N
!
g
!
rjuna and the Philosophy of
Up
!
ya
by John Schroeder
N
!
g
!
rjuna is widely recognized as one of the most important thinkers in the Buddhist philosophical and religious tradition. Born in South India during the 2
nd
Century C.E., N
!
g
!
rjuna is famous for developing a critical style of thinking that challenged the major philosophical and religious traditions of India during that time. He debated orthodox Buddhists and Hindus alike, established the “Middle Way” (M
!
dhyamika) school of philosophy, and refined the traditional Buddhist dialectical method of “emptiness” (
!"
nyat
#
) that gave birth to Buddhist traditions throughout India, China, Tibet, and Japan. In most Mah
!
y
!
na Buddhist traditions, N
!
g
!
rjuna is regarded as the 2
nd
Buddha, a bodhisattva whose writings convey the fundamental wisdom of the Buddha. N
!
g
!
rjuna has recently become important for Western philosophers as well. Because many of his texts rely on
reductio ad absurdum
logic, and because he is seen as criticizing problems surrounding causality, subjectivity, space, and time, he is thought to be a philosopher of stature. Indeed, he is often compared to such important Western thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Hume, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, and perceived as inhabiting the same intellectual milieu and struggling with the same metaphysical problems that have marked the Western philosophical tradition since Plato. While interpretations of N
!
g
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rjuna’s philosophy have always varied and range anywhere from mysticism, transcendentalism, and absolute monism to skepticism, pragmatism, nominalism and even nihilism, Western interpretations generally assume that N
!
g
!
rjuna is dealing with metaphysical issues and that his doctrine of “emptiness” is easily rendered within a metaphysical discourse. Whether he is depicted as a mystic, nihilist, or philosophical skeptic, and whether or not his dialectic of “emptiness” (
!"
nyat
#
) undermines
all
positive philosophical positions, as many scholars declare, it is commonly assumed that the driving force behind N
!
g
!
rjuna’s philosophy is geared toward very general issues relating to logic, language, subjectivity, consciousness, and other traditional Western metaphysical problems. The purpose of this article is to offer a different account of N
!
g
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rjuna than is found in contemporary Western scholarship. It will not ask what it means for causality, truth, the self, or consciousness to be "empty" in a very general sense, but rather how N
!
g
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rjuna’s philosophy relates to the soteriological practices of Buddhism and what it means for those practices to be "empty" of inherent nature. Rather than describing N
!
g
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rjuna as a metaphysician this study will situate him squarely within the early Mah
!
y
!
na tradition and the philosophical problem of practice that is expressed through the doctrine of “skill-in-means” (
up
#
ya-kau
!
alya
). It should become evident in what follows that the doctrine of
up
#
ya
has little in common with Western metaphysics. It is unconcerned with problems regarding causality, personal identity, consciousness, logic, language, or any other issues that are unrelated to specific problems surrounding the nature and efficacy of Buddhist practice. Given that every major tradition in Buddhism stresses the indispensable nature of practice, it is highly unlikely that Nagarjuna’s philosophy is concerned with metaphysical issues or that his doctrine of “emptiness” can be separated from the soteriological practices of Buddhism. The following section will explain the significance of
skillful means
in Mahayana Buddhism and the critical role it plays in an on-going Buddhist debate about the nature of Buddhist practice. The subsequent sections will offer an in-depth reading of important sections from Nagarjuna’s
M
#
dhyamikak
#
rik
#
(
Fundamental
Verses on the Middle Way
) that convey the “skill-in-means” character of Nagarjuna’s philosophy.
Skillful Means, Metapraxis, and Truth
While Buddhist scholars agree that
skillful means
is a central doctrine in Mah
!
y
!
na Buddhism, there is some confusion over how
skillful means
relates to Buddhist practice and the problem of truth in Buddhism. Interpretations of
skillful means
range from seeing it as an authoritarian doctrine used to convert people to particular viewpoints (Garner, 1993) to seeing it as the “means” for revealing an ineffable truth (Chappell, 2002). Most accounts fall somewhere between these two extremes by describing
skillful means
as a rhetorical means for expressing some version of truth: either the Buddha’s own version of truth adapted to the different levels of sentient beings (Williams, 1989; Combrich, 1996) or an entirely new version of Buddhist truth proclaimed by the Mah
!
y
!
na Buddhist tradition and argued for in texts like the
Lotus S
"
tra
(Federman, 2009). However, while interpretations of
skillful means
vary there is a common theme that underlies even the most conflicting explanations: which is that
skillful means
is less a critique of truth than a vehicle (or “means”) for expressing truth. On this account, the Buddha already knows the truth but simply gears it to the different levels of human beings. Sometimes he manipulates the truth to suit the various karmic levels of sentient beings and sometimes he withholds it because people are not spiritually prepared to receive it. While there are numerous examples to support this reading of
skillful means
in the Mah
!
y
!
na s
"
tras and commentaries, there is also a critical side to
skillful means
that not only resists being framed as a “means” to truth but is directly opposed to establishing “true” Buddhist doctrine. This common oversight gives the impression that
skillful means
is more like a passive medium than an active philosophical method, thus destroying the critical force that makes
skillful means
a provocative and conceptually challenging Buddhist concept. Before examining this other, more critical side of
skillful means
and the role it plays in the philosophy of N
!
g
!
rjuna, we first need to understand why the doctrine of
skillful means
was created in the first place. In general,
skillful means
refers to the various teaching styles and pedagogical techniques used to communicate the Dharma, and reflects a debate in early Buddhism about the nature and efficacy of Buddhist teachings. Mah
!
y
!
na Buddhism arose in part as a reaction against the attempt to restrict Buddhism to pre-established goals and fixed meditation practices, and stressed the open-ended nature of the Buddha’s teachings and the variety of practices and doctrines he used to help sentient beings. The
Prajñ
#
p
#
ramit
#
(
Perfection of Wisdom)
texts emphasize the Buddha’s unique ability to respond to suffering with the appropriate words, gestures, and teachings, and claim he used countless “medicinal aids” to help “cure” the immense suffering in the world. They depict the Buddha as an exemplary “physician” who refuses to believe in a single cure or fixed remedy and who responds to the world’s “illnesses” with wisdom (
prajñ
#
), compassion (
karu
$#
), and “skill-in-means” (
up
#
ya-kau
!
alya
). It is not surprising, then, that the
Perfection of Wisdom
texts unite
skillful means
with wisdom (
prajñ
#
), as does N
!
g
!
rjuna when he says in the
Bodhisa
%
bh
#
ra(ka)
that “skill-in-means is the father of perfect wisdom” (Lindner, 1986, p. 127). While the actual term
skillful means
(P
!
li:
up
#
ya-kusala
) rarely occurs in the P
!
li canon, the sentiment is nevertheless expressed in a number of passages, such as the
Majjhima-Nik
#
ya
where the Buddha describes his teachings as "rafts” to ferry sentient beings across the turbulent river of suffering (
du
&
kha)
. The passage suggests that all the Buddha’s teachings have provisional status and that it is mistaken to cling to them as anything more than expedient means: “If you cling to it, if you fondle it, if you treasure it, if you are attached to it, then you do not understand that the teaching is similar to a raft, which is for crossing over, and not for getting hold of” (Conze, 1954, p. 223). Early Mah
!
y
!
na texts build upon the metaphor of the “raft” by elevating
skillful means
above all other doctrines and teachings, including the firmly established
vinaya
monastic rules, which, as the
Up
#
yakau
!
alya S
"
tra
graphically outlines, should also be considered provisional precepts that--for soteriological reasons only—may be violated on some occasions (Tatz, 1994).
To avoid the error of reducing
skillful means
to a mere passive vehicle for expressing truth—and thereby eclipsing its critical force—the development of
up
#
ya
needs to be seen in the context of early Buddhist debates about Buddhist practice and the issue of whether it is possible to isolate certain practices as “ultimately true.” In the process of analyzing and interpreting the various teachings of the Buddha, for example, the Abhidharma Buddhists developed their own technique for distinguishing between different types of expressions in the P
!
li Canon and asserted the absolute sovereignty of a select group of teachings over all others (Jayatilleke, 1963). While the original P
!
li commentators distinguished between those passages that needed further explanation (
neyyattha
) from those that already made sense (
n
'
tattha
), and between expressions that used metaphor and conventional speech (
sa
%
muti
) from those that used direct speech (
paramattha
), the Abhidharma Buddhists went further by establishing rigid qualitative differences between all such expressions. That is, they asserted that only the direct, systematic and analytic teachings (such as non-self, dependent arising, causality, and so on) are not only “ultimately true” (
paramattha sacca
) but the only practices that lead to enlightenment. Other teachings expressed in parables, similes, and metaphor, on the other hand, are merely “conventional truths” (
sa
%
muti sacca
) for the unintelligent and thus soteriologically ineffectual (Nyanatiloka, 1983). Aside from minor disagreements the Abhidharma traditions agreed that “ultimate truth” consists in the elimination of “defilements” (
kle
!
as
) and the “cessation” of
dharmas
(units of experience) through precise analytic meditation. As Vasubhandu argues, the highest form of wisdom (
prajñ
#
) requires a “correct” meditative analysis of experience such that without understanding the exact nature of
dharmas
—how they rise and fall, congeal and disintegrate, and form the conditions of all experience--one remains rooted in ignorance and suffering. Because there is no means of pacifying the passions without close investigation of existents, and because it is the passions that cause the world to wander in this great ocean of transmigration, therefore they say that the teacher—which means the Buddha—spoke this system aimed at the close examination of existents. For a student is not able to closely investigate existents without teaching in true doctrine (Pruden, 1988, p. 57). The doctrine of
skillful means
was created by early Mah
!
y
!
na Buddhists to attack this restriction of Buddhist practice to set methodological requirements. Because it was developed specifically within a debate over Buddhist practice, it would be misleading to characterize
up
#
ya
as a “means” to express a “higher” truth apart from this debate—be it metaphysical, epistemological, or otherwise. A more correct characterization is similar to what Kasulis calls “metapraxis,” that is, to a type of reflection devoted specifically to the nature of religious praxis. Whereas metaphysical reflection refers to problems about the nature of being, language, consciousness, the self, and other traditional Western philosophical concepts, metapraxis refers to the power and efficacy of religious praxis itself: Religious praxis generally has either a participatory or transformative function. It participates in, to use Rudolf Otto's term, the "numinous." It is transformative in its improving the person or community in some spiritual way (purifying, healing, reconciling, protecting, informing, and so on). Metapractical reflection inquires into the purpose and efficacy of the practice in terms of these participatory and transformative functions. Something happens, or at least is supposed to happen, in and through religious praxis. Metapraxis analyzes and evaluates that happening. What does the praxis change? Is something remembered? Reenacted? Empowered? If so, exactly how does the praxis work? And why should we prefer our traditional praxis as more effective than another? (Kasulis, 1992, p. 178).
This idea of metapraxis draws our attention away from conceptualizing
up
#
ya
as a “means” for expressing Buddhist truths and directs it toward the philosophical issue of practice that is central to every major debate in the history of Buddhism. It refers specifically to the soteriological practices of Buddhism and expresses a radical critique of any attempt to establish normative guidelines or metapractical “truths” on the grounds that such efforts neglect the concrete suffering of others. As will be argued further below, Nagarjuna uses the dialectical method of “emptiness” to expresses this precise point.
N
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rjuna and Mah
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y
!
na Buddhism
While we know very little about the historical life of N
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g
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rjuna, there is no doubt that he saw himself as firmly established within the Mah
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y
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na Buddhist tradition. In the
Twelve Gate Treatise
, for example, N
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g
!
rjuna says that his fundamental goal is to clarify the teachings of Mah
!
y
!
na Buddhism. I want to reveal and make clear the supremely great teachings of the Tathagata. Therefore, I will explain the teachings of Mah
!
y
!
na (Cheng, 1982, p. 53-54). Likewise, in the
Bodhisambhara(ka)
, or "The Accumulations for Enlightenment," N
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g
!
rjuna aligns himself further with Mah
!
y
!
na Buddhism by expressing views already popularized in the
Prajñ
#
paramita
texts: Prajñ
!
paramita is the mother of Bodhisattvas, skill in means is their father, and compassion is their daughter. Attracting with gifts, teaching the Dharma, listening to the teaching of the Dharma, and also practicing acts of benefit to others--these are the skillful means for attracting (others). While benefiting living beings without tiring and without carelessness, (a bodhisattva) expresses his aspiration for enlightenment: To benefit others is to benefit oneself! Let us not desert living beings! In order to benefit living beings, first generate this attitude and then come to possess the practice of the doors to liberation (Lindtner, 1986, p. 127). Most Western accounts focus exclusively on the
M
#
dhyamikak
#
rik
#
and the
Vigrahavy
#
vartan
'
, two of his most famous texts. However, N
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g
!
rjuna's writings extend beyond these two books. He wrote to Buddhist monks, lay people, orthodox Hindus, and kings, with varying themes and philosophical motives
.
His writing style ranges from the simple to the complex, spanning personal devotional hymns, such as found in the
Catu
&
stava
, to the more philosophically abstract, such as found in the
K
#
rik
#
s
. The diversity of approaches N
!
g
!
rjuna adopts in communicating with different types of audiences is important because it situates him within a
skillful means
tradition that runs from the Buddha and through the Mah
!
y
!
na. Chr. Lindtner is one of the few scholars to recognize the diversity in style that N
!
g
!
rjuna adopts, attributing this to the doctrine of
skillful means
: In my view, the decisive reasons for the variety of N
!
g
!
rjuna's writings is to be sought in the author’s desire, as a Buddhist, to address himself to various audiences at various levels and from various perspectives. This motive would of course be consistent with the Mah
!
y
!
na ideal of upayakausalya (skillful means). Thus, the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the Sunyatasaptati and Vigrahavyavartani were intended to be studied by philosophically minded monks. The Vaidalyaprakarana was written as a challenge to Naiyayikas. The Yuktisastika, the Nyavaharasiddi, and the Pratityasamutpadahrdayakarika as well are contributions to Buddhist exegesis. The Catuhstava is a document confessing its author's