From: KLEINSCHMIDT@MCCLB0.MED.NYU.EDU
Subject: Wild attack on Nagarjuna
Organization: ----
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 17:52:49 GMT

I'm sending this article off with a sense of urgency and disgust, and some 
of the points in it are only half-baked.  It may touch off a flame war; 
some of you may accuse me of boorishness or an abhorrent degree of 
ignorance.  So be it.  I stand ready to be yelled at and corrected.  Maybe 
I'll learn something new (I hope!) and revise my view.  But to make this 
fun, I have decided to be deliberately provocative and polemical.  I could 
have spent another week thinking this through more carefully and backing up 
my points more convincingly.  Unfortunately, I don't have the time for 
that.  I'm not a Tibetan monk who has got nothing else to do but sit on his 
butt all day and split his brain trying to absorb and subsequently 
regurgitate scholastic dialectics of the Madhyamaka variety.  I'm working 
in a competitive field totally unrelated to Buddhism, and I shouldn't even 
be sitting in front of a computer arguing about an esoteric and largely 
irrelevant subject like Madhyamaka.  So keep in mind that what follows is 
an impressionistic, knee jerk reflex attack, born from a sense of 
exasperation.

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?

Tibetan Buddhists say yes to the first question, although they may be the 
only ones who say so.  For example, the Heart Sutra (... form is emptiness, 
emptiness is form ...) is a key scripture in much of East Asian Buddhism, 
and its central theme is the doctrine of emptiness but most everybody who 
reads or chants it probably takes it as gibberish, nothing that needs to be 
understood.  All schools of Tibetan Buddhism, however, and especially so 
the Gelugpa, consider Madhyamaka to be an essential subject of study.  
According to Tsongkhapa, the three pillars of Buddhist practice are: 1. 
renunciation (of all involvement with samsara), 2. arousing of bodhicitta 
(the intense desire to reach enlightenment solely for the sake of the 
welfare of all beings), and 3. correct understanding of emptiness.  Every 
Gelugpa commentator is adamant in saying that enlightenment is impossible 
unless emptiness has been correctly understood.

To me, it is debatable how many Tibetan monks over the centuries have 
understood emptiness "correctly", as opposed to lulling themselves into 
believing they have, or not giving a damn but still parroting the official 
line.  This applies even to the great Tsongkhapa who in his later life 
still wasn't quite sure whether he indeed understood emptiness.  After 
having written scores of supposedly authoritative treatises on the subject 
(his total output was collected into some 18 volumes), he found it 
necessary to take a break from building monasteries and instructing 
hundreds of monks and go on an extended retreat to check out the depth of 
his understanding, with unknown results.  It also applies to the respected 
20th century Gelugpa meditation master Geshe Rabten who had the same doubts 
and in mid-life did the same thing as Tsongkhapa, with equally equivocal 
results (see his "Song of the Profound View").  So if these folks want to 
make us believe that enlightenment is impossible without truly 
understanding the doctrine of emptiness (Tsongkhapa's and Rabten's 
uncertainties notwithstanding), and if we believe them, then we don't have 
any other choice but to bite the bullet and tackle this esoteric subject, 
right?

Consequently, I have dabbled, off and on, in this refractory subject.  And 
I can only dabble because of the following considerations.  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, and even expert sanskrit readers, 
I understand, are baffled by the tough linguistic problems posed by these 
authors.  I have spent hours trying to put together an English translation 
of just a few verses of Nagarjuna's karikas or of a couple of paragraphs of 
Candrakirti's "Clear Words" (what a joke, it should be called "Obfuscating 
Ruminations"), using multiple existing translations.  The differences 
between these translations (and the philosophical biases of the 
translators) are so pronounced that you sometimes hardly recognize you're 
dealing with the same verse or section of text.

Second, one ought to have a thorough understanding of the whole 
intellectual climate of Hindu/Buddhist India over the period of roughly 100 
B.C.E. (early prajnaparamita literature) to 700 C.E. (Prasangika Madhyamaka 
reaching its mature formulation with Candrakirti).  That's a tall order.  
Nagarjuna merely reacted to the schools of metaphysical thought existing at 
his time and tried to reduce them to adsurdities.  Although he should 
perhaps be applauded for it, personally I think his enterprise was equally 
absurd and superfluous.  It certainly seems absurd for us today to try to 
understand these ancient scholastic squabbles, except for purely academic 
interest, or to listen to those who tell us that these things are 
important.

No top flight Western philosopher has ever bothered to study Nagarjuna's 
philosophy and try to relate it to contemporary Western thought.  The only 
semblance of such an effort can be found in the Japanese Kyoto School 
(Kitaro Nishida and his descendants) several of whose members studied in 
Germany and tried to relate Buddhist philosophy to German idealist 
philosophy (Kant, Hegel etc.).  More recent descendants of this school, 
e.g. Keiji Nishitani and Masao Abe, have been trying to find parallels 
between the emptiness-inspired thought of their Kyoto School and more 
recent Western philosophers (Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger).  But as I 
said, no heavyweight Western philosopher has tackled Nagarjuna; perhaps 
none of them thinks it's worth it.  Among buddhologists, historians of 
Indian culture, translators, etc., I have not found anybody who has 
produced a digestable, incisive analysis and critique of Nagarjuna and the 
Madhyamaka body of thought, plus a defense or refutation of its relevance 
for us as Buddhist practitioners today.  As Richard Hayes observed here 
recently, Nagarjuna comes across as something of a misty oracle, open to a 
multiplicity of interpretations.

Given these serious handicaps and the difficulty of coming to grips with 
this elusive subject, I can only deliver my rough impressions and guts 
level reactions to it.  In my opinion, the basic premises from which 
Nagarjuna starts are false, and his logic is faulty.  I find it absurd to 
apply _any_ kind of verbally based or symbolic logic to such subtle matters 
of nonverbal experience as the experience of emptiness and the whole set of 
contiguous meditative experiences.  These things are not bricks or apples 
or any other well defined logical entity, they are intangible and beyond 
the grasp of ordinary conceptual analysis (for example, anybody please 
define and logically manipulate "pure awareness" for me; I know exactly 
what I mean by that but I believe I would sound like a lunatic if I were to 
try to explain it to you).  I also think that Nagarjuna's conclusions are 
precisely what any intelligent pragmatist and skeptic immediately would say 
anyway, i.e. that hair-splitting scholastic and metaphysical speculation on 
these matters is inappropriate and should be avoided.  As Wittgenstein said 
in the final (or first?) sentence of his tractatus logicophilosophicus: 
about some things one simply has to be silent (or something to that 
effect).  Just keep your mouth and conceptual apparatus shut on these 
matters, as Zen Buddhists generally do.

To amplify briefly on these points:

I think the way in which the Buddhist abhidharma scholastics divided the 
universe into dharmas (elements of existence) and then invested them with 
svabhava (self-nature or independent existence) is absurd and a rather 
primitive way of thinking.  I just don't buy this simplistic way of slicing 
up the universe.  The ancient Greeks proposed something similar for the 
_physical_ universe, i.e. that it consists of indivisible units called 
atoms, and, as everybody knows, they got this partially right.  But the 
Buddhist division of the entire universe, i.e. the whole of existence 
including the non-physical universe of the inner experience of sentient 
beings, into things called dharmas is rubbish, in my opinion.  I disagree 
with practically every major notion of the Buddhist abhidharma: the notion 
of dharmas, the possession by entities of the elements of earth, air, fire, 
and water, the skandhas, the details of pratityasamutpada, etc., etc.  
  
What I find interesting, and greatly respect, in the abhidharma Buddhist 
analysis, is the _basic approach_ to investigating mental states, including 
refined meditative states not experienced by the ordinary person who is 
mired in samsara, _not_ the concepts and language in which the old Buddhist 
explorers described their results.  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.

Nagarjuna didn't like the idea of svabhava in the dharmas but he accepted 
the basic idea of dharmas, it seems to me, an idea that I find absurd.  He 
then tried to refute the svabhava in the dharmas and replace it with 
sunyata.  To me, the logic the madhyamikas used for this is questionable; 
it strikes me as inept and childish, especially in the hands of his 
commentator Candrakirti.  I could give many examples for this but most of 
you who read this must have gotten exasperated by this yourself.  This 
logic doesn't resemble any traditional logic, and their argument is full of 
fallacies.

To recapitulate my first crack at criticizing Nagarjuna: 1. Nagarjuna at 
first seems to accept the practice common among abhidharma Buddhists of his 
time of creating abstract concepts and categories about experiences and 
things about which nothing concrete can in fact be said; he also accepts 
the silly idea of dharmas as the logical atoms of the universe, 2. he then 
uses fallacious logic and childish similes to demonstrate what he thinks 
are fatal contradictions in this body of ideas, 3. since much of his 
(flawed) logic leads to implausibilities, he considers this to be 
equivalent to a refutation, i.e. he concludes that many of these ideas are 
not true, most importantly the notion that entities are empty of 
self-nature.  What an exercise!  First, you accept your opponent's false 
premises, then through the use of whacky logic and unconvincing examples 
you try to show (possibly spurious) inconsistencies in your opponent's 
view, thereby supposedly refuting them, and finally you conclude that some 
subtle aspect in one of their basic premises (i.e. svabhava) is false, not 
realizing that the whole premise stinks.

But Nagarjuna doesn't end there; now comes the killer.  Not content leaving 
things at that, he now reifies this absence of svabhava (the dharmas now 
are empty = sunya) and invents emptyNESS (sunyata)!  If svabhava can be 
thought of as some sort of essence (using medieval Western philosophical 
language) that dharmas possess, after having emptied them (cheers for 
that!), he now fills them up with emptiness!  From then on, in Buddhist 
philosophical discourse, the word emptiNESS is repeated a million times and 
explicated in countless more million words.  Emptiness now seems to have 
become something akin to an essence again, i.e. a solid property that all 
dharmas possess!

I'm not even halfway through with what I wanted to say, and I have already 
wasted several hours on this silly subject.  I haven't pointed out some of 
the positive aspects of Nagarjuna's analysis, i.e. some ideas of his that I 
consider valid and that electrified me (e.g. how he manages to distill out 
so clearly the insubstantiality of events in consciousness = dharmas? :-), 
this would include such objects of conscouisness as love, democracy, 
fatherland etc., describing how they arise and disappear continually and by 
themselves are nothing, only existing as transient elements by virtue of 
being members in the cycle of pratityasamutpada, the interrelated chain of 
conditioned comings and goings).  Through my reading of Nagarjuna, I did 
indeed derive somewhat clearer insight (or illusion thereof) into this 
basic Buddhist notion.

What bothers me is that I feel that Nagarjuna's main point was very simple, 
i.e. an uncompromising antimetaphysical attitude, something similar to the 
Buddha's habit of keeping silent whenever he was asked unpractical, 
metaphysical questions, or to Vimalakirti's "thunderous silence" in a 
similar situation.  But somehow Nagarjuna and/or his interpreters botched 
the job, and one of the consequences is that Tibetan lamas, Gelugpas 
certainly, spend at least two years studying Madhyamaka philosophy (along 
the way learning about a dozen different flavors of emptiness, as well as 
the emptiness of emptiness), and tell their students, including those in 
the West, that the understanding of emptiness is an essential prerequisite 
for enlightenment, thereby giving everyone a big headache.  The purpose of 
this exercise in futility seems to be that at the end of it you can say to 
yourself that you learned that you shouldn't have been doing this. 

My conclusion which I have only intimated but by no means proven (can it be 
proven?) is that Nagarjuna et al. have little to offer to a practicing 
Buddhist in the 20th century.  Most of the issues the madhyamikas deal with 
are pseudo-issues that arose from false assumptions.  Don't get sucked in 
by this Madhyamaka fraud!  You can be enlightened (and already are, 
according to Dogen) without ever having heard of sunyata. 

I'm rushing this out even though it's rather uncooked and incomplete, 
principally because I would appreciate some feedback before Aug. 1.  I'm 
going away for the first two weeks of August, and although during that time 
I can login remotely to my host here, posting and editing etc. is much 
clumsier from the other location.

I may be badly mistaken in my arguments, after all I've barely put my mind 
to it, but then please tell me so.  I consider this subject important, and 
I want to gain some certainty about it, once and for all.  My silent hope 
is to find somebody who can give me an incisive, clear and definitive 
discourse on this subject, in particular on the question of what, if 
anything, in Madhyamaka thought may still be important and pertinent for us 
today.  One must admit that Nagarjuna did make some good points.  If you 
know of any exceptionally clear reading (less than 200 pages, please!) that 
fits this description, by all means tell me.  Thanks.

There may be more to come.

Jochen Kleinschmidt

P.S. Funny, now that I'm reading over what I've written, my aversion 
towards Nagarjuna is much weaker than it was at the outset (what do you 
expect, you dummy, from ever-arising/ever-vanishing dharmas!).  I see a new 
angle on this concept of emptiness now, a rather liberating angle.  Maybe 
Buddhism works, after all!

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