Quick Answer
Four hundred and fifty verses of pure demolition, and one of the few genuinely rigorous philosophical texts any religious tradition has produced. Nagarjuna's claim is that nothing anywhere has independent existence, and his method is to take each candidate for such existence and show that it cannot be coherently described. It is not nihilism, he attacks that reading himself, and it is not readable without a commentary. Get Garfield's edition and expect it to take months.
Key Takeaways
- Emptiness means dependent, not absent. Getting this wrong ruins everything downstream.
- The method is refutation only. He never argues for a position, which is itself the controversy.
- Emptiness enables causation, which is the reply to the nihilism charge and it is a good one.
- Do not read it without commentary. The opponents are unnamed and the compression is extreme.
- The samsara and nirvana verse is the most consequential line in Mahayana thought.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
The Mulamadhyamakakarika, the root verses on the middle way, is a Sanskrit text of roughly four hundred and fifty verses in twenty-seven chapters, composed somewhere around the second century of the common era.
Each chapter takes a concept and dismantles it. Causation. Motion. The senses. The aggregates that make up a person. Fire and fuel. Time. Suffering. The Buddha. Nirvana. Each is examined, and in each case Nagarjuna argues that the concept cannot be given a coherent account if the thing it names is supposed to exist independently.
The verses are extraordinarily compressed. A single line frequently carries an argument that a commentary will take a page to unpack, and the text was clearly written to be memorised and then expounded rather than read privately.
On the title. The middle way here is not the Buddha's middle way between indulgence and asceticism. It is a middle between two philosophical extremes: the assertion that things exist inherently and the assertion that nothing exists at all. Nagarjuna is steering between them and the entire book is that steering.
Who Nagarjuna Was
Almost nothing is known and a great deal is told.
The historical figure is placed in southern India around the second century, probably associated with a monastic institution, and probably in contact with a royal patron. That is close to the extent of the reliable information.
The legends are extensive. He is said to have retrieved the perfection of wisdom scriptures from the realm of the serpent-beings who had guarded them since the Buddha entrusted them, the world not yet being ready. He is credited with alchemy, with an extraordinarily long life, and with numerous works that scholars now attribute to later authors of the same name.
What matters is that this text is securely attributed and that its argument stands independent of who made it. Nagarjuna is treated in Tibetan Buddhism as second only to the Buddha, and the East Asian traditions likewise trace themselves through him, which makes him arguably the most influential Buddhist thinker after the founder.
The Problem He Inherited
The book is a reply, and knowing what to has to come first.
Early Buddhist philosophy had done something systematic with the teaching that persons lack a permanent self. It analysed the person into constituents, and then analysed experience generally into a finite list of ultimate elements, momentary and irreducible, out of which everything composite is built.
The move was elegant. A chariot has no essence; it is parts arranged. A person likewise. But the parts had to be something, or the analysis would have nothing to terminate in, so those ultimate elements were held to possess their own intrinsic nature.
Nagarjuna's target is precisely that residue. His argument is that the analysis was not carried far enough, that the ultimate elements are in exactly the same position as the chariot, and that if the reasoning applies at all it applies without limit.
This is why the book reads as an attack on Buddhism from inside. His opponents are largely other Buddhists, and the objections he answers are theirs.
What Emptiness Actually Means
Everything depends on getting this right and almost every popular account gets it wrong.
Emptiness is not a claim that things do not exist. It is not a claim that reality is a void, that the world is an illusion, or that nothing matters.
It is the claim that nothing possesses inherent existence: no thing has an independent, self-contained nature that it would still have if everything else were removed.
A thing lacks such a nature in three respects at once. It depends on causes, so it did not produce itself. It depends on parts, so it is not a simple unit. And it depends on being picked out conceptually, so its boundaries are not given by the world independently of anyone drawing them.
Take a table. Made of wood, which was a tree, which required soil and light. Composed of parts, none of which is the table. And counted as one object rather than as five pieces of timber only because a purpose selects it that way. Remove the causes, the parts and the concept, and there is no residue left over that was the table itself.
Nagarjuna's contention is that this applies to everything without exception, including the elements the earlier analysis had treated as bedrock, including consciousness, including the Buddha, and including emptiness.
The Method of Refutation
He argues almost entirely negatively, and the characteristic move is worth knowing by name.
The tetralemma takes a claim and considers four possibilities that between them appear to exhaust the options: that it is the case, that it is not the case, that it is both, and that it is neither. Nagarjuna then shows that each option leads to incoherence, and concludes that the concept as posed does not describe anything.
He also uses reduction to absurdity throughout: granting an opponent's premise and following it until it produces a consequence the opponent cannot accept.
What he does not do is offer an alternative account. Having shown that causation cannot be coherently described in terms of inherently existing causes and effects, he does not then supply a better theory of causation. The demolition is the whole content.
This is deliberate and it is the source of the deepest dispute about him.
The Opening Argument
The first chapter is on conditions and it demonstrates the method in its purest form.
Nagarjuna asks how a thing could arise. Four possibilities: from itself, from something else, from both, or from neither.
Not from itself, because if it already existed there is nothing for the arising to accomplish, and if it did not exist there is nothing there to do the producing.
Not from something else, because if cause and effect are genuinely distinct and independent, nothing connects them, and anything could then produce anything. To make the connection work, cause and effect must be related, which means they are not independent, which is what was to be denied.
Not from both, since combining two failed accounts does not produce a working one.
Not from neither, since that abandons causation entirely and nothing would ever happen in any order.
The conclusion is not that nothing arises. Things plainly arise. The conclusion is that arising cannot be described as a relation between things possessing independent natures, and therefore that things do not possess them.
Notice the shape of the whole enterprise, because it is unusual. Nagarjuna is not arguing that our beliefs about the world are false. He is arguing that a particular assumption buried underneath them, the assumption that things have their own self-contained natures, cannot be made coherent when examined. Nothing in ordinary life changes: the table still holds the cup. What changes is a metaphysical commitment most people have never noticed making, and his claim is that noticing it is the whole of what liberation consists in.
The Charge of Nihilism
This objection arrived immediately, is still the most common misreading, and Nagarjuna's answer is the best thing in the book.
The objection: if nothing has inherent existence, nothing exists, and therefore there is no suffering, no path, no ethics, no Buddha, and the whole teaching collapses.
His answer inverts it. It is precisely because things lack inherent existence that anything can happen at all.
Consider what an inherently existing thing would be. Self-contained, not dependent on anything, therefore unchangeable, since change requires being affected by something outside. Such a thing could not come into being, could not act, could not cease and could not be affected. A world of such things would be frozen.
Growth, causation, learning, decay and liberation are possible only because things are dependent and therefore alterable. So emptiness does not undermine functioning; it is the condition of functioning.
He puts the point sharply: for one to whom emptiness makes sense, everything makes sense, and for one to whom it does not, nothing does.
The Two Truths
The distinction that keeps the whole system from self-destructing, and the chapter where he introduces it is the hinge of the text.
Conventional truth is the level at which ordinary statements are true: there is a table, the fire is hot, that person is suffering, this action causes that result. Ultimate truth is that none of these has inherent existence.
Both are needed. Nagarjuna is explicit that the ultimate cannot be taught without relying on the conventional, and that someone who abandons the conventional level in the name of the ultimate has misunderstood so badly as to be worse off than before.
He compares grasping emptiness wrongly to picking up a snake by the wrong end, which is a warning aimed at people who conclude that since nothing inherently exists, nothing they do matters.
The relationship between the two truths has been the central question of Madhyamaka commentary for eighteen centuries and the schools that developed after him differ mainly on how to state it.
The Claim to Have No Position
Here is the deepest problem in the text and it is genuinely unresolved.
Nagarjuna states, in a related work and by implication throughout this one, that he has no thesis. He is not asserting that things are empty as a competing metaphysical claim; he is removing views, and emptiness is the removal rather than a replacement.
The obvious objection: saying nothing has inherent existence looks exactly like a thesis, and a very strong one. If it is a thesis, it is subject to its own analysis. If it is not, what is he doing for four hundred verses?
The traditional defence is that his statements function like medicine: taken to remove a condition, and then themselves discarded, with no residue of doctrine intended. A raft used to cross a river, in the Buddha's own image, and abandoned on the far bank.
Modern philosophers have divided sharply. Some read him as a genuine anti-realist making a substantive claim and are unpersuaded by the disavowal. Others read the no-thesis stance as coherent and as the point of the whole method, closer to a therapeutic than a doctrinal enterprise. Others again hold that he is deliberately occupying a position that cannot be stated without distortion.
The honest report is that this is live, that competent people disagree, and that a reader who finds it slippery is not being obtuse.
The Verse That Changed Everything
Chapter twenty-five contains the most consequential claim in Mahayana Buddhism.
Nagarjuna states that there is not the slightest difference between the cycle of ordinary existence and liberation from it, and that the limit of the one is the limit of the other, with nothing whatever between them.
The reasoning is consistent with everything preceding it. Neither has inherent existence. If neither is a self-contained thing, they cannot stand in the relation of one place to another place, and the picture of a journey from a bad condition to a good one presupposes exactly the substantial existence the whole book denies.
The consequences for practice were enormous and they run in two directions.
Positively: liberation is not elsewhere and not later. It is not a place to be reached, which is the ground of every subsequent tradition that says awakening is available in this moment and in this ordinary life. Dogen's identification of practice and realisation descends directly from this verse.
Negatively: it can be misread as saying there is nothing to do, which is the specific error the two-truths doctrine exists to block, and which the tradition has spent centuries warning against.
Emptiness Is Also Empty
The move that completes the system and prevents it from becoming what it opposes.
If emptiness were itself an inherently existing thing, the ultimate nature of reality subsisting behind appearances, then Nagarjuna would have replaced one metaphysical absolute with another and the analysis would have stopped one step short.
So he applies it to itself. Emptiness is not a substance, not a ground, not the true nature of things in the sense of something they secretly are. It is a characterisation of how things are, and it too is dependent, conceptual and without inherent existence.
This is what separates Madhyamaka from every reading that makes emptiness into a mystical absolute, and readers coming from traditions with an ultimate ground should notice how firmly the door is shut. There is nothing behind. That is the claim.
The Western Comparisons
These are frequently made and should be handled carefully.
Comparisons with ancient scepticism have some force, since both refuse to assert positions and both work by generating opposed arguments. The difference is that Nagarjuna is not suspending judgement out of caution; he is arguing that the concepts fail.
Comparisons with Wittgenstein are common and partly apt. Both treat philosophical problems as arising from confusions in how concepts are used and aim at dissolution rather than solution. But Wittgenstein has no soteriology, and Nagarjuna's whole enterprise is aimed at liberation from suffering.
Comparisons with deconstruction and with anti-foundationalism have been productive and also import assumptions about language and meaning that the Sanskrit context does not share.
The reasonable posture is that these are illuminating as parallels and misleading as identifications. Nagarjuna was addressing specific Buddhist opponents on specific technical questions, and detaching the arguments from that context loses what they were doing.
How to Read It
Practical advice, because reading it wrongly is the norm.
Do not read the bare verses. They are memorisation aids for a curriculum, they respond to opponents who are not named, and the compression makes them close to meaningless in isolation.
Jay Garfield's translation with commentary is the standard English recommendation and the right first purchase for a reader approaching this philosophically. It explains the arguments in analytic terms and is honest about points of interpretive dispute.
Editions carrying traditional commentaries give you the tradition's own reading rather than a modern one, which is a different and equally valuable thing.
Read one chapter at a time and reconstruct the argument in your own words before continuing. If you cannot state what the four options were and why each failed, you have not read that chapter.
And expect months rather than an evening. This is the densest text in the entire Buddhist canon and it does not reward speed.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have a genuine interest in philosophy and want to see argument of the first rank conducted from a starting point unlike anything in the Western tradition.
Read it if you practise in a lineage that treats it as foundational, in which case you will encounter it eventually and are better off knowing what it says.
Read it if you have encountered emptiness as a piece of spiritual vocabulary and want to know what the term meant to the person who made it central.
Do not read it as an introduction to Buddhism, do not read it without a commentary, and do not read it expecting consolation. It is a work of demolition and the consolation, if any, is on the far side of a great deal of work.
There is one piece of this that transfers without any metaphysics at all. Nagarjuna's method is to take a thing you are certain about, ask what it would have to be in order to be what you take it to be, and follow that question until the certainty comes apart. Apply it to something smaller than causation: your account of why a relationship failed, or of what kind of person you are, or of why a decision was correct. Ask what those descriptions would have to be picking out in order to be true in the way you hold them. The answer is usually that they depend on a boundary you drew, for a purpose, and could have drawn elsewhere. That is not nihilism. It is a considerable loosening, and it is available on a Tuesday.
Eighteen centuries of argument, and it is still not settled.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Mulamadhyamakakarika?
Nagarjuna's foundational text of the Middle Way school, roughly 450 verses in twenty-seven chapters, arguing that nothing whatever possesses inherent or independent existence. It is the most important philosophical work in the Mahayana tradition.
Who was Nagarjuna?
An Indian Buddhist philosopher of roughly the second century, about whom almost nothing certain is known. A large body of legend surrounds him and several works attributed to him are probably by others, but this text is securely his.
What does emptiness mean here?
Not that things do not exist, but that nothing exists independently. Every thing depends for its identity on causes, on parts, and on the concepts by which it is picked out, so there is no self-contained essence anywhere to be found.
What is the tetralemma?
Nagarjuna's characteristic argumentative form, which considers four exhaustive possibilities for a claim, that it is so, is not so, is both, or is neither, and shows each to be incoherent. It is a method of refutation rather than of demonstration.
Does he argue for a position of his own?
He says he does not, and this is disputed. He states that he has no thesis and that emptiness is a way of letting go of views rather than another view. Whether that stance is coherent has been argued about for eighteen hundred years.
Is emptiness the same as nihilism?
No, and Nagarjuna attacks that reading directly. His argument is that things function precisely because they lack independent essence, since an unchanging self-contained thing could not arise, act or cease. Emptiness is what makes causation possible.
What is the two truths doctrine?
The distinction between conventional truth, which is how things ordinarily work and can be spoken about, and ultimate truth, which is that nothing has inherent existence. Both are needed, and Nagarjuna says that without conventional truth the ultimate cannot be taught at all.
What is the most famous claim in the text?
That there is no distinction whatever between the cycle of ordinary existence and liberation from it. Since neither has inherent existence, they cannot differ in the way they are usually taken to differ, which is among the most consequential lines in Buddhist thought.
Is it readable without a commentary?
Not really. The verses are extremely compressed, they respond to opponents whose positions are not stated, and much of the argument depends on technical distinctions the text assumes. A translation with substantial commentary is essential.
Which translation should you read?
Jay Garfield's version with commentary is the standard recommendation for English readers approaching it philosophically. Other translations exist with traditional Tibetan or Indian commentaries, which give the tradition's own reading rather than a modern analytic one.
How does it relate to Western philosophy?
Comparisons have been made with scepticism, with Wittgenstein, with anti-foundationalism and with deflationary metaphysics. Some are illuminating and some import assumptions Nagarjuna does not share, so the comparisons are best treated as suggestive rather than as identifications.
Who should read it?
Readers with a serious interest in philosophy who are willing to work through dense argument with a commentary, and practitioners in traditions that treat this text as foundational. It is not an introduction to Buddhism and assumes a great deal.
Nothing is taken from you
The fear this text produces on a first encounter is that it removes the ground: that if nothing has its own nature, then nothing is solid, nothing is reliable, and there is nothing to stand on. Nagarjuna's whole reply is that the ground you are afraid of losing was never there and you were never standing on it, and that everything which actually works, growth, connection, change, the possibility of becoming different, works because of the very dependence you are mourning. The table still holds the cup. What goes is a claim about the table you had never examined and did not need.
Sources & References
- Nagarjuna. Mulamadhyamakakarika, roughly second century.
- Garfield, Jay L. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, translation and commentary.
- Nagarjuna. Vigrahavyavartani, on the claim to have no thesis.
- Candrakirti and Bhaviveka, the classical Indian commentaries and their disagreement.
- Tibetan commentarial literature on the two truths.
- Modern philosophical debate on the interpretation of Madhyamaka.