Nagarjuna’s Folly

 

 

 

 

 Scholars generally agree that Nagarjuna lived round about the 2nd century AD. He was apparently a Brahmin turned Buddhist1 scholiast (i.e. an ivory tower academic) who operated within a fictional world2 of highly abstracted metaphors.3

 

He apparently believed that his task was clean up his perception of the philosophical mess produced by multiple Buddhist sects and by so doing revert Buddhism back to the pristine state in which the Shakyamuni had left it. And he did it a) by proving that nothing could be proven and b) by universalising the conventional.4

 

 

Indeed it was Nagarjuna’s attempt to universalise5 his metaphors regarding the transience and conditionality of ‘the arisen’ that eventually produced the false notion of the Middle Way6 (another dodgy metaphor) which eventually spawned the highly abstract philosophy of the Mahayana complete with such quaint notions as ‘The Universal Buddha’, ‘The Universal Buddha Body’ and so on.

 

 

 

Nagarjuna was, without doubt, a brilliant scholiast (or academic), like Thomas Aquinas. But he was a lousy Buddhist monk (7). Rather than go back to what he believed were the Tathagata’s basic insights about life, such as its impermanence, conditionality and the dukkha (but apparently not the sukkah, downplayed to almost invisibility) that results from attachment to the transient and conditional, what he should have done, had he had had aspirations of Buddhahood, was to do what the yet un-awakened Shakyamuni would have done,7 namely to have re-examined and reality tested those original insights, specifically with regard to the substrate (or ground) functions of the arising of dukkha in the everyday world.

 

 

Had he done that he might have realised that the Tathagata had got the arising of dukkha (initially from transience and conditionality, later from a host of other ‘poisons’) completely wrong.8

To be sure, he would then have lost his job (or his head) but he, as new Buddha, might have given the fundamental Buddha dharma a new and more user useful lease of life.

 

However, what Nagarjuna did do was to further abstract and then permutate a bunch of already highly abstract (universal) notions/metaphors into exceedingly clever but fundamentally vacuous (i.e. empty, meaning conventionally useless) expositions9 that served only to demonstrate his scholastic brilliance but to obscure the fact that the Tathagata’s early intuitions (actually woolly notions) about the arising of dukkha could not be hardened into fact with testable detail.

 

 

 

So it was that Nagarjuna, rather than progressing the Buddha dharma to greater clarity and transparency, thus greater effectiveness, he took it down a fascinating and intellectually stimulating side track. There is little doubt that had Nagarjuna been a mathematician he would have expressed his august views with equal persuasiveness in mathematical metaphors (meaning numbers) so that his notion of ‘Samsara = Nirvana’ would have been rendered as ‘1 = 0’ (whereby 0 serves as metaphor for the absence of a 1).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

©2018 by Victor Langheld, alias  Bodhangkur

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.     Anyone who has spent a lot of time in India knows that: ‘Once a Brahmin, always a Brahmin.’ In other words, it is highly likely that the Brahmin scholar Nagarjuna superimposed his early life Brahmin/Vedantic thought imprint template on his later academic interpretation of the Buddha dharma. By so doing he possibly corrupted his Buddhist interpretation towards the Vedanta template. That could have been one of the causes of the eventual demise of Buddhism in India.

Note his most infamous, at least for Buddhists, dictum: ‘Samsara is nirvana!’ Which also means: ‘The conventional is the ultimate!’, meaning that ‘nirvana is as common as samsara’, a fact easily verified by individuals with reasonable mindfulness. Which in Vedanta understanding means: ‘Thou art that’ (tattvamasi), or ‘1 = 0’.

 

2.     It was fictional both by Buddhist definition in that all appearances, being transient and conditional, had (apparently, i.e. not reality testable) no inherent (i.e. eternal) substance, i.e. fact/reality and by the fact that the notions and their linguistic expression used were metaphorical. Since Nagarjuna operated in a purely fictional world of universal abstracts, that is to say, in a sort of metaphor simulator operating in his brain, he was in fact an idiot savant playing a clever game.

 

3.     Metaphors (i.e. verbal icons used to describe notional icons in a user friendly way), practically undefinable, such as: substance, time, space, the eternal, inherent nature, samsara, nirvana, atta, dukkha, emptiness, realness (Sanskrit: sat), truth (Sanskrit: (sic) sat), jiva, karma, tathagata, Bodhi, Middle Way and so on.

 

4.     Samsara is nirvana!’ Since the Buddha himself could not explain in precise detail the sheer complexity of life he simplified his task by inventing the notion of the 2 Truths, namely conventional Truth and ultimate Truth, both the metaphors ‘ultimate’ and ‘truth’ remaining undefined, to wit: nirguna. His attempt to add detail to his intuition about the conditionality of life, namely the 12 stage dependent arising schedule is actually a naive joke. That Nagarjuna did not catch on, or chose not to show just how fixated or cowardly he was.

 

5.     Universalization is achieved be eliminating detail (Sanskrit: guna), hence the Ultimate is nirguna as described in the Brihadaranyakaupanishad. Detail determines (relative) position (position meaning: relative limitation). Position suffers diminishing returns resulting from transience and conditionality and so can be faulted. The Buddha said of himself: ‘I am fearless and I cannot be bested’ (i.e. faulted). Hence the more abstract (i.e. the less detail) the better.

 

6.     The Middle Way was defined as holding to ‘dependent origination’. In fact the Middle Way means sitting on the fence, to wit, not taking position, thus avoiding the distress of the transience and conditionality (hence faultiness, i.e. akusala) of position/dharma. And which is why the Buddha Seat is always empty.

 

7.     In other words to emulate the Buddha’s modus operandi, to wit, his means of discovery. Bikkhus seeking Buddhahood emulate the Tathagata’s modus operandi. Arahants merely perfect the Way pointed to by the (or a) previous Buddha.

 

8.     Had Nagarjuna taken a closer, more detailed look at how, when and why dukkha (and which metaphor neither he nor the Buddha defined in systems self-regulation terms) arises in the everyday world rather than how its arising is described superficially in scripture, he might have realised that in biological systems dukkha arises, i.e. activates as warning signal about bio-system’s dysfunction or failure. In short, ‘(relative) Losers suffer, (relative) winners are delirious!’

 

9.     Which was a great starting point for hordes of later scholiasts, like Asanga, Vasubandhi, Candrakirti, Santaraksita, to spin out his notions to absurd complexity and incomprehensibility and eventually bring about the intellectual collapse of Mahayana, as can be witnessed in the Heart Sutra.

 

See: Bio-Nav