2 The Yogācārin Re-affirmation of Existence
Throughout its history, the Madhyamaka has often been interpreted nihilistically, as it is thought to render morality, and all goal-oriented activity, ultimately futile. If nothing truly exists, or, if we, along with everything else, will be completely annihilated someday, the argument goes, why should anyone bother to practice the Buddha‘s teachings? In environmental matters, nihilism includes the question of how to justify concern for nature, given a belief in the inevitable eventual destruction of the planet.
More will be said about the moral implications of nihilism in chapter 4, where I shall
distinguish separate threads in the argument and draw out their environmental
implications. For the purposes of this chapter, nihilism will be defined as a tendency
towards belief in nonexistence, which the Buddha denounced in the Kaccāyanagotta
Sutta.
One of its manifestations occurs when the teaching on emptiness, that is, the idea
of all things as merely conventionally real, leads one to infer that nothing really exists at all. A second nihilistic view is the belief that dependently co-originated entities will eventually be utterly destroyed.
Nāgārjuna‘s philosophy was interpreted as nihilism even during his own lifetime,
and in several places, he offers a response against such claims.(((For example, MMK 24 is an extended argument against nihilism, where Nāgārjuna shows that, contrary
to his opponent‘s charge it is belief in svabhāva, and not emptiness, that renders the Buddhist spiritual goal impossible to attain (Garfield 1995, 302–303). In MMK 15:7, 11, he refers explicitly to the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta and identifies as the error of nihilism, the view that "it existed before but doesn‘t now" (Garfield 1995, 224).)))
Yet, despite these efforts, his philosophy continues to be labelled nihilistic right up to the present. In a relatively recent account, we read that the Madhyamaka School reaches a "radical nihilist position", as it "denies the true existence, the existence as it appears, of the empirical reality" and suggests that "all beings and things, contingent by their own nature, which constitute the empirical reality, are unreal, non-existent" (Tola and Dragonetti 1995, xvi).
By contrast, emptiness, the authors claim, "is the true reality",and it "has been, is and will be always there independently from our analysis" (Tola and Dragonetti 1995, xxii). It seems hard to reconcile claims such as these with Nāgārjuna‘s insistence that he defends no position, and they do not tally with his refusal to affirm either existence or emptiness.