The Life and Teachings of Nagarjuna
The Paragon of the Middle Way View
8 Tuesdays from June 14 thru August 2, 2022, from 7-9:15 pm, via Zoom
In this course we will explore the philosophical view of the elusive person who is credited with having formulated the most perfect Buddhist presentation of the nature of reality, known as Nagarjuna, Hero of the Nagas. Nagarjuna was the first of many Mahayana Buddhist masters to distill and clarify the voluminous teachings of the Buddha as presented in the thousands of sutras attributed to him. Nagarjuna’s texts span many subjects but those on philosophy are the most well-known and have become the model to which all other philosophical presentations are compared. He is elusive in that there is a lot of uncertainly about his life and works. Some scholars attribute only five or six texts to him while in the traditional Tibetan collection of Indian Buddhist texts known as the Tengyur, are 180 texts attributed to him! While many maintain that he lived an average lifespan between about 150 and 250 AC, according to traditional accounts he lived for 600 years!
Using the book, Nagarjuna: Buddhism’s Most Important Philosopher by Richard H. Jones (Second Edition), we will focus on the six major texts making up his so-called Collection of Reasonings: Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way (Mula-madhyamaka-karikas), Overturning the Objections (Vigraha-vyavartanti), Jewel Garland of Advice (Ratnavali), Seventy Verses on Emptiness (Shunyata-saptati-karikas), Sixty Verses on Argument (Yukti-shashtikas), and Pulverizing the Categories (Vaidalya-prakarana). This text - focused study will be supplemented by the Jones’ commentaries on some of these texts, his essays on the subject matter and a few articles by other scholars, in particular, the wonderful chapter on Svabhava by Jan Westerhoff in his Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction.