Podcast 18.3 · May 7, 04:09 PM by Kukkurovaca
Audio

    Download

Random notes

    About Common Era and other dating systems.
    If you’re interested in those Nāgārjuna provenance issues, that name was Christian Lindtner. (Nagarjuniana: Studies in the Writing and Philosophy of Nāgārjuna, Copenhagen, Akademisk Forlag, 1982.)
    I’ll get around to doing the full bibliography sooner or later. Really. But definitely not this weekend.

Rough script
Introduction

Bho sudarṣana, and welcome to what I am pleased to refer to as the “MūlamadhyamakakārikāCast.”

Wow, three weeks in a row of the most obscure audio an RSS feed can enclose. I submitted MMKCast to the iTunes music store, so those of us who are slaves to the Apple media machine can now have marginally more convenient access to it.

How easy is it to find? Why, you could just search for “Mūlamadhyamakakārika” in the podcast directory! Don’t forget those lon vowels. Or, you could open a browser and type http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=152428935&s=143441, then wait for the browser to launch iTunes. Could it be any simpler? I, for one, doubt it.

(More seriously, there’s a link on the site. Of course, the url of the site is “http://kukkkurovaca.textdriven.com/textpattern”, which isn’t a super-improvement.)

Also, you may notice I added a little chime at the beginning there. That’s in lieu of the sort of guitar solo based podsafe intro music most podcasts use. I could have gone that route, but it just somehow didn’t seem to click with the content, if you know what I mean.

Fortunately, I don’t have any listeners, so there’s no one to complain. This is still an interesting exercise.
Tedious Micro-Lecture

I mentioned last week that I wanted to stretch out the MMKCast a bit with some background material, and I slapped together a short one for today. The topic is: What’s a Nāgārjuna?

A Nāgārjuna is a philosopher, of the Buddhist persuasion. Now, the thing to remember with historical figures of this type is that they are at best semi-historical. Which is not to say that Nāgārjuna didn’t exist or that he didn’t write works of Buddhist philosophy. But there’s more mythology built aorund him than a real philosopher could bear, and it’s a safe bet that not all of the works attributed to him can be traced back to a single author. However, I’m not going to have to worry about which can and which cannot, as I’m only working with the Mūlamadhyamakakārikāḥ, not with the other bits. (By the way, apparently the man in this department is Christian Lindtner, if you’re morbidly curious.)

So, what do we know about Nāgārjuna in his historical context? Well, keep in mind that Buddhism was a developed and established religion at this time, with considerable state support. Nāgārjuna was writing not in the context of some shady grove of trees with his ragtag bunch of followers, but in a university setting. This is of interest, because of Nāgārjuna wasn’t set up in that world, he wouldn’t have written Sanskrit, and which was a language of priests and scholars and the elite; he would have written in one of the many vulgar languages of India at that time—in which case, his writing would more closely resemble the Pāli canon of Theravāda Buddhism. (Note, however, that Pāli is also a largely artificial and literary language, but it’s certainly closer to the native language of earliest Buddhism than Sanskrit, which was fixed quite a while before.)

I guess I’m making it sound like Nāgārjuna was some sort of effete scholastic, which isn’t really my intention. Nāgārjuna’s academic skill set and the precision of Sanskrit both contribute to a certain clarity of reasoning in Nāgārjuna’s philosophy that allows him to do some really nifty things with the existing Buddhist doctrines. Things that are so interesting, they get him compared to thinkers like Kant, Wittgenstein, James, etc.—people who like to dig around at the underpinnings of philosophy and come up with new ways of thinking.

This, together with the fact that I’ve studied Sanskrit (somewhat), and have not studied the other languages of Buddhism, like Pāli or classical Chinese, make Nāgārjuna an interesting thinker for me. There are other reasons you might be interested in him, however; for example, if you’re interested in the philosophical underpinnings of Zen Buddhism, Nāgārjuna is definitely pertinent to your interests, because there are some aspects of the Zen turn that Nāgārjuna sort of foreshadowed. Alternatively, if you’re the sort of person who’s drawn to Buddhism but isn’t drawn to the fuzzy, image-laden, metaphor-driven, mystically formatted mode of discourse (and for the record, I really like that stuff), Nāgārjuna may appeal to you; Nāgārjuna has a lot more faith than many thinkers in mystical traditions in the ability of the reasoning mind to bring us closer to spiritual insight. In other words, Nāgārjuna doesn’t want you to turn off your skeptical, questioning mind and just bliss out; he thinks that if you use it correctly, intellectual inquiry can be compatible with a meditative tradition like Buddhism.

Of course, it’s kind of impressive that I’ve managed to get this far without actually telling you what Nāgārjuna thought about things, but it kind of makes sense, because there’s a sense in which Nāgārjuna doesn’t really think anything about anything. Basically, Nāgārjuna rejects the practice of taking a position—not because he’s wishy-washy, but because any particular view (or dṛṣti) has to be tentative and flawed—there is no positulate that can really hit reality on the nose; every statement captures some of the truth but misses other parts. And while there’s nothing wrong with making these tenative statements, if you let them ascend to the position of doctrines or dogmas, you’ve missed the point. This stance is obviously not exclusive to Nāgārjuna and the others of his school; we see it elsewhere in Buddhism, we see it in Taoism (Zhuangzi, for for example, talks about words as a net for catching fish or as a crossbow bolt for hunting birds; they’re very useful, but you have to remember that you can’t actually eat them.)

And obviously Nāgārjuna can’t get by without having ideas of his own, concepts, keywords, etc—for example, śūnyatā, meaning “emptiness,” is a touchstone in Madhyamaka thought; but for Nāgārjuna; it’s basically a shorthand for this insight into reality: that if you dig into anything, you find that it is empty, rather than full—and this is not a nihilistic stance (as it would be in the west), because Nāgārjuna doesn’t have the assumption that meaning must derive from fullness, but rather an anti-foundationalist one; nothing is complete, nothing is self-sufficient. In this respect, Nāgārjuna lived to some extent in the same open-ended, pluralistic universe as William James. Of course, you can say, “But isn’t that a view”; and this isn’t necessarily invalid, though it may not be significant. My initial response is that while you could take it as a dogmatic axiom, I think that Nāgārjuna takes it more as a rule of thumb, and he speaks from his experience as a debunker and deconstructor of philosophical assumptions, and in that capacity he’s giving us practical advice on what works, rather than directly expresses what really is.
Text

And now, on with the show:

nirmamo nirahaṃkāro yaśca so ‘pi na vidyate|

nirmamaṃ nirahaṃkāraṃ yaḥ paśyati na paśyati||3

(repeat)
Translation

One who is devoid of egotism, devoid of posession is not found.

Who sees one devoid of egotism, devoid of possession does not see.
Commentary

Last week, I told you that the verse Two would make a lot more sense in the context of this one, so let’s go back.

Because of the pacification of the self and what relates to it, (one) is devoid of egotism, devoid of posessivenes

He who is devoid of egotism, devoid of posessiveness is not found.

Who sees one devoid of egotism, devoid of posessiveness does not see.

That was the second half of verse two, together with verse three. Now, there’s an odd shift there: On the one hand, Nāgārjuna tells us that by pacifying the self, one can be made devoid of egotism and possessiveness, and on the other, he’s telling us that no such person exists. I take this to mean that Nāgārjuna is criticizing the notion that the qualities of the enlightened person are in fact qualities belonging to a person. In other words, neither bondage nor liberation are qualities that pertain to a self. There is no self capable of being set free of egotism and posessieness, and anyone who sees that some person has thus been liberated and thinks that these are attributes that pertain to some self, is not really seeing what’s happening.

This is not an unfamiliar problem in Buddhism and similar paths; after all, the reason people get started is because they want to get something (enlightenment) or because want to get rid of something (their childhood trauma, or what have you). But the conventional wisdom is that this attitude will only get you so far.

I differed from McCagney in how I handled some of this material. For verse two, she uses “There is no ‘I,’ no ‘mine’” but for verse three, she uses “He who has no ‘I’ and no ‘mine’”; however, the terminology in both cases is nirmamaḥ nirahaṃkāraḥ, the same words in the same case. Now, the pronouns (“yaś ca”, “he who”) appear only in the third verse, but they are in agreement with the same terms in the second verse, and so should be taken with them in this case.

Also, if you’re interested in the tangled cluster-yabha that is the question of Sanksrit existential verbs in the philosophical context, you should hang around for the textual notes.
Textual Notes

nirmama(m1s) nirahaṃkāra(m1s) yad(m1s) ca(ind) tad(m1s) api(ind) na(ind) vid(PrePasSing)

nirmama(m2s) nirahaṃkāra(m2s) yad dṛś(PreActSing) na(ind) dṛś(PreActSing)

We’ve already discused nirmama and nirahaṃkāra, so I’ll let them alone for now, other than to point out their agreement with “yaḥ” and “saḥ” (which, with sandhi, appear in he verse as “yaś” and “so”). Yaḥ and saḥ are the declined forms of yad and tad, which are your basic general use pronouns, yad being relative and tad being not so much.

“Api” is another of those annoying little words that pops up all over the place and doesn’t have a super-specific meaning. Monier-Williams gives us, among other things, “and, also, moreover, besides, assuredly, surely…even, also, very.” That’s on page 55:A:, if you’re curious.

Now, vid, appearing here as “vidyate,” is that bit of existential verbtasticness that I mentioned previously.

In translting it, I agreed with Kalupahana’s use of “found” for “vid”; this is appropriate inasmuch as “vid” is, in fact, etymologically related to our “find”, and carries some of the same connotations—that is to say, in this context it means that because something is not found,it does not exist. This connotation is missed by McCagney’s translation, which uses “occur” for vid.

However, Kalupahana may go too far when he uses this word as evidence for his claim that Nāgārjuna is basically an empiricist—which is not to say I dislike the idea or disagree with the claim, just that I’m not sure you can get all of that out of a simple word choice.

Given that, it might be less loaded in a certain sense to say “does not exist”, or, like McCagney, “does not occur,” but these also are rich with metaphysical baggage of their own kind.

Note that while we have “nirmamo nirahaṃkāro” in the nominative in the first line (because the self with those qualities is not existing), but nirmamam nirahaṃkāram in the accusative, because the self with those qualities is not being seen.

And in case you were wondering how you can get paśyati from dṛś, no, it’s not the magic of conjugation or the enchatnment of Sandhi; they were originally totally different words that just got stuck together later.

Well, that pretty much does it for this week. Happy stuff.