Occasional Papers of The Studies in Inter-Religious Relations

The first point to acknowledge is that, while the religiosity of Nāgārjuna is undisputed (in the sense that he clearly self-identifies as Buddhist), the relevance of that religiosity to his philosophical project, not to mention the religious status of the other philosopher dealt with here (Heidegger), are highly controversial.4 In support of qualifying my discussion as interreligious, then, I refe. [...] What better place than a forum for discussion of interreligious topics, however, in which to apply a term coined in the context of scholarship on one religion to scholarship on another? And what more apt use of such a term than in the context of an expressly interreligious discussion? It is in this sense, then, that the study that follows of Indian Buddhist and Continental Christianate critiques o. [...] Hence, since it is free from the two extremes of being and non-being, emptiness – defined as everthing’s non- origination from an essence – is said to be the middle path, i.e., the middle way.27 Emptiness for the Mādhyamikas is thus tantamount to a universalisation to all phenomena of the Buddha’s teaching of no-self (anātman) on the basis of dependent co-origination. [...] Indeed, in his pursuit of “a fundamental elaboration of the question of being”, Heidegger explicitly states – already in 1927 – that “The question of being attains true concreteness only when we carry out the destructuring of the ontological tradition”;42 that is, in a turning away from the ontological categories inherited from the Greeks and systemic theologians. [...] The Programme seeks to be at the forefront in the development of scholarship and applied knowledge on the roles of religion and inter-religious relations in plural societies today.