Nāgārjuna

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Nāgārjuna was an Indian Buddhist philosopher, traditionally placed in the second century CE, regarded as the founder of the Madhyamaka — the “Middle Way” — school of Mahāyāna thought and as one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Buddhism. Almost nothing about his life can be fixed with certainty. The later tradition surrounds him with legend, and a cluster of texts on tantra and alchemy circulate under his name from a much later period; scholarship generally treats these as the work of one or more later figures sharing the name, and reserves “Nāgārjuna” proper for the author of the foundational philosophical works.

A life dissolved into legend

What is told of Nāgārjuna comes almost entirely from sources written centuries after he is supposed to have lived. The earliest connected account survives in a biography rendered into Chinese around 405 by the great translator Kumārajīva; a Tibetan tradition, gathered much later by historians such as Bu-ston and Tāranātha, fills in further detail. These narratives agree that he was born a Brahmin in the south of the subcontinent and turned to the Buddhist path, and they ring him with marvels — a youth saved from an early death, mastery over hidden arts, a span of life measured in centuries. The very name carries a story: nāga, the serpent-spirits who guard treasure beneath the waters, and arjuna, a tree under which he is said to have been born. The most consequential of the legends has him descend to the realm of the nāgas and bring back the Prajñāpāramitā — the “Perfection of Wisdom” scriptures — which the serpents had kept since the Buddha first entrusted them, the world not yet being ready to receive them. The story encodes a fact about the literature itself: the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras appear in the historical record only centuries after the Buddha, and the tradition needed a figure to account for their late arrival and their authority.

Modern historians have tried to anchor him more firmly. The most discussed proposal, argued by Joseph Walser, reads Nāgārjuna’s Ratnāvalī — the “Precious Garland,” a treatise of counsel addressed to a reigning king — together with the Suhṛllekha, the “Letter to a Friend,” as documents of a real patronage relationship, and places him in the orbit of the Sātavāhana dynasty of the Deccan in the later second century, perhaps under the monarch Yajña Śrī Śātakarṇi. The inference is plausible and unprovable; it locates him in a time and a court without supplying a single fixed date. He remains, in the end, a name attached to a body of argument — which is, for a philosopher who taught that no thing carries an essence of its own, a peculiarly fitting condition.

The attribution problem runs deeper than biography. Later centuries assigned to “Nāgārjuna” an enormous and heterogeneous corpus: tantric ritual works, medical and alchemical treatises on rasāyana, the transmutation of substances and the prolonging of life. A celebrated mahāsiddha named Nāgārjuna, an adept of the tantric path, belongs to the seventh or eighth century — half a millennium after the philosopher. Scholarship sorts the corpus by treating these as distinct men of the same name, and gathers under the original Nāgārjuna a smaller set of works whose ascription is broadly accepted: the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Vigrahavyāvartanī (“The Dispeller of Disputes”), the Śūnyatāsaptati (“Seventy Verses on Emptiness”), the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (“Sixty Verses on Reasoning”), the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa, the Ratnāvalī, and a handful of hymns. The Chinese tradition adds the vast Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom, the Dazhidulun, transmitted as his commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom; its authorship is among the long-standing puzzles of the field.

The Root Verses

His central work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā — “Root Verses on the Middle Way” — is a tightly argued sequence of twenty-seven chapters dismantling the assumption that things possess svabhāva, an “own-being” or independent essence. The reasoning is relentlessly negative. Rather than advance a doctrine of his own, Nāgārjuna takes each candidate for an ultimate reality — motion, the self, time, causation, even the Buddha’s teaching and nirvāṇa itself — and shows that the concept collapses into contradiction the moment it is taken to name something self-standing. What survives the analysis is śūnyatā, emptiness: the claim that nothing exists in and of itself, because everything arises only in dependence on other things.

The method has a recognizable shape. Nāgārjuna seldom asserts; he refutes, and he does so by a form of argument the later tradition called prasaṅga — following an opponent’s premises to the absurdity they conceal. Where Indian logic offered the fourfold scheme of possibilities, the catuṣkoṭi — that a thing is, or is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not — Nāgārjuna takes up each limb in turn and lets each fail. Motion provides the model case. He opens not with the self or the cosmos but with causation, asking how anything can arise at all: a thing cannot produce itself, since it would already have to exist; it cannot be produced by something wholly other, for then anything might produce anything; nor by both, nor by neither. The going thing is not found in the path already traversed, nor in the path not yet traversed, nor in some third present stretch of going that the other two leave nothing for. Whatever ultimate foothold the mind reaches for, the analysis removes it — and removes, too, the suspicion that Nāgārjuna means to install some subtler foothold in its place.

Emptiness, and the emptiness of emptiness

The school read this not as nihilism but as the correction of two errors at once. To say things are empty is not to say they do not exist; it is to deny that they exist in the absolute, self-sufficient way the mind keeps assuming they do. Nāgārjuna held the two to be the same insight seen twice — that dependent arising and emptiness are one teaching. The verse that states it, the eighteenth of the twenty-fourth chapter, became the most quoted in the whole of Madhyamaka: what arises dependently is what is meant by emptiness, and that, a dependent designation, is itself the middle way. Emptiness is not a thing things are made of, nor a void behind appearances; it is dependent arising restated, and because it is, it must apply to itself. Emptiness, too, is empty — a designation made in dependence, not a final ground. Whoever takes emptiness for an absolute, Nāgārjuna warns, has grasped it as one grasps a snake by the wrong end.

This is where the line that the brief most carefully draws must be held. The emptiness of Madhyamaka is not the non-duality of Advaita Vedanta, with which it is sometimes loosely paired. Śaṅkara’s tradition affirms a single, changeless reality — brahman — behind the play of appearance; Nāgārjuna denies precisely that there is any such standing ground, brahman included, and would read the positing of one as the very error his analysis exists to undo. The two systems share a vocabulary of negation and a destination beyond ordinary predication, and they arrive at opposite places: one at a fullness it holds to be the sole reality, the other at the refusal to locate any self-standing real at all. The same caution governs the comparison sometimes drawn with the apophatic theology of the West, which likewise approaches its object by negation. The grammar rhymes; the work differs. The apophatic theologian unsays predicates of a reality held to exist supremely, clearing away names to leave the nameless intact; Nāgārjuna unsays existence-in-itself, and would decline the further step of installing an absolute behind the negations.

To keep emptiness from collapsing into mere denial, Nāgārjuna distinguished two truths: a conventional truth, saṃvṛti-satya, in which things function ordinarily and speech proceeds as it must, and an ultimate truth, paramārtha-satya, in which no thing is found to have an essence. The two are not rival accounts of which the second cancels the first. Without leaning on the conventional, he says, the ultimate cannot be taught; without the ultimate, release is not reached. The Middle Way is the refusal of both the assertion that things are real in themselves and the assertion that they are nothing at all — and the two truths are how that refusal keeps its footing in a world where tables hold and persons act and the path to liberation can still be walked.

The same logic produces the most vertiginous of his conclusions, in the twenty-fifth chapter, on nirvāṇa. If nirvāṇa were a thing with its own nature it would be conditioned, hence impermanent, hence not nirvāṇa; if it were a sheer nothing, there would be nothing to attain. So nirvāṇa, too, is empty — and between the round of suffering, saṃsāra, and its cessation there is, he writes, not the slightest difference, not the subtlest thing to set one apart from the other. The limit of the one is the limit of the other. Liberation is not a departure to some other condition but the same world seen without the grasping that built the cage. The objection that this leaves the entire Buddhist path hanging over an abyss is one Nāgārjuna meets head-on: it is because things are empty, not in spite of it, that the path can work at all, for only what lacks a fixed nature can change.

When his opponents pressed the obvious counter — that to argue all positions are empty is itself to hold a position, which must then be empty, hence empty of force — Nāgārjuna gave the answer that has organized debate ever since. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī he writes that if he had any thesis, the fault would attach to him; but he has none, and so no fault attaches. The refusal lets go of itself.

Eastward: the Three Treatises and Chan

Madhyamaka became one of the principal philosophical currents of later Buddhism, and it traveled. Kumārajīva, the Kuchean monk who reached the Chinese capital at the opening of the fifth century, rendered the Root Verses into Chinese as the Zhong lun, the “Middle Treatise,” in a version carrying an Indian commentary; he set beside it the Hundred Treatise of Nāgārjuna’s disciple Āryadeva and a shorter Twelve Gate Treatise, and from these three the Three-Treatise school — Sanlun — took both its name and its substance. His pupil Sengzhao gave the emptiness teaching its first native Chinese voice; two centuries on, Jizang systematized the school and wrote at length on the two truths. The Sanlun reading carried into Korea, where it shaped the early scholastic Buddhism of the peninsula (Silla and its successors), and into Japan as the Sanron. Its deepest mark in East Asia, though, was indirect: the Madhyamaka insistence that no formulation finally holds, that the highest teaching is the one that empties itself, passed into the temperament of Chan and its Japanese heir Zen, and its account of emptiness underlies the wider Mahāyāna currents that reached Japan — the esoteric Shingon and the Pure Land devotion of Shin Buddhism alike rest on the Mahāyāna ground Nāgārjuna had argued into rigorous form. The Perfection of Wisdom literature he was credited with recovering — the Diamond and Heart sūtras among it — supplied the devotional and meditative idiom into which his dialectic was absorbed.

Tibet: the quarrel over the Middle

In Tibet the Root Verses became not one teaching among many but the pivot of monastic philosophy, and the interpretation of Nāgārjuna turned into a controversy that has never closed. The Indian commentators had already divided: Buddhapālita read him as refuting by consequence alone, advancing nothing; Bhāviveka held that the Madhyamika must frame independent, formally valid arguments; Candrakīrti, in his commentary the Prasannapadā — the “Clear-Worded” — defended Buddhapālita and pressed the case that the true follower of Nāgārjuna asserts no thesis whatever. Centuries later in Tibet, Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug order, sharpened this into the distinction between the Prāsaṅgika (the consequentialist line of Candrakīrti, which he held correct) and the Svātantrika (the autonomous-argument line he ascribed to Bhāviveka), and made the negation of intrinsic nature even at the conventional level the touchstone of orthodoxy. His reading was contested at once. The Sakya scholar Gorampa judged it too coarse, a conceptual emptiness short of the real thing; and in the Jonang tradition Dolpopa had already advanced the shentong or “other-emptiness” view, that the ultimate is empty only of what is foreign to it and is itself a luminous reality — against the rangtong or “self-emptiness” reading that the mainstream defended. The argument over what Nāgārjuna meant became, in the Tibetan monastic colleges, an argument carried on in commentary and counter-commentary across the orders, and it is alive among them still.

Modern returns

Philosophers outside the tradition have repeatedly returned to the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and they have not agreed on what they found. An earlier twentieth-century reading, associated with T. R. V. Murti, cast Nāgārjuna as a kind of Kantian, his dialectic clearing the ground for an absolute approached beyond reason; later interpreters dismantled that picture. Some read the method as a thoroughgoing skepticism that suspends every thesis; some as a deconstruction of metaphysics that clears the field of essences; some as an empiricist therapy against the diseases of language; some as a mysticism arrived at by argument rather than by vision. A bolder line, pursued by Jay Garfield and Graham Priest, takes Nāgārjuna to court true contradictions at the limits of thought, to mean it when he says the ultimate cannot be spoken and then speaks of it. The disagreements are old, and the text sustains them because its conclusions are stated as denials rather than as a position to be defended.

What Nāgārjuna left was less a system than a procedure: a way of pressing any claim about how things ultimately are until the claim gives way. The tradition took that pressure to be liberating rather than merely destructive — the loosening of a grip the mind did not know it held.

Texts and scholarship

The Sanskrit of the Root Verses survives chiefly as quoted within Candrakīrti’s commentary, and the foundational modern edition is Louis de la Vallée Poussin’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikās de Nāgārjuna avec la Prasannapadā de Candrakīrti (Bibliotheca Buddhica IV, St Petersburg, 1903–1913), the text on which a century of study rests. Theodore Stcherbatsky’s The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāṇa (Leningrad, 1927) carried the first and twenty-fifth chapters into English with Candrakīrti’s gloss, and remains a landmark of the Western reception. Among modern translations and studies, David Kalupahana’s Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (1986) reads him as an empiricist in continuity with early Buddhism; Jay L. Garfield’s The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995) translates the verses through Tibetan commentary; Jan Westerhoff’s Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (2009) and Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura’s verse-by-verse Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (2013) reconstruct the arguments in analytic terms. The literature he was credited with recovering — the Perfection of Wisdom — reached English first through the forty-ninth volume of the Sacred Books of the East, the Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts of 1894, where the Diamond Sūtra stands beside the Pure Land scriptures. A current synthesis of the dating, the corpus, and the disputed life can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The neighboring entries trace where the argument went: the school as doctrine, the teaching of emptiness itself, and the wider movement of the Buddha’s followers across the elder tradition and the great vehicle — the corpus through which a man of whom no certain date survives goes on being read, verse by verse, wherever the question of how things ultimately are is still being pressed.

→ In the library: Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (SBE 49 — Müller et al., 1894)

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