A Life Buried Under Legend
Nagarjuna probably lived in South India in the second or third century CE, perhaps under the patronage of a Satavahana king to whom one of his letters of advice is addressed. Everything more specific is contested. Traditional biographies, written centuries later in Tibetan and Chinese, make him an alchemist who lived six hundred years and a magician who recovered hidden scriptures from the serpent kings beneath the sea. Modern scholars treat these as hagiography, and several argue that more than one figure of the name has been merged into one.
The texts attributed to him number in the dozens, and only a handful are securely his. The core is the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, some four hundred and fifty verses in twenty-seven chapters. Around it cluster works on emptiness, on dependent origination, and the Vigrahavyavartani, in which he answers objections to his method. Attribution disputes are unresolved for much of the rest, and the medical and alchemical works bearing his name almost certainly belong to other people entirely.
Emptiness Is Not Nothing
His central term is sunyata, usually translated emptiness, and it is easy to misread. He is not saying that things do not exist. He is saying that nothing possesses svabhava, an intrinsic nature that it has independently of causes, conditions and relations. A chariot is not found in its wheels, nor in its axle, nor apart from them. Since everything arises in dependence on something else, nothing is self-established, and emptiness is simply the other side of dependent origination rather than a hidden substance underneath appearances.
His method is relentlessly negative. Rather than defending a thesis, he takes an opponent's position and drives it into contradiction, characteristically through a fourfold analysis: a thing is not produced from itself, nor from another, nor from both, nor from neither. Applied to causation, motion, time, the self, the elements and even to nirvana and the Buddha, the argument dissolves every candidate for ultimate reality. He insists he asserts no position of his own, which critics from his day to ours have found either the deepest move in the argument or an evasion.
Two Truths and a Long Inheritance
The obvious objection is that if nothing has intrinsic nature, then nothing is true and ordinary life collapses. Nagarjuna answers with the doctrine of two truths: conventional truth, in which chariots roll and monks keep vows and the teaching can be taught, and ultimate truth, in which nothing is found to be self-existent. The conventional is not a lie to be discarded; without it the ultimate cannot be communicated. He warns that emptiness wrongly grasped is like seizing a snake by the wrong end, and that the greatest error is to make emptiness itself into a thing.
The Madhyamaka school he founded became one of the two great philosophical traditions of Indian Mahayana Buddhism alongside Yogacara, and its interpretation split almost immediately between followers of Buddhapalita and Bhaviveka over whether the method may use positive arguments at all. Carried into Tibet, it became the framework of monastic education there; carried into China, it fed the Sanlun and, indirectly, Chan. Western philosophers have compared him to Sextus Empiricus, Hume and Wittgenstein, comparisons that illuminate as often as they mislead.
