Nagarjuna And The Art Of Negation

Reading the philosophy of Nagarjuna in retrospective, his method of Nagarjuna is variously explained in this book. How the application of tetralemma-four-value structure (catuskoti) would give us enough resources to expand our thoughts and how that could help us negate the binary either/or structure of thought that demands theoretical postulations. Notably, the art of logical negation used by Nagarjuna employing neither/nor structure would help us understand the Middle Path (Madhyamika) philosophy clearly. Most of the philosophies use the structure of two-value logical interpretations to introduce their metaphysics and ethics. Metaphysical conception of soul-God is the basis of virtue ethics centred on transcendentals of goodness, truth, beauty, unity, justice, being, etc. of the classical Greeks, later being followed by Christians, Jews and Islamic thinkers. The conception of atman-Brahman is the foundation of Vedic philosophers' understanding of transcendentals as truth (sat), consciousness (cit) and bliss (ananada), Nagarjuna, on the other hand, employs negative dialectics to confute the logical structure of either/or that demands metaphysical concepts; and by employing the four-value logical structure, he introduces the transcendentals as wisdom and compassion. This book uses Nagarjunian art of negation to reread his philosophy differently to discern the concept of emptiness (sunyata) as the co-dependent evolution of various elements of the subjective self and the elements of objective experiences in the dominion of the subjective self and the elements of objective experiences in the dominion of the subjective self; therein it is possible to redefine no-soul (nairatmya) as self-being, and "dominion of subjectivity" for replacing a metaphysical postulation; and the transcendentals as wisdom and compassion.

The Buddhist saint N=ag=arjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the second century CE, is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mah=ay=ana Buddhist philosopher. His many works include texts addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and a set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises. His greatest philosophical work, the Mūlamadhyamikak=arik=a--read and studied by philosophers in all major Buddhist schools of Tibet, China, Japan, and Korea--is one of the most influential works in the history of Indian philosophy. Now, in The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Jay L. Garfield provides a clear and eminently readable translation of N=ag=arjuna's seminal work, offering those with little or no prior knowledge of Buddhist philosophy a view into the profound logic of the Mūlamadhyamikak=arik=a. Garfield presents a superb translation of the Tibetan text of Mūlamadhyamikak=arik=a in its entirety, and a commentary reflecting the Tibetan tradition through which N=ag=arjuna's philosophical influence has largely been transmitted. Illuminating the systematic character of N=ag=arjuna's reasoning, Garfield shows how N=ag=arjuna develops his doctrine that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, that is, than nothing exists substantially or independently. Despite lacking any essence, he argues, phenomena nonetheless exist conventionally, and that indeed conventional existence and ultimate emptiness are in fact the same thing. This represents the radical understanding of the Buddhist doctrine of the two truths, or two levels of reality. He offers a verse-by-verse commentary that explains N=ag=arjuna's positions and arguments in the language of Western metaphysics and epistemology, and connects N=ag=arjuna's concerns to those of Western philosophers such as Sextus, Hume, and Wittgenstein. An accessible translation of the foundational text for all Mah=ay=ana Buddhism, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way offers insight to all those interested in the nature of reality.

Sentiment analysis and prediction of contemporary Music can have a wide range of applications in modern society, for instance, selecting music for public institutions such as hospitals or restaurants to potentially improve the emotional well-being of personnel, patients, and customers respectively. In this project, a music recommendation system is built upon a Naive Bayes Classifier trained to predict the sentiment of songs based on song lyrics alone. Online streaming platforms have become one of the most important forms of music consumption. Most streaming platforms provide tools to assess the popularity of a song in the forms of scores and rankings. In this book, we address two issues related to song popularity. First, we predict whether an already popular song may attract higher-than-average public interest and become viral. Second, we predict whether sudden spikes in the public interest will translate into long-term popularity growth. We base our findings on data from the streaming platform Billboard, Spotify, and consider appearances in its "Most-Popular" list as indicative of popularity, and appearances in its "Virals" list as indicative of interest growth. We approach the problem as a classification task and employ a Support Vector Machine model built on popularity information to predict interest, and vice versa.

Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyavartani is one of the most important Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophical texts. Jan Westerhoff offers a new translation, reflecting the best current philological research & all available editions, adding his own commentary on the text.

Folk songs play a very significant role in Indian classical music as the root of Indian classical music is the Indian folk music itself. Different states have different folk songs. This work deals with the statistical analysis of the folk songs of Jharkhand. Each song's analysis concerns with verifying whether the probabilities of notes in the song are fixed throughout the song or are the note probabilities varying. This tells us whether the probability distribution followed by the notes is multinomial or quasi multinomial respectively. Statistical parameterization method is used to quantify melody and rhythm. The presence of rhythm and melody is also analyzed by the Inter Onset Interval (IOI) and note duration graphs. The book should be found useful by music researchers and students of music and musicology, ethnomusicologists and music enthusiasts.

This work is an exposition of the philosophic conceptions basic to Mahayana Buddhism as found in the Maha-prajnaparamita-sastra a commentary on the Prajnaparamita-sutras and traditionally attributed to Nagarjuna. The sastra the earliest and most extensive work in this field is lost in its Sanskrit original and preserved only in a Chinese translation. Meaning of Sanskrit and Chinese terms are expounded concepts are made clear and supplementary materials are supplied in the notes. The study is prefixed with a short historical account of the broad lines of Buddhist philosophy in its early stage. The aim of this work is to elucidate the meaning of the Middle Way, the way of comprehension. 'Everything stands in harmony with him who stands in harmony with Sunyata, which is not a rejection of existence or of understanding but of the misconstruction of the sense of the real or the error of misplaced absoluteness which is the origin of clinging and the root of conflict and suffering.'

The Indian philosopher Acharya Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE) was the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Path) school of Mahayana Buddhism and arguably the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself. Indeed, in the Tibetan and East Asian traditions, Nagarjuna is often referred to as the "second Buddha." His primary contribution to Buddhist thought lies is in the further development of the concept of sunyata or "emptiness." For Nagarjuna, all phenomena are without any svabhaba, literally "own-nature" or "self-nature," and thus without any underlying essence. In this book, Jan Westerhoff offers a systematic account of Nagarjuna's philosophical position. He reads Nagarjuna in his own philosophical context, but he does not hesitate to show that the issues of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy have at least family resemblances to issues in European philosophy.

The Silpa Prakasais an important addition to the existing literature on Indian Silpa Texts. the text goes into a great detail of the architecture, the iconography and the symbolism of all the parts of the temple. Its unique contribution lies in the description of Yantras or symbolic diagrams underlying the architecture as well as sculpture. This edition will be extremely valuable for understanding not only temple construction but the entire symbolism underlying the unique temples of Orissa.