Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction.

• Author: Hayes, Richard P.
• Position: Book review

Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction. By Jan WESTERHOFF. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009. Pp. xiii + 242. $99 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Ever since Th, Stcherbatsky published The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana in 1927, a work in which he attempted to find European philosophers with philosophical projects similar to Nagarjuna's, scholars have been engaged in not only explaining Nagarjuna in his own terms but also finding possible parallels in Western thought. The range of Western thinkers compared with Nagarjuna has been remarkably wide, which suggests that there is as wide a range of views on what Nagarjuna was trying to do and how he was trying to go about doing it among modern interpreters as there has been among Asian commentators.

Jan Westerhoff's analysis approaches Nagarjuna's principal works, mainly Mulamadhyamakakarika (MMK) and Vigrahavyavartani (VV), topically. He studies several philosophical issues in separate chapters and shows how they are all related. The relations are to some extent pointed out as he goes along and are then summarized in a concluding chapter entitled "Nagarjuna's Philosophical Project." The issues studied along the way to that conclusion are interpretations of svabhava (a polysemous term that requires delicate treatment), negation in the Indian tradition in general and in the works of Nagarjuna in particular, the peculiarities of the catuskoti, causation and time, motion (which is metonymic for all kinds of change), the self and personal identity, epistemology, and philosophy of language, with special attention drawn to Nagarjuna's potentially puzzling claim that he has no thesis--can one claim to be making no claims without contradicting oneself?

Scholars of Nagarjuna will recognize immediately that Westerhoff's main focus is on chapters one, two, fifteen, and eighteen of the MMK and on key passages of VV (on which text Westerhoff has published a useful and much more detailed separate monograph). Throughout the work it is clear that Westerhoff is convinced of what he states explicitly in the concluding chapter, namely, that all these various topics "are not just isolated philosophical statements but fit together as a unified philosophical theory which is Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka" (p. 199) and that this unified theory has counterparts in contemporary philosophy. Nagarjuna's thought is treated, then, not as a specimen to be placed behind glass in a museum of ancient philosophy but as a...