Korean Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

This paper uses a phenomenological approach to examine the world and universe from the perspective of Mādhyamaka, a branch of Buddhist philosophy. Early Buddhism and Abhidharma Buddhism proposed a constructivist worldview that describes the human body and the external world as the “five skandhas, twelve āyatanas, and eighteen dhātus.” However, Nāgārjuna, the founder of Mādhyamaka—celebrated for his eight types of investigations—rejected and deconstructed all constructivist worldviews, including the “Dharma ontology of the Three Seil and the Legal Portability” of Confucianism and the six categories of the Vaiśeṣika school. He described a “world of acting,” asserting that “nothing has an essence because it acts and is a sphere of action.” He introduced the [二諦說] worldview of irreversible transcendental dualism, wherein prapañca (conceptual proliferation) is separated from language and rationalism is extinguished. This dualistic view reduces the secular realm to a universal hypothetical existence—grounded in the principle that “niḥsvabhāva” (no intrinsic nature) and “śūnyatā” (emptiness) constitute “the nature of all things”—ultimately moving toward absolute emptiness.
Yet did Mādhyamaka philosophy initially uphold the ideology of “acting, selflessness, universality, and moderation”? And how did it come to be branded with the misplaced stigma of nihilism? The debate over Mādhyamaka’s “regression” parallels similar arguments in Western philosophy, where one exposes an opponent’s position and dismantles it by revealing its errors and contradictions. In this context, the argument invokes Spinoza’s notion of 神卽自然 (the divinity of nature) as a way to interpret Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka worldview. In other words, it suggests that Spinoza’s effort to expand the horizon of 能産 (productive capacity) and 所産 (produced phenomena) through God’s infinite absoluteness aligns with Nāgārjuna’s method of absolute affirmation achieved through absolute negation.