From: mcfarlan@corona.math.washington.edu (Thomas J. McFarlane)
Subject: The relevance of Madhyamika to the West (re: Attack on Nagarjuna)
Summary: A summary of and response to "A Wild Attack on Nagarjuna"
Keywords: Nagarjuna, Madhyamika, Sunyata, Emptiness, Philosophy
Organization: ----
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 19:26:18 GMT

Jochen Kleinschmidt writes:
   
>The basic question I raise is this: Is it beneficial or even necessary for 
>a practicing Buddhist to try to understand the doctrine of emptiness as 
>espoused by Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka school he founded?  Or is such an 
>effort an utter waste of time?
>
>Every Gelugpa commentator is adamant in saying that enlightenment is
>impossible unless emptiness has been correctly understood...
>
>First, to do this right, one ought to be an expert reader of sanskrit which
>I am not.  To make it even more difficult, the writings of Nagarjuna and
>Candrakirti are terse and cryptic, to say the least...Second, one ought to
>have a thorough understanding of the whole intellectual climate of
>Hindu/Buddhist India...
>
>No top flight Western philosopher has ever bothered to study Nagarjuna's 
>philosophy and try to relate it to contemporary Western thought...
>
>In my opinion, the basic premises from which Nagarjuna starts are false,
>and his logic is faulty...I also think that Nagarjuna's conclusions are
>precisely what any intelligent pragmatist and skeptic immediately would
>say anyway...
>
>Their approach was very sophisticated and right on track but their
>conceptualization was primitive and is outmoded now.  I think we can
>profitably study and perhaps retain the basic epistemological techniques
>used by these pioneers but we need to do the whole research project over
>again and describe our observations in a modern, scientific language that
>can mesh with parallel research going on in the cognitive and neurosciences.
>
>My conclusion...is that Nagarjuna et al. have little to offer to a practicing 
>Buddhist in the 20th century...You can be enlightened (and already are, 
>according to Dogen) without ever having heard of sunyata. 

Because Madhyamika has enriched my own life as well as a several others whom
I know, it does have something to offer the West, even if that means only
a few people.  And since I do not know Sanskrit or Tibetan, and do not have
an extensive knowledge of the history of ideas in India, I know that these
are not prerequisites for getting something valuable out of Madhyamika.

There are certainly people who have been enlightened who have nonetheless
never studied Nagarjuna.  Take the Buddha, for example.  Yet I'm sure that
the Buddha did understand everything that Nagarjuna was trying to say, even
though he never heard any of it.  The same goes for, say, Meister Eckart.
The point, I think, is that one must understand (i.e. have a direct non-
conceptual insight into) the truth that the concept of sunyata points to.
Such an understanding does not require knowledge of Sanskrit or the doctrine
of emptiness as expounded by Nagarjuna or anyone else.  But that is not to
say that such a knowledge would not help you to gain such an insight.

Regarding your criticism of Nagarjuna himself, you say above that he
starts from false premises and then uses faulty logic, but that his
conclusions are what any intelligent pragmaticist and skeptic would
say anyway.  Perhaps for someone in Nagarjuna's day, someone who knew
Sanskrit fluently and was steeped in the world view of the day, his
arguments would make perfect sense.  Through the distortions of language
and culture, it is very difficult for us to discern exactly what it all meant.
But since he apparently came to the right conclusions, as you say, perhaps
we should give him the benefit of the doubt.

I agree with you that the concepts used in Nagarjuna's tradition are not
very applicable to our culture.  This, in part, is surely one of the
reasons why no Western philosopher has tackled Nagarjuna.  What really
needs to be done, I think, is something very much like what you suggested,
namely, to express this insight in our own Western terms.  Since this 
truth is universal, I think we already have it appearing in different
guises throughout the history of cultures the world over.  I don't think
one needs to study Madhyamika at all to understand emptiness.  For example,
A 20th century American mystic-philosopher named Franklin Merrell-Wolff
wrote a book (_Pathways Through To Space_) in which he describes an
insight that cleared the way to enlightenment for him.  He had not, to
my knowledge, ever read Nagarjuna.  Yet it sounds very much like an
insight into emptiness.  Judge for yourself:

   A couple weeks prior to the 7th of last August [1936], the final
   correlation in the development of an idea broke through into my mind.
   This idea had such a clarifying effect, relative to the nature of the
   phenomenal world, that it was decisive in clearing up the remaining
   intellectual barriers to Recognition...
      Both in India and in the West, systematic philosophies exist wherein
   the ultimate Reality is posited as being pure Consciousness.  The
   apparently inert and lifeless matter comes to be viewed as merely a
   partially obscured Consciousness.  Thus, if we regard a portion of an
   originally homogeneous Consciousness as partly blanked-out or neutralized
   by its own other, the result is some degree of relative unconsciousness.
   This relative unconsciousness is the objective world...It may now be said
   that the universe is produced by a process which we may call a partial
   blinding, and that the reverse process, i.e., that of Awakening, destroys
   the universe...
      If, now, we substitute for the term 'relative unconsciousness'
   another term which is fundamentally equivalent, i.e., 'ponderable
   matter and form,' we may give the foregoing philosophy a transformation
   that fits more closely the terminology of modern science.  This leads
   to the judgement that ponderable matter and form constitute a state of
   relative vacuity or nothingness in the essential sense...
      From this it is not to be concluded that the universe is without
   value.  But it does imply that if a man misplaces his predication of
   'Reality,' he would then be caught in an illusion in the sense that
   produces bondage.  Nonetheless, it would still remain true that if he
   avoids this error he can, through the universe, find the Real...Thus,
   instead of regarding the sensuously apparent as being substantial,
   the standpoint should be reversed.  Then we would view the seeming
   emptiness of space, where there is a relative absence of physical matter,
   as being actually far more substantial than any ponderable matter...
      The end of the process is the arrival at a *seeming* nothingness,
   i.e., pure Consciousness-without-an-object.  This stage, plus the
   identification of one's Self with that *seeming* nothingness, produces
   at once the Recognition.  But at this moment the Nothingness becomes
   complete Fullness and absolute Substantiality...

                 -Franklin Merrell-Wolff
                  _Pathways Through To Space_
                  pp. 155-160

Sorry, no flames from me.
Regards,
Tom McFarlane



Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern