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Candrakīrti (c. 600–c. 650 CE)

Candrakīrti was the most influential commentator on Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) and the philosopher who established the Prāsaṅgika reading of Madhyamaka as the dominant interpretation within Tibetan Buddhism. His Prasannapadā (“Clear Words”) — a verse-by-verse commentary on the MMK — is the only surviving Sanskrit commentary on the text and the standard point of access for both traditional and modern scholars. His Madhyamakāvatāra (“Entering the Middle Way”) became the primary Madhyamaka textbook in the Tibetan monastic curriculum. Candrakīrti sided with Buddhapālita against Bhāviveka on the central methodological question in Madhyamaka philosophy: whether the Mādhyamika can advance independent arguments (svātantra) for emptiness or must rely exclusively on prasaṅga — reductio ad absurdum applied to the opponent’s own premises, without advancing a counter-thesis.

Life

Almost nothing is known with certainty. The traditional accounts place Candrakīrti in southern India, probably at Nālandā, the great Buddhist monastic university, in the seventh century CE. Tibetan hagiographies describe him as an abbot of Nālandā, but this cannot be confirmed independently. His floruit is estimated from his engagement with Bhāviveka (c. 500–570), Dharmapāla (c. 530–561, a Yogācāra philosopher), and Dignāga (c. 480–540, the Buddhist logician whose epistemology Bhāviveka adopted). These references place Candrakīrti after Bhāviveka and make a seventh-century date probable.

Candrakīrti’s influence during his own period appears to have been limited. In India, the Svātantrika approach of Bhāviveka (and later Śāntarakṣita) was more prominent. The decisive shift came in Tibet, where Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) — the founder of the Gelug school — established Candrakīrti’s Prāsaṅgika reading as the correct interpretation of Nāgārjuna and the highest philosophical view. Through the Gelug school’s institutional dominance, Candrakīrti’s reading became the standard in Tibetan scholastic philosophy.

The Prāsaṅgika method

The dispute between the Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika sub-schools of Madhyamaka turns on the question of how a philosopher who holds that all things are empty of self-nature can make philosophical arguments.

Bhāviveka’s position (Svātantrika). The Mādhyamika can and should advance independent syllogistic arguments (svātantra-anumāna) for emptiness, using the logical tools developed by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. The premises of these arguments are commonly accepted (prasiddha) by both parties in the debate; the conclusion (emptiness) follows by valid inference. Bhāviveka criticised Buddhapālita for merely refuting opponents without offering positive arguments, which Bhāviveka regarded as philosophically incomplete.

Candrakīrti’s response (Prāsaṅgika). The Mādhyamika cannot advance independent arguments for emptiness without contradiction. Any syllogistic argument requires premises that are taken to have a definite truth-value — to refer to things that exist in a determinate way. But the Mādhyamika denies that anything exists in a determinate way (everything is empty of self-nature). To use independent arguments is to implicitly accept the opponent’s framework — to grant that things have the kind of determinate existence that makes syllogistic reasoning applicable. The only consistent method is prasaṅga: take the opponent’s own premises, show that they generate contradiction, and leave the opponent to draw the conclusion. The Mādhyamika has no thesis of their own — “If I had any thesis, I would have this fault; but I have no thesis, and so I am not at fault” (Nāgārjuna, Vigrahavyāvartanī 29).

Candrakīrti defended Buddhapālita’s approach in detail in the Prasannapadā, arguing that prasaṅga is not merely preliminary (clearing the ground for positive argument) but constitutive — it is the method of Madhyamaka, full stop. Emptiness is not a thesis to be proved but a result to be arrived at through the dissolution of all theses.

The Madhyamakāvatāra

The Madhyamakāvatāra (“Entering the Middle Way”) is Candrakīrti’s independent treatise — not a commentary but an original exposition of the Madhyamaka path structured around the ten stages (bhūmi) of the bodhisattva’s spiritual development. The sixth chapter, on the perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā), contains the philosophical core: a systematic presentation of emptiness, the two truths, the critique of Yogācāra idealism, and the positive account of conventional reality.

Against Yogācāra. Candrakīrti argues at length that the Yogācāra position — that external objects do not exist and that consciousness alone is real — cannot be sustained. If there are no external objects, there is no basis for distinguishing veridical from non-veridical consciousness; the distinction collapses. Candrakīrti defends the conventional reality of external objects — not as ultimately real (everything is empty) but as conventionally functional. The empirical world, including external objects and other minds, is real at the conventional level and provides the context for the Buddhist path.

The two truths. Candrakīrti’s account of the two truths (conventional and ultimate) is more developed than Nāgārjuna’s. Conventional truth is not merely “what ordinary people believe” but what is established by the conventions (saṃvṛti) of ordinary, undistorted cognition. Ultimate truth is the emptiness of self-nature. The two are not independent realities but two modes of understanding the same dependently originated world. Candrakīrti insists that the Mādhyamika must accept and operate within conventional truth — the rejection of conventional reality is nihilism, which Nāgārjuna explicitly disavowed.

Where Candrakīrti stops

The Prāsaṅgika method raises a structural question: if the Mādhyamika has no thesis of their own, how is the Madhyamaka position communicated? Candrakīrti’s answer — that emptiness is arrived at through the dissolution of all positions rather than through the assertion of a new one — is elegant but invites the objection that it is parasitic: it can only operate against an opponent who holds a thesis and has nothing to say in the absence of opposition. The Svātantrika response — that a Madhyamaka can make positive conventional-level arguments without compromising the ultimate emptiness of all things — may be less pure but is arguably more philosophically productive. Whether the Prāsaṅgika commitment to thesis-lessness is the strength or the weakness of Candrakīrti’s reading is the central question in Madhyamaka methodology.

Candrakīrti’s dominance in the Tibetan tradition has been so complete that it has sometimes obscured the diversity of Indian Madhyamaka. Bhāviveka’s Svātantrika position, Śāntarakṣita’s synthesis of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra (Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Madhyamaka), and other interpretive currents are largely studied through the lens of their disagreement with Candrakīrti rather than on their own terms. Whether the Prāsaṅgika-Svātantrika distinction reflects a genuine difference in Indian Madhyamaka philosophy or is a Tibetan interpretive construct imposed on the Indian material is debated in modern scholarship — David Seyfort Ruegg and others have argued that the distinction is sharper in the Tibetan reception than in the Indian sources.

Key works

See also: Nāgārjuna · Śaṅkara · Garfield