Nāgārjuna

Nāgārjuna (the name combines nāga — serpent, dragon — with arjuna — white, bright; the traditional accounts make use of this etymology in narrating his life) is one of the most important philosophers in the history of Buddhism and one of the most influential in the history of any contemplative tradition. The conventional dates — c. 150–250 CE — give him a long working life across the latter part of the 2nd century and the first half of the 3rd. The traditional accounts place his origin in south India, most likely in what is now Andhra Pradesh, and associate him with the Sātavāhana dynasty.

The historical uncertainty

Almost everything biographical we have about Nāgārjuna is traditional account rather than secure history. He is associated with several different historical figures — there may have been multiple Nāgārjunas across several centuries, with later traditions consolidating them into a single legendary figure who is credited with works composed over a longer span. The major surviving philosophical works attributed to him show a consistency of voice and method that suggests a single principal author for the core texts, but the periphery of the Nāgārjuna corpus is more contested. The traditional Tibetan account credits him with works in philosophy, tantra, alchemy, and medicine that almost certainly cannot all be the work of a single author; modern scholarship typically restricts the secure Nāgārjuna corpus to a smaller set of philosophical works.

The Madhyamaka school

Nāgārjuna’s principal philosophical achievement is the founding of the Madhyamaka ([[eightfold-path|Middle Way]]) school — the name signaling its position between two extremes Nāgārjuna explicitly rejects:

• Eternalism — the view that things have permanent inherent existence (the substance-metaphysics of various Hindu schools and of the more substance-leaning Buddhist Abhidharma positions).
• Nihilism — the view that nothing exists at all, that all is illusion in a sense that denies the workability of cause and effect.

The middle is the recognition that phenomena arise in dependence on conditions, and that this [[dependent-origination|dependent arising]] is identical with their emptiness of inherent existence (svabhāva-śūnyatā).

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

The most important work attributed to Nāgārjuna is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Root Verses on the [[eightfold-path|Middle Way]]) — twenty-seven chapters of dense Sanskrit verse, totaling about 450 verses, that systematically examine the principal Buddhist and non-Buddhist philosophical categories of his time and demonstrate, for each, that the category cannot consistently be understood as referring to a phenomenon with inherent existence. The chapters work through:

• Causation (pratyaya)
• Motion (gata-āgata)
• The sense organs and their objects
• The aggregates (skandha)
• The elements (dhātu)
• Desire and the desirer
• Conditioned phenomena (saṃskṛta)
• The agent and action
• Self and not-self
• Fire and fuel
• The beginning and end of saṃsāra
• Suffering, action, the self, time, becoming, bondage and release
• The tathāgata (the awakened being)
• Error
• [[four-noble-truths|The Four Noble Truths]]
• Nirvāṇa
• The twelve links of [[dependent-origination|dependent origination]]
• View

The argumentative method is consistently the same: for each category, Nāgārjuna lays out the possible ways it might be understood as referring to something with inherent existence, and shows that each option entails consequences the proponent of the position would not accept. The structure is a sustained reductio ad absurdum of substance-metaphysics.

The conclusion of the analysis, in the famous verse 24.18:

Whatever is dependently originated, that we call emptiness. That is a designation in dependence; that itself is the [[eightfold-path|middle way]].

[[dependent-origination|Dependent origination]] is emptiness; emptiness is dependent origination; this identification is the middle way.

The emptiness of emptiness

Nāgārjuna’s most demanding move — and the one that distinguishes Madhyamaka from a vulgar nihilistic misreading — is the recognition that emptiness itself is empty. The analysis that recognizes the emptiness of all phenomena cannot be reified into a position that has its own inherent existence — the very error that emptiness-analysis dismantles. Śūnyatā is not a thing to be grasped; it is the dissolution of the substance-grasping that ordinary cognition imposes on experience. The tradition is sharp about this: someone who reifies emptiness has not understood emptiness.

Other works

The secure Nāgārjuna corpus includes (with varying degrees of scholarly consensus):

• Vigrahavyāvartanī — The Dispeller of Disputes; a defense of the Madhyamaka method against the charge that emptiness-analysis is self-defeating.
• Śūnyatāsaptati — Seventy Verses on Emptiness.
• Yuktiṣaṣṭikā — Sixty Verses on Reasoning.
• Ratnāvalī — Precious Garland; a letter to a king, more practical-ethical in character, articulating the bodhisattva path.
• Suhṛllekha — Letter to a Friend; another practical-ethical letter, similar in genre to the Ratnāvalī.
• The Catuḥstava — Four Hymns — a set of devotional praise-poems to the Buddha that confirm the philosophical analysis is not anti-devotional.

The traditional attributions extend much further (tantric works, medical works, alchemical works), but these are now generally regarded as the work of later authors writing under his name.

The continuing Madhyamaka tradition

The Madhyamaka school continued in India through important commentarial figures: Āryadeva (Nāgārjuna’s immediate student), Buddhapālita (c. 470–540), Bhāviveka (c. 500–578), and most influentially Candrakīrti (c. 600–650), whose Madhyamakāvatāra (Introduction to the [[eightfold-path|Middle Way]]) and Prasannapadā commentary on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā became the principal Tibetan-tradition entry into Madhyamaka. The Tibetan Madhyamaka tradition — particularly the Gelug school of [[tsongkhapa|Tsongkhapa]] (1357–1419), whose Lamrim Chenmo and Lhakthong Chenmo are substantial Madhyamaka treatises — continues today as the philosophical core of Tibetan Buddhism.

In modern dialogue

Nāgārjuna’s work has been one of the principal points of contact between Buddhism and modern Western philosophy. His treatment of self-reference, paradox, and the limits of conceptual thought has been read against Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Derrida, and others. The American philosopher Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary The Fundamental Wisdom of the [[eightfold-path|Middle Way]] (1995) is now the principal English-language scholarly entry into the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. The continuing 21st-c. analytical-Buddhist philosophy of mind also takes Nāgārjuna seriously.

What he gives

A philosophical analysis of unusual rigor that closes the door on substance-metaphysics in a way that has continuing implications for the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science. A contemplative orientation that takes the dismantling of conceptual reification not as a destructive move but as a liberative one — the recognition that the categories of ordinary cognition do not hold up under examination is itself the doorway to a freedom those categories alone cannot provide. And, through the continuing Tibetan and East Asian Madhyamaka traditions, one of the most consequential philosophical legacies in human history.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Parallels: [[sunyata]] · [[dependent-origination]]
• Member of: [[person]]
• Part of: [[mahayana]]