3. Nāgārjuna: Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way - Tsongkhapa: Ocean of Reasoning
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
Jay L. Garfield [+]
Smith College
Description
Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is Nāgārjuna’s most important and best known work. Translated here is this work’s’ 24 th chapter called Examination of the Four Noble Truths. This chapter is the locus classicus for Nāgārjuna’s account of the two truths. The first six verses of this chapter are in the voice of an opponent who Nāgārjuna imagines objecting to his analysis on the grounds that the claim that all of these phenomena are empty undermines all of Buddhist doctrine which is encapsulated here in the fundamental tenets of Buddhism, namely the four noble truths taught by the Buddha. These four noble truths are the theses that all of existence is characterized by suffering; that suffering is cause by attraction and aversion grounded in primal confusion; that when those causes are eradicated, suffering ceases; and that this eradication can take place by following the eightfold path. In the remainder of the 40 verses in the 24th chapter of Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, Nāgārjuna artfully turns the table on this imagined opponent, arguing that it is the view that things are non-empty that undermines the four noble truths, and that the only way to make sense of those truths is by accepting the doctrine of universal emptiness and the identity of the two truths. Selections from Tsongkhapa’s important Tibetan commentary upon this text are also featured here in translation.