Nāgārjuna (Sanskrit, from Nāga + Arjuna; Chn. Lóngshù 龍樹; Tib. Klu sgrub; ) was an Indian scholar-monk, philosopher, and teacher (acharya) of Mahayana Buddhism from south India. He is considered the founder of the Madhyamaka (Centrism, Middle Way) school.Walser (2005) p. 1-3.
Nāgārjuna is widely considered to be the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself.Garfield, Jay L. (1995), The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Indeed, in Tibetan Buddhism, he is even called the "second Buddha".Ye Shaoyong, 2019. “Nāgārjuna”, in Brill's Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Volume II: Lives. pp. 335-347. He was a well known defender of the Mahāyāna movement and his treatises (śāstras) are the foundational texts of a school of Buddhist philosophy known as the view of emptiness (Śūnyatāvāda) or Madhyamaka.Walser (2005) p. 3. Nāgārjuna remains a key figure in all contemporary traditions of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and his philosophical writings on the doctrine of “emptiness” (śūnyatā) influenced Indian philosophy for a millennium, as well as being an indispensable doctrinal source for Mahāyāna doctrine in East Asian Buddhism and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Root Verses on Madhyamaka, MMK) is the most important text on the Madhyamaka philosophy of emptiness. The MMK inspired a large number of commentaries in Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Korean and Japanese and continues to be studied today.Garfield (1995), p. 87.
History
Background India in the first and second centuries CE was politically divided into various states, including the Kushan Empire and the Satavahana Kingdom. At this point in Buddhist history, the Buddhist community was already divided into various Buddhist schools and had spread throughout India.
At this time, there was already a small and nascent Mahāyāna movement. Mahāyāna ideas were held by a minority of Buddhists in India at the time. As Joseph Walser writes, "Mahāyāna before the fifth century was largely invisible and probably existed only as a minority and largely unrecognized movement within the fold of nikāya Buddhism."Walser (2005), p. 43. By the second century, early Mahāyāna Sūtras such as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā were already circulating among certain Mahāyāna circles.Mäll, Linnart. Studies in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā and other essays. 2005. p. 96
Life Very little is reliably known of the life of Nāgārjuna and modern historians do not agree on a specific date or place (multiple places in India suggested) for him.Walser (2005), p. 60. Nevertheless, most scholars place him somewhere in South India at some time between 1st to 3rd century CE. The surviving accounts were written in Chinese and Tibetan centuries after his death and are mostly hagiographical accounts that are historically unverifiable. The earliest accounts date to Kumārajīva's time (350−409 or 344−413) and are quite sparse in detail, while Tibetan accounts date from much later (11th century onwards).
Some scholars such as Joseph Walser argue that Nāgārjuna was an advisor to a king of the Sātavāhana dynasty which ruled the Deccan Plateau in the second century.Walser (2005), p. 61. This is supported by most of the traditional hagiographical sources as well. Archaeological evidence at Amarāvatī indicates that if this is true, the king may have been Yajña Śrī Śātakarṇi (c. second half of the 2nd century). On the basis of this association, Nāgārjuna is conventionally placed at around 150–250 CE.
Walser also thinks that it is most likely that when Nāgārjuna wrote the Ratnavali, he lived in a mixed monastery (with Mahāyānists and non-Mahāyānists) in which Mahāyānists were the minority. The most likely sectarian affiliation of the monastery according to Walser was Purvasailya, Aparasailya, or Caityaka (which were Mahāsāṃghika sub-schools).Walser (2005), p. 87. He also argues that "it is plausible that he wrote the Ratnavali within a thirty-year period at the end of the second century in the Andhra region around Dhanyakataka (modern-day Amaravati)."
Traditional accounts The earliest biographical sources on Nāgārjuna are associated with the Kuchan translator monk Kumārajīva (344–413) and his circle of scholars.Walser (2005), p. 66.Young, Stuart H, 2019. “Nāgārjuna in China”, in Brill's Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Volume II: Lives. pp. 728-734. They include the Zhu weimo-jie jing (注維摩詰經; T. 1775, a commentary on the Vimalakirti), the Maming pusa zhuan (馬鳴菩薩傳, Tradition of Aśvaghoṣa Bodhisattva, a combined biography of Nāgārjuna and Aśvaghoṣa) and also various prefaces to the Chinese translations to Nāgārjuna's works, such the preface to the Zhong lun (中論; *Madhyamaka-śāstra, T. 1564) and the preface to the Da zhidu lun (大智度論; T.1509).
These writings paint a minimal picture of Nāgārjuna, who is depicted as the greatest bodhisattva since Śākyamuni himself. He is depicted as living during a time when the Dharma was "decadent and weak" and as saving the Mahāyāna by championing its teachings through debate and textual composition. According to Huiyuan's preface to the Da zhidu lun, Nāgārjuna was a virtuous gentleman who, saddened at the delusion of the masses, took the vows of a monk and "dwelt in seclusion in the woods and swamps, lived as a hermit and practiced dhyāna. He stilled his mind and studied the subtle, his thoughts penetrating the supranormal." According to Huiyuan, Nāgārjuna had an awakening, and then travelled to the Himālayas, where he received the Mahāyāna teachings from a śramaṇa. He then travelled to the palace of the nāgas, where "there was no important canon or secret text that he did not master." Then, according to Huiyuan, When the roots of his impediments had been pulled up, his name crowned the stages of the [bodhisattva] path … Consequently, the non-Buddhists esteemed his manner and famous gentlemen submitted to his dictates. From that time, the enterprise of the Greater Vehicle flourished again. This basic account of Nāgārjuna as a great Mahāyāna revivalist is echoed by the writings of Sengzhao, and Sengrui, both students of Kumārajīva. For example, Sengrui writes that at the end of the age of Semblance Dharma false teachings flourished, and then Nāgārjuna's writings "opened the great road in such a manner that the carriage of the Greater Vehicle could advance straight ahead". Sengzhao also tells a story of Nāgārjuna defeating a non-buddhist in debate.
Later hagiographies were composed in China and in Tibet. Chinese hagiographies include the Longshu pusa zhuan (T. 2047), which, while traditionally attributed to Kumārajīva, is likely a later composition, and the Fu fazang yinyuan zhuan (T. 2058). These texts state that Nāgārjuna was a Brahmin who had mastered all the Vedas and traditional Brahmin arts and then converted to Buddhism, later travelling to the palace of the dragons (nagas) under the ocean. They also contain various miraculous stories, depicting Nāgārjuna as a spellcasting wonderworker who is a master of mantras as well as alchemy, able to defeat haughty Brahmins in battles of intellect and magic duels."Notes on the Nagarjunikonda Inscriptions", Dutt, Nalinaksha. The Indian Historical Quarterly 7:3 1931.09 pp. 633–53 "..Tibetan tradition which says that Nāgārjuna was born of a brahmin family of Amaravati."Geri Hockfield Malandra, Unfolding A Mandala: The Buddhist Cave Temples at Ellora, SUNY Press, 1993, p. 17Shōhei Ichimura, Buddhist Critical Spirituality: Prajñā and Śūnyatā, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers (2001), p. 67Bkra-śis-rnam-rgyal (Dwags-po Paṇ-chen), Takpo Tashi Namgyal, Mahamudra: The Quintessence of Mind and Meditation, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers (1993), p. 443 The traditional religious hagiographies place Nāgārjuna in various Indian regions. Chinese sources, as well as Candrakirti, place him in Vidarbha, South India,Transaction - Indian Institute of World Culture, Issue 73, Indian Institute of World Culture, 1987, p. 5 while Xuanzang mentions he was from south Kosala.
Traditional religious hagiographies also associate Nāgārjuna with the teaching of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, as well as with having revealed these scriptures to the world after they had remained hidden for some time. The sources differ on where this happened and how Nāgārjuna retrieved the sutras. Some sources say he retrieved the sutras from the land of the nāgas, which is located either in the Himalayas or at the bottom of the ocean.Walser (2005), pp. 69, 74.
Nāgārjuna himself is often depicted in composite form comprising human and nāga characteristics. Nāgas are snake-like supernatural beings of great magical power that feature in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain mythology.Walser (2005), p. 74. Nāgas are found throughout Indian religious culture, and typically signify intelligent serpents or dragons that are responsible for rain, lakes, and other bodies of water. In Buddhism, a naga can be a symbol of a realised arhat or wise person.
Tibetan and Chinese Esoteric sources also associate Nāgārjuna with the use of mantras, and with the Vajrayana tradition in general. For example, Yijing (635–713) writes that Nāgārjuna had passed down the teachings of the Vidyādharapiṭaka ("Canon of the Spell-Wielders"), which was a legendary source of Buddhist dhāraṇī and mantra incantations, to his disciple Nanda, placing him at the beginning of the East Asian Buddhist esoteric tradition, which soon began to see him as their founding patriarch. In a similar fashion, the Pure Land tradition also considers Nāgārjuna to be its first patriarch, basing itself on the Chinese translation of the Dasabhumikavibhāsā (Commentary on the Ten Stages Sutra) which discusses how to be born in the Sukhāvatī pure land of Amitābha Buddha. To authenticate their view of Nāgārjuna as patriarch, Pure Land authors drew on this and other classic sources, like a prophecy found in the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra of Nāgārjuna's rebirth in Sukhāvatī, and the Pure Land Rebirth Dhāraṇī (T. 368) which is said to have been received by Nāgārjuna in a dream, according to a colophon to the dhāraṇī.
Traditional sources also claim that Nāgārjuna practised ayurvedic alchemy (rasāyana), creating elixirs of long life, among other substances. The Longshu pusa zhuan, for example, depicts Nāgārjuna making an elixir of invisibility, and Buton Rinchen Drub, Taranatha and Xuanzang all state that he could turn rocks into gold.Walser (2005), pp. 75-76.
Tibetan hagiographies also state that Nāgārjuna studied at Nālanda Mahavihara. However, according to Walser, this university was not a strong monastic center until about 425. Also, as Walser notes, "Xuanzang and Yijing both spent considerable time at Nālanda and studied Nāgārjuna’s texts there. It is strange that they would have spent so much time there and yet chose not to report any local tales of a man whose works played such an important part in the curriculum."Walser (2005), p. 78
Some sources (Buton Rinchen Drub and the other Tibetan historians) claim that in his later years, Nāgārjuna lived on the mountain of Śrīparvata near the city that would later be called Nāgārjunakoṇḍa ("Hill of Nāgārjuna").Hirakawa, Akira. Groner, Paul. A History of Indian Buddhism: From Śākyamuni to Early Mahāyāna. 2007. p. 242Walser (2005), p. 72. The ruins of Nāgārjunakoṇḍa are located in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh. The Caitika and Bahuśrutīya nikāyas are known to have had monasteries in Nāgārjunakoṇḍa. The archaeological finds at Nāgārjunakoṇḍa have not resulted in any evidence that the site was associated with Nagarjuna. The name "Nāgārjunakoṇḍa" dates from the medieval period, and the 3rd–4th century inscriptions found at the site make it clear that it was known as "Vijayapuri" in the ancient period.
Other Nāgārjunas