Who is this Nagarjuna?

Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit to read the Gita. A quantum physicist was told his ideas sounded like a second century monk and went to find out.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 05 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

Carlo Rovelli tells a story in Helgoland that Swami Sarvapriyananda retells with obvious pleasure. Somebody asked Rovelli whether he had read Nagarjuna, because what he was saying about quantum theory sounded like Nagarjuna. Rovelli's reaction was roughly, who is this Nagarjuna, I had better read him. He turned out to be a Buddhist monk and philosopher who lived nearly two thousand years ago in India, and when Rovelli read a translation of his root verses on the middle way he found a picture of interdependent existence that looked like a mirror image of his own field, arrived at by pure argument, with no physics at all.

The swami's point is that this keeps happening. Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit at Berkeley so that he could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original, called it the greatest philosophical song in any language, handed copies to friends, and kept one in the small library that travelled with him. Everyone knows the line about the destroyer of worlds. Fewer know the other one he borrowed from the same chapter, the brightness of a thousand suns. Schrödinger and Heisenberg read Vedanta too and talked about it among themselves.

He is careful about what this does and does not show. He says twice that he is not trained in physics, that he has tried to avoid the subject, and that it cannot be avoided, because the question follows him into every room. He mentions that he knows several monks with PhDs in physics and thinks the same hunger drove them to particle physics and then to the monastery. And he quotes someone's remark that the most unexpected new arrival at fundamental physics conferences over the last thirty years is consciousness, which is not a thing you would expect to find at the level of building blocks.

The thing I want to be honest about is that physicists liking the Gita proves nothing about the Gita. Clever people find echoes of what they already believe in everything they read, and I do it too. I am recording the story because it is a good story and because the direction of travel interests me. Nobody had to go looking for these resonances. A physicist was handed a name he had never heard and it led somewhere.

Whether it leads to the same place, I cannot say. I read Rovelli's book the year it came out and I still could not tell you what a wave function is.