[Buddha-l] Anomalous doctrines [Lusthaus V]

[Stephen Hodge]

Dear Dan,

This is the last of my sub-threads dealing with your initial reply.  Points 
that I have not addressed are either not in contention or not considered 
essential to the debate.

However, you wrote:
> Finally, it is interesting that in order to give the proposal a narrative
> coherence, Stephen has to push Nagarjuna entirely off the narrative track,
> as an aberration. Some would see Nagarjuna's understanding of Buddhism as
> the actual recovery of earlier intentions lost in the intervening
> centuries -- a recovery diametrically at odds with the tathagatagarbha
> strain of eternalism that vies for the same credentials. My vote goes to
> Nagarjuna, and I'll reserve the notion of aberrant for the ttg deviants.
Elsewhere in a subsequent msg, you wisely warn against retro-fitting 
evaluations through the lenses of subsequent Buddhist developments.  To my 
mind, the importance of Nagarjuna has been distorted out of all proportion 
for ideological reasons.  Now, I do not want to get involved here in a 
lengthy discussion about Nagarjuna.  He can be viewed as aberrant because, 
among other things, of his and the subsequent Madhyamika understanding of 
sunyata which cannot easily be derived from earlier teachings.

The MPNS, given its probable date, seems to contain one of the earliest 
critiques of Madhyamika sunyata -- this features quite largely in the text, 
but is ignored by those who have not had or taken the opportunity to look at 
other elements of the MPNS apart from the TG and BD doctrines (these are 
important but the MPNS has a lot of other interesting things to say for 
itself)  As with the Yogacarins, the MPNS prefers the earlier 
Cula-su~n~nata-sutta version of emptiness.  This version of emptiness also 
lends itself (and is thus explicitly used in the MPNS) to an extrinsic 
emptiness interpretation of nirvana / buddhahood, which (as I have mentioned 
elsewhere) necessarily involves some kind of post-mortem persistence which 
you crudely label as "eternalism".  I think part of your problem with TG and 
BD concepts is that you have fallen into the trap you have warned me against 
several times:  I know next to nothing about later Sino-Japanese 
interpretations of these concepts whereas I assume that you would be 
considerably more familiar with them.  I wonder then if you are not 
unconsciously projecting this onto those concepts.  For myself, I did not 
approach them with any pre-conceptions of which I am aware -- in fact, I was 
intially very sceptical about these teachings but the more I like at them, 
the more I can see that they are adumbrated with doctrines found in very 
early forms of Buddhism.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge