Customer Reviews

Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Madhyamka (National Foreign Language Center Technical Reports)

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This is an excellent read.
It's also a tough one. The author uses deep academic language -especially at the beginning- but it is really worth learning the terms used. Huntingdon's attempt to strip most current academic ideas about Madhyamaka into dust is pretty fun to read, and edifying for the practitioner. The book has some great one-liners, even if it is a bit rich on quotes from modern philosophy.
If you think that Buddhist Philosophy is similar to Kant or Platonic ideas, read this. If you think that you are a capable academic in the field of Philology, Philosophy, Historiography, or Buddhism, read this!
Actually.. Unless long words are wasted on you, read this!

In "The Emptiness of Emptiness", the deceptively simple philosophy of Buddhism is disected and discussed with the care and rigor that we expect from good academic writing. Without diminishing the importance of either tradition C.W. Huntington Jr. offers insight into the giants of the Buddhist tradition by pointing out points of intersection between them and western philosophers with whom we might be more familiar. A challenging and fascinating read!

This book really helped me to understand some concepts of this branch of Buddhist philosophy. It's a more detailed explanation of Nagarjuna's thoughts, it's helpful for the scholar in a school context and at the same time it gives the oportunity of a wide introspection.

Huntington is proud of his "strong miss-reading." But I say that unless your found of pretentious academic BS, read something different. A good academic read is Empty Words, by Jay L. Garfield. A better one still is The Ontology of the Middle Way, by Fenner. However, and I almost forgot, Huntington's book does have a translation of Candrakirti's The Entry into the Middle Way, which is cool. Still, read Huntington at the library and buy Garfield's Empty Words for home.