An Outline of the Religious Literature of India c8.s2.t2.28

c8.s2.t2.28

§ 128. Nāgārjuna,¹ a Brāhman convert, who became the greatest authority on Mahāyāna Buddhism, is regarded as a younger contemporary of Aśvaghosha in Buddhist tradition; and modern scholars are inclined to place his activity in the latter half of the second century. His chief service was to think out the new doctrine of Vacuity. In those days a philosopher embodied his teaching in a series of aphorisms, either in prose (*sūtras*) or in verse (*kārikās*), and expounded them in a commentary. Nāgārjuna’s work is in verse, and, as the system is called the middle teaching, Mādhyamaka, the book is known as the *Mādhyamaka-kārikās*. The system is called Mādhyamaka because its leading idea, ‘All things are empty’, takes the middle course between existence and non-existence. Two distinct kinds of truth must be recognized, apparent truth, *saṃvṛitisatya*, and real truth, *paramārthasatya*.² The world appears to be real, but the appearance is an illusion, as empty as a dream; yet we must live in it and in practice take it as real. The actual truth, that all things are empty, seems to us to be folly, but it is the final truth of the world; and when we rise to the wisdom of the Buddhas, we shall see its truth. Thus we need not hope to find the truth by intellectual activity, but must strive to hear the silence which is neither affirmation nor denial. Thus the Mādhyamaka philosopher has no system; he has only a method. The doctrine is thus a guarded nihilism, a faith in the emptiness of all things which does not profess to see the truth of what it believes, but holds hard by its faith, while it frankly lives on that which it declares to be illusion. The early Prajñā texts, and a number of other works are said to be by Nāgārjuna. An extraordinary mass of legends gathered round his head.