Nagarjuna. Mulamadhyamakakarika. The Doctrine of the Middle Way. Heart Sutra

In the "Mañjuśrī-mūla-tantra," there is the following prophecy of the Buddha Śākyamuni: "After I, the Buddha, have passed away, four hundred years will pass, and then a monk called Nāga will appear. He will understand the subjects of various sciences and will expound the Teaching on Non-substantiality. And after he casts off this bodily skeleton, he will be reborn in the realm of Sukhāvatī. And finally, the state of Buddhahood must be definitely attained by him."

On Nāgārjuna’s treatises, His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV says: "The view of emptiness set forth by Nāgārjuna should be understood as dependent origination. When reading these texts, a deep admiration for Nāgārjuna arises. Many later scholars and holy beings relied in their views on the works of this master."

THE TEACHING ON THE MIDDLE WAY (Mūlamadhyāmaka-kārikā)

The text consists of 450 verses divided into 27 chapters. It is devoted to the topic of the "emptiness" of empirical reality and to the concepts on which experience of knowing it is based. Nāgārjuna’s critique of conventional concepts is carried out on two levels of truth—relative and absolute. The kārikā is built on paradoxes, and for subsequent thinkers it provoked various interpretations. At first, many Western commentators, relying on a superficial reading of Nāgārjuna’s teaching, considered the concept of emptiness as a universal negation, and Buddhist philosophy as an example of extreme nihilism. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the development of Buddhist studies and more careful acquaintance with the tradition, the interpretation of Nāgārjuna as a nihilist became rare.

SEVENTY VERSES ON EMPTINESS (Vigrahavyāvartanī)

The main purpose of this text is to refute, by means of the theory of debate, critical attacks on the concept of emptiness, and to justify the concept of emptiness itself in this way. Nāgārjuna’s position is expressed in this treatise as "making no assertions" and "negating nothing," because, from the standpoint of the highest reality, there is nothing that can be asserted or denied.

This work of 70 verses (kārikās) has come down to us in metrical form, but each stanza has a prose commentary—often a paraphrase of the stanza in the same terms—supplemented with conjunctions and service words. Traditionally, the prose part is considered an auto-commentary, i.e., the text by Nāgārjuna himself, although certain passages apparently are later insertions. The Sanskrit manuscript copied by Śīlakarā (1106–1190) was found by the scholar Rahul Sankrityāyan in 1936 in the Shalu monastery and published.

THE HEART SŪTRA OF BHAGAVĀN PRAJÑĀPĀRAMITĀ (Hṛdaya)

The "Heart Sūtra" is an exposition of Buddhist ideas of Perfect Wisdom and belongs to the shortest Buddhist sūtras. One of the Russian translations contains 22 sentences. Along with the Diamond Sūtra, the Heart Sūtra is a main model of Buddhist literature of "Perfect Wisdom."

Nāgārjuna’s main ideas:

• All things, ideas, events, and the like are "empty," that is, they do not generate and determine themselves; rather, they arise and cease due to various conditions.
• Upon closer examination, even the most rationally constructed positions and systems, including Buddhism, prove to be inconsistent and irrational.
• Things cannot be adequately explained either from within themselves or from their connections with other things.
• No being arises either from itself, from another being, from both itself and another at once, or in any other way.
• All thinking presupposes categories of "identity" and "difference," but these categories are inconsistent, and nothing stands behind them.
• Language does not communicate about things; it only communicates about itself.
• There are two levels of reasoning: conventional and ultimate; the latter is studied through the former; Nirvāṇa is attained based on the latter.
• Our deepest emotional and existential problems arise from attachment to particular positions and predispositions in cognition.
• A deeply rooted, persistent tendency to create an illusion of conceptual order through rational self-justifications can be overcome and destroyed.