Nāgārjuna

c. 150-250 CE · Indian · Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Logic, Buddhist Soteriology

Whatever is dependently arisen, that we call emptiness; this is dependent designation, and it is itself the middle way.

Around the second century CE, in south India under Sātavāhana patronage, a Buddhist monk composed philosophical treatises that would reshape every school of Mahāyāna thought. Nāgārjuna wrote against Abhidharma scholasticism, whose analysis of phenomena into elementary constituents reproduced the essentialism the Buddha meant to dismantle. His answer was the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā — verse-examinations of causation, motion, time, and nirvāṇa, each reaching the same conclusion: nothing possesses svabhāva, an intrinsic nature independent of conditions.

Topics Nāgārjuna addresses

• śūnyatā (emptiness)
• svabhāva (intrinsic nature)
• pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination)
• the middle way between essentialism and nihilism
• the two truths (paramārtha-satya and saṃvṛti-satya)
• catuṣkoṭi (the tetralemma)
• prasaṅga (reductio argument)
• the no-thesis view
• emptiness of emptiness
• the four-corner refutation of causation
• prapañca (conceptual proliferation)
• saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not two
• the analysis of motion
• the analysis of time
• anātman (no-self)
• the catuṣkoṭi applied to the tathāgata
• the catuṣkoṭi applied to nirvāṇa
• prasajya versus paryudāsa negation
• critique of the Naiyāyika pramāṇas
• critique of Abhidharma essentialism
• the prāsaṅgika versus svātantrika distinction
• bodhicitta and the bodhisattva path
• the inseparability of prajñā and karuṇa
• dependent designation (prajñapti)

Converse with Nāgārjuna on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Nāgārjuna's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.