Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

109
Chapter 8: Nāgārjuna
[89] The adherents of the Hīnayāna proclaim the Prajñāpāramitā in a
hundred thousand ślokas to be the latest Mahāyānasūtra and
attribute its authorship to Nāgārjuna. The authority for this is
Tāranātha, the Tibetan historian (p. 71), whose work has been
translated from the Tibetan by Scheifner. So far the tradition may be
correct in that it is an apocryphal sūtra issuing from the school of
Nāgārjuna, for it consists, like all Prajñāpāramitās, only of
innumerable repetitions of the principles of the Madhyamika system
founded by Nāgārjuna. What appears in the dialogues of those sūtras
as somewhat abstruse and confused is expressed systematically and
with lucid clarity in the Madhyamakakārikās or Madhyamikasūtras
of Nāgārjuna. This principal work of Nāgārjuna, with the
commentary by Chandrakīrti called Prasannapada, was published by
L. de La Vallée-Poussin, in the St. Petersburg Bibliotheca Buddhica,
in 1903, and the twenty fourth chapter of the commentary has been
translated by the same Belgian scholar in the Mélanges Le Charles
de Harlez. The Madhyamakakārikā is a systematic philosophical
work of the class with which we have been familiar in Brahmanic
scientific literature. It is in a metrical form to help the memory. It is
composed as kārikās to which the author himself usually appends his
own scholia. Now the commentary composed by Nāgārjuna himself
to his work and the title of which we know to be Akutobhāya is no
longer extant in Sanskrit but is known to us only in a Tibetan
translation. This valuable scholia, has been translated from the
Tibetan by Max Walleser. Both the old commentaries of
Buddhapālita and Bhavaviveka are preserved only in the Tibetan