PREVIEW-Episode 27: Nagarjuna on Buddhist “Emptiness”

0:00 Unknown speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode Preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living. But then he saw that all of that was emptiness and attained nirvana. Our question for episode 27 does reality have a foundation at all? With readings by the 2nd century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, including Reasoning the 60 Stanzas and Emptiness the 70 Stanzas. You can find a link to these and other readings plus other entertaining things at our blog partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, multiclassing a fifth level bodhisattva and a third level rogue in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:01 Seth: Ah, this is Seth Paskin, aspiring merely to attain virtuous action in Austin, Texas.

1:09 Eric: And this is Eric Douglas out of England's sadly missing Wes.

1:13 Mark: Yes, Wes is a sick boy. He had nothing to say anyway, he's attained Nirvana. Say that we have some rules for our discussion, but when I look upon them, I see only emptiness. Let me give them nonetheless, because they are conventionally true. Number one, we try not to assume our audience is fully enlightened about philosophy or has even heard the Steely Dan song Bodhisattva. Number two, we will not do the name dropping thing except when we feel like it. We will say what we mean instead of saying, all enlightened beings should know what I'm talking about, for they have surely read Carl Jung's masterwork the Collective Unconscious says, you must make the love to me. Number three, we shall be rigorous in exacting all that we say, except for Eric, who as guest is allowed to blither away nonsensically and unendingly.

2:01 Seth: I don't remember that exception ever being provided before for any other guest.

2:07 Mark: So yes, Buddhism.

2:10 Seth: For this particular episode we had a specific reading by a specific author. Since Buddhism is kind of a very broad term, maybe it would make sense to kind of explain what this particular guy this isn't the Buddha. We're not. We didn't read the Buddha. Right? We read it. Somebody who was attempting to explicate certain aspects of the Buddha's teachings.

2:32 Mark: Yes, we did not read the Buddha. The Buddha is from around 563-400-BC people think maybe. And this guy that we read is more like 150 to 250 AD somewhere in there. And they're not clear on either of them. And Buddha didn't actually write anything anyway. Oral tradition.

2:52 Eric: We were originally talking about doing an episode on Zen, right?

2:57 Mark: Yes. It being the coolest, most western one.

3:00 Eric: Most definitely. It's so hip. So when we started to think about that, we realized that, nevermind Zen, what was Buddhism. And then when we thought about Buddhism, we kept sort of going backwards because we were thinking Zen. Then go back to China with Chan Buddhism, then take a step back behind that to Mahayana Buddhism. Take a step back behind that, we get to the Buddha. We took a half a step up and we got to Nagujana.

3:27 Mark: Now you pronounce it Nargujana.

3:28 Eric: That's the way I learned it at school.

3:30 Mark: Okay. I just listened to a. I listened to a YouTube video where the guy actually said Nagarjuna as opposed to Nagarjuna or Narjuna.

3:40 Eric: Maybe it's the English thing. I don't know.

3:42 Mark: Who knows, Maybe this guy didn't know what he was talking about. And it had flute music in the background, so it must be authentic.

3:49 Seth: Let's not get hung up on pronunciations like we did. I think early episode somebody was complaining about the way we were pronouncing German names.

3:56 Mark: That happened after we did. Folks that listened to our Daoism episode on Zhuangzi, we'll recognize Eric, he was our guest last time. And after that somebody came down to us and said, how could you do a whole episode and talk for three hours and not even know how to pronounce the guy's name? Chuang Tzu. Because that's how I heard it in my classes.

4:15 Seth: Yeah. And that one at least was transliterated into pretty standard English. There are accent marks on tops of letters on this thing that I have no idea how to pronounce. So I won't make any apologies for what might come out of my mouth this episode.

4:29 Eric: I want to know how the Nagas pronounced him's name. That's what I want to know.

4:32 Mark: Ah, actually we should talk about the Naga story for just a second as a.

4:36 Eric: Absolutely.

4:37 Mark: Nagarjuna means lover of snakes, Right? Lover of sea snakes. Of the Nagas. The Nagas are magical sea snake beings that were popular in the mythology of the time. And so he was regarded as passing on some secret teachings of the Buddha that hadn't leaked out before. And so the explanation of why these were so secret is because the Nagas, the snake people, listened to Buddha talk. And in fact I read some of the Lotus Sutra I think maybe, Eric, you pointed me out that one, which I guess was kind of current at the time, probably Nagarjuna would have read that, right?

5:11 Eric: Some variation of it. I don't know when they put the actual Lotus Sutra together. But of course, the Lotus Sutra, the sutras like that are actually supposed to be expositories from the Buddha himself.

5:20 Mark: Yes. Started off as a big speech from the Buddha and the whole first chapter was, here's everybody that was. There must have been 5,000 people and all the kings and the gods and they were all gathered around and listening to the Buddha and the Nagas were there and they're all. And all these other magical beings are hanging around cheering for the next awesome thing that the Buddha is going to say. It's pretty over the top. And so the Nagas apparently learned some things from the Buddha that the humans at the time, they weren't prepared for. And so they had to wait for someone wise enough to be born to pass on this special teaching. And then when Nagarjuna showed up, he was so evidently wise that they took him to their undersea kingdom and taught him the core doctrines of interdependent origination and other things that are special to the Mahayana school and associated with Nagarjuna.

6:09 Eric: I learned a slightly different variation, so Nagujana. Sorry, I don't know if I can stop pronouncing them that way. And all the snake people that are offended, I'm very, very sorry. So Nagarjuna was a very cheeky person. Apparently. The story goes with him too, that when he was young, he broke in with some friends into the king's harem and attempted to seduce the king's mistress. They were almost successful, but they kind of all got caught. He managed to just escape. All his friends got their heads cut off. And because of that, he saw how impermanent life was and vowed not to follow the paths of desire anymore.

He did such a good job of it that the Nagas were very impressed with him and eventually invited him to their undersea kingdom, where they had some very special knowledge waiting, which had come from the Buddha and which they then passed on to him. Now, the reason that that knowledge had not been brought out before his time was not so much that they were waiting for this very special person, but because humanity as a whole was not ready. The idea is that Buddha has this sort of incredible awakening, and then he brings out these teachings, but people really aren't ready to hear most of his teaching right off the bat.

And so a whole lot of the teaching is putatively stored with these various places, people. And this is not the only instance where this happens. And the idea is that this knowledge then gets brought out to all the people at the right time. Now, what this sort of corresponds to is then also a very major split in Buddhism that happens a little bit like the Reformation, that originally Buddhism appears, whatever you said, 500 BC, give or take 100 years, and then over the next several hundred years, say, like with Christianity, you have many schools, many versions of Buddhism begin to form.

Then 200 or so BC or 100 AD, it's not clear. There's this major upheaval and this split in a fundamental doctrine. And this corresponds to Nagujana and the receiving of this wisdom. That's, of course, why we've now kind of focused on Nagujana, because it's sort of a major branch and split off.

8:27 Mark: Yes. So you're talking about the rising of

8:29 Eric: the Mahayana tradition, right, which means great vehicle. And the correspondent term is hinayana. But hinayana, which means lesser vehicle, is actually a term only used by Mahayana people.

8:42 Mark: Right. There are non Mahayana traditions alive. There's like the Theravada. Theravada that is sometimes associated with hinayana, but not really that. Whatever they're objecting to and that they call the Hinayana school really doesn't exist anymore.

8:58 Eric: The Theravada, they don't all regard that as a very nice name, so they don't use the name. But yeah, essentially Theravada is the alternative. All of the Buddhisms that you find south of the Himalayas, so all of them in Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, Southeast Asia, everywhere there, that's all Theravada Buddhism.

9:17 Mark: Okay.

9:17 Eric: All right. And Theravada was actually one school of the many schools that belonged to traditional orthodox Buddhism. And when Islam came to India in about 700 or 800, whatever it was, and it just swept like a wave, they destroyed Buddhism. They killed everybody and destroyed all the temples. So the Buddhism got wiped out of India, everything south of the Himalayas, unless you go to Sri Lanka.

9:40 Mark: Right. And the texts we are reading are most, if not all translated from Tibetan.

9:45 Eric: Right.

9:46 Mark: They're written in Sanskrit, but in a lot of cases, these texts don't even exist anymore in the original Sanskrit.

9:51 Unknown speaker: Right.

9:51 Mark: So all types of Buddhism is the realization that life sucks, we must escape life somehow. We must escape the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Right. With the whole reincarnation thing was around hundreds of years at least before Buddha with the Vedas. Right. This was an Old belief. This is relevant to why Western philosophers would care about it in the first place. Like if you read Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is a philosopher who was influenced directly by Buddhist writings. And the thing that he reacted to was what he saw as pessimism in it.

So whether you believe in reincarnation or not, life is mostly suffering, right? Even if something good is going on. The way that we are constructed is such that, and you can think of this back to Freud from last time, that we are constructed in a way that happiness cannot be permanent for us, that we are forever at need, and that just overall things in the environment are going to go against us. That even if we have a happy, comfortable life, well, there's going to be suffering and death. It's all going to be meaningless from that respect. So the enlightened person will want to get out of this somehow.

And Buddha supposedly discovered a way to do this through meditation, through transcendence of this material plane.

11:07 Eric: Buddha comes around, he gives a whole lot of sermons after sort of having this great realization is truth. What's in a way fundamentally philosophically interesting is that he throws away all kinds of notions that had been around up to his time. A lot of traditional metaphysics, a lot of traditional polytheist views. It's very difficult to say exactly what he's saying with respect to what kind of religion is it or if it is even a religion. However, the fundamental teaching that he espouses is called the Four Noble Truths. These are four fundamental truths that provide the absolute foundation to Buddhism and everything that follows. The first is that suffering is the real nature of our lives. The second Noble Truth is that it has a cause. It arises through the accumulation of karma,

12:00 Mark: or more loosely, actually I'm just looking at one version of it on the web. The origin of suffering is attachment. So it's the fact that we have desires at all, sure. Right. Is what causes us suffering. We make ourselves suffer.

12:12 Eric: Go. What do you have there for the third one?

12:14 Mark: The cessation of suffering is attainable, right?

12:17 Eric: So there's a way out of this nasty little prison. And the Fourth Noble Truth is the way that one needs to follow in order to get out of that prison. And the fourth one then breaks up into what's sometimes called the Eightfold Path, which is the sort of eight methods you can use to actually get out of it. It's all very cool and actually kind of practical and useful in sort of a day to day life way.

12:39 Mark: I do think that just the way that the Eightfold path is stated are almost circular. So the Eightfold Path is stuff like right view, right speech, right intention, right action. In other words, it's not telling you what, it's not characterizing in any way what the right view is, what the right speech is. It's just make sure that you're paying attention to all these things. Your mindfulness, your concentration, your action, your livelihood, your effort. Pretty much you need to remake yourself as a person into something else to break away from this ordinary way that people live, which is being dominated by their passions.

13:14 Eric: Okay, well there are some things that have been written about this certainly, but what is fair to say is that all Buddhism believe in the four noble Truths and their thumbs up to the Eightfold Path. And once you get into the details of, well, exactly how you do right speech and right action and all that sort of stuff, then you'll start to find some subtle variations and different views in schools.

13:36 Mark: So the goal is for each person to follow this Eightfold path, to meditate and so attain nirvana, which is escape from the cycle of rebirth. And for the old time Buddhists, that was it. You get out, you become an arhat. Right, that's the enlightened one, I believe is the term.

13:52 Eric: The arhat is a Vedic notion.

13:54 Seth: This is getting dangerously close to throwing out too many words. That was the only thing about reading the text is that there's like, oh, and you must of course believe in the triple gem and the Sabahana and this and that. There's just much so, so much jargon.

14:06 Eric: You're right.

14:07 Mark: We will restrain ourselves.

14:09 Seth: Enlightened, whether it's Vedic or arhat or

14:11 Mark: whatever, just we will not tell what the four fruits are. What the what the, the six realms. There's a lot of lists of things. Yes, there are words in, oh, let's

14:22 Eric: do the six realms. They're fun. I like that one.

14:25 Mark: Actually, I do want to make fun of that for a minute because we were talking about the cycle of rebirth. That part of this was that there are all these different worlds that you could be born into. And in fact even if, oh like if you're really good, maybe you'll go into a heaven, but then like what are you doing this heaven? And this is different than Nirvana. This is one of the other six realms is, well, you'll just lie around and accumulate bad karma essentially in the heaven. And so you'll end up in one of the hells again. So even if your life here or your anticipated life in this heaven is going well, for sure you're going to be reborn enough times that you'll end up in some bad places in there. A few of the realms that are hells or the. The realm of hungry ghosts and other stuff like that. So that there's a lot packed in there.

15:04 Eric: Strictly speaking. Right. You're really talking about a school of Buddhism called Vajrayana. I'm not sure the other Buddhisms actually advocate the six realms it's mentioned in. I don't think that Zen does. I don't think that Zen Buddhism does, or if they do, I mean, you will find authors who refer to it as a metaphor. I mean, this is the same concept of, you know, what the hell do you mean by hell in the Christian context? When you look at all the different sects and you find they have very different conceptions of what sheol or whatever the hell the Hebrew term is, like what that refers to. So there's not a sort of one set of reincarnated realms fits all.

15:36 Mark: Now that you mentioned, I'm not sure if I saw that reference in the Nagarjuna reading or in one of the commentaries.

15:41 Eric: When Buddhism appeared, the context was two parts. One was there was the Vedic religions and the other was that there was the Vedic philosophies.

15:49 Mark: Vedic religions is like the parent religion of Hinduism.

15:52 Eric: Basically, it's Hinduism, but the whole Hinduism is like this massive pantheon where if you come along and you have a different religion, they'll go, cool, another God and incorporate it in. And that means Jesus and that means, you name it. I mean, they just keep growing. They accept Buddha and they're good with it all. One of the fundamental concepts in Vedic theology is that nevertheless you can, if you're really good and you're a Brahman class, right, remember, and you're male, you can actually attain a state of perfection where you get to go and hang out with, you know, Vishnu and these groovy gods and be enlightened, you know, term that you hear often.

16:29 Mark: Okay, so even the term of enlightenment was kind of already in the Vedic tradition.

16:34 Eric: It's in the yogic. All the yogic traditions, you know, Maharishi yogi, this, that and the other, they all have this notion of enlightenment. Sometimes they call it illuminated, sometimes they call it transcended. You know, however you want to translate it from the Sanskrit, this fundamental notion of some profound spiritual attainment is possible. And to some extent, at least some Buddhists will claim, okay, this was a move away from that into a different way of engaging in dharma, among other things. You know, it's not sufficient Simply that you worship some gods and that they tap you on the shoulder and then off you go.

That the whole notion of liberation, which is operative term for enlightenment in Buddhism, happens through a very specific methodology and way. It was trying to dispel a whole lot of ritual, a whole lot of doctrine, and also a whole lot of philosophy. And one of the things to bear in mind in this is that, you know, as sophisticated as Greece was in the Axial Age, in those sort of few hundred years from 600 BC to 300 BC, that same period saw a similar flowering in India, where you had umpteen philosophers writing extraordinary texts. The first text of grammar was written at this time in Sanskrit.

But one very important difference is that there's a sense in which theology and philosophy didn't suffer the kind of separation it seems to have. At least when we look at, you know, Greece from this modern day, we say, oh, well, there was of course they believed in various gods, but they had their philosophy and those two were different. You never had that separation in the east, neither in India nor in China. Philosophy and theology never properly separateable. Does that sound right to you guys?

18:13 Mark: It's not reflected so much in what we read, which is for the most part very secular. Certainly from the description I gave of the Lotus Sutra, Buddha himself was deified, certainly in the tradition. Even though one of the things you hear about Buddhism is it's fundamentally atheistic that there's not a God underlying everything or something like this, still, anybody that's a hero in any culture pre modern age is going to be deified at some point. So not only Buddha, but Nagarjuna in this whole story about the sea, snakes and stuff like this. So we can do our best to kind of giggle at that and, you know, look for the actual philosophical core of what's in there, apart from any dogmatism.

18:52 Eric: Well, let's not forget modern China. Mao got deified. Mao, strictly speaking, is demigod. Very nice.

19:00 Mark: So Mahayana comes along. I know one of the big differences was just the idea that instead of just trying to escape the cycle of birth and redeath, you want to have compassion and come back and help other people and become Bodhisattva. That's the new goal that you're not trying to just. It's not nihilistic, you're not just trying to escape everything, you're trying to bring everybody else to enlightenment. So that ultimately the goal is that every single soul that exists would be enlightened, not just you trying to get out of there.

19:26 Eric: Well, we Got the Buddha sort of comes out of this Vedic context and then bad Vedic habits creeped back into Buddhism over the several hundred years that followed Buddha. And this is where Nagujana then enters the picture and where you then have this sort of equivalent of a reformation happen. And the idea is to sort of purify and get back to what Buddha was talking about and not to have all this new doctrine, new rituals. This is the claim of what are then many Mahayana Buddhists. And in many respects Nagujana is the person that is pointed to as sort of the Luther, you know, of this Reformation.

20:02 Mark: I guess one of the things that I heard growing up about Buddhism is that, oh, they don't believe in God, they believe in the void. That if you look what's underneath all of the physical things that you see, your idea of yourself is profound nothingness. So in other words, there is an ontology, a list of things that are. But what is in it is this void which is, you know, you might as well call it the dao. Whereas reading this, it seemed it was a lot more subtle than that, this pure nothingness. Because that sounds like a very nihilistic philosophy.

And because if you really think that why pursue ethical action? I mean, you might say there's the Eightfold path because, oh, I have to be selfless to people because I want to achieve nirvana. I want to get away from my urges that are bringing me suffering. And so therefore I should be ethical. But there's no reason, it's not that I actually have a responsibility to other people because ultimately those other people are not real and I'm not real. This knife that I'm stabbing you with is not real. And the raping that's going on next door is not real.

So it really undermines it's very self defeating sort of philosophy to really take seriously the idea that all is void, this is all just illusion.

21:06 Eric: Well, I think that's more of a Western trivialization. I found in my experience that I mostly hear that talking to Christians, you know, who just utterly don't understand, you know, what's going on.

21:17 Mark: Well, I'm, I just wanted to voice that just to get that out there.

21:21 Eric: Fair enough. And it's also partly due to folks like Schopenhauer. And if you look at the way people take Nietzsche, of course, you know, he's a nihilist, he doesn't believe in anything. And I was like, well, and maybe sit down and read the book first or something.

21:32 Seth: Let me throw something in here then. This idea that Mark just mentioned of nothingness and a Western view of, well, if you're going to try to tell people to act a certain way, if you're going to try to give them an ethical system or give them morality, there has to be something that backs it up, that underlies it. And so we have a very well developed metaphysics that underlies the ethical system that we accept in the West. And because we have that, when we look at these other cultures, we say, oh, well, if you're going to tell me to act a certain way, then you're going to have to somehow justify telling me to do that.

So for our view simplistically, we say, well, the goal is to get to the afterlife, the kingdom of heaven. And the way you do that is by living a virtuous life here on this earth. And the reason you want to do that is because God tells you to do it. And we have this whole series of steps we go through. And so I think we're looking for a similar kind of structure in Buddhism to say, oh, well, here, yeah, you want to live a virtuous life because the goal is to get to this point which we call liberation or nirvana or whatever. And here's how it's underwritten by this metaphysics.

What was interesting to me about this text and about trying to understand this was in a weird way, the goal is not virtue, right action. The goal is liberation, which seems to me somehow qualitatively different than attaining the kingdom of heaven or the afterlife or whatever. And it's not the same as virtue ethics, because although virtue is important in the system, it's not the end goal. Being a virtuous person is not all there is to it. The goal is getting out of this cycle of rebirth. That just seems to me to be something fundamentally different than what I can relate to as a Westerner in kind of Western religious, traditional.

23:17 Eric: Properly speaking, this divide is not so much Buddhism, but East and West. This is the difference, I would say, more between just the Vedic religions altogether and the Western religions. Fundamental to Judaism is this notion of a relationship with the personalized God. And fundamental to the Vedic religions is this notion that you're in life. This is weird, but there's a way out of suffering, there's a way to achieve an enlightenment. And then Buddha is just one specific flavor of that.

23:47 Mark: If you do see the attainment of heaven and the attainment of Nirvana as analogous in any way, attaining Nirvana, it's not a matter of divine grace, it's a matter of getting your mind to function in A certain way to detach itself from desire, to see the ultimate lack of grounding of things. And maybe ethical action is part of what you have to do to train yourself to get yourself on the way to that. And again, there's also the idea that once you attain Nirvana, for the Mahayana view, Nagarjuna is among them, then you don't actually want to escape yourself, yet you want to help everybody else escape first. So that requires that you stick around acting selflessly and lead a very ethical life. But it's still you doing it. It's not God granting you a favor.

24:29 Eric: The claim by the Mahayana Buddhist is that Buddhism was becoming re corrupted by bad metaphysics. And part of that led to this notion that as a Buddhist, you could basically do the Vedic thing and become an arhat, you know, a liberated person. And one of the fundamental principles in Mahayana Buddhism is actually it's not an option to become enlightened. It's not an option to become liberated. These are not actually possibilities really, that are there for you. It's a being. You've got a body, you've got form, you've got ego. There's no getting away from from it.

The best you can actually do is to quit collecting it. And ultimately in Zen, this becomes very important because what Zen people then call enlightenment isn't sort of necessarily this ultimate state. Now, there's a story, and this is a mythological story about the Buddha. It said that, you know, after he worked for lifetimes and lifetimes doing all sorts of wonderful things like offering himself up as a sacrifice to a tiger because he felt pity for a hungry tiger and said, well, go ahead and eat me. Lifetimes of good deeds, right? And they did all this work.

And eventually he actually arrives at what is in this context termed heaven. And from within heaven, he hears voices saying, hey, we've been waiting for you. And he's reputed to have said, how could I actually enter heaven and leave all these people that are still in Samsara?

25:51 Mark: Samsara being the cycle of birth and death.

25:52 Eric: Yeah, I mean, or all of illusionary reality or many ways of talking, talking about Samsara. But he's supposedly about to get the big enlightenment. He says, no, I can't do this. Now, there's two views on that. One is ethical. I can't do this because my compassion, like Jesus, right, Pulls me back to the world and I must seek out the liberation and the cessation of suffering for all sentient beings. There's also a metaphysical take on it, which is this is not possible. It's ontologically impossible to attain a state of enlightenment because enlightenment intrinsically is a unified state.

State. And as long as you have beings that are not in an enlightened state, then the whole cannot be enlightened. And the only thing that can meaningfully be enlightened is the whole. This is a fundamental departure from the traditional Vedic thinking, because all of a sudden, you know, hey, even that's been taken off the table. There is no escape from this. The option that they leave you with is this notion of being a bodhisattva, which is being a being who's made a promise to sort of go against the grain and try and cause a cessation of suffering and help sentient beings, but is not actually enlightened.

27:02 Mark: Buddha in training.

27:03 Eric: Yeah, but Buddha in training for yet many more lifetimes. And, you know, you get texts on how many lifetimes.

27:08 Mark: All right, now to Nagarjuna, finally. He's the founder of this early school within the Mahayana tradition, which is Madhyamika. Okay, Madhyamika is how he's initially pronouncing it. The same video was bad Yamika, like Hanukkah to make me think of that. So what this means is the view of the Middle Way. Something like that. And the reason it's called the Middle Way. And in fact, one of their big texts, which is one that we skimmed for today, is like foundation stanzas of the Middle Way are also translated as verses from the center. But it's the Middle Way is between seeing everything is real, right?

So it's the things of your experience have this absolute reality. And that's just what reality is, objective, scientific reality. And this nihilism of, no, everything is illusory. What's ultimately real is nothingness. He's trying to go between those two. The Middle Way. And the way he does that is to say it's not that things don't really exist. It's that these phenomena that we encounter, our experience, they have emptiness. So they do not have inherent existence. They do not have. Oh, I'm going to use another word, svabhava, this inherent existence.

You could say objective existence, but that doesn't quite capture it because we have phenomenologists or pragmatists. We've already even discussed in some of these episodes the idea of, you know, if both of us are in a room and I drop a rock on the ground and you see it fall and I see it fall, it seems like that rock and what it just did has objective existence. Just because it has intersubjective verifiability. And for scientific purposes, that's all you need. But that's not to say maybe we're in the Matrix, right? So it has an objective existence in that it's part of the program, part of our shared delusion, but it's not real in a way that the philosopher would want it to be.

You could still wake up from the Matrix and see that it was all bogus. So I think the Matrix works very well as an image for what Nagarjuna sees are reality. I mean, he talks about dreams a lot and compares our experiences to the. Yeah, okay, you could talk that there was an object in that dream you could describe. There was a chair, it was red, it has properties, it caused something else to happen. But you're still talking about a dream, right? So there's conventional reality, which is what he calls all this, and it still has cause and effect.

You could still do science and there's still ethical implications. But ultimately under that is the ultimate reality, which is the recognition of the underlying. But you don't even want to say it's nothingness because that's making a positive metaphysical statement that is contradicting the metaphysical statement of the solidity of the things in front of us. So it's, it's something else. It's some kind of escape. It's really recognition of emptiness is the true reality.

29:44 Seth: Emptiness is not the same thing as nothingness, because nothingness implies that there could be a something. And emptiness is somehow supposed to be a neutral term where there's not a full and an empty, there's just simply emptiness.

29:58 Mark: This is where it gets very hard to talk.

30:01 Eric: I think nothingness is a very poorly chosen term. I think that actually one of the reasons that, for example, in the translations that we were looking at that the term emptiness is, is used, is precisely for that reason. Nothingness is a distinct term, especially in the context of Nagujana's writings here. Emptiness is not a dichotomy.

30:21 Seth: Yes, that's kind of the key points. Is that middle way, in a kind of way, it's a solution to the problem of being and becoming. That if you look at the Western tradition and you see all the people who deal with the issue of being and non being, particularly when we start talking about them as predicates, you know, trying to say like, something does not exist, like what is that something? And how do we talk about it not existing? And how is existence a predicate and all that sort of thing. But even going back to our episode on quantum physics, when we talked about the pre Socratics, you know, there was a real issue with trying to understand the concept of change and whether or not there were actual things that became other things, or if everything was static and you were just getting different properties or experiences of them and all that.

And this middle way is a way of trying to address that problem.

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