MADHYAMIKA

(Sanskrit: Intermediate), important school in the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) Buddhist tradition. Its name derives from its having sought a middle position between the realism of the Sarvastivada (Doctrine That All Is Real) school and the idealism of the Yogacara (Mind Only) school. The most renowned Madhyamika thinker was Nagarjuna (2nd century AD), who developed the doctrine that all is void (sunyavada). The three authoritative texts of the school are the Madhyamika-sastra (Sanskrit: Treatise of the Middle Way) and the Dvadas-dvara-sastra (Twelve Gates Treatise) by Nagarjuna and the Sataka-sastra (One Hundred Verses Treatise), attributed to his pupil Aryadeva. Buddhism in general assumed that the world is a cosmic flux of momentary interconnected events (dharmas), however the reality of these events might be viewed. Nagarjuna sought to demonstrate that the flux itself could not be held to be real, nor could the consciousness perceiving it, as it itself is part of this flux. If this world of constant change is not real, neither can the serial transmigration be real, nor its opposite, nirvana. Transmigration and nirvana being equally unreal, they are one and the same. In the final analysis, reality can only be attributed to something entirely different from all that is known, which must therefore have no identifiable predicates and can only be styled the void (sunyata). Madhyamika thinkers thus strongly emphasize the mutations of human consciousness to grasp the reality of that which is ultimately real beyond any duality. The world of duality could be assigned a practical reality of vyavahara (discourse and process), but, once the ultimate meaning (paramartha) of the void is grasped, this reality falls away. These ideals influenced Hindu thinkers, principally Gaudapada (7th century) and Sankara (usually dated AD 788820); the latter is therefore called a crypto-Madhyamika by his adversaries. The basic Madhyamika texts were translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva in the 5th century, and the teachings were further systematized (as the San-lun, or Three Treatises, school) in the 6th7th century by Chi-tsang. The school spread to Korea and was first transmitted to Japan, as Sanron, in 625 by the Korean monk Ekwan.