Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy

Abstract

Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 ce) is the founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers following the Buddha himself. Throughout his works, Nāgārjuna repeatedly calls for the complete abandonment of all views. But how could anyone possibly abandon all views? And how could a philosopher of Nāgārjuna’s stature resort to using so self-contradictory a form of argumentation as the tetralemma, which openly negates a position, its contrary, both, and neither? Many scholars have attempted to parameterize Nāgārjuna’s paradoxes in an apologetic effort to justify him to mainstream Western philosophers as being irreproachably logical. This book, however, shows not only how Nāgārjuna’s truly radical teaching of no-view or “abelief” makes perfect sense within his Buddhist philosophy but also how it stands at the summit of his religious mission to care for all living beings. Rather than treating any one aspect of Nāgārjuna’s ideas in isolation, here his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics emerge as forging a single coherent and convincing philosophical-religious system of thought and practice. Overall, this book takes a comprehensive approach to Nāgārjuna’s thought in its Buddhist context, integrating his views on views, belief, and conceptualization; language, mind, and intention; action, attachment, and selfhood; suffering, violence, and peace; and emptiness, nirvāṇa, and Buddhahood. By drawing on Buddhist sources in a way that resolutely strives to move beyond the Christianocentrism and Occidentocentrism still so dominant in scholarship today, this work challenges the very ways in which we think about religion and philosophy.