Sadao Intranet

The Indian philosopher Acharya Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE) was the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Path) school of Mahayana Buddhism and arguably the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself. Indeed, in the Tibetan and East Asian traditions, Nagarjuna is often referred to as the 'second Buddha.' His primary contribution to Buddhist thought lies is in the further development of the concept of sunyata or 'emptiness.' For Nagarjuna, all phenomena are without any svabhaba, literally 'own-nature' or 'self-nature', and thus without any underlying essence. In this book, Jan Westerhoff offers a systematic account of Nagarjuna's philosophical position. He reads Nagarjuna in his own philosophical context, but he does not hesitate to show that the issues of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy have at least family resemblances to issues in European philosophy.

"After the Thora, the Koran and the Gospels the Indian literature on ‘The Perfection of Wisdom’ has had the greatest impact on the religious consciousness of mankind. Its composition extended for over seven hundred years, and here we offer the reader the first two works which were composed in South India between 100 B.C. And A.D. 100." (from the back cover).

The Reason Sixty is the most concise philosophical work by the second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. This translation was prepared on the basis of a careful reading of both the Sanskrit original and its Tibetan translation and by consulting Candrakirti’s commentary (Tengyur, Dergé, dbu ma Ya, p.1a – 30b) as well as Je Tsongkhapa’s Notes on the “Sixty Stanzas of Reasoning” (rigs pa drug cu pa’i zin bris, The Collectected Works of Je Tsongkhapa, vol.ba).

This is a completely new translation of Nagarjuna`s major work the Mulamadhyamakakarika, accompanied by a detailed annotation of each of the verses. The annotation identifies the metaphysical theories of the scholastics criticized by Nagarjuna, and traces the source material and the arguments utilized in his refutation back to the early discourses of the Buddha. The book shows that Nagarjuna`s ideas are neither original nor are they an advancement from the early Buddhist period. Nagarjuna is not a Mahayanist.

The Buddhist saint Nagarjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the second century CE, is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mahayana Buddhist philosopher. His many works include texts addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and a set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises. His greatest philosophical work, the Mulamadhyamikakarika—read and studied by philosophers in all major Buddhist schools of Tibet, China, Japan, and Korea—is one of the most influential works in the history of Indian philosophy.