Grappler Gocki on Nostr: Really the only place Buddhists will use Sanskrit these days is in technical ...

Really the only place Buddhists will use Sanskrit these days is in technical arguments like this, and they tend to be Mahayana arguments (Madhyamaka is one of a number of foundational Mahayana positions, in something of a rivalry/conversation with Yogacara), since it's Mahayanists who retained the Sanskrit. Otherwise it's quite rare; Pali sees probably more use. For English-speaking Buddhists there are only a handful of Sanskrit terms they ever really need to have ready to rock, so to speak, at any given time. That one in particular surely gets more play time than any other, simply because being able to articulate the concept in a single term is very useful for illustrating what Madhyamaka is saying, as opposed to the many things it is *not* saying (it's confused with nihilism so often that I had someone quite interested in it just today ask whether or not it was a form of nihilism). Curious how we got from "middle way" to the title for board exams though.