The History of Buddhist Thought c25.19

c25.19

It is not surprising that a system expressed in such terms should have been called negativism or even nihilism.¹ It was even so-called by contemporary opponents, and Nāgārjuna’s commentator Chandrakīrti had to deny that the Mādhyamikas were nihilists (nāstika, nāsti, “ is not ”). D. T. Suzuki says, “ it simply means conditionality or transitoriness of all phenomenal existences.”² Stcherbatsky translates śūnya (void) and śūnyatā (voidness) by “ relativity ”, and says, “ we use the term ‘ relative ’ to express the fact that a thing can be identified only by mentioning its relations to something else, and becomes meaningless without these relations.”³ This explains the relative side, but says nothing about the positive. It is not the doctrine that all is relative, but that all is relative to an absolute.