Note: apologies in advance for not being bothered to render diacritics properly here.
Thinking a bit lately about Nagarjuna, an important Buddhist philosopher who was to some extent a precursor to Zen.1
He was sort of a via negativa kind of dude, his schtick was basically taking every possible metaphysical assertion and dismantling each in turn. He's not doing allusive or lateral thinking to get at a counterintuitive truth. He's just fucking demolishing conventional logic like a bulldozer and leaving the rest to the reader.
He's pretty difficult to translate well, not because of his grammar or prose style2 but frankly because of what he was actually saying. The language is easy to parse, the ideas are often not, due to the density of information and the often minute distinctions at issue.
Anywho, the bit I've been thinking about lately is from his analysis of Nirvana in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK 25:19-20):
न संसारस्य निर्वाणात् किं चिद् अस्ति विशेषण
na saṁsārasya nirvāṇāt kiṁ cid asti viśeṣaṇaṁ
There is nothing whatsoever of samsara distinguishing (it) from nirvana.
न निर्वाणस्य संसारात् किं चिद् अस्ति विशेषणं। १९
na nirvāṇasya saṁsārāt kiṁ cid asti viśeṣaṇaṁ| 19
There is nothing whatsoever of nirvana distinguishing it from samsara.
निर्वाणस्य च या कोटिः।कोटिः। संसरणस्य च
nirvāṇasya ca yā koṭiḥ koṭiḥ saṁsaraṇasya ca
(That?) is the limit which is the limit of nirvana and the limit of samsara;
न तयोर् अन्तरं किंचित् सुसूक्ष्मम् अपि विद्यते। २०
na tayor antaraṁ kiñcit susūkśmam api vidyate| 20
Even a very subtle interval is not found of (between) them.
That's what Wikipedia has, with a pointed [citation needed] on it. Full disclosure: There's a sliiiiight chance that it was actually just me in 2004 as a student with a few semesters of Sanskrit throwing my best guess up there. Apologies to Wikipedia if so.
Here's a couple of citable translations I have on hand:
Nancy McCagney, Nagarjuna and the Philosophy of Openness, p. 209:
There is no distinction whatever between samsara and nirvana
There is no distinction whatever between nirvana and samsara
The limit of nirvana is that of samsara
The subtlest difference is not found between the two
David Kalupahana, Mulamadhyamakakarika of Nagarjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way, pp. 366-367:
The life-process has no thing that distinguishes it from freedom. Freedom has no thing that distinguishes it from the life-process.
Whatever is the extremity of freedom and the extremity of the life-process, between them not even a subtle something is evident.
If I were to gloss this in Western terms, it would basically be, "heaven and hell3 are coterminous" or perhaps "bondage and liberation are coextensive."
It is sometimes read as equating nirvana and samsara, but if Nagarjuna meant that, he would almost certainly have said it outright. I think the takeaway is more intended to be that when we, as people trapped in the world of suffering, posit a state of salvation from that, we cannot meaningfully be describing a different place or time or space in any sense. If it's anywhere, it has to be here. (And if it's nowhere, it still has to be here.)
(My pet reading on this is that liberation is an act of interpretation, which I think creates a through line from Nagarjuna to Dogen in particular, who is most known for his refusal to distinguish between a proper religious practice of meditation and just sitting down.)
Anyway, I think the reason this is popping up to the forefront of my terrible brain is that I have been thinking a lot lately about how terrible the things I/we love are, and the impossibility of escape, even mentally, from the human condition under oppression. This sounds dire, but the reason Nagarjuna's formulation clicks is partly that it is exactly as optimistic as it is pessimistic, you know?
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This is heinously reductive, so, apologies
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Nagarjuna wrote in Sanskrit, which is not true of that many important Buddhist thinkers in India; Sanskrit was not treated as a liturgical language by Buddhism, so texts were composed and transmitted in regular vernacular languages that people actually so spoke. Buddhism in India also eventually also evolved its own liturgical language, as well as, oddly, a form of fake Sanskrit that was, like, "ye olde tavern" type shit for folks who wanted to sound fancy. Anyway, Nagarjuna's Sanskrit is all grammatically well-formed, but it's also quite simplistic; I'm not sure whether this just reflects the state of the language in scholarly use at the time, or whether it says something about Nagarjuna himself.
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Samsara refers to being trapped in the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, while Nirvana refers to a state of enlightenment which confers freedom from rebirth. Because of this, Buddhism was widely panned as a form of nihilism in India, which was more true than false IMO.
and then I remembered I can just order used books online now
Frederick Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, p. 217:
The extreme limit (koti) of nirvana is also the extreme limit of existence-in-flux
There is not the slightest bit of diference between these two.
Basically everyone who tries to translate Nagarjuna is super annoying. Why on earth translate samsara as existence-in-flux (samsara) and leave nirvana untranslated?
(The answer is quite possibly that Nagarjuna has an inherent appeal for a certain kind of annoying literalist. (Yes I'm including myself there.))
Anywho, Nancy McCagney's is my favorite of the bunch, although they all have problems. Kalupahana's is an easy pick for the worst.
