Buddhapalita’s Commentary on Nagarjuna’s Middle Way

A masterful translation of classic scholar Buddhapalita’s breakthrough elucidation of Nagarjuna’s famous Middle Way text, which has profoundly influenced generations of Buddhist philosophers. This Buddhapalita commentary on Nagarjuna’s famous first-century text Wisdom: Fundamental Middle Way Verses has been considered for over a thousand years by Indian and Tibetan philosophers to be the special key that best unlocks the deep philosophical freedom from confusion and perplexity that the Middle Way (or Centrist) school seeks to provide for its students.

Chandrakirti (seventh century) defended Buddhapalita’s elegant approach as most effective in opening the Middle Way for the inquiring mind to find the liberating experience of reality. Atisha (eleventh century) brought Buddhapalita’s and Chandrakirti’s transformative critical method to spread widely in Tibet, and Tsongkhapa (fifteenth century) provided a clarification of this philosophical work that was so rigorous and crystal clear that it opened the minds of Tibetan philosopher scientists of all schools until today.

Ian Coghlan’s masterful translation makes Buddhapalita’s breakthrough elucidation of the Wisdom Verses clearly accessible. The translator’s unique education combines the Indo-Tibetan geshe curriculum with the modern doctoral training that adds comparative text-critical analysis and comparative language research in Sanskrit as well as Tibetan. This intellectual and experiential education enabled him to produce this reliable translation for the philosophical seeker to fully engage with Buddhapalita’s richly transformative, liberating work.