Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna was an Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher who probably lived in the second or third century CE. He founded the Madhyamaka, or "Middle Way", school of Mahayana Buddhism, and his central idea, that all things are "empty" of independent existence, became one of the most influential doctrines in Asian thought. Tibetan Buddhists sometimes call him a "second Buddha", and many historians regard him as the most important Buddhist thinker after the Buddha himself.

Almost nothing about Nagarjuna's life can be established with certainty. The earliest biographies were written in Chinese around the early fifth century, two hundred years or more after his death, and Tibetan accounts appeared only from the eleventh century. These texts are works of devotion rather than history. They tell, for example, that he was born a Brahmin in southern India, that he travelled to the underwater realm of the nagas, serpent spirits, to recover lost scriptures, and that he lived for several hundred years. His name joins naga, serpent, with Arjuna, the hero of the epic Mahabharata.

Modern scholars broadly agree that he came from south India and was active somewhere between the first and third centuries CE. A common working date is about 150 to 250. Some, notably Joseph Walser, connect him with the Satavahana kings who ruled the Deccan plateau, since a surviving work of advice to a king, the Ratnavali or "Precious Garland", seems to address a Satavahana ruler. The Buddhist sites at Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda in today's Andhra Pradesh have long been associated with him, though the link is traditional. Later legends that make him head of the great monastery of Nalanda are anachronistic, as Nalanda flourished centuries later.

In Nagarjuna's day India was divided among several powers, including the Kushan Empire in the north-west and the Satavahanas in the Deccan. Buddhism had split into many monastic schools, each with its own body of scholastic analysis, called Abhidharma. These schools broke experience down into fleeting basic elements, dharmas, which they treated as the ultimate building blocks of reality, each with its own fixed nature, svabhava.

A newer movement, the Mahayana or "Great Vehicle", was spreading through texts such as the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, which taught that even the dharmas are empty. At this stage Mahayana was a minority current inside existing monasteries. Nagarjuna gave its intuitions a rigorous philosophical defence.

Nagarjuna's main work is the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the "Root Verses on the Middle Way", a set of some 450 short verses in 27 chapters. Its target is the idea of svabhava, intrinsic nature: the belief that anything exists by itself, independently, with an essence of its own. He argued that nothing does. Everything arises in dependence on causes, conditions and parts, and on the concepts we use to pick it out. Because things are dependently originated, they are empty, sunya, of intrinsic existence. In a famous verse he identifies dependent origination with emptiness itself.

This is why he called his position the middle way. Emptiness does not mean that nothing exists, which would be nihilism, nor that things exist with a solid essence, which he called eternalism. Things exist, but only relationally and conventionally. Emptiness, he added, is itself empty: it is not a hidden absolute behind appearances, but simply the absence of intrinsic nature.

His method was largely critical. He took concepts such as causation, motion, time, the self and even the Buddha's own teachings, and showed that if they are understood as referring to things with fixed natures, they lead to contradiction. He often worked through the tetralemma, the four options that something is, is not, both is and is not, or neither, and rejected each when applied to intrinsic existence. Critics accused him of mere destruction, but he answered that he held no thesis of his own to defend, only the clearing away of false views.

To reconcile emptiness with ordinary life and with Buddhist practice, Nagarjuna drew on the doctrine of two truths. Conventional truth is the world of everyday experience, language and moral action, in which people, chairs and karma function normally. Ultimate truth is that all of these lack intrinsic nature. He insisted that the ultimate can only be taught through the conventional, and that understanding emptiness does not cancel ethics. Clinging to things as permanent and real, he held, is the root of suffering, so seeing their emptiness is liberating.

Many works are attributed to Nagarjuna, and scholars disagree about which are genuinely his. Besides the Root Verses, those most often accepted include the Vigrahavyavartani, "Dispeller of Disputes", which answers objections from logicians of the Nyaya school; the Sunyatasaptati, "Seventy Verses on Emptiness"; the Yuktisastika, "Sixty Verses on Reasoning"; the Vaidalyaprakarana, a critique of Nyaya categories; and the Ratnavali, which joins philosophy with advice on just and compassionate rule. A huge commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom that survives only in Chinese was long credited to him, but most scholars now doubt this. Later tantric writers also used his name, which adds to the confusion.

Nagarjuna's student Aryadeva continued his work, and over the following centuries Madhyamaka became one of the two great philosophical schools of Indian Mahayana, alongside Yogacara. Commentators such as Buddhapalita, Bhavaviveka and Chandrakirti argued over how his reasoning should be presented, a dispute that shaped later Tibetan classifications. His ideas reached China through the translator Kumarajiva around 400 CE, inspiring the Three Treatise school and influencing Tiantai, Chan and later Zen. In Tibet, Madhyamaka as interpreted by Chandrakirti came to be regarded as the highest philosophical view, and the Root Verses remain a core text in monastic education there today.

Within India, his critique of fixed essences provoked replies from Hindu schools, and the debate between Buddhist and Brahmanical thinkers shaped Indian philosophy for centuries. Some later Hindu critics even accused Adi Shankara of being a hidden Madhyamika, though his position differs in important ways. In the twentieth century Nagarjuna attracted Western philosophers interested in logic, language and anti-essentialism, and he is now studied in comparison with figures from Kant to Wittgenstein. For background on the land where he lived, see the History of India.