Nāgārjuna’s “Middle Way”: A non-eliminative understanding of selflessness by Dan Arnold
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A non-eliminative understanding of selflessness
Dan Arnold
I. Introduction: On the difference it makes that Nāgārjuna starts with causation
The thought of the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna – about whom we
have little more non-hagiographic knowledge than that he probably flourished
in south India around 150 C.E. – has exercised generations of interpreters, both
within various streams of Buddhist tradition and among modern and contemporary scholars. Though generally expressed in stylistically lucid Sanskrit, his
ideas have proven so complex and elusive that it has been found possible to read him both as a paradigmatic exemplar of radical skepticism, and as advancing
fundamentally metaphysical claims of universal scope; as engaged in a Wittgensteinian
sort of philosophical “therapy,” and as advancing distinctively Buddhist
claims that have been readily incorporated into scholastic traditions of Buddhist
pedagogy; as a basically “mystical” sort of religious phenomenologist, and as a paraconsistent logician whose distinctive contributions can be expressed in terms of predicate calculus. That his works should thus admit of so many divergent
readings is surely evidence of the logically and epistemologically distinctive character of his thought, which has eluded defi nitive interpretation to at least the extent that typically characterizes the projects of thinkers of enduring philosophical significance.1
Typically of Indian traditions of philosophical thought, the self-styled Madhyamaka (“middle way”) school of Buddhist thought that stems from Nāgārjuna’s
writings chiefl y unfolds in the form of commentaries (and commentaries on commentaries…) on the texts traditionally attributed to Nāgārjuna. Chief among
1. Andrew Tuck has written a brief but illuminating study of some of the various ways that Nāgārjuna has been read by modern interpreters; see his Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: On the Western Interpretation of Nāgārjuna (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990). Along with a general overview of the Madhyamaka tradition of thought that stems from Nāgārjuna’s writings, I have provided what I think is a useful annotated bibliography on the subject in my article (“Madhyamaka”) for The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; see <http://www. iep.utm.edu/b/b-madhya.htm> for further references.