Discussions

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nagarjun/

Reading this now goes along very nicely with the john dunne podcasts i've been listening too recently. They are on the upaya.org website and highly recommended.

This nagarjuna document is particularly nice because apart from clearly showing how the concept of emptiness evolved and what it means, it writes about the context of the times that nagarjuna was writing in.

...and that's only the first half. I've not finished it yet.

There's quite bit of explanation of doubt and skepticism which should interest secular buddhists too.

Quote from Candol on April 19, 2012, 07:19
http://www.iep.utm.edu/nagarjun/

There's quite a bit of explanation of doubt and skepticism which should interest secular buddhists too.

Nagarjuna seemed to be particularly interested in showing how Buddhist schools at the time were adopting the metaphysical and how it was not what the Buddha had taught . Here's a quote that caught my attention and seems relevant to secular Buddhism:

Nagarjuna appears to have understood himself to be a reformer, primarily a Buddhist reformer to be sure, but one suspicious that his own beloved religious tradition had been enticed, against its founder’s own advice, into the games of metaphysics and epistemology by old yet still seductive Brahminical intellectual habits. Theory was not, as the Brahmins thought, the condition of practice, and neither was it, as the Buddhists were beginning to believe, the justification of practice. Theory, in Nagarjuna’s view, was the enemy of all forms of legitimate practice, social, ethical and religious. Theory must be undone through the demonstration that its Buddhist metaphysical conclusions and the Brahminical reasoning processes which lead to them are counterfeit, of no real value to genuinely human pursuits.

Interdependent causality and the emptiness which change depends on mean that things can always go either way, and so which way they in fact go depends intimately on one’s own deeds. And this leads one to grasp that the proper site of practice for the Buddhist cannot be just the monastery, removed as it tries to be from the machinations of state, economy, social class and the other tumultuous and sundry affairs of suffering beings. As there is no difference between samsara and nirvana owing to the emptiness and constantly changing nature of both, so the change which a Buddhist effects upon herself and those around her is a change in the world, and this constant and purposeful change is the rightful mission of Buddhism.