Causality & Emptiness The Wisdom of Nagarjuna
Peter Della Santina
In the early seventies when I first went to India to study Buddhism, I soon came into contact with H.H. Sakya Trizin the forty first hierarch of the Sakya Order of Tibetan Buddhism and the Sakya community of scholars and monks which surrounded Him at Dehra Dun and Mussoorie. It was H.H. who first introduced Jay Goldburg and myself to N@g@rjuna’s The Good Hearted Letter.
That happy event eventually led to a Translation of the letter which has been much appreciated over the years by students of Buddhism. Not long afterwards, I began to work on translations of some of Nagarjuna’s shorter texts which were then still untranslated. The first was very short indeed, Nagarjuna’s The Heart of Interdependent Origination.
Despite of its brevity however, it proved to have more than enough in it to keep a young scholar occupied with it for sometime. It still seems to me to be of indispensible for understanding the Buddhist conception of Interdependent Origination.
The next work to attract my interest was Nagarjuna’s Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas.
It was of a totally different order from The Heart of Interdependent Origination. In the first place, it was considerably longer than the former. In addition, the subject matter was more difficult since it dealt with the key applications of the Philosophy of Emptiness. The translation of this text, accomplished with the help of Tibetan scholars of the Geluk.
nagarjuna
