Tradition
Buddhist
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Reading group: Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika chapter 1 (on conditions)
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an examination of causal conditions (pratyaya). The first verse says that nothing arises from itself, from something else, from both, or without a cause. The chapter then examines the four types of condition recognised by the Abhidharma schools:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
My working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous Western one side by side, slowly, and see…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24
The Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates all lead back to the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, so I'd like to read three chapters of it together. Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), which has the verses…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
Reading group: Nāgārjuna’s Middle Verses, chapter 24, where emptiness is accused of nihilism
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…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Reading group: Gettier’s three pages, with Russell’s clock and Dharmottara’s mirage alongside
The thing I love most about Gettier's paper is that it works like a failing test case. One counterexample, cleanly stated, and a definition that looked settled stops compiling. It is also the shortest famous paper I know, so it is an…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies