Content area
Full text
The Problem of Interpretation
Though contemporary reevaluations of the text have at times overestimated the impact of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (hereafter MMK) on scholastic Buddhism in classical India, the enthusiastic reception of the work in Tibet and East Asia along with its fervent revival in modern Western scholarship are fitting tributes to the treatise's philosophical value. While the MMK has been both hailed as a definitive refutation of metaphysical essentialism by its advocates and decried as a facile attack on logical red herrings by its detractors, the furious debates inspired by it in the past century of Buddhist studies demand an accurate interpretation of its provocative stanzas.
A pivotal focus of MMK exegesis for the past half century has been the attempt to decipher Nagarjuna's philosophy of language and determine how this best aids us in characterizing Madhyamaka thought as a whole (Tuck 1990, pp. 54.64). In this vein, MMK 24:18, where Nagarjuna declares the identity of the concepts pratityasamutpada (conditioned co-arising) and sunyata (emptiness), has been universally agreed to embody the "central" teaching of the text. The stanza has been judged of particular weight insofar as it purportedly further insists that these two indispensable concepts are themselves only "nominal" or "conventional," that is, they are merely labels that do not referentially signify anything that can be taken to be an ontologically ultimate reality. This construal of the verse does comport with the general aim of Nagarjuna's Buddhist opus, namely the refutation of Sarvastivada and Vaibhasika Buddhist theories of substantialism that are propped up by intricate, theoretical terminology. However, in various guises, as a result of this explication, Nagarjuna's thought has been seen to embrace an overarching linguistic conventionalism in which words, whether they are used for the purposes of theory or practice, though they serve as commonly accepted currency in the transactions of worldly business (vyavahara), are in the end only ideas (prajñapti) or metaphysical fabrications (prapanca). It is strangely ironic that this reading of Nagarjuna has created, in no small measure through the major English renditions of the MMK, a merely linguistic convention of its own. A close reading of the text of MMK 24:18 alongside its major English translations, especially in light of the degree to which these translations rely on the idiosyncratic...