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Madhyamaka - Coggle Diagram
Madhyamaka
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Sunyata
- Sunyata - empty of inherent existence
- Svabhava (own being) - existence which is dependent on nothing else
- "The coming into being of own-being from conditions and causes is not possible"
- Nagarjuna sees himself as simply restating the original teaching of the Buddha that all states come into being through causes and conditions - "It is dependent origination that we call emptiness"
- Emptiness means no individual thing exists independently, but only in relation to others
- Emptiness denies there is any entity, physical or non-material which possesses svabhava (own being)
- Nagarjuna's critique of svabhava argues that anything which arises to conditions, as all phenomena do, can have no inherent nature, as it depends on what conditions it
- Emptiness implies the interdependence of all things
- The Madhyamaka school argues that phenomena cannot be spoken of as separate entities which interact with each other because things only exist in relation to other things (light and dark analogy)
- Nagarjuna - "Emptiness wrongly grasped is like picking up a poisonous snake by the wrong end"
Misunderstanding of emptiness
- Emptiness does not mean complete nothingness or voidness, that is nihilism, emptiness means lacking inherent existence - nothing exists in its own right as nothing has svabhava
- Thich Nhat Hanh argued sunyata should be more accurately translated as interbeing - nothing stands alone, everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape, no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity
- Gethin - "Those who see in emptiness some kind of annihilationism have a faulty view of emptiness"
- Gethin - "It is not that nothing exists, but that nothing exists as an individual essence possessed of its own inherent existence"
- Each phenomenon lacks an inherent nature, and so all are said to share an empty 'non-nature' - therefore one dharma cannot ultimately be distinguished from another - this is the notion of 'sameness' of dharmas
- Emptiness is described as an 'adjectival quality of dharmas' as opposed to a substance which composes them - it is neither a thing nor it is nothingness, it refers to reality as incapable of ultimately being pinned down in concepts
- This idea is comparable to modern physics as classic physics saw protons, neutrons and electrons as indivisible building blocks of reality, however further analysis showed them to consist of many particles including quarks
- Critics from early schools argued that the emptiness teaching implied that the Four Noble Truths were themselves empty, subverting the Buddha's teaching
- Nagarjuna responded that it is the notion of dharmas-with-inherent-nature which subverts the four truths - if suffering had own-nature, it would be causeless and eternal, and could never be brought to an end - it is because everything is empty that there can be spiritual development
- Lewis Richmond - the Buddha taught emptiness because of his profound insight into why we suffer
- Ultimately we suffer because we grasp after things thinking they are fixed, substantial, real and capable of being possessed by ego
- It is only when we can see through this illusion and open ourselves "to the reality of flux and fluidity that is ultimately ungraspable and inconceivable" (Ari Goldfield) that we can relax into clarity, compassion and courage
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Samsara and nirvana
- "There is no distinction what ever between nirvana and samsara. The limit of nirvana is the limit of samsara. There is not the slightest difference between the two"
- Nirvana is said to be neither existent or non-existent - "The calming of all apprehension and the blissful calming of false concepts"
- Nirvana and samsara cannot be separated as nirvana is seeing samara for what it really is - empty
- Nirvana and samsara are different understandings of the ultimate truth - emptiness
- Harvey - "Nirvana and samsara are not two separate realities, but the field of emptiness, seen by either spiritual ignorance or true knowledge"
- There is no difference between nirvana and samsara as both states are empty and therefore cannot be differentiated between, as they lack own-nature
- The only difference between samsara and nirvana is how they are experienced - either through spiritual ignorance (samsara) or true knowledge (nirvana)
- The bodhisattva can experience the non-duality of samsara and nirvana - nirvana is something already present in samsara
- Perfect wisdom of the Mahayana involves not just intellectually accepting emptiness, but realising it in our attitudes and emotions
Two levels of truths
- On the conventional level, 'empty' things exist as we understand them to
- On the ultimate level, things do not exist eternally and independently
- Things do not exist absolutely nor do not exist at all, they exist relatively
- Nagarjuna felt he was following in the true footsteps of the Buddha in asserting a middle way between the eternalism of existence and the annihilationism of non-existence
- Harvey - "What we experience does not exist in an absolute sense, but only in a relative way, as a passing phenomenon"
- Things are empty and exist relatively - this can be expressed as the tathata (suchness of things), which means things simply are, in this relative way
- For the Madhyamaka school, true statements at the conventional level are 'true' because humans agree to use concepts in certain ways, due to linguistic conventions