Nāgārjuna
c. 150–250 CE, southern India
Madhyamaka Buddhism
Nothing has a nature of its own; everything is what it is only in relation.
“Whatever is dependently arisen, that we call emptiness.”
The life
Almost nothing reliable is known. The traditional accounts are hagiography: a brahmin born in the south, converted to Buddhism, who is said to have retrieved the Perfection of Wisdom sutras from the realm of the nāgas (serpent beings) which is where the first half of his name comes from. He is associated with the Sātavāhana court and with the monastic university tradition of the Deccan.
Scholars disagree about whether one person wrote everything attributed to him; several texts are now assigned to a later 'Nāgārjuna' or to his school. What is not in doubt is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, which is among the most rigorously argued works produced anywhere in the ancient world.
What shaped the ideas
By the second century CE, Buddhist scholastics had spent centuries analysing experience into dharmas (momentary irreducible elements) and the Abhidharma schools treated these as the real constituents of which persons and objects were convenient fictions. The self had been dissolved; the building blocks had not.
Nāgārjuna's intervention was to turn the same analysis on the blocks. If the self is empty because it is a composite dependent on parts, then so is every part, and the regress does not stop. This was simultaneously a defence of the earliest teaching against its own scholastic elaboration and the philosophical foundation of the emerging Mahāyāna.
Core arguments
- 01
Emptiness
Nothing possesses svabhāva, an intrinsic nature it has independently.
Anything with an intrinsic nature could not change, since change would make it something else, and could not depend on causes, since it would already be what it is. But everything we encounter changes and depends. So nothing has intrinsic nature. Emptiness is not a substance underlying things; it is the absence of a certain kind of existence.
- 02
Emptiness is dependent origination
The two doctrines are one claim stated from either end.
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. The identification is what stops emptiness collapsing into nihilism: things exist, in the only way anything ever does.
- 03
The two truths
Conventional truth is not false, and ultimate truth is not a deeper description.
Chariots roll and promises bind; conventional discourse works. The ultimate truth is not a rival account of what is really there underneath, but the observation that there is no underneath: the categories are conventions rather than joints in reality. Without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be taught at all.
- 04
The emptiness of emptiness
Emptiness is itself empty, and is a therapy rather than a position.
If emptiness were an intrinsic nature it would be precisely what it denies. So the arguments are medicine: they dissolve grasping after essences, including grasping after emptiness, and then they are done. Those for whom emptiness becomes a view, he writes, are incurable.
Commonly got wrong
- Emptiness is not nothingness. He spends much of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā defending against exactly that charge and treats nihilism as the more dangerous error.
- It is not idealism either. He is not saying the world is mind-made; he is saying nothing, mind included, has independent existence.
- The tetralemma is not mysticism dressed as logic. It is a device for exhausting the available positions on a question so that all four can be refused.
- Comparisons with Western scepticism mislead. He is not doubting whether we can know things; he is arguing about what kind of existence things have.
Works
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā c. 2nd century CE
Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. 27 chapters of compressed refutation.
Vigrahavyāvartanī c. 2nd century CE
The Dispeller of Disputes: his reply to the charge that his position refutes itself.
Ratnāvalī attributed
The Precious Garland. Advice to a king, and much more accessible.
Śūnyatāsaptati attributed
Seventy Verses on Emptiness.
Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, in Jay Garfield's translation. It contains both the defence against nihilism and the identification of emptiness with dependent origination.
Why they still get taught
The philosophical backbone of Mahāyāna Buddhism across Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, and the figure Western philosophers reach for first when they want an argument that is genuinely rigorous and genuinely not in the Greek tradition.
Chapters
- Emptiness and the Middle Way · The Other Half of the World