When Buddhism began to develop into distinct schools of thought its main division occurred between what became known as the Theravada (or Hinayana) and Mahayana schools. Further division then took place in both these schools. Theravada Buddhism divided into the Vaibhasika and Sautrantika schools. Mahayana Buddhism gave rise to the Madhyamika school and then, more than a century later, to the Yogacara.1
It is in virtue of his founding and promulgation of the Madhyamika branch of Mahayana Buddhism that Nagarjuna ranks among the greatest of the Indian Buddhist thinkers. Madhyamika teaching focuses on the Buddha’s doctrine of the Middle Way, that advocacy of a life lived between the two extremes of a rigorous asceticism and an over-worldly indulgence, and Nagarjuna’s philosophical thought provides a kind of logical counterpart to the Buddha’s teaching of the Middle Way. He developed a process of dialectical reasoning which exposed contradictions in ordinary thought and which, by reducing all claims to pairs of negations, sought to dislodge thinking from such extremes, thereby freeing the mind to achieve enlightenment. According to this procedure, when it is recognized that opposing poles of thought may be negated by reasoning, the mind is able to acknowledge that reality is neither of them, and is able to experience sunyata, an emptiness or void which, although it defies description, is not nihilistic in its import. This experience of emptiness is regarded as the condition of a poised and perfect wisdom, prajnaparamita, in which intellect and intuition are united. Perhaps it is best thought of as a clarity of one’s whole consciousness that permits the kind of apprehension that is not possible for a mind that thinks in terms of stark oppositions: ‘. . . the middle between these two extremes . . . is the intangible, the incomparable, non-appearing, not comprehensible, without any position . . . that verily is the Middle Path – the vision of the Real in its true form.’2 For Nagarjuna, sunyata is a concept which encompasses a range of meanings and which, together with the method of dialectical reasoning, provides the framework for a visionary yet rigorous philosophy.
Nothing conclusive is known about the exact dates of Nagarjuna’s life. On all accounts it seems to have been a long one. He was probably philosophically active somewhere between 50 CE and 200 CE but he has also been placed around 300 CE and these uncertainties about his dates have suggested to some commentators that more than one person may have been responsible for the doctrine and writings attributed to him. The several biographical reports that are available are not entirely consistent with each other. It seems reasonably certain that he was a Brahmin, born in southern India, and that his early years were strangely clouded with the threat of sin and evil, so that he appeared to be someone doomed to an early death. A biography by Kumarajiva3 records that he was redeemed from this state in early manhood when he experienced some kind of illumination or conversion in which he recognized that desire and passion are the causes of suffering. The account relates that as a consequence of this realization he entered the Buddhist Order. Some Tibetan sources tell a somewhat different story, recounting that astrologers had predicted that Nagarjuna would die at the age of 7 but that he avoided that fate by entering the Buddhist Order in early childhood and undergoing instruction. Whatever his route to scholarship and spirituality, there is entire agreement concerning his remarkable aptitude for intensive study, the profundity of his insights and the compassion and care he exercised towards the community in which he lived.
Nagarjuna’s thought constitutes a distillation and systematization of the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) texts. Those texts form an immense body of literature that is the source of the sunyata (emptiness) doctrine and that derives from those teachings of the Buddha that were meant for his more philosophically minded followers. It is no longer thought, as it once was, that Nagarjuna was the author of some of these texts but there is general agreement in attributing to him the authorship of approximately twentyfive works including a number of sastras, or commentaries, on the primary Prajnaparamita literature.4 What is not in doubt is that he was the agent of a profound revolution in Buddhism in that he developed the Buddha’s ‘silence’ concerning the nature of ultimate reality into a comprehensive critique of metaphysical dogmatism. In a conversation with a disciple the Buddha is reported to have described his position in the following words:
To hold that the world is eternal or to hold that it is not, or to agree to any other of the propositions you adduce, Vaccha, is the jungle of theorizing, the wilderness of theorizing, the tangle of theorizing, the bondage and the shackles of theorizing, attended by ill, distress, perturbation and fever; it conduces not to detachment, passionlessness, tranquillity, peace, to knowledge and wisdom of Nirvana. This is the danger I perceive in these views which makes me discard them all.5
It is precisely this standpoint that Nagarjuna’s dialectic upholds and develops.
Broadly, the method of the dialectic is fourfold: first, it considers the affirmation of something; next, its negation; then, the affirmation of both the affirmation and the negation; and, finally, the negation of both the affirmation and the negation.6 Something of its use is exemplified in Nagarjuna’s treatment of a fundamental theme in his philosophy: the idea of ‘dependent origination’. It concerns causation and has to be understood in relation to the general Buddhist principle, already described, that repudiates all polarities and affirms that reality lies in the Middle Way. In the Madhyamika sastras (commentaries), and repeatedly throughout Buddhist scriptures in general, the repudiation of polarities is expressed in the following words of the Buddha: ‘No production nor destruction; no annihilation nor persistence; no unity nor plurality; no coming in nor going out’.7 In accordance with this principle, when Nagarjuna considers causality, he rejects both a total determinism and a total indeterminism and espouses a Middle Way account of causation. He maintains that it is by means of an interdependence, or ‘dependent origination’, that the world has its being, and that a certain kind of intuitive realization of this fact of interdependency, although not dogmatically stateable in language, is essential to enlightenment and spiritual development: it is the condition of the Middle Way. He writes: ‘Dependent origination we call emptiness. This is metaphorical designation and is, indeed, the middle path’.8
In examining causation, Nagarjuna considers three positions: first, that of identity, which holds that the effect is included in the cause; second, that of non-identity, which holds that the effect is distinct from the cause; third, a mixed view in which a cause is regarded as the consequence of a preexistent cause and becomes so in virtue of an external combination of conditions. When subjected to Nagarjuna’s dialectical logic, all three positions are shown to be untenable: the first because if an effect already exists as part of its cause then it cannot be produced; the second because if the conditions supposedly giving rise to the effect are distinct from it, then ‘anything can come out of anything’, and that is not what is understood by ‘causation’; the third for the reasons already given for the unacceptability of the first two. Nagarjuna further points out that causality presupposes change and that this disposes us to adopt a view of reality as consisting of momentary events, since it is absurd to speak of change with regard to what is permanent. But as change involves a process of change requiring continuity, there cannot be a process of change in relation to events which are merely momentary. Deployed thus, the dialectic reduces all three accounts of causality to incoherence and there appears to be no way in which to enunciate an intelligible causal theory. The condition for the realization of sunyata obtains.9
What has to be remembered in the endeavour to grasp Nagarjuna’s ideas is that when his logic has demolished a particular position or point of view it is not because he is going to assert its contrary or opposite. That, too, will be similarly demolished in order to experience the emptiness in which it is recognized that the distinctions of opposites are false distinctions and, more profoundly, that essentially there are no differences between the polarities formulated by reason.
Has Nagarjuna, in exposing inadequacies in the several accounts of causality, also destroyed the buddhistic understanding of dependent origination that he wishes to promulgate? Some commentators have said that he has and that his doctrine is a negating and wholly nihilistic one in that it rules out any kind of conceptualization. Others have defended his method on the grounds that it can bring someone to the experience of sunyata and so to the central focus of Madhyamika doctrine; that is, to the point at which polarities of thought collapse into incoherence and it is recognized that apparent oppositions are actually non-existent, that there is ‘no production nor destruction; no annihilation nor persistence’, indeed, no oppositions of any kind, because there is really no difference between the posited opposites. Ultimately, Nagarjuna maintains, we come to see even that the conditioned existence of samsara is not different from nirvana. This does not mean that he wanted to deprive ordinary empirical distinctions of their utility and validity. Their legitimate use, he held, is in the transactions of daily life. However, they have to be recognized as misleading if applied to higher or philosophical truth. What is important is that the empirical distinctions of practical living are understood within the context of the critical account of their relationship to the higher reality.
Nagarjuna’s discussion of dependent origination is a corollary of the general tenet of Buddhism that everything is in flux, is becoming rather than being, and that the notion of an enduring essential substance as the foundation of the real is an illusion or an incorrect interpretation of experience. His remarks on the existence of the self are similarly consistent with this view. He held that the entities of the world cannot be said to have enduring self-natures, or souls, and that prajna, or wisdom, consists in the continuing consciousness of the transitoriness of all things. Once again, this is not to be taken as a refutation of claims for the existence of the self but as a critique of all definitive assertions both of its existence and non-existence. Thus Nagarjuna writes: ‘The self is not different from the states, nor identical with them; (there) is no self without the states; nor is it to be considered nonexistent.’ 10
It could be claimed that Nagarjuna’s repudiation of all systems and theories cannot escape being construed as yet another system or theory. In contesting such a claim it may be pointed out that, unlike theories and systems, his thought is not concerned to provide anything resembling an explanation of things according to some pattern or formula, but to generate a critical awareness of the presuppositions on which all such formulas depend and to note that our choices of such presuppositions are often entirely arbitrary or a matter of purely personal dispositions. T.R.V. Murti has likened Nagarjuna’s critique to the procedures of the western philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant,11 both of whom set out to be profoundly sceptical of all traditional justifications of metaphysical claims. It may also be compared, perhaps at an even more fundamental level, with the existentialist approach of Jean-Paul Sartre; in particular with Sartre’s claim that free human choice is ultimately an absurd choice since it is made on the basis of nothing. Murti remarks that: ‘The Madhyamika method is to deconceptualize the mind and to disburden it of all notions . . . The dialectic is not an avenue for the acquisition of information, but a catharsis . . . It is the abolition of all restrictions which conceptual patterns necessarily impose. It is not nihilism, which is itself a standpoint asserting that nothing is. The dialectic is a rejection of all views including the nihilistic.’12
By those who practise it, Buddhism is often spoken of as ‘Dharma’. The word derives from the root dhr, ‘to uphold’, and has numerous meanings. Chiefly it refers to the ultimate reality of nirvana, the law or nature of the universe, the moral life, right conduct and teaching, and the insights of enlightened understanding. It is also used to speak of particular things. Terms such as ‘dharma-body’ and ‘dharma-eye’ occur frequently and there are countless other uses that have to be interpreted in relation to their particular contexts. A broad distinction is always maintained between everyday entities, which are illusory or false in some way, and ‘dharmas’, which are always aspects of a deeper and more essential reality. The bodhisattva, the devout Buddhist who has achieved enlightenment but forgoes transition to nirvana for the sake of guiding others towards the same goal, is someone who has progressed even beyond dharmas. The mind of such a person maintains a transparency from which self-consciousness and all other forms of dualism have been banished by means of the union of intellect and intuition and its concomitant condition of complete freedom: ‘Bodhisattvas do not grasp at ideas, they cling to nothing, their perfected knowledge is empty. This is the essence of supreme wisdom.’13
In his writings, Nagarjuna describes a sixfold path of spiritual discipline for those who aspire to this condition. His emphasis in this aspect of his teaching is always on the transcending of – although he never belittles – the everyday virtues of life. He rejects the ideal of the arhat, the saintly person of traditional Buddhism whose purposes were confined to the bringing about of the cessation of personal suffering and the realization of nirvana. Instead, his concern is with the bodhisattva’s dedication to the service of others and a sense of the community of all beings. His is not a discipline for the recluse. It has a moral quality not unlike that which informs Plato’s account of the ascent of the human mind from illusion and shadows to a direct, intuitive knowledge of the Good. Like Nagarjuna, Plato advocates that those who achieve such knowledge should return to help those who are still struggling at the lower levels of understanding.14
The scope, detail and rigour of Nagarjuna’s thought are not easily conveyed in a short essay; nor is its spirituality, which is at once intense and serene. His ideas have been powerfully influential in India, China, Tibet, Japan and Korea for over two thousand years and were, in particular, notably formative of Chinese Zen Buddhism.15 Nagarjuna is closely studied in the West as well as in Asia, for occidental philosophers seem able to detect countless affinities between his views and certain elements of the western tradition. Since no more than about 5 per cent of the Prajnaparamita literature has so far been reliably translated and edited, this is an area of scholarship that will surely continue to develop and flourish.
1 The leading figure of the Yogacara school was Vasubandhu, c. fourth or fifth centuries CE. (See pp. 58–64 in this volume.) The fundamental difference in the two main schools of Buddhism is between their views of the basic elements of existence (dharmas). Theravadins believed in the existence of distinct entities possessing essences. Madhyamika doctrine affirmed the non-substantiality of things and the ultimate identity of samsara and nirvana.
2 Quoted from the Kasyapaparivarta in T.R.V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, London, Allen & Unwin, 1955, p. 210.
3 Kumarajiva (344–409/413 ce) translated into Chinese, in 100 books, Nagarjuna’s commentary on the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra. It was through him that Mahayana became established in China. With the help of numerous pupils he translated many sutras and sastras and comprehensively taught the practices of the Middle Way.
4 The sutras of the Prajnaparamita literature are anonymous and are held to enshrine the words of the Buddha. The sastras are commentaries on these primary texts. Nagarjuna is said to have brought the Prajnaparamita sutras from the country of the Nagas in 100,000 gathas and to have produced an abridged sastra of 25,000 gathas.
5 Murti, op. cit., p. 47.
6 There is a very full discussion of Nagarjuna’s dialectic in Murti, op. cit., Pt II.
7 These are the famous ‘Eight Noes’ of Madhyamika literature, as translated in Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1952, pp. 54, 55.
8 Ian C. Harris, The Continuity of Madhyamika and Yogacara in Indian Mahayana, Leiden, Brill, 1991, p. 143.
9 The process of the dialectic is sometimes described as having three stages: dogmatism, criticism and intuition. But intuition may also be achieved through moral and religious consciousness, and by the cessation of pain-causing acts.
10 Murti, op. cit., p. 206.
11 op. cit., especially ch. XII.
12 op. cit., p. 212. Murti’s comparison of Nagarjuna with Kant has been examined and discussed most interestingly by Andrew P. Tuck in his Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991.
13 Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History, Vol. I, India and China, New York and London, Macmillan, 1988, p. 31.
14 Plato’s account of the ascent from the cave is in Republic, Bk VII.
15 The reciting of the Diamond Sutra, one of the bestknown works in the Prajnaparamita literature, enabled the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng (638–713 CE), to achieve enlightenment.
There is no single, definitive list of Nagarjuna’s writings. A fairly comprehensive list, accompanied by bibliographical sources, is in D.S. Ruegg’s The Literature of the Madhyamika School of Philosophy in India in A History of Indian Literature, Vol. 7, fascicle 1, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1981. T.R.V. Murti’s The Central Philosophy of Buddhism contains a helpful section on the Madhyamika literature (pp. 87–103) in which he attributes six main treatises and a number of smaller works to Nagarjuna. Almost all are commentaries (sastras) on the Prajnaparamita sutras.
See also:
Conze, E. (trans.), The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and Its Verse Summary, Berkeley, CA, Four Seasons Foundation, 1973
Inada, Kenneth K., Nagarjuna: A Translation of his Mulamadhyamakakarika with an Introductory Essay, Tokyo, Hokuseido, 1970
the Buddha, Vasubandhu, Hui-neng
Harris, I.C., The Continuity of Madhyamika and Yogacara in Indian Mahayana, Leiden, Brill, 1991
Murti, T.R.V., The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 2nd edn, London, Allen & Unwin, 1970
Radhakrishnan, S., Indian Philosophy, 2 vols, Vol. I, London, Allen & Unwin, 8th impression, 1966, pp. 643–669
Radhakrishnan, S. and Moore, C.A. (eds), A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957, contains extracts from Nagarjuna’s Mahayana Vimsaka and his Madhyamika Sastra (pp. 338–345)
Ramanan, K.V., Nagarjuna’s Philosophy, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1978
Smart, Ninian, Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy, London, Allen & Unwin, Muirhead Library of Philosophy, 1964 (discusses Nagarjuna’s dialectical critique of causation)
Tuck, Andrew P., Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991