Chapter 1. Nāgārjuna: the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, emptiness, dependent origination, and the two truths¶

Essay 4 repeatedly described Prajñāpāramitā's emptiness as Mahāyāna's most important philosophical premise and the historical way out of the impasse of reification discussed in Essay 3. The Prajñāpāramitā sūtras proposed emptiness; Nāgārjuna, around the second century CE, developed it into rigorous argument in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Middle Treatise). This chapter begins the account of Madhyamaka. Its name derives from the middle way. The tradition's central task is to use emptiness to criticize the presupposition that phenomena have intrinsic nature, while holding to the middle course that avoids annihilationism.

1. Nāgārjuna: legend and historical evidence¶

As usual, legends must first undergo historical scrutiny. Sectarian narratives give Nāgārjuna extraordinary powers. He lives six hundred years, practices alchemy, and retrieves the Prajñāpāramitā from the nāgas' palace, as mentioned in 4.1. These are not treated as historical facts. The writings attributed to him present a greater difficulty. They range across Madhyamaka, tantra, medicine, and alchemy. Modern research concludes that one person could not have written them all. Several authors named Nāgārjuna have been conflated.¹ Only a few works can safely be assigned to the Madhyamaka Nāgārjuna, chiefly the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, and the Vigrahavyāvartanī.² This chapter takes the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā as its standard for identifying him. He probably lived in the second century and may have worked in southern India, in connection with the Sātavāhana dynasty. Much else cannot be established.

Two historical inferences deserve consideration here. They are the book's judgments, which readers may assess for themselves.

The first comes from the internal logic of the story about retrieving scriptures from the nāgas' palace. Nāgārjuna believes he has mastered all the teachings the Buddha left. Only when the nāga king tells him of deeper teachings is he led to the palace to retrieve them. Even as legend, this says something. In its narrative, Nāgārjuna seeks a deeper source on the premise that the existing Buddhist scriptures have been exhausted. This can be considered alongside the distance between the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā's actual procedures and the historical Gautama.

The second comes from the treatise itself. It begins with a verse of homage to the Buddha and occasionally cites his words thereafter, but all its substantive arguments rely on independent logical reasoning, without resting on his authority. The exchange in the chapter on the Four Truths is still more revealing. "You are destroying the Three Jewels." "No, you are destroying them." Both sides claim the Buddha for their own, but he functions as a banner, not an adjudicator. Quoting him cannot settle the dispute.

The book's position is that Nāgārjuna did not, in fact, treat Gautama Siddhārtha as a philosophical authority. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Buddha is a banner and a resource borrowed for argument, rather than the source of its thinking.

The inference can be taken further. Much of Mahāyāna Buddhism follows the same pattern. Mahāyāna honors Nāgārjuna as the "second Buddha" and the "common patriarch of the eight schools." Its devotion centers on the divine buddhas of the Prajñāpāramitā, Avataṃsaka, and Lotus sūtras, rather than the historical Gautama of the Āgamas. When Mahāyāna devotees say that slandering the Buddha leads to hell, they mean these divine buddhas, never the person in the Āgamas. Clarifying this distinction does more than any religious debate to explain what Mahāyāna is.

2. The central equation: dependent origination, emptiness, provisional designation, and the middle way¶

At the center of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā stands a verse that brings four key concepts together. Kumārajīva's Chinese translation is widely known:

Whatever arises through causes and conditions, I call empty (void); it is also provisional designation, and it is the meaning of the middle way. (Chapter on the Four Truths)⁵

The verse treats dependent origination, emptiness, provisional designation, and the middle way as four names for the same thing. Its argument has the following structure:

The key is intrinsic nature, a mode of existence that is independent of everything else and eternally unchanged. Nāgārjuna argues that whatever arises through conditions cannot have such a nature. Its existence is borrowed, relative, and changeable. Emptiness therefore does not mean that nothing exists. It means that phenomena lack that independent, self-subsisting nature. Emptiness and dependent origination are two sides of the same matter. Precisely because things are empty, lacking intrinsic nature, they can arise and cease through conditions and affect one another.

An ancient commentary provides direct testimony for this step. In refuting production from another in the chapter on conditions, Qingmu writes, "Because self is absent, other is absent too; because there is self, there is other." Self and other are established in relation to one another. Remove self, and other cannot be established either. This describes the use of the paired terms, without deriving from an empirical discovery about the world. Part II, Essay 18, Chapter 4 takes it as the principal classical testimony for the relationality premise: the identity conditions of anything that exists necessarily involve difference and relations. The first requirement in the definition of intrinsic nature is precisely that it does not depend on anything different from itself. The two conflict directly, and the derivation of the book's central proposition begins here.³

Before proceeding, at least two uses of intrinsic nature (svabhāva) must be distinguished, or the treatise can easily be misread. The descriptive use refers to a thing's inherent characteristics, such as fire's heat or ice's coldness. Ordinary language calls these its nature. The ontological use refers to a mode of existence that is independent and depends on no conditions. When Abhidharma says that a phenomenon has intrinsic nature, it means that it is a real ultimate existent, self-sufficient and not constructed from other things.

Nāgārjuna attacks the second sense, not the first. The distinction must hold. Denying the first would produce absurd conclusions such as "fire has no property of heat" and destroy even conventional common sense. Critics, including some modern scholars, nevertheless argue that his reasoning sometimes crosses the boundary, inadvertently moving from criticism of the second sense to denial of the first. This is among the most contested points in contemporary Nāgārjuna scholarship. The distinction alone is established here; the debate will return in Chapters 3 and 4, in the context of Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika.

Nāgārjuna's criticism directly challenges the foundations examined in Essay 3. Abhidharma makes every effort to give each phenomenon an intrinsic nature, as in ultimate phenomena and the eternal existence of their substance. Nāgārjuna replies that none has intrinsic nature. Even phenomena themselves are empty. Essay 4 identified Mahāyāna emptiness as a response that arose along the historical path from the schools' metaphysical impasse. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is the undertaking that turns this response into rigorous argument.

3. Method: refutation without establishing a position¶

Nāgārjuna argues in a distinctive way. He rarely advances a positive thesis. He takes an opponent's presupposition and derives absurd consequences from the claim to intrinsic nature until it contradicts itself. Chapter after chapter examines ordinary concepts, including going, coming, cause, effect, time, the self and the five aggregates, and even nirvāṇa. Each is shown to lead to contradiction if assumed to have intrinsic nature. In the chapter on motion, for example, what is being traversed, what has been traversed, and what has not been traversed cannot form a continuous act of going if each has its own intrinsic nature. Such reductio reasoning (prasaṅga) is Madhyamaka's characteristic skill.

Each of the treatise's twenty-seven chapters examines a class of concepts. The table outlines their subjects:

The table gives the chapter on the Four Truths only one row, although it identifies the chapter as the treatise's center. That role deserves further explanation. The chapter confronts the work's most urgent challenge. "If everything is empty, there are no Three Jewels, Four Truths, rebirth, or liberation. You, Nāgārjuna, are destroying Buddhism." It answers on three levels.

First, it corrects the misunderstanding. Emptiness means absence of intrinsic nature, not nonexistence. Absence of intrinsic nature expresses the other side of dependent origination and does not deny that things exist.

Second, it establishes the two truths as successive steps. "Without relying on conventional truth, the ultimate cannot be attained; without attaining the ultimate, nirvāṇa cannot be attained." Conventional truth is a step toward ultimate truth, rather than a switch between parallel worlds. Speaking of suffering, its origin, cessation, and the path, practicing the path, and realizing its fruits must all begin at the conventional level. Without passing through conventional truth, ultimate truth cannot be reached at all.

Third, it turns the attack around. If phenomena had fixed intrinsic natures, everything would be frozen and unchanging. Suffering could neither arise nor cease, the path could not be practiced, and its fruits could not change. That would truly destroy Buddhism. "Because there is emptiness, all phenomena can be established; without emptiness, nothing can be established."

These three levels were repeatedly invoked over the following centuries. Candrakīrti, Śāntideva, and Tsongkhapa generally took this chapter as their most important point of reference.

Nāgārjuna also repeatedly uses the four alternatives (catuṣkoṭi): a thing exists, does not exist, both exists and does not exist, or neither exists nor does not exist. He denies all four, leaving none of these positions available.

Most crucially, Nāgārjuna claims to have no position. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, he says that if he had a thesis, a thesis of intrinsic nature, he would be at fault. He has no thesis and therefore no fault.⁴ Whether having no thesis really avoids every philosophical risk will be examined in Volume 2. Emptiness is no further substance or declaration that nothing exists. It is the act of relinquishing all views. He therefore specifically warns against holding emptiness itself as a view. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā says, "The Great Sage taught emptiness to relinquish all views; those who take emptiness as a view cannot be cured by the buddhas." Those who take emptiness as real are beyond treatment.⁵ This is the emptiness of emptiness repeatedly emphasized in 5.1 and 1.5. The medicine itself must be discarded, or it becomes a new illness.

4. The two truths: emptiness does not destroy the world¶

Nāgārjuna's imagined opponent objects that if everything is empty, the Four Truths, karmic results, and the practice of the path all disappear. This would destroy the entire Buddhist teaching.

Nāgārjuna answers with the two truths (satya-dvaya):

In this book’s account, the two truths distinguish levels of assertion within one world; ultimate truth registers the metaconstraint concerning intrinsic nature.

The book's terminology can now be fixed. The two truths distinguish levels of assertion, not two worlds. There is one world and two levels of discourse. Conventional truth registers the legitimacy of assertions at the everyday and linguistic levels. Ultimate truth registers the metaconstraint itself, which concerns intrinsic nature. Part II, Essay 19, Chapter 6 calls the reading that assigns the truths to two domains of objects the divided-domain reading and rules it out. Everything in the second domain would fall once more within the scope of assertions about intrinsic nature and be refuted under the same rule.⁶

Nāgārjuna even turns the objection against his opponent: "Because there is emptiness, all phenomena can be established; without emptiness, nothing can be established."⁵ If things really had fixed, unchanging intrinsic natures, they could neither move nor change nor combine through causes and conditions. Nothing could then be done. Precisely because things are empty and lack intrinsic nature, arising and ceasing, causation, and practice can operate. Emptiness does more than leave the world intact. It is the condition that makes the world possible. The book holds that the two truths are essential to Madhyamaka. They allow both "everything is empty" and "karmic results, the path, and liberation remain possible" to be true, rescuing emptiness from annihilationism.

The middle course must still be maintained. Clinging to intrinsic nature is eternalism; mistaking emptiness for the claim that nothing exists is annihilationism. Madhyamaka accepts neither extreme. This is the middle way and a further development of the Buddha's path between existence and nonexistence in the Kaccānagotta Sutta, discussed in 1.5. Nāgārjuna himself cites the discourse.

5. Historical role and liberation¶

Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka does two things.

Within Buddhism, in relation to the schools, it undertakes systematic negation. It dismantles Abhidharma's painstakingly built system of intrinsic natures at the level of its presupposition, directly denying that a bearer must be something real with intrinsic nature. It no longer adds a substantially real bearer to explain continuity without a self. This is the historical way out repeatedly indicated in Essay 3.

In relation to its source, the Buddha, it understands itself as a return. Nāgārjuna explicitly cites the Kaccānagotta Sutta, connecting Madhyamaka to the Buddha's middle way of dependent origination that avoids existence and nonexistence. From one perspective, the book sees Madhyamaka as an attempt to turn the restraint described in 1.5, establishing no fixed doctrine and avoiding conceptual proliferation, into a practical approach to undoing attachment. Its means, however, change from silence to incisive reductio arguments.

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā's account of liberation culminates in the cessation of conceptual proliferation (prapañcanirodha). Conceptual proliferation (prapañca) is the mind's automatic conceptualization and reification of an object on encountering it, together with the liking, aversion, grasping, and rejection that follow. Every "this is X," "X is good," and "I want X" is conceptual proliferation. The treatise's implications for liberation, especially in its chapters on the Four Truths and nirvāṇa, can be arranged in the following sequence. This is the book's interpretive reconstruction from the text, not a framework taken directly from a reliable secondary source. Scholars differ over the precise path, and readers may consult the cited commentaries to assess it:

Within this sequence, nirvāṇa is not set up as a really existent place to be reached elsewhere. The procedure of the whole Chapter on Nirvāṇa is to test the four lemmas one by one, that nirvāṇa is existent, is nonexistent, is both, is neither, and to reject them all; this yields one of the treatise's best-known declarations:

Nirvāṇa and the world have not the slightest difference; the world and nirvāṇa likewise have not the slightest difference. (Chapter on Nirvāṇa, 25.19–20)⁵

This is the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. But how far the sentence reaches must be fixed by the scope of the argument itself, and it must not be enlarged.⁷

Consider first what the procedure requires. Every one of the four lemmas begins with "nirvāṇa is"; whatever can occupy the subject position and take a copula must already have been set up as a thesis. So the nirvāṇa the chapter refutes can only be the one that someone had already set up, and its historical targets are in fact named: the refutation of "nirvāṇa exists" is aimed at the Sarvāstivāda, which set up cessation through discernment as a really existent unconditioned dharma (3.1, 3.2); the refutation of "nirvāṇa does not exist" is traditionally aimed at the Sautrāntika line's claim that nirvāṇa is mere nonexistence. Conversely, the layer that was never set up as a thesis and admits only negative statement is beyond the reach of the four-lemma procedure, which neither refutes nor establishes it.

The chapter keeps its own evidence. Ten verses before that declaration, 25.9 says: "Because of receiving conditions, one turns in birth and death; not receiving conditions is called nirvāṇa," and Qingmu glosses it: "because the five aggregates, having no intrinsic nature, no longer continue, it is called nirvāṇa." The continuing and the non-continuing of the five aggregates is a distinction that can be fully stated at the conventional level, and the chapter nowhere cancels it. And the reason Qingmu gives for 25.19 is "because all dharmas neither arise nor cease, the world and nirvāṇa have no difference": what nonduality rests on is that all dharmas are without arising and ceasing, not that the two sides have become indistinguishable at the conventional level too. So what the declaration establishes is this: any nirvāṇa that is spoken, that is set up as a concept, is under ultimate analysis no different from saṃsāra; the nirvāṇa that was never set up, the one guarded by silence, the argument never touches from beginning to end.

One more turn must be recorded. Verses 25.17–18 handle the four lemmas about whether the Tathāgata exists after his passing and conclude in non-receiving and non-discrimination; Qingmu's verdict is "therefore at all times and in every way, no mark of nirvāṇa can be found." This step repeats the Buddha's handling of the fourteen undetermined questions. The immediately following 25.19–20 then turns into a positive judgment of identity, and the tone changes. Refusing to answer and giving an answer are two different things; if there is a boundary crossing, it happens between these two verses. The weight of this turn is examined in a chapter of its own in Volume 2, Madhyamaka, Part II, Chapter 3; why the exhaustive refutation of the four lemmas empties the subject position rather than choosing among four predicates is shown in Part II, Essay 18, Chapter 3.

A comparison with modern philosophy may help understanding, without implying historical influence. Nāgārjuna's refutation without establishing a position or advancing a thesis is often compared with Wittgenstein. At the close of the Tractatus, those who understand him eventually recognize his propositions as nonsensical. They discard them like a ladder after climbing it. His later therapeutic approach seeks to dissolve philosophical problems rather than solve them. Both approaches resemble Madhyamaka's reductio, the emptiness of emptiness, and discarding the raft after crossing. Others compare it with Pyrrhonian skepticism, suspending every assertion. A strong modern reading can be proposed here. Ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya) is a semantic metaconstraint. It provides no content, only a prohibition. Every assertion about intrinsic nature becomes self-contradictory at this level and is therefore empty. It defines boundary conditions for language, rather than a substance. Its role is to specify that nothing can be said about intrinsic nature without contradiction, rather than to describe what the world is. This reading comes closest to Wittgensteinian unsayability. Madhyamaka says its purpose is liberation and the cessation of grasping, not doubt for its own sake. This distinguishes it from simple skepticism or dissolution in the manner of analytic philosophy.

Part II gives this strong reading formal expression. Essay 18, Chapter 5 sets out three clauses governing levels. The scope clause restricts the metaconstraint's quantifiers to assertions about intrinsic nature at the object level. The inventory of resources states that its own establishment uses only definitions, logic, and one analytic truth, without backing from any substantially real existent. The reflexive exit addresses the reifying interpretation of its own name. This chapter introduces the term metaconstraint, which Part II uses for the same thing. Part I gives its philosophical orientation; Part II gives its formal clauses.⁸

In formal terms, this metaconstraint reads as follows. Let X be any object-level proposition of the form "a has intrinsic nature." Then:

Ultimate analysis of the proposition (X) → X is self-contradictory.

The same thing can be written from the side of the subject term. For any a:

Ultimate analysis of the subject (a) ≡ empty.

The two formulations are equivalent. To say that a is empty is to say that the sentence "a has intrinsic nature" does not survive ultimate analysis. The first formulation treats ultimate analysis as a test applied to propositions; the second treats it as a verdict passed on subject terms. The first shows that it is an operation; the second shows that the operation yields only one result.

The same value does not transmit identity. That two subject terms both receive "empty" shows only that two assertions of intrinsic nature fail in the same way. It does not show that the two subjects have anything in common, still less that they are without difference. Here emptiness is the name of a verdict, not a property conferred on subject terms. If one insists on reading it as a property, it holds of every term analyzed, and using it to tell terms apart yields nothing. Chapter 6 of Essay 18 in Part II establishes this as a corollary.

Both formulations presuppose that a has already been set up as a subject term. Something that was never set up as an object cannot be substituted for a, and so it never receives the value "empty"; what it receives is "not applicable." When this chapter said above that the argument of the chapter on nirvāṇa never touches the nirvāṇa guarded by silence, this is what it means formally: ultimate analysis of the subject is a partial function whose domain is the set of terms a on whose behalf real existence with intrinsic nature has been asserted, and nibbāna without remainder in the baseline sense is not in that domain. Lying outside the domain and being judged empty are two different values; the former means that no verdict was ever handed down. This is not an exception opened for nirvāṇa, and no such exception can be opened. Whoever wants something else to lie outside the domain in the same way must likewise refrain from asserting real existence and intrinsic nature on its behalf, and a thing of which no such assertion is made leaves nothing to believe in, to prove, or to seek; the price is settled in Chapters 5 and 8 of Essay 18 in Part II. Chapter 5 of Essay 18 establishes this as a corollary of clause (a).

The emptiness of emptiness applies this operation to the name "emptiness" itself. Substitute "emptiness" for a:

Ultimate analysis of the subject (emptiness) ≡ empty.

In the propositional form: ultimate analysis of the proposition "emptiness has intrinsic nature" → that proposition is self-contradictory. This step does no harm to ultimate analysis itself, because the operation does not depend on the sentence "emptiness has intrinsic nature" being true. It uses only definitions, logic, and one analytic truth (clause (b) in Part II), and it never placed "emptiness" as a thing among its own foundations. Nor does it fall within the range of X. X is a proposition of the form "a has intrinsic nature"; ultimate analysis is not a sentence of that form. It assigns intrinsic nature to nothing and only tests the sentences that assign it. This exclusion does not depend on a special exemption. The scope clause already places outside its range every statement that makes no assertion of intrinsic nature, including statements of logic and linguistic usage; ultimate analysis is excluded together with them, through the same door. If its exclusion depended on a tailored exception, the entire division of levels would become a privilege.

What the emptiness of emptiness actually rejects is the interpretation of the name emptiness as something with intrinsic nature. To say that a thing called emptiness survives analysis intact and is established independently of other conditions is a standard instance of "a has intrinsic nature." It falls under refutation by the same rule. Part II, Essay 18, Chapter 5 establishes this as clause C governing levels and specifies that what is rejected is the reifying interpretation, not the metaconstraint itself.⁸

Modern scholars disagree substantially about what Nāgārjuna means. Several principal approaches are listed for reference:

The book is close to anti-essentialism, judging it most compatible with Nāgārjuna's text and the two-truth framework. The Candrakīrti tradition nevertheless dominates Tibetan systems of practice and is internally coherent. Its debates will be examined in Chapters 4 and 5.

A familiar attitude in Mahāyāna practice deserves a related discussion. The high regard for a mind without discrimination, or nondiscriminating wisdom (nirvikalpa-jñāna), has an internal rationale in Nāgārjuna's theory. Buddhas constantly occupy the perspective of ultimate truth and make no discriminations of intrinsic nature before objects. The cessation of conceptual proliferation means that objects are no longer automatically reified. What ceases is the act of framing objects as things established by themselves, not the distinctions made at the level of designation. Higher and lower, liked and disliked, can still be said; they are simply no longer taken as natures that objects carry on their own. The more practitioners can maintain this nondiscriminating mind, the closer they come to the cessation of conceptual proliferation and thus to liberation in Madhyamaka theory. It is awareness without grasping through intrinsic nature, rather than indifference in which nothing matters.

One introductory intuition may help, though it cannot replace the treatise's systematic arguments. From dependent origination and emptiness, any thing, concept, or phenomenon becomes what it is through dependence on its constituents, maintainers, counterparts, and makers, and even on what it maintains and produces. Each dependency depends on further things in the same layered way. This is the philosophical intuition behind Indra's net. It remains an intuition, however, not a proof. It cannot show whether the chain of dependence converges, including whether anything ultimately depends on itself. Nor can it rule out independent subgraphs of dependence in which a local system is self-sufficient. These gaps make the treatise's full sequence of logical arguments indispensable.

The next chapter turns to Āryadeva and early Madhyamaka, followed by its methods of argument and the internal dispute between Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika. One concern should also be anticipated. Calling everything empty while claiming to have no thesis easily invites the objection that this leads to nihilism or makes all speech impossible. In response to such concerns, and to find a secure basis for emptiness, Yogācāra's consciousness-only teaching will take another path in Essay 6.

References¶