Nagarjuna

The work

Nagarjuna's principal work is the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, a set of some 450 verses in twenty-seven chapters. Each chapter takes a category — causation, motion, the senses, the elements, time, the self, the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, nirvana — and argues that it cannot be given a coherent account if the things in question are taken to possess independent existence.

The method is negative throughout. Nagarjuna does not advance a thesis about what things are; he shows that every available account of what they are collapses, and concludes that they are empty of intrinsic nature.

Emptiness and dependent origination

The central move identifies emptiness with dependent origination. To arise dependently is precisely to lack independent existence; a thing with its own intrinsic nature could not arise, change or relate. Emptiness is therefore not a claim that nothing exists — a reading Nagarjuna anticipates and rejects — but a claim about the mode in which things exist.

He couples this with the two truths: conventional truth, in which things function and the teaching operates, and ultimate truth, in which nothing is found to possess intrinsic nature. Without the conventional the ultimate cannot be taught; the doctrine of emptiness does not abolish the path but explains how it can work.

Consequences

Madhyamaka became one of the two great Mahayana philosophical traditions, with Yogacara, and the debate between them and their synthesis occupied Indian Buddhist philosophy for centuries. Through Kumarajiva's translations it shaped Chinese Buddhism, particularly the Sanlun and Tiantai traditions, and it is foundational in Tibet, where Madhyamaka is generally regarded as the highest philosophical view.

The person

Nagarjuna is conventionally placed in the second century CE, associated with the Satavahana country in the Deccan. Almost nothing about his life is secure, and a very large number of works — on medicine, alchemy and tantra — were attributed to him over subsequent centuries, so that "Nagarjuna" in later sources may denote several figures.