Theology
150 to 250 AD, India
Emptiness and the middle way of Buddhist philosophy.
Start learning Nagarjuna →Nagarjuna’s revolutionary claim that nothing whatsoever has independent, inherent existence - that all things are ‘empty’ of any fixed essence of their own.
Nagarjuna’s identification of emptiness with dependent arising - the insight that to exist is to arise in dependence on conditions, never on one’s own.
Nagarjuna’s startling logic - denying that a thing is, is not, both is and is not, or neither - and his refusal to hold any thesis at all.
Nagarjuna’s solution to the charge of nihilism - that there are two levels of truth, conventional and ultimate, and that emptiness destroys neither everyday reality nor the path.
Nagarjuna’s dazzling deconstruction of motion - arguing that under analysis, the most obvious thing in the world cannot be found to exist independently at all.
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