Walser

Position summary

Joseph Walser is professor of religion at Tufts University and a contemporary social-historical interpreter of early Mahāyāna and of Nāgārjuna in particular. His 2005 monograph Nāgārjuna in Context: Mahāyāna Buddhism and Early Indian Culture (Columbia University Press) shifts the centre of Nāgārjuna studies from doctrine to social and institutional setting. Walser’s distinctive move is to read Nāgārjuna’s writings as publications — texts whose form was determined by the demands of being copied, recopied, and preserved within mainstream non-Mahāyāna monasteries that controlled the relevant labour and authority. Where the doctrinal-philosophical tradition (Indian, Tibetan, and modern alike) reads MMK’s distinctive features as articulations of Madhyamaka thought, Walser reads many of those same features — Tripiṭaka-only citation, the precise targets of refutation, the avoidance of attacking Mahāsāṅghika and Pudgalavādin doctrines — as strategic moves designed to win the cooperation of the institutional authorities on whom Mahāyāna’s textual survival depended.

The methodology draws on Resource Mobilisation Theory (McCarthy and Zald) and Herbert Kitschelt’s “political opportunity structure” from sociology of social movements, applied to early Mahāyāna as a marginal movement within a mainstream Indian monastic establishment. The “political opportunity structure” relevant for Mahāyāna is the vinaya law governing what texts a monastery is committed to copy and preserve; Mahāyāna’s strategic challenge is to position its sūtras as falling within categories the host monastery already had a prior legal commitment to reproducing. Walser argues this is precisely what Nāgārjuna’s śāstra-form publications do.

Hermeneutical approach

Walser describes his project as supplementing rather than replacing philosophical study of Nāgārjuna. He grants that “the majority of the works that can most securely be attributed to Nāgārjuna are prima facie works of philosophy and that the depths of the philosophy contained in these writings have yet to be plumbed.” His question is the strategic one — why this particular argument and not some other? — placed before the question of validity. The philosophical content is taken as sincere; the form the argument takes (which authorities are cited, which schools are attacked, which doctrines are quietly rehabilitated) is what the strategic-publication thesis explains.

He stands outside the Indo-Tibetan commentarial tradition entirely. Candrakīrti, Bhāviveka, and Buddhapālita are engaged only as historical witnesses to legends and translations of Nāgārjuna, not as authoritative interpretive guides; Tibetan tradition is treated as a much later development whose retroactive doxographies should not be projected onto the second-century setting. He is comfortable with David Burton’s nihilist reading of Nāgārjuna as a textual claim while reframing the philosophical move involved as a strategic alliance with the Prajñaptivādins / Pudgalavādins rather than as a category mistake.

Key claims

• The third audience. Nāgārjuna writes for three audiences simultaneously: Mahāyānist supporters, philosophical opponents (Sarvāstivādins, etc.), and — most importantly — non-Mahāyānist monks in his host monastery whose cooperation he needed to copy and preserve Mahāyāna texts. The opponents he attacks are chosen because his host audience also has reason to want them defeated. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Introduction, pp. 2–9)

• Nāgārjuna’s monastery was mixed, not Mahāyāna. No exclusively Mahāyāna monastery existed in the Lower Krishna Valley in the late second century. Inscriptions from the period attest eleven Buddhist sects in the region; “Mahāyāna” is not among them. Nāgārjuna lived as a minority Mahāyānist within a Pūrvaśaila, Aparaśaila, or Caityaka monastery — most plausibly a Mahāsāṅghika institution. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 2, pp. 87–88)

• Date and place of the Ratnāvalī. By convergence of translator colophons, hagiographical legitimation analysis, and art-historical evidence on the padmapīṭha (Buddha-on-lotus) motif, the Ratnāvalī dates to c. 175–204 CE under Yajña Śrī Sātakarṇi (or 210–227 CE under his successors), composed in the Lower Krishna River Valley around Dhānyakaṭaka / Amarāvatī. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 2, pp. 60–88)

• The Sātavāhana patronage. Among all the kings associated with Nāgārjuna in the legend tradition (Cirāyus, Huṣka, Juṣka, Kaniṣka, etc.), only the Sātavāhana association resists explanation as a hagiographical legitimation device (no alchemy, nāga, or famous-pilgrimage-site connection). Walser concludes the association reflects what hagiographers took as common knowledge, hence as historical. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 2, pp. 67–78)

• Rejection of the “multiple Nāgārjunas” hypothesis. The postulation of separate Nāgārjunas (philosopher, alchemist, Tantric, medical) does not solve the hagiographical problem because the alchemical and Tantric elements already appear in Kumārajīva’s fifth-century Biography. The diversity of legend instead reflects a small number of legitimating sources — Jain Nāgārjuna, the Mahāmegha prophecy, nāgas, alchemy — each of which can be traced and excised. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 2, pp. 65–76)

• MMK engages three abhidharmas. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā attacks specific Sarvāstivādin doctrines (the four pratyayas of MMK 1.2–3, the technical Sarvāstivādin sense of svabhāva) while allying with Mahāsāṅghika ones (the seed-and-sprout theory of karmic continuity in MMK 17:7–11; pratītyasamutpāda as asaṃskṛta) and rehabilitating Pudgalavādin/Saṃmitīya ones (avipraṇāśa in MMK 17:12–20; the fire-and-fuel relation of pudgala and aggregates in MMK 10). Different works show different alliance patterns. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 7)

• Prajñaptir upādāya (MMK 24:18) is Pudgalavādin in resonance. Nāgārjuna’s distinctive use of the term in MMK 24:18 fits the Saṃmitīya Nikāya Śāstra’s pudgala-and-aggregates usage (whose original title was probably Upādāya Prajñapti Śāstra) much more closely than Candrakīrti’s later “designation in dependence on parts” gloss. The fire-fuel metaphor of mutual dependency is Saṃmitīya rather than Sarvāstivādin. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 7, pp. 257–260)

• Endorses Burton on emptiness as prajñaptisat. Walser explicitly affirms David Burton’s reading that Nāgārjuna equates dependent origination with prajñaptisat, but reframes the move as a strategic alliance with the Prajñaptivādins rather than as a category mistake or regress-generating error. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 7, pp. 234–235)

• Different works, different alliances. The Ratnāvalī contrasts sharply with the MMK: it attacks Pudgalavāda directly, drops upādāya prajñapti terminology, has few Sarvāstivādin references, and engages instead with the doctrine of momentariness held by the Pūrvaśaila and Aparaśaila of the Lower Krishna Valley. The shift in alliance pattern tracks the schools whose cooperation Nāgārjuna’s immediate setting required. (From walser-nagarjuna-2005 Ch. 7, pp. 261–263)

Related scholars

• Endorsed and extended by Westerhoff (in westerhoff-golden-age-madhyamaka-2018 pp. 105–107) on the Tripiṭaka-citation-as-strategy thesis. Westerhoff names the dissenting Buddhological cohort (Ruegg, Lindtner, Bronkhorst) by name.
• Endorses Burton on Nāgārjuna’s equation of dependent origination with prajñaptisat — but reframes it as strategic alliance rather than category mistake.
• Argues against Kalupahana’s reading of MMK 17:12–20 avipraṇāśa as Nāgārjuna’s own position (Walser places it in the mouth of a Saṃmitīya speaker whom Nāgārjuna then rehabilitates).
• Disagrees with Candrakīrti’s “designation in dependence on parts” gloss of prajñaptir upādāya (MMK 24:18); Walser reads the term as Pudgalavādin/Saṃmitīya in resonance.
• Methodologically aligned with Greg Schopen on the use of epigraphic and institutional evidence against doctrinal reconstruction; aligned with David Drewes and Jonathan Silk on the institutional-history approach to early Mahāyāna.