ABSTRACT
Inspired by Jacques Derridas reading of Emmanuel Levinas in Violence and Metaphysics, the author attempts to bring Ngrjuna into a dialogue with these two European philosophers, showing how the issue of violence is viewed differently in both traditions. Aharon Appelfeld writes in the New York Times about what happened in Auschwitz that the few people left alive describe the prevailing silence as the silence of death. Obviously, Ngrjuna was fully aware of the accusation of nihilism. In response to this criticism, Ngrjuna points out that the realists have wrongly understood the concept of emptiness to be mere nonexistence. On the other side, those philosophers known as Sarvstivdins classify all existences with categories that, in the final analysis, are based on the notion of svabhva. In Buddhist philosophy, this process of naming, classification, and discrimination is also called vikalpa. The notion of the original face was invented in Chinese Buddhism to lay down an existential meaning of emptiness.
