#jay garfield

[improvisedliturgy]

If one were to think that in asserting that things are empty that one is positing entities and ascribing to those independent entities the property of emptiness, one would be treating the language of Madhyamika as making literal assertions. But from the standpoint from which these would be true, there are no entities and no characteristics, and a fortiori, there are no entities having the characteristic of being empty. The language must hence be understood, from the ultimate perspective, not as making assertions, but rather as ostending—indicating that which cannot be literally asserted without falling into nonsense—as Wittgenstein puts it in the Tractatus, showing that which cannot be said. […] To hold a view of emptiness—to reify it and then attribute it to phenomena—would then involve simultaneously reifying those phenomena as having a fixed nature and denying their existence at all, in virtue of disparaging their conventional reality as unreality by contrast with the reality of emptiness. It is this incoherence, so characteristic of essentialist philosophies, that leads Nagarjuna to assert that one holding such a view is completely hopeless—incapable of accomplishing anything, philosophically or soteriologically.

Jay L. Garfield, Commentary on The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way

[noosphe-re]

Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

1. If arising were produced, Then it would also have the three characteristics. If arising is not produced, How could the characteristics of the produced exist?

2. If the three, arising, etc., are separate, They cannot function as the characteristics of the produced. But how could they be joined In one thing simultaneously?

3. If arising, abiding, and ceasing Have characteristics other than those of the produced, There would be an infinite regress. If they don’t, they would not be produced.

4. The arising of arising only gives rise To the basic arising. The arising of the basic arising Gives rise to arising.

5. If, as you say, the arising of arising Gives rise to the basic arising, How, according to you, does this, Not arisen from the basic arising, give rise to that?

6. If, as you say, that which is arisen from basic arising Gives rise to the basis, How does that nonarisen basis Give rise to it?

7. If this nonarisen  Could give rise to that, Then, as you wish, It will give rise to that which is arising.

—Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, translated by Jay L. Garfield

[improvisedliturgy]

No entity can arise from itself, from another, from both, or from a noncause. This was the burden of the first chapter. We must, of course, recall that this is not a refutation of the existence of the suffering we all experience and wish to avoid. Rather it is a demonstration of its emptiness of inherent existence. For just as the analysis in Chapter I has provided the key to dismissing the inherent existence of suffering, the positive side of that same analysis can be used to recover its conventional existence. If by suffering we mean something dependently arisen, impermanent, and conventional, existing only as imputed and only in relation to its empty subjects, there is plenty of suffering to go around.

Jay L. Garfield, Commentary on The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way

[footnotes-2-plato]

The Invariance of Variation: Or Why Metaphysics Must Become Ungrounded (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Tim Jackson and I dialogue about a number of conversations we watched, including: Full Transcript of my dialogue with Tim: MATT SEGALL We didn’t read anything, but we did listen to a whole bunch of conversations. I guess three. Okay, four: I threw another one in there. So there’s the Levin and Deacon dialogue about evolutionary biology, and there’s the Bernardo Kastrup and Jay Garfield…

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[edwordsmyth]

“It is an important fact about human beings that their cognitive, affective and motivational states are linked inextricably with those of indefinitely many others in a vast causal nexus. Our happiness, suffering and moral progress depends at all times on the actions and attitudes of others, as well as on their welfare. Similarly, our own actions, mental, verbal and physical have endless ramifications both for our own affective and moral well-being and for that of those around us. These are natural facts and to ignore them is to ignore the nature of action and its relevance to our moral, psychological and social lives.

To fail to take another’s suffering seriously as a motivation for action is itself a form of suffering and is irrational. This is a deep insight, and one over which we should not pass too quickly: the bodhisattva path is motivated in part by the realization that not to experience the suffering of others as one’s own and not to take the welfare of others as one’s own is to suffer even more deeply from a profound existential alienation born of a failure to appreciate one’s own situation as a member of an interdependent community. Our joys are social joys; our sorrows are social sorrows; our identity is a social identity; the bounds of our society are indefinite. We either suffer and rejoice together in the recognition of our bonds to one another, or we languish in self-imposed solitary confinement, afflicted both by the cell we construct, and by the ignorance that motivates its construction.” -Jay Garfield

[lasterfox]

For the aspiration for awakening — for a complete, liberative understanding of the nature of reality and of human life — need not, and should not, for a Mahayana Buddhist, be personalized. Just as a stonemason building the ground floor of a medieval cathedral might aspire to its completion even if he knows that he will not personally be around to be involved in its completion, a practitioner who aspires that awakening will be achieved need not believe that she will be around to see it, but only hope that her own conduct and practice will facilitate that. So, this suggests one way for a Buddhist not taken with the idea of personal rebirth across biological lives to take that doctrine as a useful metaphor: Treat the past reflectively and with gratitude and responsibility, and with an awareness that much of our present life is conditioned by our collective past; take the future seriously as something we have the responsibility to construct, just as much as if we would be there personally. This makes sense of the ideas, for instance, of intergenerational justice, or of collective contemporary responsibility for harms inflicted in the past, as well as our current personal responsibility to future generations.

What Does Buddhism Require? (h/t Monica)