The purpose of this article is to offer a different account of Nagarjuna than is found in contemporary Western scholarship. It will not ask what it means for causality, truth, the self, or consciousness to be "empty" in a very general sense, but rather how NÄgÄrjuna's philosophy relates to the soteriological practices of Buddhism and what it means for those practices to be "empty" of inherent nature. Rather than describing NÄgÄrjuna as a metaphysician this study will situate him squarely within the early Mahayana tradition and the philosophical problem of practice that is expressed through the doctrine of “skill-in-means†(upÄya-kausalya).
Social Bookmarks
