Madhyamaka

Madhyamaka (Sanskrit: मध्यमक, Madhyamaka, Chinese: 中觀派; pinyin: Zhōngguān Pài; also known as Śūnyavāda) refers primarily to a Mahāyāna Buddhist school of philosophy founded by Nāgārjuna. According to Madhyamaka all phenomena (dharmas) are empty (śūnya) of "nature," a "substance" or "essence" (svabhāva) which gives them "solid and independent existence," because they are dependently co-arisen. But this "emptiness" itself is also "empty": it does not have an existence on its own, nor does it refer to a transcendental reality beyond or above phenomenal reality.

Etymology

The school of thought and its subsidiaries are called "Madhyamaka"; those who follow it are called "Mādhyamikas". "Madya" means "middle", as the Teaching of the Buddha is called "The Middle Way". "Madhyamaka" means "middlemost". A "Madyamika" is a "middlemoster", because he takes the middlemost way in philosophy.

Emptiness

Central to Madhyamaka philosophy is sunyata, "emptiness." The term refers to the "emptiness" of inherent existence: all phenomena are empty of "substance" or "essence" (Sanskrit: svabhāva) or inherent existence, because they are dependently co-arisen. At a conventional level, "things" do exist, but ultimately they are "empty" of inherent existence. But this "emptiness" itself is also "empty": it does not have an existence on its own, nor does it refer to a transcendental reality beyond or above phenomenal reality.

Pratītyasamutpāda

Pratītyasamutpāda (Sanskrit: प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद; Pali: पटिच्चसमुप्पाद paṭiccasamuppāda), commonly translated as dependent origination or dependent arising, states that all dharmas ("things") arise in dependence upon other dharmas: "if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist." It is a pragmatic teaching, which is applied to dukkha (suffering) and the cessation of dukkha.

The term is also used to refer to the twelve links of dependent origination, which describes the chain of causes which result in rebirth. By reverting the chain, liberation from rebirth can be attained.

Etymology

Pratityasamutpada (Sanskrit: प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद) consists of two terms:

The term has been translated into English variously as dependent origination, dependent arising, interdependent co-arising, conditioned arising, and conditioned genesis. The term could be translated somewhat more literally as arising in dependence upon conditions.

Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one of the major English encyclopedias of philosophy.

The first edition of the encyclopedia was in eight volumes, edited by Paul Edwards, and published in 1967 by Macmillan; it was reprinted in four volumes in 1972.

A "Supplement" volume, edited by Donald M. Borchert, was added to the reprinted first edition in 1996, containing articles on developments in philosophy since 1967, covering new subjects and scholarship updates or new articles on those written about in the first edition.

A second edition, also edited by Borchert, was published in ten volumes in 2006 by Thomson Gale. Volumes 1–9 contain alphabetically ordered articles. Volume 10 consists of:

Its ISBNs are 0-02-865780-2 as a hardcover set, and 0-02-866072-2 as an e-book.

See also

Middle Way

The Central Path, Middle Way or Middle Path (Pali: Majjhimāpaṭipadā; Sanskrit: Madhyamāpratipad; Tibetan: དབུ་མའི་ལམ། Umélam; Vietnamese: Trung đạo; Thai: มัชฌิมาปฏิปทา) is the term that Gautama Buddha used to describe the character of the Noble Eightfold Path he discovered that leads to liberation.

Theravada

In the Pāli Canon of Theravada Buddhism, the expression Middle Way is used by the Buddha in his first discourse, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, to describe the Noble Eightfold Path as the way to achieve nibbana instead of employing extremes of austerities and sensual indulgence. Later Pali literature has also used the phrase Middle Way to refer to the Buddha's teaching of dependent origination as a view between the extremes of eternalism [ ?] and annihilationism.[ ? ]

Mahayana Buddhism

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Middle Way refers to the insight into śūnyatā "emptiness" that transcends the extremes of existence and non-existence, the two truths doctrine.

Noble Eightfold Path

Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics (QM; also known as quantum physics or quantum theory) including quantum field theory, is a fundamental branch of physics concerned with processes involving, for example, atoms and photons. In such processes, said to be quantized, the action has been observed to be only in integer multiples of the Planck constant, a physical quantity that is exceedingly, indeed perhaps ultimately, small. This is utterly inexplicable in classical physics.

Quantum mechanics gradually arose from Max Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem (reported 1859) and Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which offered a quantum-based theory to explain the photoelectric effect (reported 1887). Early quantum theory was profoundly reconceived in the mid-1920s.

The reconceived theory is formulated in various specially developed mathematical formalisms. In one of them, a mathematical function, the wave function, provides information about the probability amplitude of position, momentum, and other physical properties of a particle.