What is Shoonya?
A long time back I visited the place where the great Acharya Nagarjuna lived, It is a tourist place called Nagarjuna Sagar in India.
I had no prior understanding of Acharya Nagarjuna and his greatness, even now, it takes a lifetime to understand Buddhist philosophy, and we should be humble enough to accept that.
The whole Indian philosophy leaped to another level because of Acharya Nagarjuna.
What makes me say this? let’s take one concept which looked interesting to me.
The concept of “Phenomena can originate without cause”, in other ways it means at the end of the tunnel there is “Shoonya” or a kind of nothingness, the meaning of this, is whatever we see and experience in this world is constructed by our mind through the process of perception, this includes our so-called “Self”, this is a very hard concept to digest and realize.
Imagine a question like this What is the cause of our existence?
If we apply regression, it leads to Shoonya at the other end of the spectrum like ( You went on regressing till atoms, particles, energy … further it is like Shoonya whether we accept it or not is a topic for deep discussion)
In the process of answering the above question, a lot of religions got invented, and they invented several gods and several irrational explanations, ultimately leading to the world that we see today.
Now imagine our foundational thinking does not have any assumptions, it open’s up our minds to think more rationally about the world and try to get answers for the phenomenon we see around us, and this is what he tried to practice in his life as a chemist and also I believe tried to preach.
