Nagarjuna- The Second Buddha

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I welcome this small book by Mohini Kent in which she seeks to introduce the great Indian Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna to a contemporary readership. Nagarjuna is someone for whom I have immense admiration. As soon as I wake up in the morning, I recite a verse he wrote in praise of the Buddha and his explanation of emptiness.

I have the greatest respect for the world's various religious traditions, because they have evidently been immensely helpful to many people. However, by and large they depend on faith. In the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha taught us to test and verify his teaching through reason and analysis, and that is what Nagarjuna and other masters of the ancient Nalanda University have done. This scientific approach is a unique feature of the Buddhist tradition.

Nagarjuna made clear that while the teachings found in the Sanskrit Mahayana tradition are more profound than the teachings found in the Pali tradition, they do not contradict the Pali teachings. The Mahayana scriptures elaborate on themes presented and first developed in the earlier teachings of the Buddha, giving deeper and more detailed explanations of the ideas they contained. He explained that the reason we seek to understand the complex explanations of sunyata or emptiness is to understand reality and to eliminate wrong views and distorted ways of thinking, Wrong view here relates to the second of the Four Noble Truths, the origin of suffering. Once we begin to understand wisdom and Viminate wrong view, we may glimpse that achieving liberation actually is possible.

The twenty-first century is unique in the annals of human history, both for its opportunities and its challenges. We, who live in this century, are unique human beings, poised as we are on the cusp of nature's next evolutionary thrust forward. Each one of us can participate in the great adventure of consciousness without being dogged by dogma or circumscribed by rigid religious and social rules. Personal freedom, for many, is theirs for the asking. The future, it seems, is in our hands. By personal effort, we can invent ourselves and shape our lives.

This is also the message of Nagarjuna, the ancient Buddhist monk. Legends revolve around his birth and death, as is customary with great heroes. Who he was, where he lived, or even when he lived, iv all a bit of a mystery, but there is nothing shadowy about the message he left behind. According to traditional accounts, he was a scholar monk at Nalanda University, the great Indian centre of Buddhist learning, in the late second century AD He went on to become the head at Nalanda, his mental prowess being such that he alone would defeat scores of scholars in debate. His philosophy and writings fundamentally influenced Buddhism in the millennia to follow. Nagarjuna's most famous work-the Mulamadhyamakakarika (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way)-introduced the concept of emptiness, and after Gautama Buddha, Nagarjuna remains the single most important figure in Buddhist thought. In fact, in the Mahayana traditions, his work has earned him the sobriquet of "The Second Buddha.

Frankly, much of the Madhyamaka text is baffling, maddeningly so to lay readers. It can seem like an exceptionally difficult mental maze from which it is impossible to find one's way out! However the one thing that stands out clearly is its emphasis on reason. Reason itself helps in deconstructing reason, to assimilate all knowledge that transcends reason. And that is why the Madhyamaka is important for our present age.

This book is not for the scholar, nor do I claim to be a Buddhist scholar. This book is for the simple seeker who, like me, is trying to understand. The concept of emptiness is truly difficult to put across in simple words, ie. the notion that people and things, all phenomena in fact, lack a fixed, immutable essence. Had that not been the case, it would be impossible to be transformed into something else. It is because of interdependence and lack of rigid, immutable personal essence of being that we can change, that samsara (the world of suffering) can flow into nirvana (enlightenment), which is why the Buddha too was transformed. It is a frightening concept because people do not like change. They fee safe and secure in sticking to the familiar. What's more, each one of us likes to believe that we have our own independent thoughts and ideas, and we are not comfortable being told that there is nothing definitive in us that cannot be changed.