Opinion of Nagarjuna

[Tokugawa Sexgod Ieyasu]

Often considered the most important Buddhist philosopher after Shakyamuni himself. Brought together several preexisting Buddhist notions into the general concept of sunyata, emptiness; developed the two-truths doctrine, from which is derived the concept of 'expedient means' that finds its most accomplished expression in the Lotus Sutra; radically relativized Mahayana Buddhist cosmology and epistemology.

Posted in part because he's a subject of scholarly interest for me, in part because afleitch has a point about most of the people this board has these threads on being relatively anodyne modern Christians, and in part as an attempt to attract anvi's attention to this board again.

FF; while I'm not sure that it's fair for me to vote FF or HP on a thinker so important to an entirely different religion, his thought definitely does fascinate me.

[anvi]

I've devoted lots of study to Nagarjuna's thought and have written a fair amount about him.  I guess I'm giving away my identity here, but I've been on the forum about five years so I suppose it's time.  I am the author of the second piece listed in the "External Links" list of the wikipedia article, the essay on Nagarjuna hosted by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  That was one of my first published pieces on his thought--I wrote that about eleven years ago or so.

Anyway, I'd have to vote FF.  Indisputably one of the most important philosophers in the entire history of Buddhist thought.  He didn't really invent the distinction between the two truths, he modified it from a foregoing Abhidharma usage.  His critique of epistemology in one of his most famous treatises has always struck me as being off-mark.  But, in equating emptiness with dependent co-arising, no thinker in the history of that tradition influenced the ongoing development of Mahayana thought as much as he did, and in quite profound and admirable ways too.