Dear DC and Bryan,

sorry for jumping into your discussion. But your topic is quite interesting
and if I may, I would like to comment on something you brought up:


That was my own feeling when I attended the class on Naagarjuna nd

> muulamadhyamakaarikaa. My professor was fully convinced of the above. But I
> never agreed because of a question. If the Buddha and Naagarjuna said the
> same thing how could Naagarjuna become the 'father of Mahaayaana'? It took
> me years to unravel it.
>
> The meanings of 'sunyataa' as used by the Buddha, and Naagarjuna were
> different. If you read Chapter 25 of the Muulamadhyamakaarikaa--nirvaana
> pariikshaa, then you will realise that Naagarjuna did not understand
> 'nibbaana'.
>
> As an example, here is verse 19 of chapter 25:
> na sa.nsaarasya nirvaanaath kincidasti vishesana,m
> na nirvaa,nasya s.nsaaraat kincidasti vishesana.m.
>
> Let me give the idea in English: there is nothing that in nibbaana that can
> be differentiated from what is in sansara and vice versa. He couldn't find
> the difference between sa.nsaara and nibbaana!!!!! In effect sansaara =
> nibbaana in some sense. {I am not familiar with writing Sanskrit is roman
> characters; please forgive me for the above]
>

Nagarjuna himself never acknowledged to be a "Mahayana-follower" and based
his explanations almost entirely on the Sutta-Pitaka (if I understand Stefan
Anacker or Christian Lindtner correctly). However, Nagarjuna directed his
criticism to a purely academic abhidhammic-scholastic understanding of the
teaching of the Buddha (which at that time all Theravada-predecessor schools
were busy with) - and only in that limited sense I could agree with
Nagarjuna and see why one would equal Nibbana and Samsara: To point out,
very shockingly :-) that they are just "names" or mind-objects and not
independent realities.

This of course to me is the only interpretation possible which would still
make sense in the context of the Suttas (as Ven. Nyanananda pointed out so
clearly in the later chapters of his "Concept and Reality" book where he
discusses Nagarjuna and compares his understanding of shunyata with the
Buddha's suññatā).

In this regard, if you look at a passage in MN1, funny enough, that is
exactly the same way the Buddha deals with the "concept" of Nibbana:

nibbānaṃ mā maññi, nibbānasmiṃ mā maññi, nibbānato mā maññi, nibbānaṃ meti

> mā maññi, nibbānaṃ mābhinandi. Taṃ kissa hetu? ‘Pariññeyyaṃ tassā’ti vadāmi.


> nibbānaṃ nibbānato abhijānāti; nibbānaṃ nibbānato abhiññāya nibbānaṃ na
> maññati, nibbānasmiṃ na maññati, nibbānato na maññati, nibbānaṃ meti na
> maññati, nibbānaṃ nābhinandati. Taṃ kissa hetu? ‘Nandī dukkhassa mūla’nti
> – iti viditvā ‘bhavā jāti bhūtassa jarāmaraṇa’nti.

And so personally I understand Nagarjunas criticism to be nothing more than
a warning to take the Buddha's pragmatic message and turn it into a mere
papanca "object" without seeing the true nature of how our mind tries to
"objectify" everything. Then, truly, Nibbana becomes Samsara. Which means
that if we stay in takkāvacara alone (or sammutti as Nina pointed out) but
never make attempts to get beyond words we miss the great opportunity the
teaching of the Buddha gives us in replacing concepts necessary to the path
(like Samsara and NIbbana) with personal realization (paccattam veditabbo) .

But you are definitely right - even if this would have been Nagarjunas
intention, then even his own students did not understand that properly and
very soon made him intellectually part of Mahayanistic ideas...eventually
this justifiable criticism of people taking language and concepts and
mistake them for experience was completely lost and now suddenly the
"Nirvana equals Samsara" koan like riddle became itself another "object"
people "believed" in and grasped!
At this point very much so diametrically opposed (as you mention) to the
raft-metaphor the Buddha usually employed to compare his teaching to, i.e
leading from the one side of suffering to the other.

thank you both for this interesting discussion,

metta,

Lennart
see also this link:
http://theravadin.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/taking-on-the-lankavatara/


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