The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way

"This is a book from a very different cultural universe. I include it here because I stumbled upon it, without previously knowing anything about it, while writing my book, and it had a very strong impact on me. Nagarjuna was a Buddhist monk of the second century and this book is a major philosophical text in the Buddhist tradition. Garfield is a contemporary analytical philosopher and his commentary has been essential for me to open up the ideas in the book. Nagarjuna’s philosophy is centred on the idea of the interdependence of all things and the absence of autonomous essence of anything. This implies that, in a precise sense, there is no ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is neither matter, nor energy, nor mind, nor platonic ideas, nor language, nor phenomena, nor Kantian noumen… It is just not there. I have found this a tremendously attractive and useful perspective. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter No, I don’t. I do think that we are beginning to understand the complexity of time and that we have an overall picture that makes sense; but there are several aspects of this picture that are still unclear, including for the physics. Why, for instance, was entropy low in the past? Is this just a feature of the universe we happen to inhabit, or is it our peculiar perspective on the universe that gives us this impression, like the apparent rotation of the heavens? This is one of the questions I am working on now, and where I hope better understanding will come."