Grappler Gocki on Nostr: As a Madhyamika the way I'm using it is much more like "unchanging essence," ...

As a Madhyamika the way I'm using it is much more like "unchanging essence," timeless, inhering, immutable yet somehow also apparent, *independent* essence that somehow still interacts with the world. Nagarjuna's view, and mine so far as I have ever understood it, is that following this logic leads to absurd outcomes that do not make sense within a framework of phenomena arising/appearing, persisting, and passing away. Nagarjuna's principal targets were Sautrantikas, whom he saw as smuggling in an essentialism foreign to the rejection of the tetralemma, but this was give or take 2,000 years ago, and even at the time so far as I know, the term could be used to refer to 'personality' among a bevy of other forms. Among Buddhist theory at the time (or at a minimum, just after) so far as I know, 'pudgala' tended to be used for 'persona' rather than 'svabhava,' but when it comes to its modern usage outside of a Buddhist context, I'm certainly out of my depth.