Rev. Danny Fisher

Today’s quote comes from Acharya Nagarjuna, the second-third century Indian Buddhist pundit credited with founding the founded the Madhyamaka tradition of Mahayana Buddhism.

Born to a South Indian brahmin family, it was predicted that he would live only a week.  A soothsayer informed the family, however, that if they made offerings, the boy would live to be seven years old.  At age seven, he was sent to Nalanda University for his protection.  There, he met his main teachers Saraha and Ratnamati.

Eventally, Nagarjuna became the abbot of Nalanda. As scholar Alexander Berzin writes in his biography of Nagarjuna:  “There, he expelled eight thousand monks who were not keeping the vinaya monastic rules of discipline properly. He also defeated five hundred non-Buddhists in debate.”

At the invitation of two nagas (sea-serpent deities), Nagarjuna visited the naga realm to give teachings.  While there, he asked to see the hitherto unseen text The Hundred Thousand Verse Prajnaparamita Sutra, which he later taught back in the human realm.  Berzin again:  “Once, when Nagarjuna was teaching Prajnaparamita, six nagas came and formed an umbrella over his head to protect him from the sun. Because of this, the iconographic representation of Nagarjuna has the six nagas over his head. From this event, he got the name Naga. And from the fact that his skill in teaching Dharma went straight to the point, like the arrows of the famous archer Arjuna (the name of the hero in the Hindu classic, Bhagavad Gita), he got the name Arjuna. Thus, he became called ‘Nagarjuna.’”

Nagarjuna lived out his last year in a South Indian kingdom around present-day Nagarjunakonda, at the holy mountain of Shri Parvata.

Among Nagarjuna’s many texts include A Precious Garland, Refutation of Objections, Seventy Verses on Voidness, Sutra Called “Finely Woven”, Sixty Verses of Reasoning, Praise to the Sphere of Reality, Praise to the Deepest Truth, Praise to the Supramundane (Buddha), A Commentary on (the Two) Bodhichittas, Anthology of Sutras, Letter to a Friend, Abbreviated Means for Actualization, Method for Meditating on the Generation Stage of the Mahayoga Tantra Guhyasamaja Mixed with Its Textual (Sources), and The Five Stage (Complete Stage).

His most famous and influential work, however, would have to be the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā–the basis for the whole Madhyamaka system.  Scholar Jay Garfield, who has offered perhaps the best English translation of the text in his The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:  Nagarjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, describes the content of the text thus:

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. Nagarjuna 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 Nagarjuna’s greatest philosophical contribution. If the analysis in terms of emptiness is the substantial heart of Mulamadhyamikakarika, the method of reductio ad absurdum is the methodological core. Nagarjuna, like Western skeptics, systematically eschews the defense of positive metaphysical doctrines regarding the nature of things, demonstrating rather that any such positive thesis is incoherent, and that in the end our conventions and our conceptual framework can never be justified by demonstrating their correspondence to an independent reality. Rather, he suggests, what counts as real depends precisely upon our conventions.

Here’s the quote–from Stephen Batchelor’s translation of Nagarjuna’s work for his book Verses from the Center:  A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime:

Blocked by confusion
I survive by forging a destiny
Through impulsive acts.

Self-consciously
I enter situations
Where personality unfolds
And world impacts
On my sensitive soul.

Personality creates
Self-consciousness
Just as attention,
The eye and a colourful shape
Trigger vision.

Impact is the meeting
Of self-consciousness
Senses and world.
It leads to experience
I crave to have and avoid.
Craving makes me cling
To sensuality, opinions
Rules and selves.

Clinging is to insist
On being someone;
Not to cling
Is to be free to be no one.

To be someone is to be
Self-conscious, impulsive,
Thinking, feeling body,
Which is born, ages, dies,
Suffers torment, grief, pain,
Depression, anxiety.

Anguish emerges
When someone is born.

Impulsive acts
Are the root of life.
Fools are impulsive
But the wise see things as they are.
When confusion stops
Through practising insight
Impulsive acts will cease.

By stopping this
That won’t happen.
Anguish will end.