What Is Madhyamaka? A History of Buddhist Philosophy's Most Radical Tradition
I empathise with anyone first encountering madhyamaka. It seems to be baffling no matter where you start, not knowing how much there is to ‘wrap your head’ around. The aim of these three introductory pieces is to orient you without overwhelming you. We begin with some historical context, we move to the claims of the tradition, and we finish by showing it has practical benefits for us. Let’s begin!
Why Does Madhyamaka’s Historical Context Matter?
Madhyamaka’s intellectual ancestry comes from Buddhism**,** so an overview of Buddhist history provides invaluable context when first learning about madhyamaka. This part aims to introduce you to the Buddha, the development of his teachings, the groups that formed around them, and the ways they changed over time. This is a narrative overview, a short flight over a beautifully dense and diverse landscape. Each paragraph has multiple experts, texts and debates to explore if you are interested in any one section.
Who Was the Buddha?
Around 400BCE somewhere around present-day India and Nepal, a boy named Gotama Siddhartha was born into a wealthy merchant family. This historical period was marked by a burgeoning agrarian movement, increases in trade and governance, and a culture of ascetic religious wanderers. These wanderers renounced virtually all possessions, finance, and family commitments in order to seek the truth and find liberation. In exchange for their devotion and insights, the wider community donated food, clothing, and medicine to them. The practices these seekers undertook to ‘progress’ to insight varied considerably, with mini-groups forming to test the same methods together. Many were very extreme, especially on the body, including a drastic reduction in nutrition, or holding specific postures for hours, days or even their lifetime. Others involved many mental practices, similar to what we know as ‘meditation’ today. Because these people had given up ‘worldly’ pursuits and were supported by their community, the focus was to break though perceived limits of human experience.
After leaving home to join these wanderers, Gotama tried many of these practices that each promised the truth, including some of the extreme ones. Although practicing diligently and achieving some insights, the liberation promised by these groups remained elusive, including for the adherents! Determined to find a method for this liberation, he sat under a Bodhi Tree, committed to find a middle between (and eventually beyond) the fruitless extremes. And, after some time, everything that appeared to be preventing liberation unknotted. Extinguishing all ignorance; peacefulness bloomed.
After a couple of days, he caught up with some old practice friends, and they were convinced that Gotama got it. So they called him ‘Buddha’ - the awakened one. Together, they walked the lands around present-day North India, teaching and practicing the dharma (method/law/way). His teaching method was joyously simple, someone would ask the Buddha a question, and the Buddha would answer. There were no lectures, sermons, or multi-day courses… it was all Q&A. After 45 years of teaching he passed away, leaving a community of practitioners (called a sangha) to continue sharing his dharma.
How Did Buddhist Thought Evolve After the Buddha?
It is said that in the days after the Buddha’s passing, the sangha gathered and recited all of his teachings, and would do so once a year. After some time a more systematised and thorough compilation of some of the ‘big questions’ that nobody asked the Buddha during his lifetime emerged, called the ‘higher teachings’ (abidharma). It was another 400ish years before these oral compendiums began to be written down. Once they were, they could be spread to other places, exposed to contesting ideas, and more carefully parsed. This generated a great deal of discussion, debate, and conjecture, so much so that 12 groups, or ‘schools’ emerged. They differed on topics like doctrine, monastic ethics, and governance. For our purposes, one school in particular is most important: the mahāsāṃghika.
What Was the Mahasamghika and Why Does It Matter?
The mahasamghika (Great/Largest Practice Community) developed a number of explanatory concepts that were not reflected in the earliest writing of the Buddha’s Q&A’s or later abidharma. Some of the mahasamghika’s ideas include the transcendent mind of the Buddha, the existence of other Buddhas, and the abiding purity of mental awareness. In order to connect these new ideas to the founder, they say that the Buddha told some of his advanced students of these teachings, but instructed to keep them secret, only revealing them to other advanced practitioners when the time was right. Whether you accept this explanation, or even if the teachings need to be connected to the Buddha at all, is up to you. This is important because it indicates the continued development of dharma by the sangha. There were traditionalists, but there were also reformers and evolutionists among the Buddhists. Which sets the stage for perhaps the single biggest event in Buddhist history: the advent of the mahayana.
Living up to its name both in adherents and outlook, the mahayana (great vehicle) further developed the mahāsāṃghika views. The scope of practice changed: whereas early Buddhists practiced for their own extinguishing, the mahayana opened their awareness to be of greatest benefit: that extinguishing is for all beings. This widened scope of effect was matched by a wider scope of causes: now anyone could work towards practicing dharma, even if you were not a monk or nun. Practice was no longer focused on renouncing and exiting the world, rather practice was in and for the world. The combination of these ideas could be considered a kind of democratisation of dharma: more people could practice, the benefits of the practice were aimed at communities, and this practice occurred in the same world inhabited by farmers, artisans, children and the elderly.
So between the earlier mahāsāṃghika and the resulting mahayana, we have a dharma and sangha that looks very different to the earliest Q&A’s with the Buddha. This did not happen overnight, but was the result of the practices meeting the needs of new people, adapting to new lines of inquiry, coming to new conclusions. And there is one new conclusion that is the crown jewel of the mahayana teachings, that is unique among all the ideas in Human history… sunyata.
What Is the Prajnaparamita and What Is Sunyata?
Originally a collection of 8,000 lines, the prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) is a text that makes a lot of claims, but central to many of them is the concept sunyata. This is often translated into English as ‘emptiness’; ‘voidness’ was popular for a time. I use the English word ‘insubstantial’, but prefer the original sunyata. Whatever the term used, the concept points to a lack: that there is no unchanging or permanent essence. Not in an object, not in a place, not in or across time, not in causal efficacy, not in identity or difference, not in mind or mental awareness. Everything is insubstantial, everything is sunyata… but also clearly appearing. The prajnaparamita turns on this central insight: all things without exception are insubstantial, but clearly appear in unidirectional causal fields between minds and objects. Now, that is a big statement that needs unpacking. We will get there in the next piece. But for the purposes of this flight, the sangha discovered that when combined with meditative practices, sunyata proved a legitimate method to remove the fundamental frictions caused by human ignorance, a swift path to the very same extinguishing of the Buddha.
Like other mahayana texts, these were declared to be ‘secret’ teachings preserved orally and hidden to ensure they were only introduced to those who had the capacity to comprehend them. It is very important to clarify that the origin & authenticity of these texts and their connection to the historical Buddha is not relevant to my lines of inquiry. Attempting to find certainty in the prajnaparamita’s pedigree (either affirming or negating) is an interesting question of textual analysis, anthropology, and religious history. But my concern is ‘is it useful?’; and for that we look to the groups of practitioners who worked to answer that question.
How Did Madhyamaka Emerge from the Prajnaparamita?
Once the prajanaparamita rippled though sanghas, there were a lot of questions. Few will argue that the prajnaparamita is comprehendible without further guidance; there are many collections of texts, all using unfamiliar language and argument styles (including regularly invoking paradox), and they do not always give good reasons for their conclusions… how can all this be the cause for extinguishing? The task of explicating the prajnaparamita was taken up by one of the brightest stars of Buddhist (and human) thought, a scholar-monk named Nagarjuna. The moves he made to explain and apply the prajnaparamita were so influential, so powerful*,* so convincing, that his work is considered the beginning of a new Buddhist intellectual and practice movement geared towards realising sunyata & extinguishing for the benefit of all beings.
This movement is called madhyamaka.
Here concludes the Concorde-speed flight across Buddhist history that hopefully contextualises the rise of madhyamaka.
So what does madhyamaka have to say? Read on to find out…