Madhyamaka - Understanding in Modern Scholarship

Understanding in Modern Scholarship

Western scholarship has given a broad variety of interpretations of Madhyamaka:

Over the past half-century the doctrine of the Madhyamaka school, and in particular that of Nāgārjuna has been variously described as nihilism, monism, irrationalism, misology, agnosticism, scepticism, criticism, dialectic, mysticism, acosmism, absolutism, relativism, nominalism, and linguistic analysis with therapeutic value.

Garfield likewise rephrases Ruegg:

"Modern interpreters differ among themselves about the correct way to read it as least as much as canonical intepreters. Nagarjuna has been read as an idealist (Murti 1960), a nihilist (Wood 1994), a skeptic (Garfield 1995), a pragmatist (Kalupahana 1986), and as a mystic (Streng 1967). He has been regarded as a critic of logic (Inada 1970), as a defender of classical logic (Hayes 1994), and as a pioneer of paraconsistent logic (Garfield and Priest 2003)".

These interpreattions "reflect almost as much about the viewpoints of the scholars involved as do they reflect the content of Nāgārjuna's concepts".

Most recent western scholarship (Garfield, Napper, Hopkins, Huntington, and others) have, after investigation, tended to adopt one or another of the Gelugpa collegiate interpretations of Madhyamaka.