Stcherbatsky's word for śūnyatā shaped how a generation of English readers met Nāgārjuna. He admits it is a compromise, made "for want of a better solution", and renders śūnya as relative and śūnyatā as "relativity or contingency". His footnote reaches back to Aristotle's category of relation, but in 1927 the word carried a charge from physics that the footnote does not mention, and the book prints its Nāgārjuna as a Treatise on Relativity. Later translators settled on emptiness. His argument, that śūnya means devoid of independent reality and never a bare void, has lasted; the label he gave it has not.
The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana — Th. Stcherbatsky (1927)
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1 It is clear that we have here that conception of a substance as something independently existing which is well known to the students of European philosophy, cp. Spinoza’s definition of substance as a quod in se est et per se condpitur». This conception resulted either in estab¬ lishing the theory of a harmonia generaliter stabilita in order to explain the interdependence of the monads, or to the view that there is only one unique substance. The latter view is taken in Mahayana, the former in Hinayana, where the harmony between the monads is established by karma as a special iorce(sa>nskdra,), the force xaregoy-^v, the Tipukov xtvouv.
2 Ibid. XVIII. 9.
3 Ibid. p. 263.3 — kdlika-dydcitakam.
4 Ibid. p. 173.9, 545.18, 147.4.
5 Ibid. p. 547.1.
6 Although the Hlnayanist presses to the utmost the reality of the ultimate elements (dharmas) alone, nevertheless the importance of the whole is foreshadowed in the conception of sarvam (cp. below p. 54), as well as in the conception of a general Causality. Under the name of kdrana-hetu a kind of causality is asserted through which every moment of reality is conditioned by nothing short of the state of the whole Universe. This is expressed in the following way, (Ab. Kosa, II. 50), svato’nye ( sarve dharmah) karana-hetuh, i. e., an element (or a moment) cannot be its own cause, but all the other elements, i. e., the whole Universe, are in some, direct or indirect, causal relation with it. Since the three times ( adhvan ), i. e., all the future and all th
NIRVANA
XIV. RELATIVITY
XIV. The doctrine of Relativity
In Mahayana we are thus faced by a new interpretation of the old Buddhist principle of the dependency- coordinated -existence of the elements (dharmanam pratltya-sam-utpada). It is now being declared that whatso¬ ever is dependent or relative cannot be considered as an ultimate reality, and this feature is then pressed to its last extreme. In Hinayana existence was bifurcated in conditioned and unconditioned (samskrta and asamskrta), both being realities. Neither of them is now considered as ultimately real, and both are brought under the higher unity of Relativity. The central conception in Early Buddhism is the idea of a plurality of ultimate elements ( dharmas ). The central conception of Mahayana is their relativity (iSunyata ). The Buddhists themselves contended that the idea of ultimate elements ( skandha - dyatana - dhatavah ), of their interdependence (pratitya - samutpada) and of the «Four Truths of the Saint» are admitted in both Hinayana and Mahayana. But in the first they are referred to the reality of separate elements, and in the second they are interpreted as meaning their relativity, or non-reality . 1 Since we use the term «relative» to describe the fact that a thing can be identified only by mentioning its relations to something else, and becomes meaningless without these relations, implying at the same time that the thing in question is unreal, we safely, for want of a better solution, can translate the word sunya by relative or contingent, and the term sunyatd by relativity or contingency . 2 This is in any case better than to translate it past moments are included in the conception oall the elements», sarve dharmah, it is clear that although the world appeared in, Hinayana as validly analyzable into bits, the idea of it as a logical continuum was foreshadowed. In Mahayana it became definitely asserted.
1 The germ of the idea that the elements of existence, because interdependent, are not real can be found in some passages of the Pali Kanon. This Candrakirti himself admits (Madhy. avat. p. 22. 15 ff. B. B. IX). But it does not in the least interfere with the fact that Hinayana is a system of radical pluralism, all dharmas, and even Nirvana, are vattu, whereas Mahayanism is a monistic system ( advaya , nisprapahca). It is quite impossible to maintain that Hinayana is an advaita-system. But if the Madhyamika system is characterised as negativism, and everything negative is thrown into the same bag, then it is not difficult to discover in Majjh. N. I. 1 a full blown prajna-paramita, and to maintain that «es ist ein Irrtum anzunehmen, im alten Buddhismus sei etwas anderes als Negativismus gelehrt worden», as prof. B. Otto Franke has done, cp. Ernst Kuhn Memorial Volume, p. 332 ff. (Miinchen 1916). It is also difficult to say what the contention of M. de la V. P. that athere is a great deal of Madhyamika philosophy in the Pali Kanon» (ERE VIII, p. 334) exactly means.
2 The notion of Relativity is thus taken in a generalised sense, just as Aristotle himself uses it in the Metaphysics, where he treats Ad altquid, not as one among the distinct categories,