Incommensurability of Two Conceptions of Reality: Dependent Origination and Emptiness in Nāgārjuna’s MMK

Nāgārjuna is reconstructed here as someone who challenges the way that much of the mainstream Western and Indian philosophical traditions deal with the tension between conceptions of ultimate and conventional reality, termed “genic” and “generative.” He argues for fundamental incommensurability between the two and proposes a radically different way to understand the world, making it generatively real and genically empty. In so doing, he questions the distortive presence of genic elements in our understanding of the world, everyday and meditative.