Aryadeva Quotes on Knowledge
Āryadeva (c. 3rd century CE), the principal disciple of Nāgārjuna and the second great figure of the Madhyamaka school, extended the Madhyamaka analysis of emptiness in the Catuḥśataka (Four Hundred Verses) and the shorter Śataka. The work systematically refutes the essentialist commitments of contemporary Buddhist and Brahmanical schools through the dialectical method by which any positive metaphysical thesis is shown to entail contradiction. Knowledge for Āryadeva is not the apprehension of self-existent essences (svabhāva) but the realization, in dependent designation, of the conventional and ultimate truths whose articulation is the work of the Madhyamaka treatises.
Quotes
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Attributed to Aryadeva:
“The wise refute the views of others not from contention, but to free their interlocutors from clinging.”
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Attributed to Aryadeva:
“Emptiness is the medicine for those who suffer from the disease of intrinsic existence.”
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Attributed to Aryadeva:
“The Buddha is no thesis; what he taught is no doctrine.”
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“That (country) which (lies) between the Himavat and the Vindhya (mountains) to the east of Prayaga and to the west of Vinasana (the place where the river Sarasvati disappears) is called Madhyadesa (the central region). But (the tract) between those two mountains (just mentioned), which (extends) as far as the eastern and the western oceans, the wise call Aryavarta (the country of the Aryans).”
Manu smriti, ch. ii -
“Aryavarata was the sacred land of Dharma, the elevated path to Heaven and to Moksha; where men were nobler than the Devatas themselves; where all knowledge, thought and worship were rooted in the Vedas, revealed by the Devatas themselves.”
Vishnupuranam, II, 3, 4; trans. and paraphrased in Sandeep Balakrishna - Invaders and Infidels_ From Sindh to Delhi_ The 500-Year Journey of Islamic Invasions. Bloomsbury India (2020) -
“Vishnupuranam, II, 3, 4; trans. and paraphrased in Sandeep Balakrishna - Invaders and Infidels_ From Sindh to Delhi_ The 500-Year Journey of Islamic Invasions. Bloomsbury India (2020)”
Aryavarata was the sacred land of Dharma, the elevated path to Heaven and to Moksha; where men were nobler than the Devatas themselves; where all knowledge, thought and worship were rooted in the Vedas, revealed by the Devatas themselves. -
“Visaladeva, the Chahamana king, proudly declares that “he once more made Aryavarta (Northern India) what its name signifies (abode of the Aryas i.e. Hindus) by repeatedly exterminating the Mlechchhas (Muslims, who had rendered the name meaningless by their occupation of the country).”
quoted in R.C. Majumdar editor, Volume 5 : The Struggle for Empire [1000-1300 A.D.] p 497-502 -
“The Vedic Hindus called themselves Aryas, and the tract in which they settled themselves in India has the distinctive name of Aryadesa ... The Aryadesa or Arya-vartta [sic!] of Manu is bounded on the north by the Himalaya; and on the south by the Vindhyan chain.”
Rajendralala Mitta, Indo-Aryans:Contributions Indo-Aryans: contributions towards the elucidation of their ancient and mediaeval history the EJ11cilltl- tum of their Ancinst 11ntl Metlinlll Hisuwy, vol. II, pp. 438-9., 21.. in Indira Chowdhury - The Frail Hero and Virile History_ Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal-Oxford University Press (1998)