Tricycle | Awake in the World

The second version of Nagarjuna’s life, however, is not only less historically plausible but reveals through its overlay of mythical elements how Nagarjuna came to be represented as a founder of Mahayana Buddhism. Yet nowhere in Verses from the Center is there a reference to either the Buddha’s Wisdom Discourses or the Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva. Not only does Nagarjuna fail to mention the bodhisattva, he explicitly understands the Buddhist path to be the way of the liberated sage (arhat). Since the Buddha compared this sage to a naga, it could be that Nagarjuna received teachings on emptiness that had been preserved as an oral tradition in the early schools.

Whatever the case, Nagarjuna is convinced that the intelligence that animates the Buddhist path is incompatible with any orthodoxy. He concludes his enquiry into the self with these lines:

When buddhas don’t appear
And their followers are gone,
The wisdom of awakening
Bursts forth by itself.

If Nagarjuna considered the vitality of the early tradition to be exhausted and the Mahayana as propounded through the Wisdom Discourses to be the way forward, why did he not use this verse as an opportune moment to extol the virtues of the bodhisattva? Instead he looked to the emergence of “solitary buddhas” (pratyekabuddha): those who achieve awakening independently of Buddhist institutions through their own insight into contingency and emptiness.

Whoever else he may have been, Nagarjuna was indisputably the first person after the historical Buddha to disclose the Dharma in a voice of his own. Until then, Buddhists had confined themselves to remembering the discourses given by Gautama, while classifying, defining, and cross-referencing his key terms and ideas into encyclopedia (abhidharma) and metaphysical systems. By the time of Nagarjuna, there was no consensus among different Buddhist schools either as to what constituted an authoritative canon, or to what the welter of conflicting discourses meant.

In this uncertain milieu, Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center served as a catalyst to trigger the chain of events that was to revolutionize Buddhist tradition. Through his startling sequence of verses, Nagarjuna recovered the key liberative insights of the Buddha’s teaching and articulated them in an original and compelling language. He opened up the possibility of tradition being animated as much by contemporary voices as by reference to ancient discourses and encyclopedia.

The key to Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center lies in his understanding of emptiness as inseparable from the utter contingency of life itself. Moreover, the emptiness experienced by easing one’s obsessive hold on a fixed self or things is declared by Nagarjuna to be the Buddha’s middle way:

Contingency is emptiness
Which, contingently configured,
Is the middle way.

Emptiness is not a state but a way. Not only is it inseparable from the world of contingencies, it too is “contingently configured.” To experience emptiness is not a descent into an abyss of nothingness but a recovery of the freedom to configure oneself as an intentional, unimpeded trajectory through the shifting, ambiguous sands of life.

Every moment of experience is contingent on a vast complex of myriad conditions. Nothing exists in and of itself as “this” or “that,” “self” or “other.” Everything is what it is only in relation to what it is not. To recognize this emptiness is not to negate things but to glimpse what enables anything to happen at all:

When emptiness is possible,
Everything is possible;
Were emptiness impossible,
Nothing would be possible.

Being inseparable from life itself, emptiness cannot be experienced apart from things. Emptiness is a way of talking about the sublime depth, mystery, and contingency that are revealed as one probes beneath the surface of anything that seems to exist in self-sufficient isolation. Emptiness is the untraceability of any such isolated thing. Yet for something to be empty does not imply that there is nothing there at all. “Were there a trace of something,” says Nagarjuna,

There would be a trace of emptiness.
Were there no trace of anything,
There would be no trace of emptiness.

To understand emptiness does not mean that “emptiness” becomes a discrete “object” of a “consciousness.” Emptiness is experienced as the letting go of fixed ideas about oneself and the world:

Buddhas say emptiness
Is relinquishing opinions.
Believers in emptiness
Are incurable.

One can become fixated on emptiness as easily as anything else. In doing so, what is intended “to stop fixations” becomes an insidious form of entrapment. To symbolize this, Nagarjuna compares emptiness to a snake: a dangerous but fascinating creature that elegantly negotiates the trickiest terrain. While a handler knows exactly how to pick it up, one who does not will be bitten and killed.

An urgency runs through the verses that reveals Nagarjuna’s concern to ease the existential and linguistic fixations that keep one locked in repetitive cycles of anguish. He pulls the comfortable rug of common sense from beneath one’s feet, short-circuiting the habits of the mind, leaving nothing to hold on to. Instead of offering the consolations of belief, he holds out the tantalizing possibility of freedom.

Nagarjuna is not interested in simply reiterating the Buddha’s discourses or offering formulaic reinterpretations of orthodox doctrines. He acknowledges his debt to tradition while speaking in a voice that departs from its stylistic conventions. A playful and provocative tone runs through his text. The verses embody the movement of a supple but disquieting intelligence, which constantly has to sidestep the logical traps of the language Nagarjuna cannot help but utter. His awareness of the contingency of “self” and “other,” “something” and “nothing,” is expressed in a voice that is quixotic and inquisitive, dramatic and tentative, always poised to surprise:

Believers believe in buddhas
Who vanish in nirvana.
Don’t imagine empty buddhas
Vanishing or not.

Nagarjuna has relatively little to say about emptiness. Each poem is an attempt to disclose emptiness through the play of language. For poetry works not by describing its subject with detached objectivity from without, but by imaginatively entering inside its subject so as to disclose it from within. As a poet, Nagarjuna gives voice to the freedom of emptiness from within. He is not interested in confirming what is safe and familiar but in exploring what is unsettling and strange. For the letting go of fixed opinions about oneself and the world can be both frightening and compelling. Although such emptiness may seem an intolerable affront to one’s sense of identity and security, it may simultaneously be felt as an irresistible lure into a life that is awesome and mysterious.

Image: Nagarjuna, seated at right, with disciple Aryadeva. A naga presents a sutra text. Sized pigment on cotton thangka, Eastern Tibet, Kham, mid- to late-eighteenth century.