etiquette of the debate process, but also an
entire system of inference which distinguished between logically acceptable and
unacceptable forms of argument. Finally, undergirding all forms of valid
argument was a system of epistemology, a theory of proof (pramanasastra),
which distinguished between various kinds of mental events which could be
considered truth-revealing, or corresponding to real states of affairs and
those which could not be relied upon as mediators of objective reality. Direct
sensory perception, valid logical argument, tenable analogy and authoritative
testimony were held by the Logicians to be the only kinds of cognitions which
could correspond to real things or events in the world. They could serve as
proofs to the claims we make to know. With some modifications, the approach of
Nyaya came to be accepted as philosophical "first principles" by almost all the
other schools of thought in India for centuries, both Vedic and non-Vedic.
Indeed, in many philosophical quarters, before entering into the subtleties and
agonism of advanced philosophical debate, a student was expected to pass
through the prerequisites of studying Sanskrit grammar and logic. All thought,
and so all positive sciences, from agriculture to Vedic study to statecraft,
were at times even said to be fundamentally based on and entirely specious
without basic training in "critical analysis" (anviksiki), which,
according to Gautama Aksapada, was precisely what Nyaya was.
The Logicians, upon becoming aware very early of Nagarjuna's
thought, brought against his position of emptiness (sunyata) a sharp
criticism. Certainly no claim, they insisted, should compel us to give it
assent unless it can be known to be true. Now Nagarjuna has told us that
emptiness is the lack of a fixed, essential nature which all things exhibit. But
if all things are empty of a fixed nature, then that would include, would it
not, Nagarjuna's own claim that all things are empty? For one to say that all
things lack a fixed nature would be also to say that no assertion, no thesis
like Nagarjuna's that all things are empty, could claim hold on a fixed
reference. And if such a basic and all-encompassing thesis must admit of
having itself neither a fixed meaning nor reference, then why should we believe
it? Does not rather the thesis "all things lack a fixed essence, and are thus
empty," since it is a universal quantifier and so covers all things including
theses, refute itself? The Logicians are not so much making the claim here
that skepticism necessarily opts out of its own position, as when a person in
saying "I know nothing" witnesses unwittingly to at least a knowledge of two things,
namely how to use language and his own ignorance, as in the cases of the
Socratic Irony and the Liar's Paradox. It is more the direct charge that a
philosophy which refuses to admit universal essences must be flatly
self-contradictory, since a universal denial must itself be essentially true of
all things. Should we not consider Nagarjuna as a person who, setting out on
what would otherwise be an ingenious and promising philosophical journey, in a
bit too much of a rush, tripped over his own feet on his way out the front
door?
Nagarjuna, in The End of Disputes, responds in two
ways. The first is an attempt to show the haughty Logicians that, if they
really critically examine this fundamental concept of proof which grounds their
theory of knowledge, they will find themselves in no better position than they
claim Nagarjuna is in. How, Nagarjuna asks in an extended argument, can
anything be proven to a fixed certainty in the way the Naiyayikas posit? When
you get right down to it, a putative fact can be proven in only two ways; it is
either self-evident or it is shown to be true by something else, by some other
fact or piece of knowledge already assumed to be true. But if we assent to the
very rules of logic and valid argument the Vedic Logicians espouse, we shall
find, Nagarjuna thinks, that both of these suppositions are flawed. Let us
take the claim that something can be proven to be true on the basis of other
facts known to be true. Suppose, to use a favorite example from the Logician Gautama,
I want to know how much an object weighs. I put it on a scale to measure its
weight. The scale gives me a result, and for a moment that satisfies me; I
can rely on the measurement because scales can measure weight. But hold on, Nagarjuna
flags, your reliance on the trustworthiness of the scale is itself an
assumption, not a piece of knowledge. Shouldn't the scale be tested too? I
measure the object on a second scale to test the accuracy of the first scale,
and the measurement agrees with the first scale. But how can I just assume,
once again, that the second scale is accurate? Both scales might be wrong.
And the exercise goes on, there is nothing in principle which would justify me
in assuming that any one test I use to verify a piece of knowledge is itself
reliable beyond doubt. So, Nagarjuna concludes, the supposition that something
can be proven through reference to some other putative fact runs into the
problem that the series of proofs will never reach an end, and leaves us with
an infinite regress. Should we commit ourselves to the opposite justification
and propound that we know things to be true which are self-evident, then Nagarjuna
would counter that we would be making a vacuous claim. The whole point of
epistemology is to discover reliable methods of knowing, which implies that on
the side of the world there are facts and on the side of the knower there are
proofs which make those facts transparent to human consciousness. Were things
just self-evident, proof would be superfluous, we should just know straightaway
whether something is such and such or not. The claim of self-evidence
destroys, in an ironic fashion which always pleased Nagarjuna, the very need
for a theory of knowledge!
Having tested both criteria of evidence and come up short,
the Logician might, and in fact historically did, try an alternative theory of
mutual corroboration. We may not know for certain that a block of stone weighs
too much to fit into a temple I am building, and we may not be certain that the
scale being used to measure the stones is one hundred percent accurate, but if
as a result of testing the stones with the scale I put the stones in the
building and find that they work well, I have reason to rely on the knowledge I
gain through the mutual corroborations of measurement and practical success.
This process, for Nagarjuna, however, should not pass for an epistemologist who
claims to be as strict as the Brahminical Logicians. In fact, this process
should not even be considered mutual corroboration; it is actually circular. I
assume stones have a certain measurable mass, so I design an instrument to
confirm my assumption, and I assume scales measure weight so I assess objects
by them, but in terms of strict logic, I am only assuming that this
corroborative process proves my suppositions, but it in fact does nothing more
than feed my preconceived assumptions rather than give me information about the
nature of objects. We may say that a certain person is a son because he has a
father, Nagarjuna quips, and we may say another person is a father because he
has a son, but apart from this mutual definition, how do we know which
particular person is which? By extension, Nagarjuna claims, this is the
problem with the project of building a theory of knowledge as such.
Epistemology and ontology are parasitic on one another. Epistemologies are
conveniently formulated to justify preferred views of the world, and ontologies
are presumed to be justified through systematic theories of proof, but apart
from these projects being mutually theoretically necessary, we really have no
honest way of knowing whether they in fact lend credence to our beliefs.
Again, Nagarjuna has used tools from the bag of the logician, in this case,
standard argumentational fallacies, to show that it is Brahminical Logic, and
not his philosophy of emptiness, which has tripped itself up before having a
chance to make a run in the world.
This, as said above, was Nagarjuna's first response to the
Logicians' accusation that a philosophy of emptiness is fundamentally
incoherent. There is however, Nagarjuna famously asserts, another pettito principii
in the Nyaya charge that the thesis "all things are empty and lack a fixed
nature" is incoherent. The statement "all things are empty" is actually, Nagarjuna
says, not a formal philosophical thesis in the first place! According to the Nyaya
rules of viable logical argument, the first step in proving an assertion true
is the declared statement of the putative fact as a thesis in the argument (pratijna).
Now in order for something to qualify as a formal philosophical thesis, a
statement must be a fact about a particular object or state of knowable affairs
in the world, and it is a matter of doctrine for Nyaya that all particular
objects or states of affairs are classifiable into their categories of
substances, qualities, and activities. Nagarjuna however does not buy into
this set of ontological categories in the first place, and so the Logician is
being disingenuous in trying to covertly pull him into the ontological game
with this charge that the idea of emptiness is metaphysically unintelligible.
The Brahminical Logician is insisting that no person can engage in a
philosophical discussion without buying, at least minimally, into a theory of
essences and issues surrounding how to categorize essences. It is exactly this
very point, Nagarjuna demurs, that is eminently debatable! But since the
Logician will not pay Nagarjuna the courtesy of discussion on Nagarjuna's
terms, the Buddhist replies to them on their terms: "If my statement (about
emptiness) were a philosophical thesis, then it would indeed be flawed; but I
assert no thesis, and so the flaw is not mine."
With the exception of his two major commentators four
centuries later, this stance of Nagarjuna satisfied no one in the Indian
philosophical tradition, neither Brahmanas nor fellow Buddhists. It was the
stance of the kind of debater who styled himself a vaitandika, a person
who refutes rival philosophical positions while advocating no thesis themselves.
Despite all their other disagreements, Brahmanas and Buddhists in following
centuries did not consider such a stance to be truly philosophical, for while a
person who occupied it may be able to expose dubious theories, one could never
hope to learn the truth about the world and life from them. Such a person, it
was suspected is more likely a charlatan than a sage. Despite the title of his
work then, Nagarjuna's attempt to call into "first question" theories of proof
fell far short of ending all disputes. However, Nagarjuna closes this
controversial and much-discussed work by reminding his readers of who he is.
Paying reverence to the Buddha, the teacher, he says, of interdependent
causality and emptiness, Nagarjuna tells his audience that "nothing will
prevail for those in whom emptiness will not prevail, while everything will
prevail for whom emptiness prevails." This is a reiteration of Nagarjuna's
commitment that theory and praxis are not a partnership in which only through
the former's justification is the latter redeemed. The goal of practice is
after all transformation, not fixity, and so if one insists on marrying
philosophy to practice, philosophical reflection cannot be beholden to the
unchanging, eternal essences of customary epistemology and metaphysics
5. The New Buddhist Space and Mission
There may be some extent to which the age-old debate as to
whether Nagarjuna was a devotee of the traditional Theravada or Classical
Buddhism or the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) sect turns on the authorship of the
two letters attributed to him. Very little can be gleaned from the other works
in Nagarjuna's philosophical corpus that would lend much support to the
supposition that the second-century scholar was even much aware of Great
Vehicle doctrines or personages, even though the ground-breaking notion of
emptiness was the one which Mahayana fixed on as its central idea. The two
"ethical epistles" addressed to the historical Satvahana liege Gautamiputra Satkarni
(r. ca. 166-196) would certainly give Nagarjuna a plausible historical locus.
With their abundant references to the supremacy of the Great Vehicle teachings,
they would also depict Nagarjuna as unequivocally within this movement.
However, the non-existence of original Sanskrit versions of the Suhrllekha
(To a Good Friend) and Ratnavali (Precious Garland), as
well as their obviously heavy redactions in the Tibetan and Chinese editions,
make any definitely reliable attribution of them to Nagarjuna practically
impossible.
The familiar distinctions between the Classical and Great
Vehicles are well-worn; the conservative scriptural and historical literalism
of the former pitted against the mythological revisionism of the latter, the
idealization of the reclusive ascetic pursuing his own perfection in the former
as opposed to the angelic and socially engaged bodhisattva of the
latter. Nagarjuna's other works are filled with honorific passages dedicated
only to the Buddha himself, while the two epistles abound in praise of the
virtues of angelic bodhisattva-hood, though even these are found amidst
passages extolling the perfections of the eightfold path and the nobility of
the four truths. Whatever Nagarjuna's precise sectarian identification, he
never loses sight of the understanding that the practice of Buddhism is a new
sort of human vehicle, a vehicle meant not to carry people from one realm to
another realm, but a vehicle which could make people anew in the only realm
where they have always lived.
Nagarjuna's letters to the war-mongering Gautamiputra are
somewhat conspicuous for the relative paucity of advice on the actual art of
statecraft. Long sermons in To a Good Friend on the correct
interpretation of subtle Mahayana teachings are intermingled with
catechism-like presentations of the excellence of monastic virtues, and these
are so numerous that even the author concedes toward the end of the
correspondence that the king should keep as many of the enumerated precepts as
he can, since keeping all of them would tax the fortitude of the most seasoned
monk. But with all of these somewhat disconnected sections of the letter which
even internally are wont to jump from one topic to another, a motif emerges
which does seem to cohere with the more thematic approaches to the idea of
emptiness in the other works, and that motif is the primacy of virtuous conduct
and practice, which takes on even a higher and more relevant role than the
achievements of wisdom.
This motif is surely significant, given the fact that the
Classical and Great Vehicles, while both submitting that ultimate wisdom (prajna)
and compassion (karuna) were the two paramount virtues, argued over
which one was highest, the Theravada opting for wisdom and Mahayana for
compassion. In these epistles, while Nagarjuna warns that the intentions behind
moral acts must be informed by wisdom lest the benefits of the deed be spoiled,
he stresses repeatedly the importance of steadfastly ethical conduct. Dharma
or behavior upright in the eyes of the Buddha's law of existence has two
aspects, one which is characterized by meditative non-action and the other
through positive action, and the road to Buddhahood, he says, passes through
the positive action of the bodhisattva. For even though dharma is
subtle and hard to comprehend, particularly where the notion of emptiness is
involved and so easily misunderstood, its practice through the cultivation of
moral intentions and attitudes will lead unerringly through the tangle of
doctrinal debates. Beyond this general advice, which would apply to any monk
or nun, counsel is given to the king that dharma as positive ethical
conduct is also "the best policy," for when one socially promotes adherence to
ethical conduct, justice will prevail in the kingdom and benefits will accrue
to all, benefits which rivals will envy beyond any transient material wealth
and false senses of power.
In the worlds of the present and the future, it is after
all only actions which matter. It is indeed the very physicality of deeds
which leads to the accumulation of either meritorious or detrimental karma,
and so one's fate lies squarely in ones own hands. But through acts performed
in the field of samsara, all conceivable changes are possible. A prince
can become a pauper, either willingly, like the Buddha, or unwillingly. Young
men become old, beauty morphs into decrepitude, friendship descends into
enmity. It is this piercing contingency of samsara which is so often
experienced with such anguish. But, Nagarjuna quickly reminds his readers, all
these transformations can just as easily go in the opposite direction, with
material poverty blossoming into spiritual riches, fathers reborn as sons and
mothers as young wives, and the wounds of conflict sutured with the threads of
reconciliation. Interdependent causality and the emptiness which change
depends on mean that things can always go either way, and so which way they in
fact go depends intimately on one's own deeds. And this leads one to grasp
that the proper site of practice for the Buddhist cannot be just the monastery,
removed as it tries to be from the machinations of state, economy, social class
and the other tumultuous and sundry affairs of suffering beings. As there is
no difference between samsara and nirvana owing to the emptiness
and constantly changing nature of both, so the change which a Buddhist effects
upon herself and those around her is a change in the world, and this constant
and purposeful change is the rightful mission of Buddhism. With his own
peculiar and visionary interpretation of the concept of the emptiness of all
things then, Nagarjuna has woven an anti-metaphysical and epistemological
stance together with an ethics of action which was, true to its own
implications, to transform the self-understanding of the Buddhist tradition for
millennia to come.
6. References and Further Reading
Nagarjuna's Works Addressed to Buddhists
Mulamadhyamakakarika, (Fundamental
Verses on the Middle Way) translated as The Philosophy of
the Middle Way by David J. Kalapuhana, SUNY Press, Albany, 1986.
Sunyatasaptati, (Seventy
Verses on Emptiness) translated by Cristian Lindtner, Nagarjuniana:
Studies in the Writings and Philosophy of Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag,
Copenhagen, 1987, 35-69.
Yuktisastika, (Sixty
Verses on Reasoning) translated by Christian Lindtner, Nagarjuniana:
Studies in the Writings and Philosophy of Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen,
1987, 103-19.
Pratityasamutpadahrdaya, (The
Constituents of Dependent Arising) translated by L. Jamspal and Peter Della
Santina in Journal of the Department of Buddhist Studies, University of
Delhi, 2:1, 1974, 29-32.
Bodhisambharaka, (Preparation
for Enlightenment) translated by Christian Lindtner, Nagarjuniana:
Studies in the Writings and Philosophy of Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag,
Copenhagen, 1987, 228-48.
Nagarjuna's Works Addressed to Brahminical Systems
Vigrahavyavartani, (The
End of Disputes) translated as The Dialectical Method of Nagarjuna by
Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1978.
Vaidalyaprakarana, (Pulverizing
the Categories) translated as Madhyamika Dialectics by Ole Holten Pind,
Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1987.
Nagarjuna's Ethical Epistles
Suhrllekha, (To a Good
Friend) translated as Nagarjuna's Letter to King Gautamiputra by L. Jamspal,
N.S. Chophel and Peter Della Santina, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1978.
Ratnavali, (Precious Garland)
translated as The Precious Garland and the Song of the Four Mindfulnesses by
Jeffrey Hopkins, Lati Rimpoche and Anne Klein, Vikas Publishing, Delhi, 1975.
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