Nagarjuna is the most important Buddhist thinker after the Buddha, and the only philosopher revered as a founder by every Mahayana tradition — Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese. His central work, the Mulamadhyamakakarika (“Root Verses on the Middle Way”), is 447 verses across twenty-seven chapters, and it is among the most demanding philosophical texts ever written.

What makes it demanding is not obscurity. The verses are terse to the point of austerity, the arguments are explicit, and the method is relentlessly consistent. What is difficult is what the arguments do to the reader’s assumptions.

The man #

Almost nothing is known. He probably lived in southern India in the second or third century CE, possibly with Satavahana patronage — one of his works, the Ratnavali, is addressed to a king. The traditional biographies are hagiographies of a familiar type, and a large number of texts on medicine, alchemy, and tantra were attributed to him over the following millennium, which historians attribute to several different Nagarjunas.

The best-known legend has him descend to the realm of the nagas, serpent-beings, to retrieve the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, which had been entrusted to them until the world was ready. The story’s function is transparent: it explains how texts presented as the Buddha’s word could appear five hundred years after his death. It is also the source of his name.

The works generally accepted as his include the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the Vigrahavyavartani (a reply to objections), the Sunyatasaptati, the Yuktisastika, and the Ratnavali.

The core argument #

Everything turns on one concept: svabhava, usually rendered “intrinsic existence,” “inherent existence,” or “own-being.”

For something to have svabhava would be for it to exist in its own right — independently, by its own nature, not depending on causes, not depending on parts, not depending on being conceptually designated. It would be what the thing is, intrinsically, apart from everything else.

Nagarjuna’s claim is that nothing has this, and his argument is that dependent origination rules it out. His most quoted verse (24.18) says that whatever arises dependently is explained as emptiness; that this is dependent designation; and that this is the middle way.

The reasoning is short enough to state. If a thing arises in dependence on causes and conditions, it does not exist independently. To exist independently is what svabhava means. Therefore a dependently arisen thing lacks svabhava — it is empty. And since the Buddha taught that all conditioned things arise dependently, all of them are empty.

The conclusion is then extended: emptiness is not a property that things have but the absence of a property they were assumed to have, and emptiness itself is empty — it has no intrinsic existence either, being simply the dependence of everything else.

The method #

Nagarjuna almost never asserts. He takes a concept, enumerates the possible ways it could work if the things involved had intrinsic existence, and shows each to be incoherent.

The standard device is the tetralemma (catuskoti), which exhausts the logical options: a thing is X; it is not X; it is both; it is neither. Chapter 1 opens by applying it to origination: no entity is ever found to arise from itself, from another, from both, or from no cause at all.

Take arising from another as an example of how the arguments go. If cause and effect are genuinely distinct things with their own natures, then at the moment the cause exists the effect does not, and there is no relation between them to make one produce the other; and if the effect already exists, nothing is produced. Either way, production between intrinsically existing relata cannot be made sense of. The difficulty dissolves only when neither cause nor effect is taken to exist intrinsically.

The same treatment is applied, chapter by chapter, to motion (chapter 2, which begins by arguing that what has been moved is not moving and what has not been moved is not moving), the sense faculties, the aggregates, the elements, desire and the desirous, agent and action, fire and fuel, time, causation, the self, suffering, bondage and liberation, the Buddha, the four noble truths, and nirvana.

Nothing is exempt. The chapters on the Buddha and on nirvana are the point at which readers usually understand that this is not a polemic against other schools.

The nihilism objection, and the reply #

Chapter 24 stages the objection at length. If everything is empty, then there is no arising or ceasing, and therefore no Four Noble Truths, no path, no fruits, no Buddha, no Dharma, no Sangha. Emptiness destroys Buddhism.

Nagarjuna’s reply is that the objection is exactly backwards.

If things had intrinsic existence, they would be fixed by their own nature and could not change. Suffering with intrinsic existence could never cease. A person with intrinsic existence could never become awakened. Seeds could not become sprouts. On the opponent’s assumption, nothing could ever happen at all.

His formulation: for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible; for whom emptiness is not possible, nothing is possible.

Emptiness, on this reading, is not the denial of function. It is the only account on which function is intelligible. Things work precisely because they are not locked into fixed intrinsic natures.

He does add a warning (24.11): emptiness wrongly grasped destroys the unintelligent, like a snake seized at the wrong end, or a spell miscast. Taking emptiness to mean that nothing matters, or taking it as a new ultimate reality to hold onto, are both failures of the same kind.

The two truths #

Nagarjuna’s framework for keeping this coherent is the two truths, introduced in chapter 24.

Conventional truth is the ordinary world of persons, objects, causes, and practices — which functions, which can be spoken about, and in terms of which the path is taught.

Ultimate truth is that none of it exists intrinsically.

These are not two worlds. They are two ways of describing the same one, and Nagarjuna insists that both are needed: without relying on the conventional, the ultimate is not taught; without the ultimate, nirvana is not attained.

The most striking consequence is in chapter 25: samsara and nirvana have no difference whatsoever. Not because nothing matters, but because neither has intrinsic existence, and it is the intrinsically existing version of samsara that would have to be escaped from somewhere else.

Does he hold a position? #

The Vigrahavyavartani answers an obvious objection: if all statements are empty, is the statement “all things are empty” empty too, and does it therefore fail to say anything?

Nagarjuna’s reply is that his words are indeed empty, and that this is no defect, since they operate conventionally as everything else does — like a magically created person preventing a magically created person from doing something. He then makes the celebrated claim that he has no thesis (pratijna), and that because he asserts nothing, he cannot be refuted.

How to read this is the central interpretive dispute about Madhyamaka. Some read it as genuine quietism, a philosophy that dismantles positions without occupying one. Some read it as a substantive metaphysical thesis about the absence of intrinsic existence, stated with rhetorical modesty. Graham Priest and Jay Garfield have read the tetralemma as involving a deliberate and controlled contradiction. The argument is live in contemporary scholarship.

Prasangika and Svatantrika #

The methodological question produced the school’s main internal division, several centuries later.

Bhaviveka held that a Madhyamika should advance independent (svatantra) formal arguments, with premises both parties accept, in the style of the Indian logical tradition.

Buddhapalita, and after him Chandrakirti, held that this concedes too much: any independent argument presupposes that its terms refer to things established in some sense, which is precisely what is at issue. The Madhyamika should proceed only by prasanga — drawing out the unacceptable consequences of the opponent’s own commitments — and never assert.

Chandrakirti’s Madhyamakavatara and Prasannapada made the Prasangika reading dominant, and Tibetan Buddhism reads Nagarjuna almost entirely through him. The Prasangika–Svatantrika distinction as a formal doxographic category is a Tibetan development; there is no Sanskrit term for it.

Why it is supposed to matter #

Nagarjuna is not doing metaphysics for interest. The claim is that suffering rests on a mistake about how things exist — that grasping and aversion presuppose solid, independent, defensible entities, and that seeing through the presupposition removes the ground of the reaction.

Tibetan traditions therefore treat the arguments as meditation objects. Analytical meditation works through the reasoning repeatedly on the cushion, not to reach a conclusion once but until the conclusion becomes perceptual rather than propositional. The Bodhicaryavatara’s ninth chapter is the standard text for this, and the surrounding chapters make clear that the analysis is in service of compassion, not a substitute for it.

Common questions #

Is emptiness the same as nothingness? No, and Nagarjuna spends a great deal of effort on the distinction. Nothingness would be the absence of things; emptiness is the absence of intrinsic existence in things that do function, conventionally, exactly as they appear to.

Is Madhyamaka scepticism? It resembles it in method but not in aim. Sceptics suspend judgement about how things are; Nagarjuna makes a definite claim about how they are not, and does so in order to end suffering rather than to achieve intellectual tranquillity.

Did Nagarjuna reject the Abhidharma? He accepted its analytical method and rejected its stopping point. The Abhidharma dissolves composite things into dharmas and treats the dharmas as ultimate. Nagarjuna applies the same analysis to the dharmas.

Where should I start reading? Garfield’s translation of the Mulamadhyamakakarika with commentary, or Westerhoff’s introduction. The root text alone, without commentary, is very hard going — which the tradition has always assumed, having never transmitted it without one.

Sources & further reading #

Jay L. Garfield (trans.), The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Oxford, 1995) — the root text with a verse-by-verse philosophical commentary. Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford, 2009) — the best analytic study. Mark Siderits & Shoryu Katsura (trans.), Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (Wisdom, 2013) — a translation with the Indian commentarial tradition in view. Chandrakirti, Introduction to the Middle Way, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Shambhala, 2002) — the interpretation Tibet follows. Jan Westerhoff, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford, 2018), chs. 2–3 — on the school’s development.