SECOND BUDDHA

Acharya Nagarjuna was the founder of the thesis “Fundamental Wisdom of Middle Way”. Lord Buddha prophesied that a person with the name of ‘Naga’ would spread his message in later years. It was none other than Acharya Nagarjuna.

When Nagarjuna was born, astrologers predicted that he would live for either seven months or at the most seven years only. However, when he was taken to Nalanda for studies, where the Buddhist philosopher Saraha said that if he became a monk he would live longer and become a great scholar. It was proved correct.

Nagarjuna’s contribution to Buddhism was considered to be extraordinary. When there was drought, he meditated and produced enough food for the entire Nalanda. After Lord Buddha, it was Nagarjuna who propagated Buddhism.Some historians say that there were actually two persons with the name of Nagarjuna and both were Buddhist philosophers. But it was only one Acharya who produced Fundamental Wisdom of Middle Way. Acharya Nagarjuna lived in Nagarjuna Konda and disciples from Sri Lanka attended his teachings. Buddhism flourished in Sri Lanka long before Jesus Christ, he recalled. Acharya Nagarjuna predicted that young Satavahana would become a king. And when he returned from Nalanda he found that Satavahana became the kind of an empire.

The one among first major irrigation projects taken up by the independent India near Nagarjuna Konda was named as Nagarjunasagar Project in memory of Acharya Nagarjuna only.

Nagarjuna was born in AD 78 and later on became the guru of the Satavahana kings. His origins were in Mahakosal and as a young boy Nagarjuna studied the Vedas and Vedangas. From there he traveled to Patliputra to worship Goddess Saraswati. At 18 he became a Buddhist and began an in-depth study of Ayurveda and Buddhist Philosophy. During the time of Nagarjuna, Buddhism had seen many changes and Nagarjuna did not entirely agree with the Buddhist philosophy. He founded ‘Shunyavad’, the cult of nothingness. He had not entirely forsaken the Vedic teachings, and his ‘Shunyavad’ shares many similarities with Kashmir Shaivism. He is also the founder of the Madhyamik School of Buddhism. Two of his works are well-known: Mul Madhyamika Karika and Vigraha Vyavar Vartika. His work, Suhrilekha (letters to the King), is addressed to the Satavahana king, Yashshri (AD 173-230). He also studied the Mahayana creed in great detail and later propagated it in north India. His views of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy on existentialism have comparable perspectives to the modern views of Heideggar and Sartre.

Tibetan sources too give indication of Nagarjuna’s medical works. He was a Siddha, a Sorcerer, and a powerful alchemist. His close proximity to South India is worth noting. His laboratory was on Shree Parvat, i.e., Srisailam (where the famous Shiva Temple (Jyotirling) Mallikarjuna is located) in Andhra Pradesh.

At Srisailam, he experimented on metals, especially on mercury (parad). (The other name for parad is darad and the place was called Dardistan.) Here the chemist distinguished between metals and sub-metals, and also between solvents and solubles. He found that mercury could dissolve all metals and Nagarjuna was given the appellation Rasraj.

Ayurvedic medicine prior to Nagarjuna comprised preparations largely from vegetable sources. Nagarjuna founded Ras Chikitsa or Rasayan which was vehemently opposed by orthodox vaidyas. Rasvaidyas however argued that the advantage of rasa is the small dose that is required, and the quick action, which protected the patient from imbibing foul tasting decoctions. They also argued that vegetable-based medicine becomes stale in the course of time while medicines comprising chemicals improve and become more potent. Nagarjuna invented the processes of "distillation" and "calcinations". According to Vrinda and Chakradutta he also discovered Kajjavali, the black sulphide of antimony. They were able to convert most metals into ashes and use them as powerful medicines. Makaradhwaj or Chandrodaya is a mercury compound that can work wonders with patients close to death. Like modern chemotherapy, rasa medicine is excellent but can sometimes be harmful. The preparation of ashes (bhasma) is a tedious chemical process that entails a thousand calcinations (sahasraputi). We still do not know how these processes impart special qualities to known chemical compounds.

Nagarjuna had a command over iron and mercury. The treatise on iron (Lauha Shastra) existed in ancient times and Dhanvantari and Agnivesh refer to it. Kashyap and Dhanvantari experimented on the transformation of iron into gold but were unsuccessful. Patanjali also refers to a Lauha Shastra, yet it is undeniable that the Lauha Shastra of Nagarjuna is excellent.

Nagarjuna was the first to use mercury and Kharpar (antimony?) as medicine, making them insoluble (agnisah). He found five types of mercury : The examples red and grey (slake) were good; yellow, white or multi colored (peacock color) had bad qualities and needed at least 18 treatments (sanskar) before they could be used. Regarding mercury, quicksilver, a vast amount of literature (post-Nagarjuna) is available. The Siddha sect (neither Buddhist nor Vedic) held that parad is Shiva, Mica is Parvati, gandhak is the raja of Parvati, and many fanciful theories were formulated. Mercury becomes solid and a Shiva linga can be made out of it. They worshipped a parad Shiva linga, called it Raseshwar, and started Raseshwarvad.

Few Ayurvedic alchemists have made a mercury linga even in modern times. Other sects like Pashupati, Shaiva, Pratbhingya, and Vedics were attracted to the science of mercury. Buddhism had sects like Vajrayan (vajra is iron), Lingayan, or Sahajayan, and Mantrayan. They believed that the knowledge of Mantra and Tantra must be kept a secret, but Gorakhnath discussed them and his chief disciple believed this secrecy was merely for show.

Vagbhatta lists the names of 27 Rasa Siddha Rasacharyas and Nagarjuna is one of them. Bharvi, the great poet, includes him in the quartet of four great scholars, the other three being Aryadeva, Ashwaghosh, and Kumar Labdh. He also forms part of the list of 84 Siddhas of Vajrayan.

The Arabic word alchemist, the Latin word chemist, and modern chemistry are gifts of Nagarjuna. All these alchemists were in search of the elixir of life (and still are), and of a prescription capable of transforming iron or base metals into gold. Their quest is for a drug that can serve as an antidote for all poisons (theric). Modern science can be said to be indebted to many of these futile pursuits.

Acharya Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE) was an Indian philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. His writings are the basis for the formation of the Madhyamaka school, which was transmitted to China under the name of the Three Treatise (Sanlun) School. He is credited with developing the philosophy of the Prajnaparamita sutras, and was closely associated with the Buddhist university of Nalanda. In the Jodo Shinshu branch of Buddhism, he is considered the First Patriarch.

Little is known about the actual life of the historical Nagarjuna. The two most extensive biographies of Nagarjuna, one in Chinese and the other in Tibetan, were written many centuries after his life and incorporate material seen by some as historically unreliable. Nagarjuna was born a Brahmin, which in his time connoted religious allegiance to the Vedas, probably into an upper-caste Brahmin family and probably in the southern Andhra region of India.Very few details on the life of Nāgārjuna are known, although many legends exist. He was born in Southern India, near the town of Nagarjunakonda in present day Nagarjuna Sagar in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. According to traditional biographers and historians such as Kumarajiva, he was born into a Brahmin family, but later converted to Buddhism. This may be the reason he was one of the earliest significant Buddhist thinkers to write in classical Sanskrit rather than Pāli or Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.

From studying his writings, it is clear that Nāgārjuna was conversant with many of the Nikaya school philosophies and with the emerging Mahāyāna tradition. However, affiliation to a specific Nikaya school is difficult, considering much of this material is presently lost. If the most commonly accepted attribution of texts holds, he was clearly a Māhayānist, but his philosophy holds assiduously to the non-Mahāyāna canon, and while he does make explicit references to Mahāyāna texts, he is always careful to stay within the parameters set out by the canon.

Nagarjuna may have arrived at his positions from a desire to achieve a consistent exegesis of the Buddha's doctrine as recorded in the Canon. In the eyes of Nagarjuna the Buddha was not merely a forerunner, but the very founder of the Madhyamaka system. David Kalupahana sees Nagarjuna as a successor to Moggaliputta-Tissa in being a champion of the middle-way and a reviver of the original philosophical ideals of the Buddha.

There exist a number of influential texts attributed to Nāgārjuna, although most were probably written by later authors. The only work that all scholars agree is Nagarjuna's is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā(Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), which contains the essentials of his thought in twenty-seven short chapters. According to Lindtner the works definitely written by Nagarjuna are:-

• Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way)
• Śūnyatāsaptati (Seventy Verses on Emptiness)
• Vigrahavyāvartanī (The End of Disputes)
• Vaidalyaprakaraṇa (Pulverizing the Categories)
• Vyavahārasiddhi (Proof of Convention)
• Yuktiṣāṣṭika (Sixty Verses on Reasoning)
• Catuḥstava (Hymn to the Absolute Reality)
• Ratnāvalī (Precious Garland)
• Pratītyasamutpādahṝdayakārika (Constituents of Dependent Arising)
• Sūtrasamuccaya
• Bodhicittavivaraṇa (Exposition of the Enlightened Mind)
• Suhṛllekha (To a Good Friend)
• Bodhisaṃbhāra (Requisites of Enlightenment)

There are other works attributed to Nāgārjuna, some of which may be genuine and some not. Some confusion may be caused by the fact that there were other Nāgārjunas, f.e. the Siddha Nāgārjuna, a holder of the Mahamudra-Lineage, who wrote probably several important works of esoteric Buddhism (most notably the Pañcakrama or "Five Stages"), as contemporary research suggests that these works are datable to a significantly later period in Buddhist history (late eighth or early ninth century), but the traditional sources maintain the theory that there was only one Nāgārjuna, who lived for almost 1000 years (as mentioned in Keith Dowmans "Masters of Mahamudra"). Traditional historians (for example, the 17th century Tibetan Tāranātha), aware of the chronological difficulties involved, account for the anachronism via a variety of theories, such as the propagation of later writings via mystical revelation.

Lindtner considers that the Māhaprajñāparamitopadeśa, a huge commentary on the Large Prajñāparamita not to be a genuine work of Nāgārjuna. This is only extant in a Chinese translation by Kumārajīva.There is much discussion as to whether this is a work of Nāgārjuna, or someone else. Étienne Lamotte, who translated one third of the Upadeśa into French, felt that it was the work of a North Indian bhikṣu of the Sarvāstivāda school, who later became a convert to the Mahayana. The Chinese scholar-monk Yin Shun felt that it was the work of a South Indian, and that Nāgārjuna was quite possibly the author. Actually, these two views are not necessarily in opposition, and a South Indian Nāgārjuna could well have studied in the northern Sarvāstivāda. Neither of the two felt that it was composed by Kumārajīva which others have suggested. Philosophy

Nāgārjuna's primary contribution to Buddhist philosophy is in the use of the concept of śūnyatā, or "emptiness," which brings together other key Buddhist doctrines, particularly anātman (no-self) and pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination), to refute the metaphysics of Sarvastivāda andSautrāntika (extinct non-Mahayana schools). For Nāgārjuna, as for the Buddha in the early texts, it is not merely sentient beings that are "selfless" or non-substantial; all phenomena are without any svabhāva, literally "own-being" or "self-nature", and thus without any underlying essence. They are empty of being independently existent; thus the heterodox theories of svabhāva circulating at the time were refuted on the basis of the doctrines of early Buddhism. This is so because all things arise always dependently: not by their own power, but by depending on conditions leading to their coming into existence, as opposed to being. Nāgārjuna was also instrumental in the development of the two-truths doctrine, which claims that there are two levels of truth in Buddhist teaching, one which is directly (ultimately) true, and one which is only conventionally or instrumentally true, commonly called upāya in later Mahāyāna writings. Nāgārjuna drew on anearly version of this doctrine found in the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta, which distinguishes nītārtha (clear) and neyārtha (obscure) terms -

By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one reads the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'non-existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one reads the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one.

"By and large, Kaccayana, this world is in bondage to attachments, clingings (sustenances), and biases. But one such as this does not get involved with or cling to these attachments, clingings, fixations of awareness, biases, or obsessions; nor is he resolved on 'my self.' He has no uncertainty or doubt that just stress, when arising, is arising; stress, when passing away, is passing away. In this, his knowledge is independent of others. It's to this extent, Kaccayana, that there is right view.

"'Everything exists': That is one extreme. 'Everything doesn't exist': That is a second extreme. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma via the middle..."

Nāgārjuna differentiates between saṃvṛti (conventionally true) and paramārtha (ultimately true) teachings, but he never declares any conceptually formulated doctrines to fall in this latter category; for him, even śūnyatā is śūnyatā; even emptiness is empty. For him, ultimately,

nivṛttam abhidhātavyaṃ nivṛtte cittagocare|

anutpannāniruddhā hi nirvāṇam iva dharmatā||7

The designable is ceased when the range of thought is ceased,

For phenomenality is like nirvana, unarisen and unstopped.

This was famously rendered in his tetralemma with the logical propositions:

X (affirmation)

non-X (negation)

X and non-X (both)

neither X nor non-X (neither)

Nagarjuna also taught the idea of relativity; in the Ratnāvalī, he gives the example that shortness exists only in relation to the idea of length. The determination of a thing or object is only possible in relation to other things or objects, especially by way of contrast. He held that the relationship between the ideas of "short" and "long" is not due to intrinsic nature (svabhāva). This idea is also found in the Pali Nikāyas and Chinese Āgamas, in which the idea of relativity is expressed similarly: "That which is the element of light ... is seen to exist on account of [in relation to] darkness; that which is the element of good is seen to exist on account of bad; that which is the element of space is seen to exist on account of form."

Nagarjuna as Ayurvedic Physician

Nagarjuna was also a practitioner of Ayurveda, or traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine. First described in the Sanskrit medical treatise entitled Sushruta Samhita (of which he was the compiler of the redaction), many of his unique conceptualizations, such as his descriptions of the circulatory system and blood tissue (uniquely described as rakta dhātu) and his pioneering work on the therapeutic value of specially treated minerals knowns as bhasmas, which earned him the title of the "father of iatrochemistry," are described by Frank John Ninivaggi in his text: Ayurveda: A Comprehensive Guide to Traditional Indian Medicine for the West

Nāgārjuna is often depicted in composite form comprising human and naga characteristics. Often the naga aspect forms a canopy crowning and shielding his human head. The notion of the naga is found throughout Indian religious culture, and typically signifies an intelligent serpent or dragon, who is responsible for the rains, lakes and other bodies of water. In Buddhism, it is a synonym for a realized arhat, or wise person in general. The term also means "elephant". Mulamadhyamakakarika Other works

Author	Title	Publisher	Notes
Kawamura, L.	Golden Zephyr	Dharma, 1975	Translation of the Suhrlekkha with a Tibetan commentary
Bhattacharya, Johnston and Kunst	The Dialectical Method of Nagarjuna	Motilal, 1978	A superb translation of the Vigrahavyavartani
Lindtner, C.	Master of Wisdom: Writings of the Buddhist Master Nāgārjuna	Dharma, 1986	An excellent introduction to Madhyamika, Master of Wisdom contains two hymns of praise to the Buddha, two treatises on Shunyata, and two works that clarify the connection of analysis, meditation, and moral conduct. Includes Tibetan verses in transliteration and critical editions of extant Sanskrit. Tibetan Translation (product ID: 0-89800-286-9)
Lindtner, C.	Nagarjuniana	Motilal, 1987 [1982]	Contains Sanskrit or Tibetan texts and translations of the Shunyatasaptati, Vaidalyaprakarana, Vyavaharasiddhi (fragment), Yuktisastika, Catuhstava and Bodhicittavivarana. A translation only of the Bodhisambharaka. The Sanskrit and Tibetan texts are given for the Vigrahavyavartani. In addition a table of source sutras is given for the Sutrasamuccaya.
Komito, D. R.	Nagarjuna's "Seventy Stanzas"	Snow Lion, 1987	Translation of the Shunyatasaptati with Tibetan commentary
Tola, Fernando and Carmen Dragonetti	Vaidalyaprakarana	South Asia Books, 1995
Jamieson, R. C.	Nagarjuna's Verses on the Great Vehicle and the Heart of Dependent Origination	D.K., 2001	Translation and edited Tibetan of the Mahayanavimsika and the Pratityasamutpadahrdayakarika, including work on texts from the cave temple at Dunhuang, Gansu, China
Hopkins, Jeffrey	Nagarjuna's Precious Garland: Buddhist Advice for Living and Liberation	Snow Lion Publications, 2007	ISBN 1559392746
Brunnholzl, Karl	In Praise of Dharmadhatu	Snow Lion Publications, 2008	Translation with commentary by the 3rd Karmapa
Jones, Richard	Nagarjuna: Buddhism's Most Important Philosopher	Booksurge, 2010	Translation into plain English with commentaries of the Mulamadhyamikakarikas, the Vigrahavyavartani with Nagarjuna's commentary, and part of the Ratnavali.