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The Root Stanzas of the Middle Way: The Mulamadhyamakakarika
Book
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Description
This volume presents a new English translation of the founding text of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Mahayana Buddhism, Nagarjuna’s Root Stanzas of the Middle Way, and includes the Tibetan version of the text. The Root Stanzas holds an honored place in all branches of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as in the Buddhist traditions found in China, Japan, and Korea, because of the way it develops the seminal view of emptiness (shunyata), which is crucial to understanding Mahayana Buddhism and central to its practice. It is prized for its pithy and pointed arguments that show that things lack intrinsic being and thus are “empty” (shunya). They abide in the Middle Way, free from the extremes of permanence and annihilation.
Citation
Blankleder, Helena, and Wulstan Fletcher (Padmakara Translation Group), trans. The Root Stanzas of the Middle Way: The Mulamadhyamakakarika. By Nāgārjuna. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2016.
Publisher Link
Interconnections
1 Full translation of
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.)
