The wisdom for solving our irreconcilable problems.

Meet Nagarjuna

Our world is drowning in a sea of rights vs. wrongs, governments trapped in ideological deadlocks, conflicts and wars, based on the same, religions likewise immersed in egocentric, self-righteousness (that results in an ever-increasing division of sects), news spun as fake, political alienation, and of course, a global pandemic that is decimating both people and economies. And lest we not forget: Global climate changes, that if not addressed soon, will eliminate us all. It is thus time to pull Nagarjuna out of the closet and dust him off.

We begin this dusting off in a familiar fashion; I need to introduce readers to Nagarjuna. He was a wise sage who lived a long time ago, roughly 1,800 years ago (150–250 CE), about 600 years following The Buddha’s death and, according to modern scholars, was thought to have resided in Southern India. In the Zen tradition, he is the 14th Patriarch. He is also recognized as a patriarch in Tantric and Amitabha Buddhism.

While considered a philosopher of incomparable standing, he put no stock in philosophy, claiming his mission was the apologist of the Buddha’s transcendent wisdom—Beyond any rational articulation. In that sense, he was a sort of Apostle Paul of Buddhism. The Buddha attempted to convey, with words, matters beyond words. The Buddha, like The Christ, was consequently recondite and rarely understood. Nagarjuna set out to correct that and, in the process, created what is now known as The Middle Way—of the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

The reason he is so critical to today’s world is that he was able to show, in a less mind-boggling way, that we live within a world of seeming contradictions that, when carefully examined, are not contradictory. To most, we live in a relative world, governed by conditional rights vs. conditional wrongs with nothing beyond. Nagarjuna used the logical method of his era to articulate how there is no contradiction. At that point, ancient Indian scholars employed a method of logic called a tetralemma: an algorithm with four dimensions (affirmation, negation, equivalence, and neither). In terms of conditional rights versus conditional wrongs, it would look like this:

1. Explicit absolute right exists: affirmation of absolute right, implicit negation absolute wrong.
2. Explicit absolute right does not exist: affirmation of absolute wrong, implicit negation absolute right.
3. Explicit absolute right both exists and does not exist: both implicit affirmation and negation.
4. Explicit absolute right neither exists nor does not exist: implicit neither affirmation nor negation.

He thus created the Two Truth Doctrine of conditional truth and unconditional truth. That doctrine stated, so long as this tetralemma method of logic is used alone, there is no way to reconcile either a conditional absolute right or a conditional absolute wrong since all conditions are contingent. That is where Nagarjuna began, but it is not where he ended. He then went to the next level—to the unconditional, which has no contingencies (beyond rational understanding) and pointed out there was a fifth dimension: none of the above.

“The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths: a truth of worldly convention and ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the distinction drawn between these two truths do not understand the Buddha’s profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth, the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, liberation is not achieved.”

Allow me to translate for you. We ordinarily consider truth as conditionally contingent (e.g., one thing contingent upon something else, such as right and wrong). Still, there is an ultimate truth beyond contingencies, and these two (while appearing as two), are actually two sides of the same thing. They arise dependent upon one another, and neither can exist without the other, sort of like the inside and outside of a roof. One of these truths is a truth of discriminate opposition (e.g., this vs. that; right vs. wrong—the core dilemma), but the other is the truth of indiscriminate union. We must use the conventional truth to lead us to the higher truth since the conventional is the coin of standard logic and communications (words), and we use this truth to know how it is different from the higher. But unless we experience the higher truth, we will forever be lost in a conditionally, contingent, rational trap.

Then he stated a subset of this doctrine. That conventional truth was a matter of tangible form, but the higher truth was of imperceptible emptiness (thus, what the Buddha had said in the Heart Sutra/Sutra of Perfect Wisdom: Form is emptiness; Emptiness is form). Nagarjuna reasoned that if this ineffable dimension of emptiness was valid, then it must apply to everything, including emptiness, thus empty emptiness, which creates an inseparable feedback union back to form again. The two are forever fused together.

So how does this affect the problems of today? It “can” revolutionize the dilemma of egotism and self-righteousness. When properly understood and experienced, it means that the obstacle standing in the way of the higher truth is the perceptible illusion of the self (ego: the contingent, conditional image). Once that illusion is eliminated, we experience our true self (unconditional non-image) that is the same for all people. 

There is no discrimination at this higher truth level (e.g., distinction), and consequently, there is no absolute right vs. wrong, but neither is there not an absolute right nor wrong (independent of each other). Everything is unconditionally, indiscriminately united, yet not conditionally. Thus it can neither be said that truth either exists or does not. If all of us could “get that,” the conflicts of the world would vanish in a flash, and we would at long last know peace and unity among all things.