Buddhism between Philosophy and Religion: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness

"Nagarjuna is generally accepted by Buddhists and Buddhiologists alike as one of the most important of all Buddhist thinkers. Indeed, his thought has been core to the historical shaping and reshaping of Buddhism throughout South-, Central-, and East-Asia. It continues to fascinate, moreover, as evinced by the plethora of recently published inspirational and intellectual works devoted to him by adherents and academics. Recent scholarly interest in Nagarjuna has been intense, with especial focus on the vexed question of the rationality, or irrationality, of his thought. For understandable reasons, debates in this regard have gravitated toward two points of friction between the arguments Nagarjuna laid out in India almost two millennia ago and those considered acceptable by his philosophically minded interpreters today, trained as these latter have typically been in twentieth-century Western analytical philosophy. Briefly stated, the issues at question relate, firstly, to Nagarjuna's use or tetra lemma, according to which a proposition may be true, false, both true and false, or neither true nor false; and secondly, to Nagarjuna's espousal of the "abandonment of all views""--