Part I, Chapter 2: Early Madhyamaka's Theory of the Path: Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva¶

The previous chapter stated Madhyamaka soteriology's core claims through the five questions. Its account of the truth of the path (mechanism) stopped at the principle: seeing emptiness breaks the view of intrinsic existence and thereby removes the conditions of suffering. This chapter brings that link into closer focus with a more specific question: what does this path of “ending suffering by seeing emptiness” look like in actual practice? What theory of the path did early Madhyamaka provide?

Why Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva must be read together

If we consider only Nāgārjuna (c. second century), the question immediately encounters a familiar asymmetry: his philosophical arguments are extremely precise, while his practical guidance is extremely sparse. Almost every one of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā's twenty-seven chapters conducts conceptual analysis and reductio; its explanations of meditation methods, stages of practice, and psychological processes are few and far between. The Vigrahavyāvartanī restates Madhyamaka methodology more compactly, but it too is a philosophical defense, not a practice manual. This asymmetry need not mean that Nāgārjuna's writing had no connection to practice. A more likely explanation is that it presupposed a living background of practice, transmitted orally within the monastic community of the time and therefore not needing inclusion in philosophical treatises. For later readers, however, reconstructing a theory of the path from the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā alone is like facing an architectural theorist who left almost no construction drawings.

This chapter therefore includes Āryadeva (known in Chinese as Shengtian, c. third century, Nāgārjuna's direct successor), treating “early Madhyamaka” rather than Nāgārjuna alone. This is more than a convenience in assembling material; it is closer to the historical facts. Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva were the founding pair of Madhyamaka, as Volume 1 has explained (see 5.1 and 5.2). Their texts on the path complement each other. Nāgārjuna's discussions of practice occur mainly outside the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, scattered through his more ethical and admonitory works, especially the Ratnāvalī and the Suhṛllekha (a verse letter to the ruler of a friendly kingdom). Āryadeva, meanwhile, left a treatise with practice as its very backbone, the Catuḥśataka. Only by bringing these together can we assemble a substantial early Madhyamaka account of the path. One qualification is needed at the outset: even read together, this account still leans toward “counteraction and breaking grasping,” rather than providing a complete manual of calming and insight. A truly systematic sequence of path stages was built gradually after Nāgārjuna. That belongs to the next chapter.

First clarify a term: which kind of “practice”?

Before proceeding, one term must be clarified, or the phrase “presupposed a living background of practice” will pass without a clear meaning: the two Chinese characters translated as “practice.” Different traditions do not have the same thing in mind when they encounter this term. In early Buddhism, practice centers on the three trainings in ethics, concentration, and wisdom, especially the experiential realization through calming and insight associated with the four establishments of mindfulness and the four jhānas: concentration provides the foundation, and the wisdom of insight sees impermanence, suffering, and nonself (Introduction, Chapter 2). In Mahāyāna, including Madhyamaka, the emphasis often lies elsewhere: the six perfections, gathering the two accumulations of merit and wisdom, arousing bodhicitta, following bodhisattva conduct, and cultivating loving-kindness and compassion toward sentient beings. The two are not mutually exclusive and have intertwined historically, but their emphases clearly differ. When we say that “early Madhyamaka presupposed a living background of practice,” we must therefore ask what kind of practice it was.

An honest observation is that the practical content early Madhyamaka actually committed to writing leans clearly toward the latter. Nāgārjuna's practical material in the Ratnāvalī and Suhṛllekha concerns the two accumulations, pāramitās, bodhisattva conduct, and ethical instruction. The first eight chapters of Āryadeva's Catuḥśataka detail contemplations that directly counteract inversions, bodhisattva conduct, the abandonment of afflictions, and disciples' study and practice. Early Buddhism's finely differentiated stages of calming (jhāna), and its procedures specifying the fetters abandoned at each stage, are almost entirely absent from their writings. Mindfulness of death, contemplation of the body's impurity, and contemplation of suffering are certainly forms of meditation. They tend, however, toward direct antidotal contemplation, rather than the calming side of deep concentration. Set alongside bodhisattva accumulations, they give the “practice” described in early Madhyamaka an emphasis on counteraction and accumulation. The manner of this counteraction also deserves attention: it mostly attacks the inversions themselves head-on—mindfulness of death breaks grasping at permanence, and contemplation of the body's impurity breaks grasping at purity. This contrasts with the orientation of the early Noble Eightfold Path distinguished in Introduction, Chapter 2, which works through indirect cultivation by ethics, concentration, and wisdom rather than direct assault.

This raises a question that should neither be avoided nor treated as settled: the “living background” presupposed by early Madhyamaka may not have been early Buddhism's experiential realization through concentration and wisdom. It was more likely already a culture of practice centered on counteraction, accumulation, and bodhisattva conduct. This book does not make that a definitive conclusion; oral transmissions are difficult to reconstruct. But readers should be warned against completing early Madhyamaka's account of the path on its behalf by assuming that “concentration and wisdom were already there; they simply went unwritten.” What it did write points to another center of gravity in practice. This distinction must be clear before we assess whether Madhyamaka preserved the early mechanism for ending suffering.

The three trainings are ethics, concentration, and wisdom. The Mahāyāna panel includes accumulating the two accumulations and arousing bodhicitta. In chapters 5–8, “afflictions” means abandoning afflictions, and “training disciples” refers to disciples' study and practice. The list for chapters 9–15 includes refuting grasping at extremes, not merely naming extremes.

Āryadeva's Catuḥśataka: a gradual path of counteracting inversions

The early Madhyamaka text closest to a “manual of the path” is Āryadeva's Catuḥśataka. Its two halves correspond neatly to Madhyamaka's two faces. Within the latter eight chapters, Chapters 9–15 offer refutational dialectic akin to the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, refuting permanence, self, time, views, faculties and objects, grasping at extremes, and the characteristics of the conditioned. Chapter 16 closes with a teacher–disciple dialogue, returning to the tone of instruction for disciples and echoing Chapter 8 in the first half. The first eight chapters (1–8), meanwhile, offer a gradual path mainly concerned with counteracting inversions, traditionally read within Madhyamaka as a preparatory sequence for entering the path.¹

The first eight chapters are built around “counteracting the four inversions.” These inversions (viparyāsa) are the ordinary person's four fundamental misrecognitions: taking the impermanent as permanent, suffering as happiness, the impure as pure, and the selfless as self. Chapters 1–4 of the Catuḥśataka attempt to counteract them one by one. Chapter 1 uses mindfulness of death to break grasping at permanence; Chapter 2 contemplates suffering to break grasping at happiness; Chapter 3 contemplates the body's impurity to break grasping at purity; and Chapter 4 breaks self-conceit to break self-grasping. Chapter 5 then treats bodhisattva conduct, Chapter 6 the abandonment of afflictions, Chapter 7 counteraction of sensual lust, and Chapter 8 the attitude disciples should bring to study and practice. Beginning with the coarsest delusions of permanence, happiness, self, and purity and clearing the way through to the bodhisattva's daily conduct, these chapters form a ladder of antidotes leading from elementary to deeper practice.

This aspect most deserves to be explained on early Madhyamaka's behalf, but with due restraint. Counteracting the four inversions of permanence, happiness, self, and purity is precisely the old subject of early Buddhism's four establishments of mindfulness: contemplating the body as impure, feelings as suffering, mind as impermanent, and dharmas as selfless. Āryadeva did not start anew. He took up these oldest targets of counteraction as preparations and steps toward seeing emptiness. In terms of the object—what is contemplated—early Madhyamaka's starting point on the path has strong continuity with this book's baseline. A further distinction cannot be omitted, however: Āryadeva treats these topics through arguments in verse, urging people to break their grasping. He does not teach how to enter concentration or how to develop insight from it. Though the subjects are old, the technique is now exhortation, not experiential realization through concentration and wisdom. This matters especially later. Introduction, Chapter 2 has already said that impermanence and nonself are precisely the characteristics that shut the door on “permanence, happiness, self, and purity.” Āryadeva's first four chapters do just this, using antidotes to break each of the four. In subject matter, then, early Madhyamaka stands close to the early teaching; in its manner of practice, it already has a different emphasis.

Nāgārjuna's two accumulations: practice is not purely epistemological

On Nāgārjuna's side, the Ratnāvalī contains the richest account of the path. It presents the ruler with the overall pattern of practice: the bodhisattva path requires two kinds of accumulation (sambhāra), the accumulation of wisdom (jñāna-sambhāra) and the accumulation of merit (puṇya-sambhāra). The former means understanding and directly realizing emptiness; the latter means practicing the perfections (pāramitā), such as giving, ethical discipline, and patience, together with compassion (karuṇā) for all sentient beings. The Suhṛllekha, in the form of a letter, broadly follows the same ethical and gradual instruction: leaving faults behind, keeping precepts, cultivating concentration, arousing compassion, and moving toward liberation.²

The two-track structure of these accumulations has an important implication for the path: early Madhyamaka does not claim that “obtaining the right view of emptiness is enough.” Practice must also transform emotion and conduct. Wisdom breaks the epistemic foundation of grasping at self and dharmas; merit accumulates in the mental continuum the conditions that make practice possible, and supplies the soil in which bodhicitta can arise and become stable. The two depend on each other. Without the accumulation of wisdom, accumulating merit lacks proper direction and may amount only to worldly wholesome karma. Without the accumulation of merit, even a conceptual understanding of emptiness can easily fall into “dry wisdom”—understanding that spins its wheels, with no power to transform. At least in Nāgārjuna's own conception, the Madhyamaka path is not purely intellectual.

Emptiness too is empty: the tools of practice must also be relinquished

One step distinguishes early Madhyamaka's account from an ordinary gradual path: it applies “emptiness” to the tools of practice themselves. Nāgārjuna did not distinguish conventional bodhicitta (saṃvṛti-bodhicitta) from ultimate bodhicitta (paramārtha-bodhicitta) as systematically as the later Bodhicaryāvatāra, but the logic of that distinction was already present in his two-truth framework. Conventional bodhicitta is the vow “May I become a Buddha to liberate sentient beings,” a conditioned dharma belonging to conventional truth. Ultimate bodhicitta is the understanding of bodhicitta's own emptiness: bodhicitta too is empty, without intrinsic nature, and should therefore not itself be grasped as a really existent object.

This step carries great weight in the theory of the path. If practitioners hold only conventional bodhicitta without understanding its emptiness, bodhicitta can easily carry a subtler self-grasping: the “I” that seeks to “become a Buddha and liberate sentient beings” may simply be the view of intrinsic nature wearing a compassionate cloak. Understanding ultimate bodhicitta is meant to guard against this subtle grasping. It does not cancel bodhicitta's efficacy in practice, but prevents it from turning into a new bond. At the level of the path, this corresponds exactly to the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā's “emptiness too is empty”: emptiness likewise must not be grasped as really existent. The tools of practice must themselves be empty, or the means become new objects of grasping. Early Madhyamaka's theory of the path thus has a self-dissolving character: it requires one to see the path itself as empty while walking it.

Calming and insight: permeated by the view of emptiness, yet harder to test

The coordination of calming (śamatha) and insight (vipaśyanā) provides another thread in early Madhyamaka's theory of the path. Nāgārjuna's verses in the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā and elsewhere occasionally touch on calming and insight, but briefly. Later accounts usually summarize his position as follows: calming steadies the mind and enables it to focus powerfully on its object; insight is direct insight into emptiness. Nāgārjuna does not, however, differentiate the levels of jhāna, the fetters (saṃyojana) abandoned at each level, or the specific objects and procedures of contemplation in the manner of the Abhidharma.

The surviving texts show an early Madhyamaka understanding of calming and insight strongly colored by prajñā. What matters is whether the right view of emptiness permeates the entire process; the quality of insight is not judged by the depth of calming, or which jhāna one reaches. At the level of conventional truth, training in calming and insight still follows the traditional course: restraining the faculties, regulating the body and breath, and concentrating. At the ultimate level, however, the answer to “what is contemplated?” is the direct realization of emptiness, not a fixed visualization directed at a fixed object. This makes early Madhyamaka's framework more open in operation than the Abhidharma's, but also harder to test definitively. That openness has consequences for verification, to which Part II, Chapter 6 will return.

A clear direction, without systematic stages of the path

Taken together, these elements allow the following description of early Madhyamaka's theory of the path. It has a clear backbone: Āryadeva's sequence of antidotes to the four inversions, Nāgārjuna's two tracks of accumulation, the dialectic of ultimate and conventional bodhicitta, and calming and insight permeated by the view of emptiness. What it lacks is a systematic, finely articulated sequence of path stages. It tells practitioners quite clearly which direction to take, but says little about the individual steps.

This lack contrasts sharply with the abundance of contemporary Abhidharma. The Sarvāstivāda, for example, offers an extremely systematic account: the five paths of accumulation, preparation, seeing, cultivation, and no further learning follow an orderly sequence. Each stage has definite psychological events, types of afflictions abandoned, and observable functional changes. The path of seeing centers on the direct realization of the Four Truths in sixteen mind-moments; the path of cultivation gradually abandons the nine grades of affliction assigned to it. Every step has markers of “attainment.” Early Madhyamaka supplies no comparable map. This does not mean it is shallower than the Sarvāstivāda. Nāgārjuna's criticism is precisely that the Sarvāstivāda analyzes dharmas without intrinsic nature into intrinsically existing atoms, building its entire edifice of practice on a mistaken ontological foundation. Even so, the criticized party does hold a construction drawing; the critic's replacement is much sparser.

Connecting the view of emptiness to a complete set of path stages—especially integrating the ten bodhisattva grounds of the Daśabhūmika-sūtra, ground by ground, with seeing emptiness and compassion—was a project completed gradually after Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva. It was taken up mainly by systematizers in the line of Candrakīrti's Madhyamakāvatāra. That falls beyond “early Madhyamaka” and belongs to the next chapter. Here we need only remember that early Madhyamaka supplied a philosophical core and an antidotal ladder. Later thinkers built the complete system of practice within that core, sometimes also by expanding or revising it.

Recapitulation and prospect

Stated in its strongest form, early Madhyamaka's theory offers this path: begin gradually with Āryadeva's antidotes to the four inversions, continue along Nāgārjuna's two tracks of merit and wisdom, give the path flesh and blood through bodhisattva conduct and compassion, and take as its final destination the direct realization of emptiness that permeates it throughout. Even the tools themselves—“seeing emptiness” and “bodhicitta”—must be seen as empty, leaving no new grasping. At its starting point, it has strong continuity with early Buddhism's path of counteraction. At its destination, it places the full weight on “seeing emptiness.”

This chapter's task remains faithful presentation, without explicit judgment. One matter for later examination can already be identified, however: the theory's direction is clear, but its specific sequence is thin, and its success or failure depends on accomplishing a single epistemic act—directly realizing emptiness. Does walking a path centered on “seeing everything as empty, and seeing the tools of that seeing as empty too” lead toward cessation, or toward an ever more refined exercise in speculation? That is what the chapters of Part II will test.

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