The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika [Paperback]

Before you stare at a wall to practice suchness, you may want to spend some time acquainting yourself with this philosophical presentation that justifies your practice.

It will be no easy task. Both Nagarjuna's text and Garfield's commentary are challenging: I'm sure that would be true for the Western philosophers Garfield's commentary is targeted to and it certainly was for me as a lay person. But I persisted in what often seemed repetitious and tedious to find enough interspersed wisdom to make my patient reading worthwhile. This is not a book I could comfortably have browsed. Without Garfield's commentary, I might have quickly read over Nagarjuna's verses and believed I had understood much of it. Despite much that seemed cryptic, I'd have thought myself well educated in dependent origination, impermanence, emptiness, the self and other key Buddhist concepts. But, if I did that, I may have missed about 99% of what Garfield found therein.

A Sanskrit text by Nagarjuna translated into Tibetan and then into English by Garfield. A commentary informed by a tradition of Tibetan teachings. Understandings which may enrich one's meditation ... on emptiness. It is humbling to consider that Nagarjuna composed his verses in India about the 2nd century A.D. Such a thorough and penetrating analysis must have resulted from many challenges from others. That it holds up is something worth ... experiencing as one reads Nagarjuna and Garfield.

Nagarjuna's text is presented by itself, then again interspersed wihin Garfield's commentary. Garfield proceeds very precisely, keeping his interpretations closely tied to the verses at hand. Together they offer a tour de force in Buddhist philosophy. If you read this book and later hear someone say, as if it were a complete thought, that the self is an illusion, you should understand much better what the too often unstated context for such a statement is.

There are many valuable lessons: about the lack of inherent existence, interdependence, conventional and ultimate truth, dependent origination of all phenomena, the emptiness of even emptiness, even dependent origination as dependently originated, reification, of the self as a conventional designation. There are conclusions I found profound such as that "the conventional nature of conventional entities and their emptiness are one and the same". That "to say of a thing that is dependently arisen is to say that its identity as a single entity is nothing more than being the reference of a word", i.e. that its identity "depends upon verbal convention". Do I follow that? One problem may be that at the time I read such lines I may think I do but a short while later, I've lost it. This is not a book I would want to be tested on anytime soon after finishing it. I don't know when I will be ready for such a test. The answers may not be found through further study of the text and commentary but through meditation ... or perhaps some of both.

I recommend going back over after a first reading and making notes. Even then, it may take ... years ... lifetimes? ... for everything taught in here to sink in, but the intent is to enable you to internalize the teachings presented here through meditation so that it becomes more than philosophy but a way to live. A tall order but that is what Buddhist meditative practice, properly understand, seems to be.

I do feel I understand better from this reading, if only a little better, why meditation seems warranted. Being a less confused about that seems worthwhile.

The book's title begins with the word "Fundamental", and for Tibetan Buddhism or the related forms of buddhism such as Zen, it certainly is. The book was written by tibetan monk Nagarjuna over 1000 years ago on the buddhist idea of "emptiness" or emptiness of inherent existence, which reaches to the top and bottom of buddhist philosophy.

The book is split into 2 halves - the first is the translation in full, the second is the translation plus commentary by Garfield at the end of each chapter. Unless you have an IQ reaching into the upper reaches of the galaxy, then like me you will only be able to read this book via the commentary. It is an extremely difficult book and subject to get your head around (initially), but I really need to qualify that with a few things.

1. The main reason it is so difficult is the main reason for the book existing, or buddhism existing. The whole idea behind buddhism is that we are mistaken in our views of the world and reality, and all the training is to lead us to give up these mistaken views. Imagine trying to get a very stubborn and unreasonable person who believes their head has fallen off to see that it hasn't. The book contains the arguments that the head hasn't fallen off, which obviously is tough for the headless one to understand!

2. This book is dealing with the 3rd and final stage of mental training in buddhism, understanding reality, therefore it is not for novices, and you need to be concentrated and determined as well as have a good grounding in the general ideas of buddhism and meditation.

That is not to say it's not a good book, or that it's not worth the effort! It is one of my favourites, but I started off reading a page at a time and sometimes thinking for days over a paragraph and it's meaning before I could venture onwards.

Garfield's commentary is helpful (without it Nagarjuna's writings would be impenetrable), he has obviously worked hard to make the subject's writing lucid but made his own commentary more difficult by using
philisophical jargon and obscure (to me) words. Having to use an encyclopaedia to understand the commentary with an already difficult subject was irritating. This is where it loses a star.

In my view, Nagarjuna must have been an intellectual collossus. The arguments within the book are so deeply thought out, every twist and turn, argument and counter argument has been covered, that I really am simply amazed when I read it or even think about it. Think Einstein and beyond. Physicists would certainly do well to read the chapter on Motion (I studied physics at university so it was of much interest).

Overall, this is a book for study and thought, and is really only for more advanced practitioners but will bring rewards for anyone who puts in the effort.

This book is all about proving that things are just what they are, with no hidden or inherent existence behind them. They are parts in relation to other parts of the universe (dependent origination or paticca-samuppada) and posess no soul or inherent existence (anatta). Bikkhu Boddhi affirms that paticca-samuppada and anatta are precisely the two most important, mutually reinforcing tenets of Buddhism. They are linked in this text through the concept of sunyata or "emptiness" (of inherent existence).

The text is also concerned with the relation between the two levels of truth, "absolute reality", of which nothing can be said definitely, and "conventional reality", where objects exist merely as referents to words. Nagarjuna posits the emptiness of both conventional and ultimate reality. In the famous verse XXIV:18, the climax of the text, he asserts a close relationship of identity between dependent origination, emptiness, verbal convention, and the Middle Way itself. He asserts that the way to realize emptiness and nirvana is to see phenomena just as they are, and conventional reality as just merely conventional.

The main argument of Nagarjuna is that, if phenomena had inherent existence (eternal essences), they would not be able to function in our impermanent world of cause and effect and hence there would be no change in the world, and that a hyperreality would be necessary to accomodate these inherent phenomena.

Another way, in my mind, to prove the absurdity of things possessing souls or inherent essence is to look at the parts of compounded objects (that is, all objects). If people had souls, would their organs or cells have individual souls too ? Would animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses have souls too ? Would machines and their individual parts have souls ? Would works of art have souls ? Would earth and water and air and rock and fire have souls? Would molecules, atoms, quarks, or what may lie behind quarks have individual souls ? Would abstract ideas in all forms of human intellectual ideas have souls ? How about arbitrary sets of individual constituents, would they too have soul ? If human beings had souls, absolutely everything else that is worth individuating and describing would have souls too. And of course, ascribing to them a verbal description is a way of ascribing to them a "soul", but not the kind of impossible concept of soul that would exist as their metaphysical essence. It stands to reason that you can not distinguish all the minute constituents of compounded objects, nor all the possible combinations of them, therefore it would be impossible to account for all possible "souls" in the universe.

Nagarjuna uses mainly the technique of prasangika, which corresponds to the western notion of reductio ad absurdum, to destroy the views of two opponents, apparently situated in two opposed extremes of opinion, from within their own logic. The two opponents are a reificationist, who believes that phenomena have inherent essences, and a nihilist, who believes that nothing is ultimately real. He proves that these two opinions are one and the same thing.

Upon first reading, Nagarjuna's text will seem nihilistic, but it shouldn't be read in this way. A frequent problem I've encountered is in determining if he is quoting his opponents to make a reductio ad absurdum or if he is making positive assertions himself. Typically he will first do the reductio ad absurdum, detroying the opposing views from within, and then go on to make some positive assertions of his own. You'll have to rely on Garfield's commentary to know which is which.

Garfield's commentary is very useful to read the text. I can point out that he has a good command of the philosophical arguments involved, and he is willing to to explore, in the notes, different interpretations of the text, when they add to the discussion.

A problem in Garfield's text is using terms pertaining to the milieu of western philosophy, with which you'll have to acquaint yourself. Sometimes he also does not come up with real-world examples to illustrate the points being made, and some arguments are not very clear. I also think that he does not follow his own logic to the end. This is because in the beginning he makes a distinction of two terms used by Nagarjuna, "causes" and "conditions". He argues that causes are to be read as having an inherent essence being transmitted to their effects, while conditions are "empty". Later on in the text he does not distinguish between these two terms.

The Mulamadhyamakakarika is arguably the most important philosophical work made in the Buddhist cultural scene and Nagarjuna the most influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself. Indeed I think this book is the most important book of my little Buddhist library. This translation by Garfield is a very good exploration of Nagarjuna's original, and I feel tempted to buy other translations that he mentions, especially Kalupahana's.