Dr. Zubkov

Acarya Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE) was the founder of Madhyamaka (”middle way”), the philosophy of emptiness which became the key philosophy of the religion now known as Mahayana Buddhism. His influence on the future Buddhist schools of thought was so great that he was often called “Second Buddha”, even though he himself considered Gautama Buddha to be the true author of all his ideas.

The concept of emptiness, sunyata, does not mean nothingness, but rather that all things lack intrinsic reality, intrinsic objectivity, intrinsic identity or intrinsic referentiality. Lacking such static essence or substance does not make them not exist – it makes them thoroughly relative. According to Nagarjuna, all objects, rather than only the sentient beings (as was taught before him), are empty of their own independent nature. This is an application of the prime Buddhist concept of Interdependent Origination, pratityasamutpada, which says that any phenomenon exists only because of the existence of other phenomena in an incredibly complex web of cause and effect covering past, present and future with no ultimate first cause (later known as Indra’s Web). From this he also derived the ideas of relativity, saying that neither “short” nor “long” are concepts that exist on their own, but only in relation to the other, and thus they are “empty”.

Interestingly, Nagarjuna’s methods of reasoning remind me of Socrates. His magnum opus, madhyamakakarika, is a profound critique of reason, it demonstrates that clinging to views, including his own, taking a standpoint, however valid or true, is a fallacy, and the way in which his arguments lead to the bafflement of sunyata is similar in its consequences to the logical exhaustion of aporia. The goal of both Socrates and Nagarjuna was the perfection of wisdom by eliminating bias and beliefs, although the actual directions they took were different, owing to different societies in which they lived.

In the religious Buddhism, Nagarjuna is depicted as a bodhisattva with a snake or seven snakes above his head, based on one of the myths about his life, in one of which he travels to the land of nagas, teaches mahayana buddhism to Naga King Bodhisattva, and brings Prajnaparamita Sutra and the Wheel of Dharma back from the nagas, which they kept since the time of Lord Buddha.