THE FUNDAMENTAL WISDOM OF THE MIDDLE WAY - NĀGĀRJUNA (TRANS, with commentary by JAY L. GARFIELD)

This one took me over a month to read. I finished quite a few of the other books on this list before finally completing this one. Mostly because the content is so heady. This book is a translation of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, a text by the sage Nagarjuna, written around 150AD. It’s a foundational text for Mahāyāna Buddhism and it exists as a series of verses broken into 27 chapters, which seek to argue the ultimately emptiness of all things. This is actually a good example of the shortcoming of the Kindle, since the book presents the entire text of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and then follows with a chapter by chapter commentary by Garfield. It would have been better to read one chapter of the main text, then the commentary right after before moving on to the next chapter. But either way, I did really enjoy this and it did stretch my brain. As I understood it, Nararjuna is arguing that emptiness doesn’t mean that something isn’t real and/or doesn’t exist, he’s saying that it has no intrinsic reality, or essence, that it’s not separable from the phenomena of existence as a whole. He often stresses not to fall into the trap of reification, ie things are real and have an essence, nor into nihilism, that nothing is real, which seems contradictory but between these two ideas is the Middle Way he’s emphasizing in the title. This reaches its furthest out implication when Narajuna describes Nirvana itself as “empty” in this sense. As Garfield says in his commentary, “Just as there is no difference in entity between the conventional and the ultimate, there is no difference between nirvana and samsara, nirvana is simply samsara seen without reification, without attachment, without delusion…Nagarjuna is emphasizing that nirvana is not someplace else. It is a way of being here.” Lots of the verses are, as you might imagine, enigmatic and paradoxical, with lots of emphasis on Indian logical forms like the tetralemma. Garfield does an amazing job clarifying and commenting on the text. He gives both his opinion and shares the opinions of others, and since there is almost 2000 years of commentary, there’s lots of dissenting opinions as to what Naragarjuna means. He’s also good at connecting the text to Western philosophical ideas, especially those of Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein, which helps to dissolve some of the Western chauvinism inherent in “philosophy” as an academic discipline. While I certainly wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist, the idea of thinking of the world as empty, and not divisible into discrete parts with their own essences is comforting and does ring true to me. Got to make sure I keep up on religious texts as well, I think the Nag Hammadi library is next. 27 empty phenomena