The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY BY JAY L. GARFIELD Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1995 by Jay L. Garfield Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nagarjuna, 2nd cent. [Madhyamakakarika. English & Sanskrit] The fundamental wisdom of the middle way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika / Translation and commentary by Jay L. Garfield, p. cm. ISBN 0-19-509336-4 (pbk.); ISBN 0-19-510317-3 (cloth) 1. Madhyamika (Buddhism)—Early works to 1800. I. Garfield, Jay L., 1955—. BQ2792.E5G37 1995 294.3’85—dc20 95-1051 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper I dedicate this work, with profound gratitude and respect, to the Most Ven. Professor Samdhong Rinpoche: scholar, educator, statesman, public servant and shining exemplar of monastic life. Preface This is a translation of the Tibetan text of Mulamadhyamakakarika. It is perhaps an odd idea to translate a Tibetan translation of a Sanskrit text and to retranslate a text of which there are four extant English versions. My reasons for doing so are these: First, I am not satisfied with any of the other English versions. Every translation, this one included, of any text embodies an interpretation, and my interpretation differs in various respects from those of my predecessors in this endeavor. This is to be expected. As Tuck (1990) has correctly observed, Nagarjuna, like any philosopher from a distant cultural context, is always read against an interpretive backdrop provided by the philosophical presuppositions of the interpreter, and by previous readings of Nagarjuna. So I claim no special privileged position vis à vis Streng (1967), Inada (1970), Sprung (1979), or Kalupahana (1986) —only a different position, one that I hope will prove useful in bringing Mulamadhyamakakarika into contemporary philosophical discourse. I, like any translator/interpreter must acknowledge that there is simply no fact of the matter about the correct rendering of any important and genuinely interesting text. Interpretations, and with them, translations, will continue to evolve as our understanding of the text evolves and as our interpretive horizon changes. Matters are even more complex and indeterminate when the translation crosses centuries, traditions and languages, and sets of philosophical assumptions that are quite distant from one another, as is the case in the present project. So each of the available versions of the text embodies a reading. Inada reads Nagarjuna from the standpoint of the Zen tradition, and his translation reflects that reading; Kalupahana reads Nagarjuna as a Theravada commentator on the Kaccayanagotta-sutra, and his translation reflects that reading, as well as his view about the affinities between James’s pragmatism and Theravada Buddhism. Sprung adopts Murti’s Kantian interpretation of Madhyamika, and his translation reflects that interpretation. Streng reads the text as primarily concerned with religious phenomenology. There is no translation of this text into English, and no commentary on it, that specifically reflects an Indo-Tibetan Prasangika-Madhyamika interpretation. Inasmuch as this is my own preferred way to read Nagarjuna, and the reading dominant in Tibetan and highly influential in Japanese and Chinese discussions of Mulamadhyamakakarika, I believe that it is important to fill this lacuna in the English bibliography. Having argued that all translation involves some interpretation and, hence, that there is always some distance between an original text and a translation, however good and canonical that translation may be, it follows that Mulamadhyamakakàrika and dBu-ma rtsaba shes-rab differ, however close they may be and however canonically the latter is treated. Since dBu- ma rtsa-ba shes-rab is the text read by and commented on by generations of Tibetan philosophers, I think that it is important that an English translation of this very text be available to the Western philosophical public. This text is hence worthy in its own right of translation inasmuch as it is the proper subject of the Tibetan philosophical literature I and others find so deep and fascinating. This is not a critical scholarly edition of the text. It is not philological in intent; nor is it a discussion of the commentarial literature on Nagarjuna’s text. There is indeed a need for such a book, but that need will have to be filled by someone else. This is rather meant to be a presentation of a philosophical text to philosophers, and not an edition of the text for Buddhologists. If philosophers and students who read my book thereby gain an entrance into Nagarjuna’s philosophy and see Mulamadhyamakakarika, as interpreted herein, as a text worthy of study and discussion, this work will have served its purpose. Since my intended audience is not Buddhologists, per se, but Western philosophers who are interested in Buddhist philosophy, I have tried to balance standard renderings of Buddhist terminology with more perspicuous contemporary philosophical language. I am not sure that I have always made the right decisions or that I have found the middle path between the extremes of Buddhological orthodoxy and Western revisionism. But that is the aim. I am also striving for that elusive middle path between two other extremes in translation: I am trying on the one hand to avoid the unreadable literalism of translations that strive to provide a verbatim report of the words used the original, regardless of whether that results in a comprehensible English text. But there is on the other hand the extreme represented by a translation written in lucid English prose purporting to be what the original author would have written had he been a twentieth-century philosopher writing in English, or one that, in an attempt to convey what the text really means on some particular interpretation, is in fact not a translation of the original text, but a completely new book, bearing only a distant relation to the original. This hopelessly mixes the tasks of translation on the one hand and critical commentary on the other. Of course, as I have noted above, these tasks are intertwined. But there is the fault of allowing the translation to become so mixed with the commentary that one no longer has a grip on, for example, what is Nagarjuna and what is Garfield. After all, although the text is interpreted in being translated, this text should still come out in translation as a text which could be interpreted in the ways that others have read it. Because the original does indeed justify competing interpretations. That is one of the things that makes it such an important philosophical work. J. L. G. Amherst, Mass. November 1994 Acknowledgments Thanks are already due to many who have helped at different stages of this project: Thanks to Bob Thurman and David Sloss for first introducing me to Buddhist philosophy and then for encouraging me to wade deeper. Thanks to David Kalupahana, Steve Odin, Kenneth Inada, and Guy Newland, as well as to David Karnos, Joel Aubel, Dick Garner, and William Herbrechtsmeier for many hours of valuable and enjoyable discussion of this text at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer institute on Nagarjuna in Hawaii. And thanks to the NEH for the grant support that enabled my participation in that institute. I am especially grateful to Guy Newland for many subsequent conversations, useful suggestions, encouragement, and a critical reading of my work. Thanks to Janet Gyatso for countless hours of profitable and enjoyable philosophical conversation and for many useful and detailed criticisms and suggestions on this and other related work. Thanks to the Ven. Geshe Lobzang Tsetan for starting me in Tibetan, for much useful philosophical interchange, for teaching me an immense amount about Madhyamika, and for his close criticism of this text; to Georges Dreyfus (Geshe Sengye Samdup) for much useful advice and discussion; and to Joshua and Dianne Cutler and the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center of North America for hospitality. I also thank John Dunne for detailed comments on several chapters of an earlier draft of this translation. I am grateful to the Indo-American Foundation, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the Smithsonian Institution for an Indo-American Fellowship in 1990-91. During that time, as a Visiting Senior Research Scholar at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, I began work on this project. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to The Most Ven. Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche and his staff for hosting me and my family at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies and to Rinpoche himself for his generous personal help. I thank the Ven. Geshe Ngawang Sherab for all of his kind logistical help at Santarakshita Library and for friendship and philosophical interchange. Thanks also to the Ven. Lobzang Norbu Shastri and the Ven. Acarya Ngawang Samten for extensive conversations from which I learned much and for useful comments on this work and to Karma for Tibetan lessons. I am deeply grateful to the Ven. Prof. Geshe Yeshes Thap-Khas for reading dBu-ma rtsa-ba shes-rab and related texts with me and for giving me his invaluable oral commentary on these texts during that year and on many subsequent occasions.