Verses from the Center (Buddhist Vision of the Sublime) by Stephen Batchelor

Author:Stephen Batchelor [Batchelor, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101663097
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2001-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Rather than regarding concepts such as “self” and “no self” as the basis of a doctrinal position, which can be upheld or refuted, Nagarjuna treats them as terms within a strategic discourse of freedom, which are employed therapeutically to address the needs of specific situations. Throughout the text, he recognizes that the same is true of any such pair of polarized terms: “same” and “different,” “real” and “unreal,” “empty” and “not empty,” “eternal” and “ephemeral.”

To say that “emptiness stops fixations” does not mean that an understanding of something called “emptiness” will suddenly bring to a halt something else called “fixations.” Rather than denoting discrete states of mind, the terms “emptiness” and “fixation” suggest strategies for living. As strategies they are irreducible to simple definitions. They encompass the complex ways in which we view the world, the values we seek to uphold, the livelihoods in which we are engaged, as well as the social and political structures we hope to develop with others. The crucial difference between strategies of fixation and those of emptiness lies in the fact that the former give rise to anguish, while the latter do not.

Verses from the Center can be understood as Nagarjuna’s attempt to illustrate the strategy of emptiness in a range of different contexts. At the heart of his approach lies the recurrent theme of not losing a centered perspective through succumbing to fixated opinions of oneself as either identical or different, eternal or ephemeral, something or nothing:

You are not the same as or different from

Conditions on which you depend;

You are neither severed from

Nor forever fused with them—

This is the deathless teaching

Of buddhas who care for the world.

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