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It is said that the Buddha prophesied that someone would come after him who would clear up any confusion regarding Buddha-dharma. Nagarjuna is considered to be that person. Often called The Second Buddha, Arya [noble] Nagarjuna (2nd century CE) was from a wealthy South Indian Brahmin family. He is considered a terton (hidden-text revealer) as well as a philosopher.
Nagarjuna is sometimes called the First of “The Six Scholarly Ornaments,” a group that also includes Aryadeva, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Dignaga, and Dharmakirti.
Two groups of texts are attributed to him. The Collections of Reasonings gives the Buddha’s intentions in Turning the Wheel of Dharma for a Second Time. The Collection of Praises concerns the Third Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso explains that in it we come to understand via meditation that the dharmadhatu and our own Buddha potential are the same.
Elegant Sayings of Nagarjuna, w. comments by the Sakya Pandita.
The Legend of His Name
While he was seated by a lake one day, a naga came from the depths and invited him to Potala to teach the serpentine water spirits. As a parting gift, they presented him with the 12 volumes known as the Prajnaparamita Sutra. (This teaching had been entrusted to them by Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin.)
He is best known for his explanation of the term shunyata (Emptiness, or Open-ness) that is developed in that treatise. The volumes are kept today still, in a temple dedicated to him in Kathmandu.
In those days, there was a terrible famine in the land that grievously affected the monks, for they were supported only by the surrounding community’s generosity. Nagarjuna is said to have gone to a distant planet and returned with a Philosopher’s Stone that could turn base metals into gold. With the profit he earned from that enterprise he supported the monastery for six years, but when the monks learned that he had broken a major precept by handling gold, they expelled him.
When Nagarjuna left the monastery, he went to live in the forest where he mastered all the accomplishments of the yogi. He could make detailed mandalas, prepare the ingredients for the finest incense, and practice astrology. He is believed to have encountered, and having attained the highest siddhis, subdued yakshas, ghouls and vampires.
He is also said to have found a copper casket containing the text of the Hayagriva tantra, in the Shankarakuta stupa at the Sitavana charnel ground near Bodhgaya. He is also known for his revelation of the Green Tara practice.
He established and built many temples and stupas with special clay he had received from the nagas.
The Teacher
As a philosopher and exponent of the Middle Way (Madhyamika philosophy) Nagarjuna gave many teachings, had hundreds of disciples and won many debates. He not only explained the more abstract principles of the Buddha’s doctrine, but also poignantly presented the more mundane:
- “Whoever is born has to die; whoever are together have to separate; whatever is saved has to be used; whatever is created is impermanent. So do not be upset over these laws of nature.”
He warned against wrong interpretations, saying:
- “The Conqueror [Buddha] taught openness [sunyata: emptiness] as the refutation of all [any] views. But those who hold openness as a view are called irremediable.”
And
- “Openness [sunyata] wrongly conceived destroys the dimly witted. It is like a snake grasped by the head, or a garbled incantation.”
~ Nagarjuna (MK 13: 8 and 24:11 in McCagney, Nancy. Nagarjuna and the Philosophy of Openness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.)
Verses From the Centre (Mula-madhyamaka-karika) trans. S. Batchelor.
Legends of His Death
According to legend, he spent the last part of life in meditation at Shri Pravarta mountain in South India. His reputation for selflessness was so great that it is said that when his opponents wished his death because they never could best him in an argument, he offered to cooperate. (They were powerless to do him any physical harm.)
Nagarjuna revealed that one of the debaters had been an ant in a previous life, and was accidentally killed by Nagarjuna with a blade of kusha grass. This person — the only being who could harm him in return — now had the power to kill him which he did, using only a stalk of that same kusha grass.
Aryadeva, the second of The Six Ornaments, continued his teaching traditions. Nagarjuna’s remains, with the exception of his head, are said to be preserved at Shri Pravarta.
Nagarjuna’s head that was severed by a blade of kusha grass is kept in this walled-enclosure, guarded by the tiger on its door, that is a part of the Swayambhu complex.
Nagarjun, [ancient case suffixes are dropped in Hindi and other contemporary languages] as he is called in India and Nepal, is believed by Nepalis to have retired to Nagarjun Mountain near Katmandu.
A person with a similar name was the abbot of Nalanda, the great Buddhist monastic university near Bodhgaya, since there is no evidence that the institution was founded before the third century CE. There was also an alchemist by that name who may also have become identified with the great teacher Nagarjuna. Therefore there is wide disagreement as to how long Nagarjuna lived, with estimates as high as 300 years. The Chinese believe that he visited and taught there. Also, he is credited by Japanese Buddhists with having taught the complete path of reliance on Amitabha.
In any case, teachings attributed to Nagarjuna are today still widely followed in all the countries where Mahayana Buddhism is practiced.
Named for Acharya [master-teacher] Nagarjuna, Nagarjuna Sagar is a place 150 kms. from Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is where the Mahachaitya, most sacred of stupas [Tib. chorten] is located. The Brahmi inscription states it contains relics of the Buddha.
Misconception and Misconstrual
Misconception
About Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika, A. Charles Muller of Toyo Gakuen University says:
“Nagarjuna (c.150-250 CE) … realized at a profound level the difficulties of carrying out Buddhist discourse in the medium of language, and the degree of attachment that could occur with even such subtle concepts as shunyata. Therefore he endeavored to prevent people from falling into the error of attaching to Emptiness as a “something” or as “non-existence.”
He made his project an exercise in consciousness that sought to free people from being limited in thought by the linguistic options of “this or that” and “existence or non-existence.” He did this by taking Buddhist philosophical terms and putting them into his formula of “neither x nor not-x.” According to this formula, existence is “neither empty nor not empty,” “neither samsara nor nirvana.” Nagarjuna’s teachings are not something new ontologically speaking, but were developments toward a more advanced logical form that can be seen in his Madhyamaka-karikas.
In these texts, he strove to stop the reification of the concept of emptiness by: (1) stressing the non-difference between emptiness and dependent origination; (2) by emphasizing the understanding of emptiness as a mental attitude which pays attention to the non-attachment to concepts and theories. That is, emptiness should not be made into a theory to be clung to (as are other philosophical and religious doctrines). According to Nagarjuna, he who does so is like “a customer to whom a merchant has said that he has nothing to sell and the customer now asks to buy this ‘nothing’ and carry it home.”
For Nagarjuna, emptiness should not be interpreted ontologically, but rather in the way of the parable of the raft: The Buddhist teaching (especially shunyata), is like the raft one constructs for the crossing of a river. Once the river is crossed, the purpose of the raft has been served. It may now be discarded.
The same is true of emptiness: it should not be held on to; one who does hold on to it will have trouble functioning in life. In this sense, emptiness could also be compared to a laxative: once the obstruction has passed, there is no need to continue taking it. Nagarjuna wrote extensively, and his teachings resulted in the formation of an Indian school called Madhyamika or the “Middle Way School.”
This school was later transmitted to China [as] San-lun Tsung (School of the Three Treatises) where, although it died out as an independent sect, had great influence on the formation of Chinese Buddhist philosophy.”
~ Madhyamika: The Teaching of the Middle Way at Toyo Gakuen University, Japan. (9/2/1998 link to Zen Buddhism Electronic forum is no longer available in 2009 but on the University web site, A. C. Muller is still listed among the staff.
Progressive Misinterpretation
Andrew Tuck, in an inquiry into the philosophy of scholarship, charts three phases in the sequence of views of Western-trained scholars concerning interpretation of Nagarjuna’s Treatise on the Middle Way:
“A classic is a classic because it engenders multiple meanings. The most lasting truths are found in the least reductive configurations of the largest possible number of conflicting interpretations. In other words, the most useful interpretation may well be one that takes into account as many previous interpretations as possible and attempts to disclose the ways in which these earlier readings made sense, both to the interpretative scholar and to his or her readers . . . .
Every reading of a text–including, of course, the most carefully contextualized and historicized readings–will, in some ways, be unavoidably determined by some set of prejudgments. The choice is, therefore, not between good readings, undetermined by irrelevant considerations, and bad readings, rendered inaccurate by interpretive prejudice. The choice between one reading and an even better reading is a difference in degree and not in kind.
Within any set of rules for what counts as a desirable interpretation, choices between more and less preferable readings of texts can and will be made. And a study such as this suggests that our conventionally agreed-on rules of interpretation–the rules that tell us what is relevant, and what sorts of judgments are harmfully prejudiced–are anything but constant. Our preferences in regard to what constitutes a good interpretation are just as determined as our readings themselves… . Nagarjuna’s celebrated warnings about the perils of wrongly understanding sunyata [... ] or holding this non-position as if it constituted a philosophical view in itself (“Those for whom sunyata is itself a theory, I call incurable.” ch. 13, v. 8) thus become doubly important in the new Western climate of skepticism about philosophical theorizing.
Nagarjuna … did not intend to substitute his theory for those of his opponents. His only intention…was to cure others of the philosophical illness … . Nagarjuna was convinced, as a Buddhist, that the salvation of all living beings was at issue … .
This study offers neither an indictment of the comparative enterprise nor a suggestion that any new interpretive perspective…will offer anything like a ‘final and infallible,’ or even a wholly satisfying, interpretation. A new interpretation is often a response to a new set of critical concerns, not a solution to a formerly unsolved or poorly solved puzzle.
Looked at in this way, the post-Wittgensteinian [Western philosopher,1889 - 1951] fondness for Madhyamika Buddhism is not less determined by contemporary trends than was the late-nineteenth-century fascination with Advaita Vedanta [a Hindu school of non-dualism]. What we do seem to have is a collection of intelligent misreadings, and that may be enough … . We should not be surprised that interpretation is not an exact science. After all, translation is not an exact science. Science is not an exact science.”
~ Tuck, Andrew P. Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: On the Western Interpretation of Nagarjuna. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. (v-vii, 92, 99-100.)
Tuck cites (mainly) the Introductions of:
Garfield, Jay L. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. Oxford U P, 1995.
Inada, Kenneth. Nagarjuna: A Translation of his Mulamadhyamakakarika. Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1970.
Sprung, Mervyn. Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way. Boulder: Prajna Press, 1979.
Streng, Frederick J. Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967.
Wayman, Alex. “The Tathagata chapter of Nagarjuna’s Mula-Madhyamaka-karika.” Philosophy East and West 38.1 (Jan. 1988)
Source: Khandro
See Nagarjuna I
Biography of Nagarjuna
Nagarjuna (Klu-grub), together with Asanga (Thogs-med), were the two great pioneers of the Mahayana tradition. Nagarjuna transmitted the lineage teachings of the profound view of voidness from Manjushri, while Asanga transmitted the lineage teachings of the extensive bodhisattva practices from Maitreya.
Nagarjuna was born into a brahmin family probably around the mid-second century C.E. in South India in Vidarbha, a kingdom lying in present-day Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. He was predicted in various sutras, such as The Descent into Lanka Sutra (Lan-kar gshegs-pa’i mdo, Skt. Lankavatara Sutra). At birth, a soothsayer predicted he would live only seven days, but if his parents made offerings to a hundred monks, he could live to be seven years old. Fearing for his life, at age seven, his parents sent Nagarjuna to Nalanda Monastic University in North India, where he met the Buddhist master Saraha. Saraha told him that if he became a renunciate and recited the Amitabha mantra, he would lead a long life. Nagarjuna did so and then joined the monastery, receiving the name “Shrimanta.”
At Nalanda, Nagarjuna studied sutra and tantra with Ratnamati – an emanation of Manjushri – and, with Saraha, especially The Guhyasamaja Tantra (dPal gsang-ba ‘dus-pa’i rgyud). In addition, he learned alchemy from a brahmin, and gained the ability to transmute iron into gold. Using this ability, he was able to feed the Nalanda monks during famine. Eventually, Nagarjuna became the abbot of Nalanda. There, he expelled eight thousand monks who were not keeping the vinaya monastic rules of discipline properly. He also defeated five hundred non-Buddhists in debate.
Two youths, who were emanations of the sons of the naga king, came to Nalanda. They had about them the natural fragrance of sandalwood. Nagarjuna asked how this was so and they confessed to him who they were. Nagarjuna then asked for sandalwood scent for a statue of Tara and the nagas’ help in constructing temples. They returned to the naga realm and asked their father, who said he could help only if Nagarjuna came to their realm beneath the sea to teach them. Nagarjuna went, made many offerings, and taught the nagas.
Nagarjuna had known that the nagas had The Hundred Thousand Verse Prajnaparamita Sutra (Shes-rab-kyi pha-rol-tu phyin-pa stong-pa brgya-pa, Skt. Shatasahasrika-prajnaparamita Sutra) and requested a copy. When Buddha had taught Prajnaparamita, far-reaching discriminating awareness (the perfection of wisdom), the nagas had taken one version of it back to their realm for safekeeping, the gods another, and the yaksha lords of wealth yet another. Nagarjuna brought back the hundred thousand verse version, although the nagas kept the last two chapters to ensure that he would return and teach them further. Later, the last two chapters were filled in with the last two chapters of The Eight Thousand Verse Prajnaparamita Sutra (Shes-rab-kyi pha-rol-tu phyin-pa brgyad stong-pa, Skt. Ashtasahasrika-prajnaparamita Sutra) . This is why the last two chapters of these two recensions are the same. Nagarjuna also brought back naga clay and built many temples and stupas with it.
Once, when Nagarjuna was teaching Prajnaparamita, six nagas came and formed an umbrella over his head to protect him from the sun. Because of this, the iconographic representation of Nagarjuna has the six nagas over his head. From this event, he got the name Naga. And from the fact that his skill in teaching Dharma went straight to the point, like the arrows of the famous archer Arjuna (the name of the hero in the Hindu classic, Bhagavad Gita), he got the name Arjuna. Thus, he became called “Nagarjuna.”
Nagarjuna later traveled to the Northern Island (Northern Continent) to teach. On the way, he met some children playing on the road. He prophesied that one of them, named Jetaka, would become a king. When Nagarjuna returned from the Northern Island, the boy had in fact grown up and become the king of a large kingdom in South India. Nagarjuna stayed with him for three years, teaching him, and then spent his last years elsewhere in his kingdom, at Shri Parvata, the holy mountain overlooking modern-day Nagarjunakonda. Nagarjuna wrote for the King A Precious Garland (Rin-chen ‘phreng-ba, Skt. Ratnavali). This was the same king to whom Nagarjuna wrote A Letter to a Friend (bShes-pa’i spring-yig, Skt. Suhrllekha), namely King Udayibhadra (bDe-spyod bzang-po).
Some Western scholars identify King Udayibhadra with King Gautamiputra Shatakarni (ruled 106 – 130 C.E.) of the Shatavahana Dynasty (230 B.C.E. – 199 C.E.) in present-day Andhra Pradesh. Some identify him with the next king, Vashishtiputra Pulumayi (130 – 158 C.E.). It is difficult to identify him exactly. The Shatavahanas were patrons of the stupa in Amaravati, where Buddha had first taught The Kalachakra Tantra and which was close to Shri Parvata.
King Udayibhadra had a son, Kumara Shaktiman, who wanted to become king. His mother told him that he could never become king until Nagarjuna died, since Nagarjuna and the King have the same lifespan. His mother said to ask Nagarjuna for his head and since Nagarjuna was so compassionate, he would undoubtedly agree to give it to him. Nagarjuna did in fact agree, but Kumara could not cut his head off with a sword. Nagarjuna said in a previous life, he had killed an ant while cutting grass. As a karmic result, his head could only be cut off with a blade of kusha grass. Kumara did this and Nagarjuna died. The blood from the severed head turned into milk and the head said, “Now I will go to Sukhavati Pure Land, but I will enter this body again.” Kumara took the head far away from the body, but it is said that the head and the body are coming closer together each year. When they join, Nagarjuna will return and teach again. All in all, Nagarjuna lived six hundred years.
Among the many texts on sutra topics that Nagarjuna wrote are his Collections of Reasoning (Rigs-pa’i tshogs), Collections of Praises (bsTod-pa’i tshogs), and Collections of Didactic Explanations (gTam-pa’i tshogs).
The Six Collections of Reasoning (Rigs-tshogs drug) are:
- Root Verses on Madhyamaka, called “Discriminating Awareness” (dBu-ma rtsa-ba shes-rab, Skt. Prajna-nama- mulamadhyamaka-karika),
- Precious Garland (Rin-chen ‘phreng-ba, Skt. Ratnavali),
- Refutation of Objections (rTsod-pa zlog-pa, Skt. Vigrahavyavarti).
- Seventy Verses on Voidness (sTong-nyid bdun-bcu-pa, Skt. Shunyatasaptati),
- Sutra Called “Finely Woven” (Zhib-mo rnam-‘thag zhes-bya-ba’i mdo, Skt. Vaidalya-sutra-nama),
- Sixty Verses of Reasoning (Rigs-pa drug-cu-pa, Skt. Yuktishashtika),
Included among his Collections of Praise are:
- Praise to the Sphere of Reality (Chos-dbyings bstod-pa, Skt. Dharmadhatu-stava),
- Praise to the Deepest Truth (Don-dam-par bstod-pa, Skt. Paramartha-stava),
- Praise to the Supramundane (Buddha) (‘ Jig-rten-las ‘das-par bstod-pa, Skt. Lokatita-stava).
Included among Nagarjuna’s Collections of Didactic Explanations are:
- A Commentary on (the Two) Bodhichittas (Byang-chub sems-kyi ‘grel-ba, Skt. Bodhichittavivarana),
- Anthology of Sutras (mDo kun-las btus-pa, Skt. Sutrasamuccaya),
- Letter to a Friend (bShes-pa’i spring-yig, Skt. Suhrllekha).
Also attributed to Nagarjuna are several two commentaries to The Guhyasamaja Tantra, including:
- Abbreviated Means for Actualization (sGrub-thabs mdor-byas, Skt. Pindikrta-sadhana),
- Method for Meditating on the Generation Stage of the Mahayoga Tantra Guhyasamaja Mixed with Its Textual (Sources) (rNal-‘byor chen-po’i rgyud dpal gsang-ba ‘dus-pa’i bskyed-pa’i rim-pa’i bsgom-pa’I thabs mdo-dang bsres-pa, Mdo-bsres, Skt. Shri-guhyasamaja-mahayogatantra-utpattikrama-sadhana-sutra- melapaka).
- The Five Stage (Complete Stage) (Rim-pa lnga-pa, Skt. Pancakrama).
Nagarjuna’s most famous disciple was Aryadeva (‘ Phags-pa lha), author of Four Hundred Verse Treatise on the Actions of a Bodhisattva’s Yoga (Byang-chub sems-dpa’i rnal-‘byor spyod-pa bzhi-brgya-pa’i bstan-bcos kyi tshig-le’ur byas-pa, Skt. Bodhisattvayogacarya-catu:shatakashastra-karika) and several commentaries on The Guhyasamaja Tantra.
See Nagarjuna II
A production made by the Nation Geographical Society. With host, Wade Davis, this show explores the state of Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal, which is a huge movement and a growing one, due to the occupation of Tibet by China. Many aspects of Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal are explored, everything from some aspects of Tibetan laypeople living in Nepal, to large, thriving monasteries and Sanghas, all the way to the practice hermatice in the Himalayan foothills.
