NAGARJUNA

Nagarjuna was an Indian Buddhist philosopher who articulated the doctrine of emptiness (sunyata). He is traditionally regarded as the founder of the Madhyamikaschool, an important tradition of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy.Very little can be said concerning Nagarjuna’s life. Scholars generally place him in South India during the 2nd century CE. Traditional accounts state that he lived 400 years after the Buddha passed into nirvana (c. 5th–4th century BCE). Some biographies also state, however, that he lived for 600 years, apparently identifying him with a second Nagarjuna known for his tantric (esoteric) writings.

PHILOSOPHY 

In his first sermon, the Buddha prescribed a “middle way” between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Nagarjuna, citing an early sutra, expanded the notion of the middle way into the philosophical sphere, identifying a middle way between existence and non­ existence, or between permanence and annihilation. For Nagarjuna, the ignorance that is the source of all suffering is the belief in svabhava, a term that literally means “own being” and has been rendered as “intrinsic existence” and “self-nature.” 

It is the belief that things exist autonomously, independently, and permanently. To hold this belief is to succumb to the extreme of permanence. It is equally mistaken, however, to believe that nothing exists; this is the extreme of annihilation. Emptiness, which for Nagarjuna is the true nature of reality, is not the absence of existence but the absence of intrinsic existence.

Nagarjuna developed his doctrine of emptiness in the Madhyamika-sastra, a thoroughgoing analysis of a wide range of topics. Examining, among other things, the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, and nirvana, Nagarjuna demonstrates that each lacks the autonomy and independence that is falsely ascribed to it. His approach generally is to consider the various ways in which a given entity could exist and then to show that none of them is tenable because of the absurdities that would be entailed.

In the case of something that is regarded to be the effect of a cause, he shows that it cannot be produced from itself (because an effect is the product of a cause), from something other than itself (because there must be a link between cause and effect), from something that is both the same as and different from itself (because the former two options are not possible), or from something that is neither the same as nor different from itself (because no such thing exists).

Nagarjuna defined emptiness in terms of the doctrine of pratityasamutpada (“dependent origination”), which holds that things are not self-arisen but produced in dependence on causes and conditions. Adopting this view allowed him to avoid the charge of nihilism, which he addressed directly in his writings and which his followers would confront over the centuries. Nagarjuna employs the doctrine of the two truths, paramartha satya (“ultimate truth”) and samvrti satya (“conventional truth”), explaining that everything that exists is ultimately empty of any intrinsic nature but does exist conventionally. 

The conventional is the necessary means for understanding the ultimate, and it is the ultimate that makes the conventional possible. As Nagarjuna wrote, “For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.”