Nāgārjuna

Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) is, by unanimous agreement, the most important Buddhist philosopher after the historical Buddha — the founder of the “middle way” school, Madhyamaka, and the classical theorist of emptiness (śūnyatā). His philosophy influenced the Indian debate for a thousand years after his death, and with the spread of Buddhism to Tibet, China and Japan his writings became an indispensable point of reference for those traditions’ own philosophical inquiries. A specific reading of his thought, Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka, became the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism. ¹

Life and works

Very little is known with certainty about his life beyond his being a Buddhist monk; legendary accounts abound. The key philosophical works are the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”, MMK), the Vigrahavyāvartanī (“Rebutting the Disputes”), the Śūnyatāsaptati (“Seventy Verses on Emptiness”) and the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (“Sixty Verses on Reasoning”). ¹

Philosophy

• Emptiness and svabhāva. The central target of his philosophy is svabhāva — intrinsic nature, essence, or substance: to exist with svabhāva is to be “part of the basic furniture of the world”, independent of anything else, the end-point of a chain of dependence relations. Nāgārjuna argues there is no such end-point: all things are empty of svabhāva, and emptiness itself is empty. ¹
• Not nihilism. The position is the middle way between eternalism (things exist through an eternal essence) and annihilationism/nihilism — the latter rejected both as self-undermining and as contrary to the school’s intent: “there is no thing that is not dependently arisen; therefore, there is no such thing that is not empty” (MMK 24.19). ^{1 2}
• Regress and reductio arguments. Causation is examined through four exhaustive alternatives (from self / from other / from both / from neither), each shown to presuppose svabhāva; the same pattern is applied to change, personal identity, the epistemic instruments (which neither establish themselves nor each other), and language and truth. The conclusion is not that causation is impossible, but that our understanding of it rests on a faulty presupposition. ¹
• The two truths. Conventional truth (dependently arisen phenomena, causally effective) and ultimate truth (emptiness) are co-constitutive; “without relying on the conventional truth, the meaning of the ultimate cannot be explained” (MMK 24.10), and without understanding the ultimate, liberation is not achieved. ²
• Method and the later school. Bhāvaviveka’s Svātantrika branch held that Mādhyamikas owe positive arguments and grant conventional intrinsic reality; Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti’s Prāsaṅgika branch rejected everything intrinsic even conventionally — “emptiness is always empty” — and confined itself to reductio (prasaṅga). The dispute became a central axis of Tibetan scholasticism. ^{3 2}

Reception

• The system “is opposed to the brand of realism currently found in much of contemporary analytic philosophy” (e.g., the claim that ordinary and scientific existence statements are mind-independently true): things that exist mind-independently would exist with svabhāva. Open questions include conventional existence for objects like mountains, meaning without correspondence, relativism, and ontology without foundations — engaging the contemporary grounding debate, with formal models of foundationless ontologies (Priest). ¹
• Whether Madhyamaka is essentially linked to Buddhism, or a free-standing philosophical system, is actively debated among philosophers who study it primarily as philosophy. ¹
• The regress structure of his arguments places him in the same problem space as the Agrippan modes of ancient scepticism — see agrippas-trilemma for the Western regress tradition.

See Also

• buddhist-metaphysics — the school-by-school survey this page supports
• vasubandhu — the other great Indian systematiser (Abhidharma and Yogācāra)
• agrippas-trilemma — the Western regress problem; Madhyamaka as an anti-foundationalist response

References

• Westerhoff, J. C. (2026). “Nāgārjuna.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 31 May 2026). ¹
• Hayes, R. (2023). “Madhyamaka.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 18 Aug 2023). ³
• Thakchoe, S. (2022). “The Theory of Two Truths in India.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 16 May 2022). ²

Footnotes

1. raw/articles/sep-nagarjuna.md ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. raw/articles/sep-two-truths-india.md ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. raw/articles/sep-madhyamaka.md ↩ ↩²