Nagarjuna's Wisdom

“Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, the basis of Madhyamaka thought, is a profound but difficult philosophical text. One can work so hard to understand the ideas that the relevance to practice may not be apparent. Nonetheless, this text is indispensable to Mahayana Buddhist practice. In this volume, Barry Kerzin offers a discussion that precise but highly readable, one that reflects Dr. Kerzin’s years of study with great Tibetan masters.”

–Jay Garfield, Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities, Smith College and the Harvard Divinity School

Barry Kerzin is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, a visiting professor at Central University of Tibetan Studies in Varanasi, India, an honorary professor at the University of Hong Kong, and a former assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington. Barry is also a fellow at the Mind and Life Institute and consults for the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig on compassion training. He is the founder and president of the Altruism in Medicine Institute and the founder and chairman of the Human Values Institute in Japan. He was ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama, and for twenty-nine years he has been providing free medical care to everyone from the poor up to the highest lamas–including the Dalai Lama. After completing many meditation retreats, his brain was studied to assess structural and functional changes.

He has written No Fear No Death: The Transformative Power of Compassion and, in Japanese, Tibetan Buddhist Prescription for Happiness, and with the Dalai Lama and Professor Tonagawa, Mind and Matter: Dialogue between Two Nobel Laureates in Japanese.