Table Of ContentThe Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way
The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way
N g rjuna’s
M lamadhyamakak rik
TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY BY
JAY L. GARFIELD
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Copyright © 1995 by Jay L. Garfield
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
N g rjuna, 2nd cent.
[Madhyamakak rik . English & Sanskrit]
The fundamental wisdom of the middle way:
N g rjuna’s M lamadhyamakak rik /
Translation and commentary by
Jay L. Garfield,
p. cm.
ISBN 0-19-509336-4 (pbk.);
ISBN 0-19-510317-3 (cloth)
1. M dhyamika (Buddhism)—Early works to 1800.
I. Garfield, Jay L., 1955—.
BQ2792.E5G37 1995 294.3’85—dc20 95-1051
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
I dedicate this work,
with profound gratitude
and respect,
to the Most Ven. Professor Samdhong Rinpoche:
scholar, educator, statesman, public servant
and shining exemplar of monastic life.
Preface
This is a translation of the Tibetan text of M lamadhyamakak rik . It is perhaps
an odd idea to translate a Tibetan translation of a Sanskrit text and to retranslate
a text of which there are four extant English versions. My reasons for doing so
are these: First, I am not satisfied with any of the other English versions. Every
translation, this one included, of any text embodies an interpretation, and my
interpretation differs in various respects from those of my predecessors in this
endeavor. This is to be expected. As Tuck (1990) has correctly observed, N g
rjuna, like any philosopher from a distant cultural context, is always read against
an interpretive backdrop provided by the philosophical presuppositions of the
interpreter, and by previous readings of N g rjuna. So I claim no special
privileged position vis à vis Streng (1967), Inada (1970), Sprung (1979), or
Kalupahana (1986)—only a different position, one that I hope will prove useful
in bringing M lamadhyamakak rik into contemporary philosophical discourse.
I, like any translator/interpreter must acknowledge that there is simply no fact of
the matter about the correct rendering of any important and genuinely interesting
text. Interpretations, and with them, translations, will continue to evolve as our
understanding of the text evolves and as our interpretive horizon changes.
Matters are even more complex and indeterminate when the translation crosses
centuries, traditions and languages, and sets of philosophical assumptions that
are quite distant from one another, as is the case in the present project. So each
of the available versions of the text embodies a reading. Inada reads N g rjuna
from the standpoint of the Zen tradition, and his translation reflects that reading;
Kalupahana reads N g rjuna as a Theravada commentator on the Kacc y
nagotta-s tra, and his translation reflects that reading, as well as his view about
the affinities between James’s pragmatism and Theravada Buddhism. Sprung
adopts Murti’s Kantian interpretation of M dhyamika, and his translation reflects
that interpretation. Streng reads the text as primarily concerned with religious
phenomenology. There is no translation of this text into English, and no
commentary on it, that specifically reflects an Indo-Tibetan Pr sa gika-M
dhyamika interpretation. Inasmuch as this is my own preferred way to read N g
rjuna, and the reading dominant in Tibetan and highly influential in Japanese and
Chinese discussions of M lamadhyamakak rik , I believe that it is important to
fill this lacuna in the English bibliography.
Having argued that all translation involves some interpretation and, hence,
that there is always some distance between an original text and a translation,
however good and canonical that translation may be, it follows that M
lamadhyamakakàrik and dBu-ma rtsaba shes-rab differ, however close they
may be and however canonically the latter is treated. Since dBu-ma rtsa-ba shes-
rab is the text read by and commented on by generations of Tibetan
philosophers, I think that it is important that an English translation of this very
text be available to the Western philosophical public. This text is hence worthy
in its own right of translation inasmuch as it is the proper subject of the Tibetan
philosophical literature I and others find so deep and fascinating.
This is not a critical scholarly edition of the text. It is not philological in
intent; nor is it a discussion of the commentarial literature on N g rjuna’s text.
There is indeed a need for such a book, but that need will have to be filled by
someone else. This is rather meant to be a presentation of a philosophical text to
philosophers, and not an edition of the text for Buddhologists. If philosophers
and students who read my book thereby gain an entrance into N g rjuna’s
philosophy and see M lamadhyamakak rik , as interpreted herein, as a text
worthy of study and discussion, this work will have served its purpose. Since my
intended audience is not Buddhologists, per se, but Western philosophers who
are interested in Buddhist philosophy, I have tried to balance standard renderings
of Buddhist terminology with more perspicuous contemporary philosophical
language. I am not sure that I have always made the right decisions or that I have
found the middle path between the extremes of Buddhological orthodoxy and
Western revisionism. But that is the aim.
I am also striving for that elusive middle path between two other extremes in
translation: I am trying on the one hand to avoid the unreadable literalism of
translations that strive to provide a verbatim report of the words used the
original, regardless of whether that results in a comprehensible English text. But
there is on the other hand the extreme represented by a translation written in
lucid English prose purporting to be what the original author would have written
had he been a twentieth-century philosopher writing in English, or one that, in an
attempt to convey what the text really means on some particular interpretation, is
in fact not a translation of the original text, but a completely new book, bearing
only a distant relation to the original. This hopelessly mixes the tasks of
translation on the one hand and critical commentary on the other. Of course, as I
have noted above, these tasks are intertwined. But there is the fault of allowing
the translation to become so mixed with the commentary that one no longer has a
grip on, for example, what is N g rjuna and what is Garfield. After all, although
the text is interpreted in being translated, this text should still come out in
translation as a text which could be interpreted in the ways that others have read
it. Because the original does indeed justify competing interpretations. That is one
of the things that makes it such an important philosophical work.
J. L. G.
Amherst, Mass.
November 1994
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