Nāgārjuna

Nāgārjuna was a Buddhist monk and philosopher who lived in India, probably in the second or early third century CE. He is regarded as the founder of the Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way”, school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and he is often ranked among the most important philosophers in the history of Asia.

His central claim is that all things are “empty” (śūnya): they lack svabhāva, a Sanskrit word meaning “own-being” or “intrinsic nature”. A thing with svabhāva would exist by itself, independently of causes, parts and the minds that conceive it. Nāgārjuna argued that nothing exists like that. Everything that exists does so in dependence on other things.

This may sound abstract, but for Nāgārjuna it had a practical purpose. According to Buddhist teaching, suffering comes from craving and clinging, and clinging depends on the mistaken belief that things, and especially our own selves, are solid and permanent. Seeing through this belief was meant to loosen clinging and lead toward liberation.

Nāgārjuna’s most famous work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, is a set of about 450 short verses that examine causation, motion, the self, time, the Buddha and nirvana. Its sharp arguments made it one of the most commented-on texts in Buddhist history.

The Buddha had taught “dependent origination” (pratītyasamutpāda): things arise in dependence on causes and conditions. A sprout depends on a seed, soil, water and warmth; a feeling depends on contact between the senses and an object. Nāgārjuna took this idea to its logical conclusion. If everything arises dependently, then nothing has an independent, fixed essence. That lack of independent essence is what he called emptiness.

In one of his most quoted verses (24.18), Nāgārjuna says that dependent origination is what he calls emptiness; that emptiness is itself a dependent designation, a label that depends on something else; and that this is the middle way. Emptiness is therefore not a hidden substance behind things. It is simply the way things exist: interdependently.

Emptiness does not mean nothingness. Nāgārjuna insisted that an empty world is exactly what makes change, causation and moral effort possible. If things had fixed essences, they could never change: a seed could never become a sprout, and a person could never become wise. In a famous line he says that for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.

He also warned that emptiness can be misunderstood. A wrongly grasped emptiness, he says (24.11), destroys the slow-witted, like a snake seized by the wrong end. Emptiness is a medicine against clinging to views, not a new view to cling to.

Very little is known for certain about Nāgārjuna’s life. The earliest biography is a Chinese text attributed to the translator Kumārajīva, written around 400 CE, some two centuries after Nāgārjuna. It says he was born into a Brahmin family in South India, mastered the Vedas and other learning, and, after a youthful escapade in which he and his friends used a spell to become invisible and sneaked into a royal palace, turned to the Buddhist monastic life.

Many legends gathered around his name, which combines nāga, a serpent-deity, and arjuna, a kind of tree; Chinese and Korean translate it as “dragon-tree” (龍樹, Longshu, Yongsu). One story says that the nāgas invited him to their palace under the sea and gave him the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) sūtras, which had been kept there since the Buddha’s time. Later Tibetan histories add that he lived for six hundred years, practised alchemy and medicine, and spent his last years at Śrīparvata in South India.

Scholars suspect that several different people named Nāgārjuna have been merged in tradition: the philosopher, a later tantric master and an alchemist, among others. The later tradition that he taught at the great monastery of Nālandā is probably anachronistic, since Nālandā is not known to have existed as a major centre until several centuries later.

The more historical picture connects Nāgārjuna with the Sātavāhana dynasty, which ruled much of central and southern India in the first centuries CE. Two works attributed to him, the Ratnāvalī (Precious Garland) and the Suhṛllekha (Letter to a Friend), are addressed to a king, traditionally a Sātavāhana ruler. The Buddhist site of Nāgārjunakoṇḍa in Andhra Pradesh bears his name, but its association with him is a later tradition not confirmed by archaeology.

By Nāgārjuna’s time, some five or six centuries after the Buddha, Buddhism had divided into many schools. Several of them had developed the Abhidharma, a systematic analysis of experience into basic elements called dharmas: moments of matter, feeling, perception and consciousness. Some schools, notably the Sarvāstivāda, held that these ultimate dharmas have their own svabhāva and, in a certain sense, exist in past, present and future.

At the same time a new movement, later called the Mahāyāna or “Great Vehicle”, was producing new scriptures. Among the most important were the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, which taught that all dharmas are empty and presented the bodhisattva, who seeks enlightenment for the sake of all beings, as the ideal. Nāgārjuna is usually seen as the first great philosopher to give these teachings rigorous argumentative form.

Nāgārjuna also engaged with non-Buddhist Indian schools, especially the Nyāya school of logic and epistemology, which held that valid means of knowledge (pramāṇa) such as perception and inference give us access to real objects. His Vigrahavyāvartanī and Vaidalyaprakaraṇa respond to such thinkers.

Interestingly, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā never explicitly mentions the Mahāyāna and cites an early discourse, the instruction to Kātyāyana, in which the Buddha rejects both “it exists” and “it does not exist” (15.7). Some scholars have therefore argued that Nāgārjuna was presenting his ideas as a faithful reading of the Buddha’s original teaching, acceptable to all Buddhists.

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with dedicatory verses praising the Buddha for teaching dependent origination, the calming of conceptual proliferation (prapañca), and describing it with eight negations: no cessation, no arising; no annihilation, no permanence; no coming, no going; not one thing, not many things. In East Asia these became famous as the “eight negations” (八不).

Chapter 1 then examines causation. Things do not arise from themselves, from something other, from both, or without a cause. This pattern of four options is known as the tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi): something is, is not, both is and is not, or neither is nor is not. Nāgārjuna uses it to show that any attempt to describe entities with fixed natures runs into contradictions.

Chapter 2 examines motion with a famous puzzle. Motion cannot take place on the path already travelled, nor on the path not yet travelled, and there is no third place, the path “being travelled”, apart from these. The argument does not deny that people walk; it denies that walking and walker can be understood as independent things with their own natures.

Much of this is reductio ad absurdum: Nāgārjuna takes his opponent’s assumptions and shows that they lead to unacceptable results. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī (verse 29) he claims, famously, that he has no thesis of his own; if he had, he would be open to the same criticism. Whether this means he makes no claims at all, or only no claims about things with intrinsic nature, is one of the most discussed questions in Madhyamaka interpretation.

To explain how an empty world can still be talked about, Nāgārjuna uses the doctrine of the two truths (24.8–10). The Buddha’s teaching relies on two truths: conventional truth (saṃvṛti-satya), the everyday world of persons, tables and causes as we ordinarily speak of them, and ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya), the emptiness of all these things. Without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be taught; without understanding the ultimate, nirvana cannot be reached.

On the self, Nāgārjuna follows the Buddhist teaching of non-self. The self is not identical with the body and mind, since these are many and changing, and it is not something different from them, since then it could not be known. What we call “I” is a convenient designation dependent on the five aggregates of body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness (chapter 18).

Most strikingly, Nāgārjuna applies emptiness even to nirvana. In chapter 25 he argues that nirvana is not a thing, not a non-thing, both, or neither, and concludes (25.19–20) that there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth, and nirvana: the limit of the one is the limit of the other. This does not mean that ordinary life is already liberation; it means that liberation is not a different place or substance, but the end of clinging to fixed natures.

Finally, emptiness applies to itself. Emptiness is not a supreme reality; it too is empty. In verse 13.8 Nāgārjuna says that the victorious ones taught emptiness as the relinquishing of all views, and that those who make emptiness into a view are incurable.

More than a hundred works in Tibetan and around twenty in Chinese bear Nāgārjuna’s name, but many are certainly later. Modern scholars accept a smaller core, though the exact list is debated. The Danish scholar Christian Lindtner proposed an influential list of authentic works in the early 1980s.

Besides the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the texts most often accepted are: the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (Sixty Verses on Reasoning); the Śūnyatāsaptati (Seventy Verses on Emptiness); the Vigrahavyāvartanī (Dispeller of Disputes), 70 verses with Nāgārjuna’s own prose commentary, addressing objections from logicians; the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa (Treatise on Pulverization), directed against the Nyāya categories; and the Ratnāvalī (Precious Garland), a letter of advice to a king that combines philosophy with ethics, politics and the bodhisattva path.

The Suhṛllekha (Letter to a Friend), also addressed to a king, and a group of hymns (the Catuḥstava) are also often attributed to him. The hymns speak of ultimate truth in more devotional and positive language than the argumentative works, which has fuelled debate about their authorship and about Nāgārjuna’s own attitude.

Two important works preserved only in Chinese are traditionally ascribed to him: the vast Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom (Dazhidu lun), translated by Kumārajīva in the early fifth century, and a commentary on the Ten Stages (Daśabhūmika) sūtra. Many modern scholars, including Étienne Lamotte, who translated much of the Dazhidu lun into French, have doubted that Nāgārjuna wrote the former in its present form.

In India, Nāgārjuna’s disciple Āryadeva continued his work, and later commentators developed Madhyamaka into a major school. Buddhapālita (c. 5th–6th century) and Bhāviveka (6th century) disagreed about whether a Mādhyamika should use independent logical arguments of his own or only show the absurd consequences of opponents’ views. Candrakīrti (7th century) defended the second approach in his commentary Prasannapadā (Clear Words), through which the Sanskrit text of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is chiefly preserved. Nāgārjuna’s ideas were also debated by the Yogācāra school and criticized by Hindu philosophers, including Śaṅkara, who dismissed the doctrine of universal emptiness.

In Tibet, Madhyamaka became the highest philosophical view. Tibetan scholars classified Indian commentators into two approaches, Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika, a distinction later formalized in Tibet rather than in India. Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), founder of the Geluk school, wrote a major commentary on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and Nāgārjuna is revered in Tibet as a “second Buddha”.

In China, Kumārajīva translated the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, with a commentary by one Piṅgala (Qingmu), as the Zhonglun (Middle Treatise) in 409, together with the Twelve Gate Treatise and Āryadeva’s Hundred Treatise. These three texts gave the Sanlun (Three Treatise) school its name. The Goguryeo monk Seungnang, active in southern China around the late fifth and early sixth centuries, was an important figure in reviving this tradition, which was systematized by Jizang (549–623). In Korea it is known as Samnon.

Nāgārjuna is venerated in East Asia as a patriarch of many schools. Chan and Zen lineages list him among their Indian ancestors, and Shinran, founder of Japan’s Jōdo Shinshū, counted him first among seven patriarchs of Pure Land Buddhism because of a passage in the Ten Stages commentary on the “easy practice” of reciting the Buddha’s name.

Nihilism. From his own time, critics accused Nāgārjuna of nihilism: if everything is empty, nothing exists and moral life is pointless. Chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā begins with exactly this objection. Most modern scholars accept Nāgārjuna’s reply that emptiness rules out intrinsic existence, not existence as such, but the charge continues to shape debate.

Absolutism. In the mid-twentieth century T. R. V. Murti’s The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (1955) read Madhyamaka as a dialectic comparable to Kant’s critique of reason, pointing beyond concepts to an inexpressible Absolute. Critics objected that this imports a hidden ultimate reality that Nāgārjuna explicitly denies when he calls emptiness itself empty.

Scepticism, therapy and anti-realism. Later interpreters have compared Nāgārjuna to ancient Pyrrhonist sceptics, to Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophy as therapy, and to modern anti-realism. Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary (1995) presented him as a philosopher with a coherent position on convention and dependence. Mark Siderits has proposed a semantic reading summed up in the paradoxical slogan that “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”. Jan Westerhoff’s work (2009 and his Stanford Encyclopedia entry) analyses the different senses of svabhāva and reconstructs the arguments in contemporary terms.

Logic. Does Nāgārjuna violate the law of non-contradiction when he denies all four options of the tetralemma? Some scholars argue that the negations are “non-implicative” (they deny without affirming the opposite); others, notably Garfield and Graham Priest, have explored paraconsistent logic to model his reasoning. These debates show how Nāgārjuna remains a living interlocutor for philosophy today.

Dating. Nāgārjuna is usually placed between about 150 and 250 CE. The main clues are his citation of early Mahāyāna sūtras, the translation of works associated with him into Chinese by the early fifth century, and his connection with a Sātavāhana king. Joseph Walser’s Nāgārjuna in Context (2005) argued, using inscriptions and the Ratnāvalī’s concerns with monastic institutions and royal patronage, for a setting in the Andhra region in the later second century. Other scholars prefer slightly earlier or later dates, and none of the evidence is decisive.

Authorship. Attribution is the central philological problem. Scholars compare style, vocabulary, doctrine and the earliest testimonies, such as quotations by Candrakīrti and Bhāviveka, to decide which works are genuine. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is universally accepted and serves as the benchmark; debates focus on the hymns, the Dazhidu lun and some shorter treatises.

Texts. The Sanskrit of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā survives mainly embedded in Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā, edited by Louis de La Vallée Poussin in the early twentieth century; other commentaries survive in Tibetan and Chinese translations, which sometimes preserve different readings. Several of Nāgārjuna’s shorter works survive only in Tibetan or Chinese. Translators, therefore, must compare multiple versions, and modern translations, such as Siderits and Katsura’s (2013), which follows the Indian commentaries closely, differ significantly from one another.

Biography. The hagiographies in Chinese and Tibetan are valuable as evidence for how Nāgārjuna was remembered and venerated, but not as reliable biography. The difference between what is known and what is believed should be kept clear, as both the Stanford and Internet Encyclopedia entries emphasize.