I will track down the Inada translation. Thanks for that, and have a great summer session. I can’t tell you how much I miss Santa Fe in the summer when the clouds come rolling in. Enjoy it!

I’m not sure it’s in print anymore, but if you can find a copy in a library or something, Kenneth Inada does a translation of Nagarjuna from the Sanskrit (and includes the Sanskrit text) which has some revealing differences with the Garfield. I’ve not read any others.

I was a little concerned while reading Garfield’s book that I was getting more Garfield than Nagarjuna, but without a place to start Nagarjuna is really tough going. I read it again without the commentary and found a few points I might contend, but it’s hard to tell where the food ends and the digestion begins. I’ll have to let it settle for a while and return again later for a fresh look.

Is there a translation of Nagarjuna from the Sanskrit that you could recommend? Or any other perspective?

The roguish aspect of Vimalakirti is grating on me a little, but I expect there is a reason for that. Onward and inward.

Maybe try some Dogen, if you want to keep at this stuff. Or if Vimalakirti intrigued or unsettled you, the Sutra of Hui Neng.

I have been impressed and inspired by many of the readings — Chuang Tzu, the Upanishads, the Bhagavadgita and the Yoga Sutras in particular — but Garfield’s treatment of Nagarjuna brought me to the brink of something I can’t quite describe.

During my freshman year at St. John’s I wrote my essay on Theaetetus and his “wind egg.” I remember arguing that Socrates was suggesting that abstract concepts such as knowledge, justice, etc., could not be defined, and without definition they could not exist. My tutors argued, probably correctly, that this was not what Socrates meant, but I was never totally dissuaded. Nagarjuna brought all that back to me, twenty years later, and I think he’s right. (I also loved Hume, while doing my very best to doubt him. Kant helped.)

I don’t have much to say about Sullivan and Horgan, et al, except that in light of the tiny bit of Buddhism that I have read (the Suttas on the list, Nagarjuna, and now Vimalakirti) their judgments are superficial and seem to be based on pop notions.

Peace, brother, and good tidings on your journey!

Tom Olson, SF 86-89

That human beings “can’t seem but to stretch toward being with every word” would be understood by the Buddha, I think, as an expression of clinging, itself a consequence of ignorance, and a source of suffering.

Sometimes it sounds like a moral failing, a grasping after things in order to possess them. And the necessary insight to eliminate suffering is that they are “impermanent” in a profound and specific way (and thus cannot be possessed). It is something of a formula that one ought to be able to say of anything, “This is not mine, this is not my self, this I am not.”

Later tradition becomes quite specific in claiming that there are “worldly” or “conventional” truths that one might allow for their utility, while understanding them for what they are. And that might at least appear something like “stretching toward being with every word,” while understanding deeply how the word falls short. But I suppose enlightenment isn’t easy.