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Reading group: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Verses, chapter 24, where emptiness is accused of nihilism

Kenneth Lam Chi-ho Fellow
· 5 replies
Existence & beingBuddhistMadhyamakaNagarjuna#mulamadhyamakakarika#reading-group#sunyata#two-truths
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If you want to know what Nāgārjuna means by emptiness, the best place to look is the chapter where he is accused of destroying everything. Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an opponent's objection: if all things are empty, nothing arises or ceases, so the Four Noble Truths are impossible, and with them practice, its fruits, the Sangha, the Dharma and the Buddha. Nāgārjuna's answer turns the objection around completely.

I propose three weeks on this one chapter, about forty verses, with chapter 13, verse 8 as a coda.

Translations. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), translated from the Tibetan with a philosophical commentary. Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura, Nāgārjuna's Middle Way (2013), from the Sanskrit, with notes drawn from the classical commentaries. Where they differ, the difference is usually worth a post.

  • Week 1. Verses 1–6: the objection. State it in its strongest form.
  • Week 2. Verses 7–19: the reply, the two truths, and verse 18, which identifies emptiness with dependent origination.
  • Week 3. Verses 20–40: the counter-attack, that it is the non-emptiness of things that would make change, practice and liberation impossible. Then 13.8.

One question for the whole group: whenever the word "empty" appears, ask empty of what? If we can always answer, we are reading the doctrine; if not, we are reading a slogan.

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5 replies

  1. Nima Tsering Gurung

    Fellow

    Week 1. The objection is much stronger than I expected, and I am glad Nāgārjuna gives it so much room. It is not a cheap misunderstanding. If "empty" meant "non-existent", the opponent would be completely right: no suffering, no path, no Buddha. The monk who gave me my commentary in Manang said the chapter is a gift to beginners, because it states the beginner's fear out loud before answering it.

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  2. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    Week 2, on verse 18 in Sanskrit. It identifies dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) with emptiness (śūnyatā), calls that a dependent designation (prajñaptir upādāya), and says this is the middle way (madhyamā pratipat). So emptiness is not a further fact behind dependent origination; it is dependent origination described from the side of what things lack, namely existence by their own nature. Verse 19 draws the conclusion: since nothing is not dependently arisen, nothing is not empty. Verse 10 is the other key: without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be taught.

  3. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    Week 2, from the Theravāda side, with some sympathy for the opponent. Our Abhidhamma commentaries describe the basic factors of experience, the dhammas, as bearing their own nature, sabhāva. Part of Nāgārjuna's target is a strong reading of that idea in some Abhidharma schools, where it becomes independent existence. Many in my tradition would say sabhāva only meant a factor's distinctive characteristic, not existence apart from conditions. If so, the disagreement is narrower than the chapter's rhetoric suggests, though still real.

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  4. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    Week 3. I confess an Advaitin's guilt. Our tradition has often dismissed the Mādhyamika as a "nihilist", and Śaṅkara treats that view very briefly in his commentary on the Brahmasūtra. Reading the counter-attack here, I can't sustain that charge. Nāgārjuna argues that things with fixed intrinsic natures could never change, so suffering could never end and no path could lead anywhere. That is the reverse of nihilism. Whatever the right debate between Vedānta and Madhyamaka is, it is not that one.

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  5. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    Coda, 13.8: the victorious ones taught emptiness as the relinquishing of all views, and those for whom emptiness is itself a view are called incurable. After chapter 24 this reads differently. Emptiness is not the final view that replaces the others; it is what lets us stop clinging to views at all, including itself. The "empty of what?" test held up for three weeks.

    Helpful · 3