Emptiness and the Middle Way

By the second century CE, Buddhist scholastics had been doing something very thorough for a long time. The doctrine of not-self says a person is not a thing but a process: a bundle of momentary elements, analysed into ever finer components called dharmas. The Abhidharma schools catalogued them exhaustively. The self had been dissolved. What was left, they held, were the irreducible elements themselves: the real building blocks of which persons and chairs and mountains were convenient fictions.

Nāgārjuna asked what happened if you ran the same argument on the blocks.

His term is svabhāva (own-being, intrinsic nature) and his claim is that nothing has any. The argument has a compact form. Anything with a nature of its own could not change, because to change would be to become something else, and it could not depend on causes, because it would already be what it is by itself. But everything we encounter both changes and depends. Therefore nothing has intrinsic nature. Everything is empty: śūnya.

This is not the claim that nothing exists, and Nāgārjuna spends more effort defending against that reading than against any other. Emptiness means empty of intrinsic nature, not empty of existence. A chariot is not a thing over and above its parts arranged in a certain way; 'long' is not a property anything has except relative to something shorter; a father is not a father independently of a child. What his argument adds is that this relativity goes all the way down. There is no level of reality at which you reach self-sufficient furniture.

The move that makes the whole thing hold together is an identification, and it is the most quoted line he wrote: whatever is dependently arisen, that we call emptiness. Dependent origination had been Buddhist doctrine for seven centuries. Nāgārjuna points out that it and emptiness are the same claim from opposite ends. To arise in dependence on causes, parts and concepts just is to lack a nature of one's own; and only something without a fixed nature could arise dependently at all. That equivalence is what keeps emptiness from collapsing into nihilism. Things exist: in the only way anything has ever existed.

Then comes the obvious objection, which his opponents made immediately and which every undergraduate makes now. If everything is empty, is the claim that everything is empty also empty? And if so, has it not refuted itself?

His answer is yes to the first part and no to the second, and it is the sharpest turn in the system. Emptiness is itself empty. If emptiness were an intrinsic nature, the real truth underlying appearances, it would be precisely the thing it denies. So his arguments are not building a position. They are medicine: they dissolve the grasping after fixed essences, and when the grasping goes, the medicine goes too. He writes that those for whom emptiness becomes a view are declared incurable, and elsewhere that emptiness misunderstood is like picking up a snake by the wrong end.

What keeps ordinary life from evaporating is the doctrine of two truths. Conventional truth is not false: chariots roll, medicine works, promises bind, and the whole of practice and ethics is conducted there. Ultimate truth is not a rival description of what is really going on at a deeper level. It is the observation that there is no deeper level, that the divisions conventional truth uses are conventions rather than joints in reality. And, crucially, the ultimate can only be reached through the conventional. You cannot say anything at all without using categories that are, on the view being expressed, empty.

The method is relentlessly negative. Nāgārjuna's characteristic device is the tetralemma: present the four exhaustive options on a question (X, not-X, both, neither) and refuse all four. He does this to causation, motion, time, the self, the Buddha, and to nirvāṇa itself. He never offers a fifth option, because the whole point is that the demand for one is the disease.