Nagarjuna's Middle Way : The Mulamadhyamakakarikas

Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarikas is the foundational text of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. Its 27 chapters contain a wide variety of arguments meant to support the central Mahayana doctrine of emptiness. This translation uses the four surviving Indian commentaries to try to arrive at an understanding that comes as close as possible to what was originally intended. The verses are accompanied by a running commentary that tries to explain their content without straying far beyond the consensus among the original commentators. The aim has been to produce a translation that balances the demands of historical fidelity, accessibility, and philosophical intelligibility. It is the product of a collaboration between scholars with overlapping but distinct and complementary areas of expertise: one is a renowned Buddhologist well known for his work on Sanskrit texts, the other is a philosopher who looks to both contemporary philosophy and classical Indian philosophy for insightful arguments. The translation and commentary are preceded by a brief introduction laying out the historical context and describing some of the common argumentative strategies Nagarjuna will employ in the defense of his interesting and novel stance.

Mark Siderits was trained in Asian and Western philosophy at the University of Hawaii and Yale University. He has taught both Asian and Western philosophy, for many years at Illinois State University, and most recently as Professor of Philosophy at Seoul National University, from which he retired in 2012. He is the author or editor of five books and has published numerous articles on a wide variety of subjects in Indian Buddhist philosophy and comparative philosophy. Much of his work aims at building bridges between the classical Indian tradition and contemporary philosophy, by using insights from one tradition to cast light on problems arising in the other. Professor Shoryu Katsura received his training in Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies at Kyoto University and the University of Toronto. From 1974 to 2004 he taught in the Department of Indian Philosophy at Hiroshima University; from 2004 he was Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Ryukoku University, Kyoto, until his retirement in 2012. He remains active at Ryukoku University, where he is Director of their Research Center for Buddhist Cultures in Asia. He is the author or editor of seven books, and has published over sixty articles on various facets of classical Indian Buddhist thought. He is perhaps best known for his work on Buddhist epistemology—the thought of Dignaga, Dharmakirti, and their commentators—but has also made important contributions to the study of Madhyamaka, Abhidharma, and later Mahayana thought. In addition he serves as chief priest of Kodaiji, a small Jodo-shinshu temple in Shiga Prefecture.