Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness

Journal Article

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

Nāgārjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the first century C.E., is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher. He is the founder of the Mādhyamika, or Middle Path, schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism. His considerable corpus includes texts addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and the set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises that represent the foundation of the highly skeptical and dialectical analytic philosophical school known as Mādhyamika. Most important of these is his largest and best-known text, the Mūlamādhyamikakārikā-in English, Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way. This text in turn inspires a huge commentarial literature in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Divergences in interpretation of the Mūlamādhyamikakārikā often determine the splits between major philosophical schools. So, for instance, the distinction between two of the three major Mahāyāna philosophical schools, Svātantrika-Mādhyamika and Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamika, reflect, inter alia, distinct readings of this text, itself taken as fundamental by scholars within each of these schools.

The treatise itself is composed in very terse, often cryptic verses, with much of the explicit argument suppressed, generating significant interpretative challenges. But the uniformity of the philosophical methodology and the clarity of the central philosophical vision expressed in the text together provide a considerable fulcrum for exegesis. The central topic of the text is emptiness-the Buddhist technical term for the lack of independent existence, inherent existence, or essence in things. Nāgārjuna relentlessly analyzes phenomena or processes that appear to exist independently and argues that they cannot so exist, and yet, though lacking the inherent existence imputed to them either by naive common sense or by sophisticated, realistic philosophical theory, these phenomena are not nonexistent-they are, he argues, conventionally real.

This dual thesis of the conventional reality of phenomena together with their lack of inherent existence depends upon the complex doctrine of the two truths or two realities-a conventional or nominal truth and an ultimate truth-and upon a subtle and surprising doctrine regarding their relation. It is, in fact, this sophisticated development of the doctrine of the two truths as a vehicle for understanding Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology that is Nāgārjuna's greatest philosophical contribution. (Garfield, introduction, 219)

Scholarship on

Prajñānāmamūlamadhyamakakārikā

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. (T. Dbu ma rtsa bai tshig le'u byas pa; C. Zhong lun; J. Chüron; K. Chung non 中論). In Sanskrit, "Root Verses on the Middle Way"; the magnum opus of the second-century Indian master Nāgārjuna ; also known as the Prajñānāmamūlamadhyamakakārikā and the Madhyamakaśāstra. (The Chinese analogue of this text is the Zhong lun, which renders the title as Madhyamakaśāstra. This Chinese version was edited and translated by Kumārajīva . Kumārajīva's edition, however, includes not only Nāgārjuna's verses but also Piṅgala's commentary to the verses.) The most widely cited and commented upon of Nāgārjuna's works in India, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, was the subject of detailed commentaries by such figures as Buddhapālita, Bhāvaviveka, and Candrakīrti (with Candrakīrti's critique of Bhāvaviveka's criticism of a passage in Buddhapālita's commentary providing the locus classicus for the later Tibetan division of Madhyamaka into *Svātantrika and *Prāsaṅgika). In East Asia, it was one of the three basic texts of the "Three Treatises" school (C. San lun zong), and was central to Tiantai philosophy. Although lost in the original Sanskrit as an independent work, the entire work is preserved within the Sanskrit text of Candrakīrti's commentary, the Prasannapadā (serving as one reason for the influence of Candrakīrti's commentary in the European reception of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā). The work is composed of 448 verses in twenty-seven chapters. The topics of the chapters (as provided by Candrakīrti) are the analysis of: (1) conditions (pratyaya), (2) motion, (3) the eye and the other sense faculties (indriya), (4) aggregates (skandha), (5) elements (dhātu), (6) passion and the passionate, (7) the conditioned (in the sense of production, abiding, disintegration), (8) action and agent, (9) prior existence, (10) fire and fuel, (11) the past and future limits of saṃsāra, (12) suffering, (13) the conditioned (saṃskāra), (14) contact (saṃsarga), (15) intrinsic nature (svabhāva), (16) bondage and liberation, (17) action and effect, (18) self, (19) time, (20) assemblage (sāmagrī), (21) arising and dissolving, (22) the tathāgata, (23) error, (24) the four noble truths, (25) nirvāṇa, (26), the twelve links of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), and (27) views. (Source: "Mūlamadhyamakakārikā." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 553. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)

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