“Nāgārjuna’s Challenge to Ancient Buddhist Hermeneutics: An Inquiry into Evolving Emptiness (Śūnyatā) Doctrine in Buddhism” — Chowdhury, Sanjoy Barua, 2018.
Bibliographic note
Five-page article in ASEAN Journal of Religious and Cultural Research (2018, vol. 1 no. 3, pp. 1–5; ISSN 2587-0017). Author was at the time a PhD candidate at MCU (Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University), Thailand. The journal is a small Thai-based open-access venue; this is not a peer-flagship publication.
Thesis / main argument
The article presents Nāgārjuna’s emptiness (སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་, śūnyatā) as a polemical-hermeneutical instrument turned against the three pre-Madhyamaka schools (Sarvāstivāda, Sautrāntika, Vijñānavāda). It surveys three things in turn: the early Buddhist suttic uses of suññatā (meditative dwelling, attribute of objects, heedfulness-release); the four-school doxography compiled out of the eighteen post-second-council sects; and Nāgārjuna’s identification at MMK 24:18 of four synonyms — emptiness, dependent origination (རྟེན་འབྲེལ་, pratītyasamutpāda), dependent designation (upādāya prajñapti), and middle way (madhyamā pratipad). No original interpretive thesis is advanced. This is a survey written for a non-specialist audience.
Key claims
- Four-school doxography by epistemic stance toward external objects (p. 3): Sarvāstivāda = bāhyārtha pratyakṣa-vāda (external object directly perceived); Sautrāntika = bāhyārtha anumeya-vāda (external object inferred); Vijñānavāda = bāhyārtha apratyakṣa-vāda (external object empty); Madhyamaka = ubhayārtha śūnyatā-vāda (both external and internal empty).
- Threefold catalogue of suññatā in the Pāli canon (pp. 3–4): (1) meditative dwelling — Cūḷa-suññata Sutta (MN 121), the Buddha’s own suññatā-vihāra; (2) attribute of objects — Āneñjasappāya Sutta (MN 106), going to “an empty place” (suññāgāra); (3) heedfulness-release — Mahāvedalla Sutta (MN 43), suññatā-cetovimutti. Also cites Mahā-suññata Sutta with the anatta-of-world reading: “suññam idaṁ attena vā attaniyena vā” — “empty of self or of anything pertaining to a self”.
- Etymology: śūnya derives from the verbal root √śvi, “to swell” — what looks “swollen” externally is “hollow” inside (p. 3). Standard Indological etymology, repeated from secondary sources.
- Nāgārjuna’s initial polemical target was Ābhidharmika dharma-theory; the doctrine then expanded into a general remover of all views (p. 4).
- MMK 24:18 quoted as identifying four synonyms: emptiness, dependent origination, dependent designation, middle way (p. 4).
Methodology
The method is a standard Theravāda-academic survey: doxographical and historical, compiling secondary-source positions (Murti, Kalupahana, Conze, Williams, Santina) into a chronological narrative. The primary commentarial sources (Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, Gorampa) are named but not engaged. The hermeneutical framing is descriptive — “this is how śūnyatā evolved” — rather than analytic.
Notable quotes
- p. 3 (Buddhist hermeneutics, citing Lopez 1993): “establishing principles for the retrieval of meaning, especially from a text.”
Connections
- Aligns in spirit with kalupahana-mmk-1986 — the early-Buddhist roots of śūnyatā, the Pāli-canonical anchoring — but at a much shallower level. Kalupahana sustains his argument across primary texts; Chowdhury only summarises.
- Implicitly contests westerhoff-madhyamaka-2009 and westerhoff-vigrahavyavartani-2010, but only by omission: the narrative does not engage the Mahāyāna sūtra context, the Yukti-corpus, or the Tibetan reception at all.
- The four-school doxography overlaps on the surface with the doxographies in thuken-crystal-mirror-1802, though without the latter’s analytical sophistication.