Ocean of Reasoning: A Great Commentary on Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (review)

Why should we care? Why should we care about a new translation (by Jay Garfield and Geshe Ngawang Samten) of a formerly obscure Tibetan commentary (by Tsong Khapa, fourteenth to fifteenth centuries) on Nagarjuna’s now classic, second-century Indian Buddhist text? It’s a fair question. We have more than enough pressing issues to worry about right now. But interestingly, Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika appears to have a strong pull on many of us, whether or not we claim to be any kind of Buddhist. What may be most interesting about it, in my opinion, is that the text offers a clear and robust (meaning, not remotely tepid or wishy-washy) exposition of a strategy of philosophical self-awareness and avoidance (avoidance of tempting radical extremes)—a strategy that self-consciously eschews all the usual philosophical dualisms, contradictions, disjunctions, and oppositions of all the stark, take-it-or-leave-it choices between apparent logical alternatives and mutual exclusions, between false distinctions and all those ideal binary pairs we love so much, between Hegelian antitheses and Kantian antinomies. It offers a middle that is not a lazy, gray, messy, relative, neutral zone between blindingly clear, absolute whites and blacks—instead it demonstrates and clarifies a demanding conceptual-tightrope walk between all of our latent and manifest zero-sum tendencies.

Personally, I have a weakness for chapter 25, “The Examination of Nirvana,” but I’ve always had a weakness for extreme metaphysical idealism. Work through the text and find your own favorite. It may tell you something about yourself.