Summer 2008 — Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika

Across these five talks from the 2008 summer sesshin at Earth Spirit, Mike gives a rough overview, in his own words, of most of the twenty-seven chapters of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (MMK), a work that seems to be very difficult to understand and that he translated, not as a scholar, simply to see if Nagarjuna said the same kind of thing that Dogen said, which he admits gave him a kind of bias. In Mike’s reading, Nagarjuna is trying to cut through the category-based analysis of reality in the Abhidharma, and many of the chapters return to the theme of ‘not separate’, for instance between a subject and an object or between an agent and an action: our language divides the world into pieces, which, Nagarjuna says, is the only way we can talk about it, but it is not actually always like that. Already in the second talk Mike names two consistent themes that, he says, Nagarjuna develops throughout the book: the point of view of the present moment and the point of view of unity of experience. Mike stresses that Nagarjuna is not a nihilist, although he has been labelled one because of his constant denials: what he says is ‘no, not that’, and what he points to is something real here. He does not reject cause and effect either, Mike says, and, like Dogen, he does not deny the value of categorisation.

In the first chapter, as Mike explains it, Nagarjuna rejects the Abhidharma theory of the conditions under which things come into and go out of existence and keeps four of its categories as fundamental characteristics of reality itself: an abstract and a physical side, which are only two sides of one thing, immediacy, the fact that we are always here in the present, and the universal, the universe as a whole, undivided. The chapters on the senses, on emotion and on action and agent, as Mike presents them, make the same point of non-separation: the taster, the chocolate and the ‘nice’ form one indivisible experience, the emotion we feel and the ‘we’ who feel it are inseparable, and in the real act of picking up a book the one who picks it up, the hand and the book are indivisible. Mike calls the Abhidharma an incredibly analytical work, like an attempt to describe the whole world in categories; its authors had no tools and in their place based their categories on meditative insight, which he thinks meant imagination, and so constructed a kind of pseudo-science, very sophisticated for its time, which is just what Nagarjuna wants to cut through. Mike finds the reason for this cutting through in zazen: one of the fundamental principles of Buddhist teaching is that reality is one, and once we settle down a bit in zazen we notice that we are sitting in something that is not separate, because we are not separating it. The centre of Buddhism according to Nagarjuna and Dogen, he says, is not to divide the world into categories, as the very powerful and beneficial pursuit we call science does, but to stop dividing the world into categories. When we stop, it is as if the categories, pulled out on bits of elastic, zip back into the middle and leave something undivided, and in zazen, he says, we do not do something to make ourselves whole but stop doing everything; if we aim to be whole we can never be whole, Mike adds, but we become whole when we act fully, because then there is no space or time in which to think about what we are doing. Thinking and planning belong for him to the level of daily life, which Nagarjuna calls samsara, and we cannot function without them, but at a fundamental level there is a gap between thinking and acting that we do not notice.

In the chapter on formation Nagarjuna says that the world we form in our consciousness is made up of misrepresentations, but, as Mike explains it, he does not mean by this that we live in an illusion; he means that human beings construct a world and share it, a world of things like a bank, marriage or a retreat, which for Mike is not real in the sense that Nagarjuna means, yet which we need to affirm because we live in society. When Nagarjuna denies process, Mike says, he does so in order to put forward the existential viewpoint of reality being immediate, here and now, and Nagarjuna suggests that process is a human explanation for reality; time, too, is for both Nagarjuna and Dogen a construct, in Mike’s account, because ‘now’ is always here. Asked what changes once we know this, Mike answers that the question is abstract, whereas their teaching is concrete: this moment, here and now, is all there is, and if that makes a difference, he cannot say what the difference is. What we get from realising that reality is here and now is very simple, he says, but it is very difficult to keep ourselves in the present, and to remain in the present and not drift off too much we practise zazen, where we keep drifting off into thoughts and bringing ourselves back. In the last talk Mike skims through chapters 22 to 27 and reads two verses: the last verse of the book, a homage to the Buddha who taught the true dharma as the relinquishing of all views, suggests to him that all views are constructs and that reality is that which is left when all our views cease, and the dedicatory verse at its beginning states, for him, that reality is just here, just at this moment. We cannot live in society without views, he says, but we need to be able to relinquish them, which is what we do, or try to do, in zazen; although Nagarjuna does not mention zazen in the MMK at all, the last verse suggests to Mike that Nagarjuna must have practised it.