Recent scholarly interest in Nāgārjuna has been intense, with especial focus on the vexed question of the rationality, or irrationality, of his thought. In this article, I am concerned to bring to light the theoretical underpinnings of the hermeneutical project predominant among present-day scholars, which is to actively overlook or downright depreciate the religious motivation of Nāgārjuna’s arguments. While this project has typically been pursued in an apologetic effort to justify Nāgārjuna, as truly worthy of the title “philosopher,” to mainstream philosophers, it has also had the effect among some scholars of dismissing him as insufficiently philosophical. Regardless of the glowing or dim light in which he is thereby cast, Nāgārjuna is appraised according to exclusively philosophical criteria. My “religious critique of philosophizing Nāgārjuna,” then, is aimed at elucidating and problematizing this approach as at best tangential to and at worst seriously distortive of Nāgārjuna’s thought as a whole.
