For over fifteen hundred years, the prevailing view of the Madhyamikas in India has been that they were absolute nihilists. According to the Mimamsakas, the Vedantins, the Naiyayikas, the Jainas and even their fellow-Mahayanists, the Vijnanavadins, the Madhyamikas denied the reality of both nirvana and samsara. In the first part of this century, St. Schayer and Th. Stchetbatsky rejected the nihilist interpretation of the Madhyamikas.
The present work is a defence of the earlier nihilist interpretation (NI) of the Madhyamika against some of the leading non-nihilist interpretation (NNI) that have arisen to challenge it in recent times. This defence is conducted on two fronts. First, as a purely exegetical matter, it will be argued that the NI fits the Madhyamika writings better than the NNI. Secondly, it will be argued that the NNIs are not, as they are often claimed to be, more defensible on philosophical grounds.
Nagarjunian Disputations, Wood, Hawai'i Press, 401pp, $22.00
Thomas Wood received his B.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught Eastern and Western philosophy at the California State University at Fresno and the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is presently an Adjunct Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches comparative philosophy and religion. He is the author of two other books in Indian philosophy, The Mandukya Upanisad and the Agama Sastra: An Investigation into the Meaning of the Vedanta (1990) and Mind Only: A Philosophical and Doctrinal Analysis of the Vijnanavada (1991).
Preface and Acknowledgements xv
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
The Origins of Madhyamika Thought 15
A Critique of the NNI (I) 47
A Critique of the NNI (I) 119
A Defense of the NI 157
The Red King's Dream and Beyond (I) 211
The Red King's Dream and Beyond (II) 253
Appendix: Texts and Translations 281
Notes 323
Bibliography 375
Index 403
|
