Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

Page 543

BUDDHISM
Nāgārjuna was an actual character, and, moreover, a brilliant, crystallizing, and energizing philosophical spirit. Throughout northern India they still speak of him as “the Buldha withiout his characteristic marks.” And the works ascribed to him are revered equally with "the sūtras from the Buddha's own mouth." 63
We read in the fourteenth chapter of Nāgārjuna's Madhyamika Sāstra ("The Guide-Book of the School of the Middlc Way"): “The teaching of the Buddha relates to two kinds of truth, the relative, conditional truth, and the transcendent, absolute truthi”; 64—the meaning of which basic pronouncement is clear enough in the light of what we have already learned concerning the mystery of Enlightenment, as experienced and elucidated in the traditional schools of India. It is not a novel pronouncement, by any mcans. Nor is there anything surprising in Nāgārjuna's description of the incffable nature of the supreme experience: "The eye does not see and the mind docs not think: this is the highest truth, wherein men do not enter. The land wherein the full vision of all objects is obtained at once has been termed by the Buddlia the highest goal (paramārtha), the absolute, the truth that cannot be preached in words.” 45 Which, as we have said, is nothing new. Neverthcless, in the following verse appears the great key to Nāgārjuna's particular approach:
śünyam iti na vaktavyam ašūnyam iti vā bhavet, ubhayam nobhayan ceti; prajñāplyartham tu kathyate.
*3 Bunyiu Nanjio, A Short History of the Twelve Japanese Buddhist Selts, Tokyo, 1886, p. 48. 64 Madhyamika sästra 14; cited by Radhakrishnan, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 658. * 16. 3; Radhakrishnan, op. cit., pp. 662-663.
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