Sunya-vada
Sunya-vada
A Buddhist theory (vada) holding the world to be void (sunya) or unreal. Otherwise known as Madhyamaka (q.v.), this Mahayana (q.v.) school as founded by Nagarjuna and elaborated in the Madhyama-kasastra, is hardly correctly translated by nihilism. To be sure, the phenomenal world is said to have no reality, yet the world underlying it defies description, also because of our inability to grasp the thing-in-itself (svabhava). All we know is its dependence on some other condition, its co-called “dependent origination”. Thus, nothing definite being able to be said about the real, it is, like the apparent, as nothing, in other words, sunya, void. — K.F.L.