green numbers give full details | back to texts | unexpand this idea
| 7607 | Nagarjuna and others pronounced the world of experience to be an illusion |
| Full Idea: Many later Buddhists (after Nagarjuna, c.120 CE) developed a belief that everything we experience is an illusion: in the West we would call them idealists. | |||
| From: report of Nagarjuna (teachings [c.120]) by Karen Armstrong - A History of God Ch.3 | |||
| A reaction: This is just one step beyond Plato (who at least hung onto the immediate world as an inferior reality), and is presumably intended to motivate meditators to break out of the misery of existence into a higher realm. Personally I am against it. |