ZenExperience-obooko-rel0025

Tibetan legends his parents sent him away from home at seven
because an astrologer had predicted his early death and they
wished to be spared the sight. But he broke the spell by entering
Buddhist orders, and went on to become the faith's foremost
philosopher.
Today Nagarjuna is famous for his analysis of the so-called
Wisdom Books of Mahayana, a set of Sanskrit sutras composed
between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100. (Included in this category are
The Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines, as well as the Diamond
Sutra and Heart Sutra, both essential scriptures of Zen.)
Nagarjuna was the originator of the Middle Path, so named
because it strove to define a middle ground between affirmation of
the world and complete negation of existence.
Reality, said Nagarjuna, cannot be realized through
conceptual constructions, since concepts are contained inside
reality, not vice versa. Consequently, only through the intuitive
mind can reality be approached. His name for this "reality" beyond
the mind's analysis was sunyata, usually translated as
"emptiness" but sometimes as "the Void." (Sunyata is perhaps an
unprovable concept, but so too are the ego and the unconscious,
both hypothetical constructs useful in explaining reality but
impossible to locate on the operating table.) Nagarjuna's mostquoted
manifesto has the logic-defying ring of a Zen : "Nothing
comes into existence nor does anything disappear. Nothing is
eternal, nor has anything any end. Nothing is identical or
differentiated. Nothing moves hither and thither."
As the Ch'an teachers interpreted the teaching of sunyata, the
things of this world are all a mental creation, since external
phenomena are transient and only exist for us because of our
perception. Consequently they are actually "created" by our mind
(or, if you will, a more universal entity called Mind). Consequently
they do not exist outside our mind and hence are a void. Yet the
mind itself, which is the only thing real, is also a void since its
thoughts cannot be located by the five senses. The Void is
therefore everything, since it includes both the world and the
mind. Hence, sunyata.
As a modern Nagarjuna scholar has described sunyata, or
emptiness, it is a positive sense of freedom, not a deprivation
"This awareness of 'emptiness' is not a blank loss of
consciousness, an inanimate space; rather it is the cognition of
daily life without the attachment to it. It is an awareness of distinct