Philosophy Spotlight: Tsuga, Dragonblood

“Each of us will rejoin the Earth. In death, our bodies live past us - reforged by the flow of time and reborn in an unceasing world. We suffer during our lives when we clutch on to what we have, because we depend on a stage of the world that cannot last. But life's great irony is that the source of our suffering also grounds our purpose.”

Tsuga's philosophy highlights the progression from Nagarjuna's Buddhist metaphysics to psychology and ultimately to ethics. Nagarjuna says all things go through a process of "samsara" or continual rebirth. Nothing comes into existence out of emptiness, and nothing disappears from existence into emptiness. Instead, all things are in a continual process of disbanding and forming new objects.

Nearly 2,000 years before atoms were proven scientifically, Nagarjuna used logic to deduce that the parts that make up all things, including people, must continue to exist as new objects in a continual cycle of reformation. This insight led Nagarjuna to a radical interpretation of the Buddhist teaching of nirvana - there is no difference between nirvana (the cessation of suffering) and samsara, as our suffering ends when we are reborn. 

Nagarjuna's metaphysics naturally motivates a detached psychological perspective. The world continues on indefinitely, and our entire lives are a brief perception of how the world looks during our lifetimes. Everything we are attached to - people, animals, creative projects - are temporary forms in the world. From this detached perspective, we can infer the psychological conclusion that our attachment to temporary things in this world is the source of our suffering. We suffer when we fear our death, when we mourn the death of others, and when our desires are frustrated.

Although this psychological point is associated with the idea of extreme detachment, it does not entail it. Once we recognize attachments as the source of our suffering, it is still an open question whether those attachments are worth the cost. The latter question is the key to understanding ethics within a Buddhist framework. Buddha himself did not advise apathy or total detachment, and neither did Nagarjuna. Both left the ethical question largely unanswered. The psychological point simply informs the ethical analysis, and it is up to the individual thinker how to be selective with their own attachments. Is total apathy preferable to suffering? Can attachments give our life meaning even if they expose us to harm?