Chapter 2. Āryadeva and early Madhyamaka¶

Nāgārjuna turned Prajñāpāramitā emptiness into a method of argument. His disciple Āryadeva, around the third century, continued the work. This chapter examines his contribution and the tradition's subsequent transmission along two paths. One remained in India and later divided into Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika, discussed in 5.4 and 5.5. The other reached China through Kumārajīva's translations and became the Three Treatise school.

1. Āryadeva and his works¶

Legend must again be separated from what can be established. Āryadeva is also known as Shengtian (圣天) and Kāṇadeva, or "one-eyed Deva." Tradition places his birth in southern India or Sri Lanka and describes him as Nāgārjuna's direct disciple and a formidable debater. Stories of his giving away an eye and eventually being assassinated by the disciple of a defeated opponent largely belong to sectarian legend and are difficult to establish historically. What can be maintained is that he continued Nāgārjuna's teaching and left two important works:

• The Catuḥśataka, or Four Hundred Verses, with sixteen chapters and four hundred verses, his systematic representative work;
• The Śata-śāstra, or Hundred Treatise, translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva.

The surviving versions of the Catuḥśataka need explanation first. Its first eight chapters survive only in Tibetan translation, with incomplete Sanskrit and no Chinese translation. Xuanzang translated the latter eight as the Guang bailun ben, and they survive in Chinese and Tibetan. The chapters cover the following subjects:¹

The latter work, the Śata-śāstra, is especially important. The three treatises on which Chinese Madhyamaka rests are Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Twelve Gates Treatise (also called the Treatise on the Twelve Gates), together with Āryadeva's Śata-śāstra:

The Śata-śāstra originally had twenty chapters, of which Kumārajīva translated only the first ten. Each has ten verses, totaling a hundred, hence the title. They successively refute the spiritual self, the substantial reality of matter, karma, the four great elements of earth, water, fire, and air, time, atoms, eternalism, annihilationism, Sāṃkhya causation, and eternal sound. The work largely attacks non-Buddhist schools, especially Sāṃkhya and Vaiśeṣika. Its arguments are more direct than those of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and closer to actual encounters in debate.

The Twelve Gates Treatise is the shortest of the three. Traditionally attributed to Nāgārjuna, its authorship is disputed. Some researchers consider it a compilation by Madhyamaka successors, not necessarily the work of Nāgārjuna alone.² Twelve gates present emptiness, from examining conditions and whether an effect exists or does not exist to examining the doer, time, and characteristics. Its arguments substantially overlap with the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and can be read as a synopsis and teaching abridgment of its account of emptiness. The Three Treatise school uses it as an introductory text.

2. Removing views without establishing one¶

Āryadeva largely continues Nāgārjuna's approach, using emptiness and absence of intrinsic nature to counter attachment to views. He concentrates on debate and therapy, removing mistaken views one by one. The first eight chapters of the Catuḥśataka begin by refuting the four inversions (viparyāsa) of permanence, pleasure, self, and purity. The latter eight address specific claims of Sāṃkhya, Vaiśeṣika, and proponents of a self.¹

The philosophical criticism of the latter eight chapters follows a single logic. Intrinsic nature and relations are fundamentally incompatible. Anything with fixed intrinsic nature must be independent and self-sufficient. Anything entering a relation, whether causation, perception, long and short, or passion and the passionate, is partly as it is because of something else. This is Āryadeva's point of attack against Sāṃkhya. The spiritual self is defined as eternally unchanging yet must witness primordial matter's evolution, witnessing suffering now and pleasure later. Witnessing different contents is itself a relation that changes over time, which something eternally unchanging cannot bear. Intrinsic nature, relations, and change cannot all be assigned to the spiritual self without one failing. The systematic development of this logic appears in 5.3.

The difference between the work's two halves must be clear, or it is easily reduced to a collection of debates. The first eight chapters, now surviving only in Tibetan, guide practice. They first counter the four inversions and then address teachers and disciples and how kings should practice, forming a sequence of the bodhisattva path. Only the latter eight turn to direct debate with non-Buddhists and Buddhist schools. Their combination makes the Catuḥśataka unusual among Madhyamaka texts. Very few Madhyamaka treatises cover both a sequence of practice and philosophical debate. Āryadeva uses it to show that emptiness is embedded within a framework of practice as well as serving as a tool of dispute. The tension between that framework and early Buddhism's training in present awareness will return later.

Āryadeva makes Nāgārjuna's claim to have no thesis more explicit. A frequently quoted statement in the Catuḥśataka says that no fault can be found, even over a long time, in someone who holds no position on existence, nonexistence, or both, because that person has no thesis open to attack.¹ This continues Nāgārjuna's absence of a thesis and anticipates the later Prāsaṅgika method of refuting without establishing a position, which Candrakīrti takes up in 5.5.

His therapeutic sequence deserves attention. First remove what is unmeritorious, meaning unwholesome conduct; then remove self, the wrong view of attachment to self; finally remove every view, relinquishing even attachment to emptiness. The stages proceed like a physician first stopping harmful behavior, then removing the root of the illness, and finally withdrawing the medicine. This means the same as the Buddha's discarding the raft after crossing in 1.5 and the preceding chapter's emptiness of emptiness. Views are tools for treating attachment and should be relinquished when the treatment is complete, without substituting another set of views to worship.

The sequence further clarifies how Madhyamaka works as a whole. It consistently addresses views. The method first identifies the view a practitioner holds, then gives reasons to relinquish it. The approach need not be mistaken; removing wrong views is part of practice. Yet an unsettling difference appears beside early Buddhism. Early meditation trains awareness of body, feeling, mind, and phenomena, observing impermanence and no-self in the concrete present. It does not presuppose that practitioners must first be competent conceptual analysts. Madhyamaka does require conceptual analysis. To begin removing a view, practitioners must recognize both the view they hold and its structure. Such precise analysis of views differs in kind from early Buddhism's present awareness.

3. Āryadeva's opponents¶

The Catuḥśataka addresses opponents both outside and within Buddhism. The tables list the main ones and the claims Āryadeva targets:

Outside Buddhism

Within Buddhism

Several biographies tell how Āryadeva publicly debated a Brahmanical scholar and suffered retaliation. The history is difficult to establish, but such narratives reveal at least that third-century Indian Madhyamaka thinkers did more than reason on paper within monasteries. They also confronted other schools in a wider intellectual arena.

4. Early Madhyamaka's transmission and branching¶

After Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, Madhyamaka continued mainly through commentary and debate. Among the earliest commentaries, Qingmu's (*Piṅgala) explanation of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā was translated by Kumārajīva and became its standard Chinese form. Two lines of transmission subsequently emerged:

Here, “Part X” refers to Essay 10. The Three Treatises are the Middle Treatise, the Hundred Treatise, and the Treatise on the Twelve Gates.

In India, Buddhapālita and Bhāvaviveka appeared in the fifth and sixth centuries. Their disagreement over whether Madhyamaka should offer independent arguments, followed by Candrakīrti's seventh-century judgment, crystallized into the Svātantrika–Prāsaṅgika dispute.³ This is the subject of 5.4 and 5.5; only its source is identified here.

The Chinese line centers on Kumārajīva. His early fifth-century translations of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Śata-śāstra, and Twelve Gates Treatise established the Three Treatise school's textual foundation. His disciple Sengzhao further integrated Madhyamaka emptiness into Chinese philosophical reflection in the Zhaolun,² which contains some of the most important writings through which China absorbed Madhyamaka emptiness and deserves some explanation here alongside the Indian line. The collection normally contains four essays:

• "Things Do Not Move" argues that despite the appearance of motion and change, each phenomenon occupies its own position and has never moved. It begins from "past things remain in the past and do not pass from the present into the past," and reaches statements such as "the cyclone topples mountains yet is always still; rivers race downstream yet do not flow." Later Madhyamaka scholars find this language closer to permanence and still distant from Nāgārjuna's emptiness as absence of intrinsic nature.⁴
• "Emptiness as Lack of True Reality" centers on the claim that things are empty because they are not truly real. Things have never existed in real independence and are therefore empty. Emptiness lies in their lack of true reality, rather than in nothingness. Of the four, this is closest to Nāgārjuna's emptiness through dependent origination.
• "Prajñā Has No Knowing" argues that true prajñā does not involve objectifying knowledge. It is a nondiscriminating knowing without knowing, beyond the subject–object structure of cognition.
• "Nirvāṇa Is Nameless" discusses nirvāṇa through questions and answers, showing that it cannot be captured in names and language and is not nothingness; it is nameless.

Sengzhao matters because he explained Indian emptiness through the Chinese categories of root and branch, existence and nonexistence, and motion and stillness. He thereby created a distinctive route of adaptation. Yet the immobility of "Things Do Not Move" does subtly depart from Nāgārjuna's emptiness as absence of intrinsic nature. Chan and Tiantai later drew selectively on Sengzhao in different ways. The book judges that this route through Chinese thought produces a perceptible difference between the Three Treatise school's emptiness and that of Indian Prāsaṅgika. Essay 10 develops the details in its account of Chinese Buddhism.

The point here is that after Āryadeva, Madhyamaka continued along two routes. Its methods developed further in India, while the tradition became established in China.

5. Āryadeva's place and the tension in refuting without establishing a position¶

Āryadeva's contribution was to turn Nāgārjuna's argument of emptiness into a workable practice of removing views while establishing none of his own. Refuting without establishing a position thereby acquired a settled form and became a mark of Madhyamaka, especially the later Prāsaṅgika tradition.

A tension must be identified for later return. A school claiming to have no thesis engages in exceptionally intensive debate. It explains that all its arguments merely remove the opponent's attachment to views, while it establishes nothing. The reply is deft, but a question remains. Can continual refutation really avoid committing itself to any position? Svātantrika seeks to address precisely this concern, while Prāsaṅgika seeks to defend its claim against it. The next chapter examines Madhyamaka's methods themselves and how reductio and the four alternatives refute opponents' presuppositions of intrinsic nature until they cannot stand.

References¶