Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series | Emptiness and Authorship

Speaker: April Olsen, St. John's College Tutor

Description: This lecture will explore how the Madhyamika notion of shunyata or “emptiness” is the best and perhaps the only logical way to make sense of the Buddha’s teaching of dependent arising. It will focus on an interpretation of Chapter 17 from Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, and it will conclude by suggesting that Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji provides an excellent paradigm for understanding how the self is also ultimately empty of essence.