Abandoning All Views

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 4 brings preceding discussions of the tetralemma to bear on the central role that abandoning all views plays within Nāgārjuna’s thought as a whole. For Nāgārjuna’s masterwork opens and closes with salutations to the Buddha as one who taught the “cessation of conceptualization” and the “abandonment of all views.” In addition, this and Nāgārjuna’s other texts contain numerous analogous calls for the complete abandonment of views, which are surveyed and explained. Despite these copious, clear, and comprehensive disavowals of views, contemporary scholars almost unanimously interpret such statements as referring only to “false” views. This chapter argues instead that Nāgārjuna’s insistence on the abandonment of all views—including ultimately his own—constitutes his distinctive epistemological means to the metaphysical “exhaustion” characteristic of nirvāṇa, wherein all views are and must be abandoned as so many subtle affirmations of an only ever empty self.