Douglas L. Berger

Acquiring Emptiness: Interpreting Nāgārjuna's MMK 24:18

A pivotal focus of exegesis of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) for the past half century has been the attempt to decipher the text’s philosophy of language, and determine how this best aids us in characterizing Madhyamaka thought as a whole. In this vein, MMK 24:18 has been judged of particular weight insofar as it purportedly insists that the concepts pratītyasamutpāda (conditioned co-arising) and śūnyatā (emptiness), both indispensable to Buddhist praxis, 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. In various guises, as a result of this explication, Nāgārjuna’s thought has been seen to embrace an overarching linguistic nominalism or 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 (vyavahāra), are in the end only ideas (prajñapti) or metaphysical fabrications (prapaṅca). This interpretation is largely due to tenaciously inaccurate translations and expositions of MMK 24:18 and their dependence on Candrakīrti’s peculiar analysis of this verse in his Prasannapadā. This essay will attempt to correct both the diction of the major translations of MMK 24:18 and the fictions of nominalism and conventionalism that the consequent interpretations of this stanza have perpetuated. The argument that will be developed in the course of this essay is that Candrakīrti’s reading of this verse proffers a strong form of linguistic nominalism that Nāgārjuna himself does not embrace. It will be shown, based on everything else found in the MMK, that Nāgārjuna, rather than advocating the mere nominal or conventional status of terms such as pratītyasamutpāda and śūnyatā, demands they be accepted as both pedagogically useful and even referentially accurate descriptions of the world as it is.

Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (review)

The Bhagavad Gītā has drawn the attention of commentators for at least one thousand three hundred years. These commentators have ranged in philosophical persuasion from the nondualistic to the theistic to the speculative, from the classical Brāhmin. ical traditionalist to the modern European exclusivist to the contemporary Indian nationalist. And yet, despite the Gītā’s own prominence as a source of the epic imagination, religious inspiration, and scholarly attention, precious little, beyond some valuable translations and secondary works, has appeared in English that deals with the philosophical and theological significance of some of the text’s earliest readings. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries aims to fulfill some of the unmet need, but does so through a unique and illuminating approach. Ram-Prasad explicates the Gītā commentaries of the eighth-century Advaita preceptor Śaṅkara and the twelfth-century Viśis.tadvaitin Rāmānuja, but not from the perspective of intellectual history or complex hermeneutical or Indological analysis. Instead, he proposes in this concise work to take a step forward where “there is no established field as such,” namely in “constructive Hindu theology” (p. ix). While acknowledging that the language of the book, English, requires the employment of Western theological terminology, and while also positively hoping that intercultural dialogue will be inspired by this treatment, Ram-Prasad writes: “if Hindu theology is to flourish (again), it must do so in a world it did not make but may yet enrich, a world in which a global discourse is becoming possible without merely being rendered so by the cultural fiat of Western hegemony” (p. x). The theological purpose of the book lies in its attempt not to decide what the Gītā itself really means or to adjudicate between the relative merits of Śaṅkara’s and Rāmānuja’s readings but to present their interpretations of the classic text as two different theories of divinity, self, and being, in a way that will be of interest to other contemporary theologians who, Ram-Prasad believes, are fascinated by resonant issues (p. xi). Furthermore, between Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja we find “dialectical” differences and “complementary challenges” in reading the Gītā, particularly given “Kr .s.n. a’s declarative presence” in the root text. For the former attempts to subordinate God to a kind of knowledge that transcends both being and nonbeing, while the latter endeavors a project that makes all else dependent on our reception of God’s grace (p. xii). These conceptions of the divine also, of course, have profound implications for each Vedāntin’s formulation of the human relationship to it that end up seeing each