Maybe Nagarjuna is not a nihilist

It is not difficult to read Nagarjuna’s Shunyavada (Madhyamaka) and safely come away with a nihilist interpretation of it.  Buddhist scholars in the past like E. Burnouf, H. Jacobi, A.B. Keith and L. de La Vallée Poussin argued that Nagarjuna’s Shunyavada was nihilism.  In other words, nothing really exists the way we believe it does and therefore nothing is really knowable.  

On the other hand, there is a non-nihilist interpretation of Shunyavada.  T.R.V. Murti argues in his book, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, that Shunyavada is only denying doctrines about the real, not the real itself which is transcendent to thought.  This makes Shunyavada "a very consistent form of absolutism". 

Another interpretation, which I think is significant and a better reading of Nagarjuna’s Mula-madhyamaka-karikas, comes from discovering astonishing parallels between the Greek Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus and Shunyavada.  The correspondence between the two schools in gone over in Thomas McEvilley’s book, The Shape of Ancient Thought.  With the Skeptics and the Shunyavadins, according to McEvilley, there is “an insistent tendency to breach the Law of the Excluded Middle” (p. 470).  McEvilley states that Madhyamaka “is expressly devoted to the controversion of that principle of thought [Law of the Excluded Middle], to the farming, as it were, of the land in the excluded-middle zone” which also Sextus’s Pyrrhonism “finds its most comfortable location in the same place” (p. 455).

In this regard, Shunyavada can be read as Buddhist Pyrrhonism which, like the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, even destroys itself.  After all Nagarjuna said in the Lokâtîtastava: "The ambrosial teaching of emptiness aims at abolishing all conceptions.  But if someone believes in shunyata You [have declared] he is lost." This may help pave the way for the realization of the transcendent (this brings us back to Murti’s absolutism).  Still, this is not positive proof that Nagarjuna, with his Pyrrhonism, was clearing the way for positive transcendence.  But it doesn’t rule it out especially in other works attributed to Nagarjuna which are not in the same genre as his popular Mula-madhyamaka-karikas.  Still there is a danger with such vagueness.  Does Shunyavada really lead us to nihilism which makes it a philosophy of absolute nothingness or voidness?  For those who are materialists, reading Nagarjuna as a nihilist is certainly easy. 

Comments

[Deathless]

I haven't been around as long as the zennist, but I've been into this stuff for awhile (15 years). I've seen it happen with multiple Buddhist teachers, zen and non-zen. It used to bother me a lot. Now I just assume that all so-called dharma teachers are up to sexual shenanigans. They're NOT special superior people, although there is often pressure from institutions and students to portray themselves as such. It's a scandalous world. Just don't put people on a pedestal.

[The Zennist]

Eidolon:

My friend would sit on Sasaki's lap every time she went into his room to try an answer her koan. He was like an old sweet Teddy bear. They were both consenting adults and that is as far as it went. No harm done to anyone. As for the other allegations, I make no judgements. I have to keep in mind that Sasaki took zero in the way of typical monk's vows.

Edict number 133 issued by the Meiji government in 1872 decreed that all Buddhist monks in Japan should be free to “eat meat, take wives, and shave their heads” as they chose. As early has the Heian period (794–1185) examples are found of Buddhist monks marrying. In fact, there has been hardly a period in Japanese history where Buddhist monks did not marry.

[Eidolon]

Let's be clear, "having sex like any Christian minister" is not the same thing as serially sexually assaulting your students. Sasaki is 105 and this will likely have no real impact on him. Eido Roshi, on the other hand, just sued his sangha in NYC for 2 million dollars for "firing" him two years ago, for doing exactly the same thing. This will be in the news for some time to come, as that lawsuit is worked out. Some of Sasaki's female students may well sue his followers for hushing his behavior up, too. Obviously this has nothing whatever to do with Nagarjuna.

[The Zennist]

Jure K.

Most of what the say about the Roshi is probably true. I know of one incident. But Japanese teachers don't take the vows of a monk. So they are just like normal dudes. They can drink and have sex like any Christian minister.

[Jure K.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/asia/zen-buddhists-roiled-by-accusations-against-teacher.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0