Hi everyone,

I have never recorded a podcast episode exclusively on Buddhist philosophy before. It is an extensive corpus and difficult to know where to begin, but today we make a start!

Nāgārjuna was a teacher of Mahayana Buddhism (one of Buddhism’s main branches) who lived from around 150-250 CE. His philosophical contributions are so significant that he has been called the “second Buddha”. He is also considered to be the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism, which roughly means “middle way”.

Perhaps the central idea of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy is sunyata, which translates to something like “emptiness”. The idea is that all things lack an inherent essence; all things are, ultimately, empty. Nothing has svabhava (“own-being” or “innate essence”), and instead is ultimately groundless.

This is a somewhat perplexing notion, but sounded similar to mereological nihilism, which denies that objects like tables or trees really exist as distinct objects with an inherent nature. (The difference is that the mereological nihilist believes there is one substance—mereological simples—which has a real essence. Nāgārjuna denied even that.)

It also seemed to bear on certain questions in the philosophy of religion. Followers of Thomas Aquinas, for example, believe that there is a fundamental entity whose essence is existence itself, which they call God. They also believe that all objects ultimately rely on more foundational causes, creating a chain of causation which bottoms out in the same place. Nāgārjuna’s philosophy says there is no bottom, and indeed some of the earliest records of Western interaction with the Madhyamaka school are Thomists attempting to undermine it.

At any rate, I thought that Nāgārjuna’s philosophy of emptiness might offer an interesting, slightly radical, but also familiar enough entry point to Buddhist philosophy. So, I invited Jan Westerhoff, a professor of Buddhist philosophy at the University of Oxford—and leading expert on Nāgārjuna and emptiness—to introduce us to what it is all about.

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Nāgārjuna, The “Second Buddha”
6:03 - The Middle Way
9:16 - Ontological Nihilism
18:24 - Are Madhyamaka Buddhists Nihilists?
37:20 - How Emptiness Escapes Causal Arguments for God
44:04 - Preempting Immanuel Kant?
49:01 - Emptiness
01:08:31 - How to Escape Suffering
01:15:18 - Visualising Emptiness
01:18:54 - Is Consciousness Empty?
01:32:52 - Reality Without Substance

Buddhist Emptiness Explained - Jan Westerhoff

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