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Nāgārjuna (c. 150–c. 250 CE)

Nāgārjuna argued that nothing possesses inherent self-nature (svabhāva) — that everything arises in dependence on conditions, and that emptiness (śūnyatā) is not nothingness but the absence of independent existence. The argument is not a metaphysical claim about a hidden reality behind appearances; it is a rigorous, dialectical demonstration that every concept — existence, non-existence, causation, time, motion, selfhood — collapses into contradiction when its implicit claim to independent standing is pressed. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way”) conducts this demonstration across twenty-seven chapters, leaving no philosophical category intact. What survives is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda): things arise in relation, persist in relation, and cease in relation. Being is constitutively relational. The “middle way” is not a compromise between existence and non-existence but the recognition that both extremes presuppose the independent self-nature that the argument has dissolved.

Life

Almost nothing is known with certainty. The traditional accounts place Nāgārjuna in southern India, probably in the Satavahana kingdom (present-day Andhra Pradesh), in the second or early third century CE. He is associated with Nālandā, the Buddhist monastic university, though the historical connection is uncertain. The Tibetan and Chinese biographical traditions are rich but late and legendary — they attribute miracles, longevity, and alchemical powers. What can be established from the texts themselves is that Nāgārjuna was a Buddhist monk and philosopher, working within the Mahāyāna tradition, who founded the Madhyamaka (“Middle Way”) school of Buddhist philosophy — the most influential philosophical tradition within Indian Buddhism and, through its transmission to Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, across the Buddhist world.

The attribution of texts is contested. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is universally attributed to Nāgārjuna. The Vigrahavyāvartanī (“Refutation of Objections”) and the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa (“Treatise for Pulverising the Categories”) are widely accepted. The Yuktiṣaṣṭikā and Śūnyatāsaptati are probably his. The devotional and tantric works attributed to him in the Tibetan canon are likely by later authors of the same name. The philosophical core is secure.

Śūnyatā and dependent origination

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), composed in verse, is Nāgārjuna’s central work. The argumentative method is prasaṅga — reductio ad absurdum. Nāgārjuna does not advance a thesis of his own; he takes the theses of his opponents (Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike) and shows that they generate contradictions when their implicit assumptions are made explicit. The result is not skepticism but the demonstration that the concepts being deployed — causation, identity, change, existence — cannot be sustained as independently real.

Emptiness (śūnyatā). Everything is empty of inherent self-nature. A thing that existed by its own nature — independently of conditions, relations, and context — could neither arise nor cease, because arising and ceasing are relational. If a pot existed by its own nature, it would not need clay, a potter, or a wheel. But it does. Therefore the pot does not exist by its own nature. This is not the claim that the pot does not exist; it is the claim that the pot’s existence is dependent, relational, conditional. Emptiness is the absence of independent existence, not the absence of existence. The distinction is central and often misunderstood: “Emptiness wrongly grasped is like a snake wrongly seized” (MMK 24:11, in Nāgārjuna’s own warning).

Dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). The positive correlate of emptiness. Things arise in dependence on conditions. The teaching goes back to the historical Buddha, but Nāgārjuna radicalised it: dependent origination is not a causal mechanism operating between independently existing entities; it is the very mode of being of everything that exists. “Whatever is dependently originated, that is explained to be emptiness” (MMK 24:18). Emptiness and dependent origination are not two claims but one: to say that a thing is empty is to say that it arises in dependence; to say that it arises in dependence is to say that it is empty.

The two truths. Nāgārjuna distinguishes conventional truth (saṃvṛtisatya) — the everyday, functional descriptions by which we navigate the world — from ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) — the recognition that everything is empty of self-nature. The two truths are not two realities but two modes of understanding the same reality. Conventional truth is not false; it is the medium through which emptiness is communicated. Without conventional truth, ultimate truth cannot be taught. “Without relying on convention, the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the ultimate, nirvana is not achieved” (MMK 24:10).

The Madhyamaka tradition

Nāgārjuna’s successors developed the Madhyamaka school into one of the two major philosophical traditions of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism (the other being Yogācāra, the “mind-only” school). The tradition split into two sub-schools:

Buddhapālita (c. 470–540) maintained that Nāgārjuna’s method is purely negative — prasaṅga (reductio) only, with no counter-thesis. Bhāviveka (c. 500–570) argued that the Madhyamaka must advance independent arguments (svātantra) to establish emptiness, not merely refute opponents. Candrakīrti (c. 600–650) sided with Buddhapālita and produced the Prasannapadā (“Clear Words”), the most influential commentary on the MMK. In the Tibetan tradition, Candrakīrti’s Prāsaṅgika reading became dominant and remains the standard interpretation in Gelug and most Tibetan scholastic philosophy.

The tradition was transmitted to China (as Sānlùn, the “Three Treatise” school), to Korea, to Japan (where it influenced Zen), and to Tibet, where it became the philosophical mainstream. Nāgārjuna is revered across the Mahāyāna world as a “second Buddha.”

Where Nāgārjuna stops

Nāgārjuna’s method is dialectical and deconstructive — he demonstrates that every concept presupposing independent self-nature generates contradiction. The result is emptiness and dependent origination. But the positive content of dependent origination — how specific relations give rise to specific phenomena, what determines which relations are operative, what accounts for the particular character of what arises — is not developed. The MMK establishes that everything is relationally constituted; it does not provide an account of how relational constitution works in any particular domain. The later Madhyamaka tradition acknowledged this gap and debated it: Candrakīrti’s Prāsaṅgika school maintained that no positive account is possible without reintroducing self-nature; Bhāviveka’s Svātantrika school argued that positive philosophical work can be done within the conventional framework without compromising emptiness. The debate is internal to the tradition and unresolved.

The relationship between the two truths has generated a parallel problem. If conventional truth is functionally adequate and ultimate truth is the recognition that everything is empty, what difference does ultimate truth make to practice? The question was pressed by Buddhist interlocutors and by Hindu critics (notably Śaṅkara, who argued that Mādhyamaka emptiness is nihilism under another name). Nāgārjuna’s defenders maintain that the charge misunderstands emptiness — that the point is not to abandon the conventional world but to inhabit it without clinging to the illusion of independent existence. Whether this is a coherent practical stance or whether it leaves the relationship between knowledge and action underdeveloped is debated across the tradition.

The modern reception of Nāgārjuna in Western philosophy and physics — through Rovelli’s reading of śūnyatā as resonant with relational quantum mechanics, through Jay Garfield’s translations and philosophical commentary, and through comparative projects linking Madhyamaka to Wittgenstein’s therapeutic philosophy — is productive but contested. The cross-cultural reading risks importing Western concerns (anti-foundationalism, anti-essentialism) into a text that is conducting a specifically Buddhist philosophical project. How much the structural resonance reflects genuine philosophical affinity and how much it reflects the concerns of the reader is itself an open question.

Key works

See also: Rovelli · Wittgenstein · Heraclitus