Tradition
3 readings
Abhidharma
Tradition · 3 readings
Abhidharma is the part of the Buddhist tradition that worked out, in systematic lists and analyses, the metaphysics behind the Buddha’s teachings. Its thinkers held that composite things are built from simple elements with natures of their own, and Nāgārjuna’s arguments are addressed mostly to them.
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3 readings · Title A–Z
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 6 of 8
What is left of the two truths?
Once no ultimately real elements remain, what do conventional and ultimate truth mean? The lesson compares three readings of ultimate truth and asks whether conventional claims can still be right or wrong.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 2 of 8
What makes a condition a cause?
Nāgārjuna examines the four ways something might be thought to arise and argues that nothing with intrinsic nature could be produced. The lesson names the assumptions the argument relies on and compares two readings of causal connection.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 1 of 8
What would it mean to exist on one’s own?
Nāgārjuna argues that nothing has intrinsic nature, a nature it would have independently of everything else. The lesson states the Abhidharma view he opposes as a serious theory, then reads chapter 15’s middle path between “it exists” and “it does not exist”.
Study this in sequence
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths
Follow Nāgārjuna’s arguments that nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, from causes and motion to persons, the two truths and the charge that the argument undermines itself. Ask what the arguments leave standing: can things exist, change and matter without such a nature?