Nagarjuna (c. 150—c.

250)

Often referred to as “the second Buddha” by

Tibetan and East Asian Mahayana (Great Vehicle) traditions of Buddhism, Nagarjuna
offered sharp criticisms of Brahminical and Buddhist substantialist philosophy,
theory of knowledge, and approaches to practice. Nagarjuna’s philosophy represents
something of a watershed not only in the history of Indian philosophy but in the
history of philosophy as a whole, as it calls into questions certain philosophical
assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the world.  Among
these assumptions are the existence of stable substances, the linear and one-
directional movement of causation, the atomic individuality of persons, the belief in a
fixed identity or selfhood, and the strict separations between good and bad conduct
and the blessed and fettered life.  All such assumptions are called into fundamental
question by Nagarjuna’s unique perspective which is grounded in the insight of
emptiness (sunyata), a concept which does not mean “non-existence” or “nihility”
(abhava), but rather the lack of autonomous existence (nihsvabhava).  Denial of
autonomy according to Nagarjuna does not leave us with a sense of metaphysical or
existential privation, a loss of some hoped-for independence and freedom, but
instead offers us a sense of liberation through demonstrating the interconnectedness
of all things, including human beings and the manner in which human life unfolds in
the natural and social worlds.  Nagarjuna’s central concept of the “emptiness
(sunyata) of all things (dharmas),” which pointed to the incessantly changing and so
never fixed nature of all phenomena, served as much as the terminological prop of
subsequent Buddhist philosophical thinking as the vexation of opposed Vedic
systems. The concept had fundamental implications for Indian philosophical models
of causation, substance ontology, epistemology, conceptualizations of language,
ethics and theories of world-liberating salvation, and proved seminal even for
Buddhist philosophies in India, Tibet, China and Japan very different from
Nagarjuna’s own. Indeed it would not be an overstatement to say that Nagarjuna’s
innovative concept of emptiness, though it was hermeneutically appropriated in
many different ways by subsequent philosophers in both South and East Asia, was to
profoundly influence the character of Buddhist thought.

Table of Contents
 1. Nagarjuna’s Life, Legend and Works
2. Nagarjuna’s Skeptical Method and its Targets
3. Against Worldly and Ultimate Substantialism
4. Against Proof
5. The New Buddhist Space and Mission
6. References and Further Reading

1. Nagarjuna’s Life, Legend and Works

Precious little is known about the actual life of the historical Nagarjuna. The two
most extensive biographies of Nagarjuna, one in Chinese and the other in Tibetan,
were written many centuries after his life and incorporate much lively but historically
unreliable material which sometimes reaches mythic proportions. However, from the
sketches of historical detail and the legend meant to be pedagogical in nature,
combined with the texts reasonably attributed to him, some sense may be gained of
his place in the Indian Buddhist and philosophical traditions.

Nagarjuna was born a “Hindu,” which in his time connoted religious allegiance to the
Vedas, probably into an upper-caste Brahmin family and probably in the southern
Andhra region of India. The dates of his life are just as amorphous, but two texts
which may well have been authored by him offer some help. These are in the form of
epistles and were addressed to the historical king of the northern Satvahana dynasty
Gautamiputra Satakarni (ruled c. 166-196 CE), whose steadfast Brahminical
patronage, constant battles against powerful northern Shaka Satrap rulers and whose
ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful attempts at expansion seem to indicate that he
could not manage to follow Nagarjuna’s advice to adopt Buddhist pacifism and
maintain a peaceful realm. At any rate, the imperial correspondence would place the
significant years of Nagarjuna’s life sometime between 150 and 200 CE. Tibetan
sources then may well be basically accurate in portraying Nagarjuna’s emigration
from Andhra to study Buddhism at Nalanda in present-day Bihar, the future site of
the greatest Buddhist monastery of scholastic learning in that tradition’s proud
history in India. This emigration to the north perhaps followed the path of the Shaka
kings themselves. In the vibrant intellectual life of a not very tranquil north India
then, Nagarjuna came into his own as a philosopher.

The occasion for Nagarjuna’s “conversion” to Buddhism is uncertain. According to

the Tibetan account, it had been predicted that Nagarjuna would die at an early age,
so his parents decided to head off this terrible fate by entering him in the Buddhist
order, after which his health promptly improved. He then moved to the north and
began his tutelage. The other, more colorful Chinese legend, portrays a devilish
young adolescent using magical yogic powers to sneak, with a few friends, into the
king’s harem and seduce his mistresses. Nagarjuna was able to escape when they
were detected, but his friends were all apprehended and executed, and, realizing
what a precarious business the pursuit of desires was, Nagarjuna renounced the
world and sought enlightenment. After having been converted, Nagarjuna’s
adroitness at magic and meditation earned him an invitation to the bottom of the
ocean, the home of the serpent kingdom. While there, the prodigy initiate
“discovered” the “wisdom literature” of the Buddhist tradition, known as
the Prajnaparamita Sutras, and on the credit of his great merit, returned them to the
world, and thereafter was known by the name Nagarjuna, the “noble serpent.”
Despite the tradition’s insistence that immersion into the scriptural texts of the
competing movements of classical Theravada and emerging “Great Vehicle”
(Mahayana) Buddhism was what spurred Nagarjuna’s writings, there is rare
extended reference to the early and voluminous classical Buddhist sutras and to the
Mahayana texts which were then being composed in Nagarjuna’s own language of
choice, Sanskrit. It is much more likely that Nagarjuna thrived on the exciting new
scholastic philosophical debates that were spreading throughout north India among
and between Brahminical and Buddhist thinkers. Buddhism by this time had perhaps
the oldest competing systematic worldview on the scene, but by then Vedic schools
such as Samkhya, which divided the cosmos into spiritual and material entities,
Yoga, the discipline of meditation, and Vaisesika, or atomism were probably well-
established. But new and exciting things were happening in the debate halls. A new
Vedic school of Logic (Nyaya) was making its literary debut, positing an elaborate
realism which categorized the types of basic knowable things in the world,
formulated a theory of knowledge which was to serve as the basis for all claims to
truth, and drew out a full-blown theory of correct and fallacious logical
argumentation. Alongside it, within the Buddhist camp, sects of metaphysicians
emerged with their own doctrines of atomism and fundamental categories of
substance. Nagarjuna was to undertake a forceful engagement of both these new
Brahminical and Buddhist movements, an intellectual endeavor till then unheard of.

Nagarjuna saw in the concept sunya, a concept which connoted in the early Pali
Buddhist literature the lack of a stable, inherent existence in persons, but which since
the third century BCE had also denoted the newly formulated number “zero,” the
interpretive key to the heart of Buddhist teaching, and the undoing of all the
metaphysical schools of philosophy which were at the time flourishing around him.
Indeed, Nagarjuna’s philosophy can be seen as an attempt to deconstruct all systems
of thought which analyzed the world in terms of fixed substances and essences.
Things in fact lack essence, according to Nagarjuna, they have no fixed nature, and
indeed it is only because of this lack of essential, immutable being that change is
possible, that one thing can transform into another. Each thing can only have its
existence through its lack (sunyata) of inherent, eternal essence. With this new
concept of “emptiness,” “voidness,” “lack” of essence, “zeroness,” this somewhat
unlikely prodigy was to help mold the vocabulary and character of Buddhist thought
forever.
Armed with the notion of the “emptiness” of all things, Nagarjuna built his literary
corpus. While argument still persists over which of the texts bearing his name can be
reliably attributed to Nagarjuna, a general agreement seems to have been reached in
the scholarly literature. Since it is not known in what chronological order his writings
were produced, the best that can be done is to arrange them thematically according
to works on Buddhist topics, Brahminical topics and finally ethics Addressing the
schools of what he considered metaphysically wayward Buddhism, Nagarjuna
wrote Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mulamadhyamakakarika), and then, in
order to further refine his newly coined and revolutionary concept, the Seventy Verses
on Emptiness (Sunyatasaptati), followed by a treatise on Buddhist philosophical
method, the Sixty Verses on Reasoning (Yuktisastika).. Included in the works addressed
to Buddhists may have been a further treatise on the shared empirical world and its
establishment through social custom, called Proof of Convention (Vyavaharasiddhi),
though save for a few cited verses, this is lost to us, as well as an instructional book
on practice, cited by one Indian and a number of Chinese commentators,
the Preparation for Enlightenment (Bodhisambaraka). Finally is a didactic work on the
causal theory of Buddhism, the Constituents of Dependent
Arising (Pratityasumutpadahrdaya). Next came a series of works on philosophical
method, which for the most part were reactionary critiques of Brahminical
substantialist and epistemological categories, The End of Disputes (Vigrahavyavartani)
and the not-too-subtly titled Pulverizing the Categories (Vaidalyaprakarana). Finally are
a pair of religious and ethical treatises addressed to the king Gautamiputra,
entitled To a Good Friend (Suhrlekha) and Precious Garland (Ratnavali). Nagarjuna
then was a fairly active author, addressing the most pressing philosophical issues in
the Buddhism and Brahmanism of his time, and more than that, carrying his
Buddhist ideas into the fields of social, ethical and political philosophy.
It is again not known precisely how long Nagarjuna lived. But the legendary story of
his death once again is a tribute to his status in the Buddhist tradition. Tibetan
biographies tell us that, when Gautamiputra’s successor was about to ascend to the
throne, he was anxious to find a replacement as a spiritual advisor to better suit his
Brahmanical preferences, and unsure of how to delicately or diplomatically deal with
Nagarjuna, he forthrightly requested the sage to accommodate and show compassion
for his predicament by committing suicide. Nagarjuna assented, and was decapitated
with a blade of holy grass which he himself had some time previously accidentally
uprooted while looking for materials for his meditation cushion. The indomitable
logician could only be brought down by his own will and his own weapon. Whether
true or not, this master of skeptical method would well have appreciated the irony.

2. Nagarjuna’s Skeptical Method and its Targets

At the heart of what is called skepticism is doubt, a suspension of judgment about
some states of affairs or the correctness of some assertion. There are of course many
things, both in the world and in the claims people make about the world, which can
be doubted, questioned, rejected, or left in skeptical abeyance. But in addition to the
many different things which can be doubted, there are also different ways of
doubting. Doubt can be haphazard, as when a person sees another person at night
and is unsure of whether that other person is his friend; it can be principled, as when
a scientist refuses to take into account non-material or divine causes in a physical
process she is investigating; it can be systematic, as when a philosopher doubts
conventional explanations of the world, only in search of a more fundamental, all-
inclusive explanation of experience, a la Socrates, Descartes or Husserl (Nagarjuna
was for the most part a skeptic of this sort). It can also be all-inclusive and self-
reflective, an attitude demonstrated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who doubted
all claims including his own claim to doubt all claims. Consequently, there are as
many different kinds of skeptics as there can be found different kinds or ways of
doubting. Nagarjuna was considered a skeptic in his own philosophical tradition,
both by Brahmanical opponents and Buddhist readers, and this because he called
into question the basic categorical presuppositions and criteria of proof assumed by
almost everyone in the Indian tradition to be axiomatic. But despite this skepticism,
Nagarjuna did believe that doubt should not be haphazard, it requires a method. This
idea that doubt should be methodical, an idea born in early Buddhism, was a
revolutionary innovation for philosophy in India. Nagarjuna carries the novelty of
this idea even further by suggesting that the method of doubt of choice should not
even be one’s own, but rather ought to be temporarily borrowed from the very person
with whom one is arguing! But in the end, Nagarjuna was convinced that such
disciplined, methodical skepticism led somewhere, led namely to the ultimate
wisdom which was at the core of the teachings of the Buddha.

The standard philosophical interpretation of doubt in Indian thought was explained

in the Vedic school of logic (Nyaya). Gautama Aksapada, the author of the
fundamental text of the Brahminical Logicians, was probably a contemporary of
Nagarjuna. He formulated what by then must have been a traditional distinction
between two kinds of doubt. The first kind is the haphazard doubt about an object all
people experience in their everyday lives, when something is encountered in one’s
environment and for various reasons mistaken for something else because of
uncertainty of what precisely the object is. The stock examples used in Indian texts
are seeing a rope and mistaking it as a snake, or seeing conch in the sand and
mistaking it as silver. The doubt that can arise as a result of realizing one is mistaken
or unsure about a particular object can be corrected by a subsequent cognition,
getting a closer look at the rope for instance, or having a companion tell you the
object in the sand is conch and not silver. The correcting cognition removes doubt by
offering some sort of conclusive evidence about what the object in question happens
to be. The other kind of doubt is roughly categorical doubt, exemplified specifically
by a philosopher who may wonder about or doubt various categories of being, such as
God’s existence, the types of existing physical substance or the nature of time. In
order to resolve this latter kind of philosophical doubt, the preferred method of the
Logicians was a formal debate. Debates provided a space wherein judges presided,
established rules for argument and counter-argument, recognized logical fallacies
and correct forms of inference and two interlocutors seeking truth all played their
roles in the establishment of the correct position. The point is that, according to
traditional Brahminical thinking, certain and correct objective knowledge of the
world was possible; one could in principle know whatever one sought to know, from
what that object lying in darkness is to the types of causation that operated in the
world to God’s existence and will for human beings. Skepticism, though a natural
attitude and a fundamental aid to human beings in both their everyday and reflective
lives, can be overcome provided one arms oneself with the methods of proof supplied
by common-sense logic. For Nyaya, while anything and everything can be doubted,
any and every doubt can be resolved. The Brahminical Logician, the Naiyayika, is a
cagey and realistic but staunch philosophical optimist.

The early Buddhists were not nearly so sure about the possibility of ultimate
knowledge of the world. Indeed, the founder of the tradition, Siddhartha Gautama
Sakyamuni (the “Buddha” or “awakened one”), famously refused to answer questions
about such airy metaphysical ponderings like “Does the world have a beginning or
not?”, “Does God exist?” and “Does the soul perish after death or not?” Convinced
that human knowledge was best suited and most usefully devoted to the diagnosis
and cure of human beings’ own self-destructive psychological obsessions and
attachments, the Buddha compared a person convinced he could find the answers to
such ultimate questions to a mortally wounded soldier on a battlefield who, dying
from arrow-delivered poison, demanded to know everything about his shooter before
being taken to a doctor. Ultimate knowledge cannot be attained, at least cannot be
attained before the follies and frailties of human life bring one to despair. Unless
human beings attain self-reflective, meditative enlightenment, ignorance will always
have the upper hand over knowledge in their lives, and this is the predicament they
must solve in order to alleviate their poorly understood suffering. The early
traditional texts show how the Buddha developed a method for refusing to answer
such questions in pursuit of ultimate, metaphysical knowledge, a method which came
to be dubbed the “four error” denial (catuskoti). When asked, for example, whether
the world has a beginning or not, a Buddhist should respond by denying all the
logically alternative answers to the query; “No, the world does not have a beginning,
it does not fail to have a beginning, it does not have and not have a beginning, nor
does it neither have nor not have a beginning.” This denial is not seen to be logically
defective in the sense that it violates the law of excluded middle (A cannot have both
B and not-B), because this denial is more a principled refusal to answer than a
counter-thesis, it is more a decision than a proposition. That is to say that one cannot
object to this “four error” denial by simply saying “the world either has a beginning
or it does not” because the Buddha is recommending to his followers that they should
take no position on the matter (this is in modern propositional logic known as
illocution). This denial was recommended because wondering about such questions
was seen by the Buddha as a waste of valuable time, time that should be spent on the
much more important and doable task of psychological self-mastery. The early
Buddhists, unlike their Brahminical philosophical counterparts, were skeptics. But in
their own view, their skepticism did not make the Buddhists pessimists, but on the
contrary, optimists, for even though the human mind could not answer ultimate
questions, it could diagnose and cure its own must basic maladies, and that surely
was enough.
But in the intervening four to six centuries between the lives of Siddartha Gautama
and Nagarjuna, Buddhists, feeling a need to explain their worldview in an ever
burgeoning north Indian philosophical environment, traded in their skepticism for
theory. Basic Buddhist doctrinal commitments, such as the teaching of the
impermanence of all things, the Buddhist rejection of a persistent personal identity
and the refusal to admit natural universals such as “treeness,” “redness” and the like,
were challenged by Brahminical philosophers. How, Vedic opponents would ask,
does one defend the idea that causation governs the phenomenal world while
simultaneously holding that there is no measurable temporal transition from cause
to effect, as the Buddhists appeared to hold? How, if the Buddhists are right in
supposing that no enduring ego persists through our experienced lives, do all of my
experiences and cognitions seem to be owned by me as a unitary subject? Why, if all
things can be reduced to the Buddhist universe of an ever-changing flux of atoms, do
stable, whole objects seem to surround me in my lived environment? Faced with
these challenges, the monk-scholars enthusiastically entered into the debates in
order to make the Buddhist worldview explicable. A number of prominent schools of
Buddhist thought developed as a result of these exchanges, the two most notable of
which were the Sarvastivada (“Universal Existence”) and Sautrantika (“True
Doctrine”). In various fashions, they posited theories which depicted causal efficacy
as either present in all dimensions of time or instantaneous, of personal identity
being the psychological product of complex and interrelated mental states, and
perhaps most importantly, of the apparently stable objects of our lived experience as
being mere compounds of elementary, irreducible substances with their “own
nature” (svabhava). Through the needs these schools sought to fulfill, Buddhism
entered the world of philosophy, debate, thesis and verification, world-
representation. The Buddhist monks became not only theoreticians, but some of the
most sophisticated theoreticians in the Indian intellectual world.
Debate has raged for centuries about how to place Nagarjuna in this philosophical
context. Ought he to be seen as a conservative, traditional Buddhist, defending the
Buddha’s own council to avoid theory? Should he be understood as a “Great Vehicle”
Buddhist, settling disputes which did not exist in traditional Buddhism at all but only
comprehensible to a Mahayanist? Might he even be a radical skeptic, as his first
Brahminical readers appeared to take him, who despite his own flaunting of
philosophy espoused positions only a philosopher could appreciate? Nagarjuna
appears to have understood himself to be a reformer, primarily a Buddhist reformer
to be sure, but one suspicious that his own beloved religious tradition had been
enticed, against its founder’s own advice, into the games of metaphysics and
epistemology by old yet still seductive Brahminical intellectual habits. Theory was
not, as the Brahmins thought, the condition of practice, and neither was it, as the
Buddhists were beginning to believe, the justification of practice. Theory, in
Nagarjuna’s view, was the enemy of all forms of legitimate practice, social, ethical
and religious. Theory must be undone through the demonstration that its Buddhist
metaphysical conclusions and the Brahminical reasoning processes which lead to
them are counterfeit, of no real value to genuinely human pursuits. But in order to
demonstrate such a commitment, doubt had to be methodical, just as the philosophy
it was meant to undermine was methodical.

The method Nagarjuna suggested for carrying out the undoing of theory was,
curiously, not a method of his own invention. He held it more pragmatic to borrow
philosophical methods of reasoning, particularly those designed to expose faulty
argument, to refute the claims and assumptions of his philosophical adversaries. This
was the strategy of choice because, if one provisionally accepts the concepts and
verification rules of the opponent, the refutation of the opponent’s position will be all
the more convincing to the opponent than if one simply rejects the opponent’s
system out of hand. This provisional, temporary acceptance of the opponent’s
categories and methods of proof is demonstrated in how Nagarjuna employs
different argumentative styles and approaches depending on whether he is writing
against the Brahmins or Buddhists. However, he slightly and subtly adapts each of
their respective systems to suit his own argumentative purposes.

For the Brahminical metaphysicians and epistemologists, Nagarjuna accepts the

forms of logical fallacies outlined by the Logicians and assents to enter into their own
debate format. But he picks a variation on a debate format which, while
acknowledged as a viable form of discourse, was not most to the Nyaya liking. The
standard Nyaya debate, styled vada or “truth” debate, pits two interlocutors against
one another who bring to the debate opposing theses (pratijna or paksa) on a given
topic, for instance a Nyaya propoenet defending the thesis that authoritative verbal
testimony is an acceptable form of proof and a Buddhist proponent arguing that such
testimony is not a self-standing verification but can be reduced to a kind of inference.
Each of these opposed positions will then serve as the hypothesis of a logical
argument to be proven or disproven, and the person who refutes the adversary’s
argument and establishes his own will win the debate. However, there was a variety
of this kind of standard format called by the Logicians the vitanda or “destructive”
debate. In vitanda, the proponent of a thesis attempts to establish it against an
opponent who merely strives to refute the proponent’s view, without establishing or
even implying his own. If the opponent of the proffered thesis cannot refute it, he will
lose; but he will also lose if in refuting the opponent’s thesis, he is found to be
asserting or implying a counter-thesis. Now, while the Brahminical Naiyayikas
considered this format good logical practice as it were for the student, they did not
consider vitanda to be the ideal form of philosophical discourse, for while it could
possibly expose false theses as false, it could not, indeed was not designed to,
establish truth, and what good is reason or philosophical analysis if they do not or
cannot pursue and attain truth?
For his own part, Nagarjuna would only assent to enter a philosophical debate as
a vaitandika, committed to destroying the Brahminical proponents’ metaphysical and
epistemological positions without thereby necessitating a contrapositive. In order to
accomplish this, Nagarjuna armed himself with the full battery of accepted rejoinders
to fallacious arguments the Logicians had long since authorized, such as infinite
regress (anavastha), circularity (karanasya asiddhi) and vacuous principle (vihiyate
vadah) to assail the metaphysical and epistemological positions he found
problematic. It should be noted that later, very popular and influential schools of
Indian Buddhist thought, namely the schools of Cognition (Vijnanavada) and
Buddhist Logic (Yogacara-Sautranta) rejected this purely skeptical stance of
Nagarjuna and went on to establish their own positive doctrines of consciousness
and knowledge, and it was only with later, more synthetic schools of Buddhism in
Tibet and East Asia where Nagarjuna’s anti-metaphysical and anti-cognitivist
approaches gained sympathy. There was no doubt however that among his Vedic
opponents and later Madhyamika commentators, Nagarjuna’s “refutation-only”
strategy was highly provocative and sparked continued controversy. But, in his own
estimation, only by employing Brahminical method against Brahminical practice
could one show up Vedic society and religion for what he believed they were,
authoritarian legitimations of caste society which used the myths of God, divine
revelation and the soul as rationalizations, and not the justified reasons which they
were purported to be.
Against Buddhist substantialism, Nagarjuna revived the Buddha’s own “four error”
(catuskoti) denial, but gave to it a more definitively logical edge than the earlier
practical employment of Suddhartha Gautama. Up to this point in the Indian
Buddhist tradition, there had been two skeptics of note, one of them the Buddha
himself and the other a third century sage named Moggaliputta-tissa, who had won
several pivotal debates against a number of traditional sectarian groups at the
request of the Mauryan emperor Asoka and had as a result written the first great
debate manual of the tradition. While the Buddha had provided the “four error”
method to discourage the advocacy of traditional metaphysical and religious
positions, Moggaliputta-tissa constructed a discussion format which examined
various doctrinal disputes in early Buddhism, which, in his finding, represented
positions which were equally logically invalid, and therefore should not be asserted
(no ca vattabhe). Perhaps inspired by this logically sharpened skeptical approach,
Nagarjuna refined the “four errors” method from the strictly illocutionary and
pragmatic tool it had been in early Buddhism into a logic machine that dissolved
Buddhist metaphysical positions which had been growing in influence. The major
schools of Buddhism had accepted by Nagarjuna’s time that things in the world must
be constituted by metaphysically fundamental elements which had their own fixed
essence (svabhava), for otherwise there would be no way to account for persons,
natural phenomena, or the causal and karmic process which determined both.
Without assuming, for instance, that people had fundamentally fixed natures, one
could not say that any particular individual was undergoing suffering, and neither
could one say that any particular monk who had perfected his discipline and wisdom
underwent enlightenment and release from rebirth in nirvana. Without some notion
of essence that is, thought Nagarjuna’s contemporaries, Buddhist claims could not
make sense, and Buddhist practice could do no good, could effect no real change of
the human character.
Nagarjuna’s response was to “catch” this metaphysical position of Buddhist practice
in the coils of the “four errors,” demonstrating that the change Buddhism was after
was only really possible if people did not have fixed essences. For if one really
examines change, one finds that, according to the catuskoti, change cannot produce
itself, nor can it be introduced by an extrinsic influence, nor can it result from both
itself and an extrinsic influence, nor from no influence at all. All the logical
alternatives of a given position are tested and flunked by the “four error” method.
There are basic logical reasons why all these positions fail. It would first of all be
incoherent (no papadyate) to assume that anything with a fixed nature or essence
(svabhava) could change, for that change would violate its fixed nature and so destroy
the original premise. In addition, we do not experience anything empirically which
does not change, and so never know of (na vidyate) fixed essences in the world about
us. Once again, the proponent’s method has been taken up in an ingenious way to
undermine his conclusions. The rules of the philosophical game have been observed,
but not in this case for earning victory, but for the purpose of showing all the players
that the game had all along had been just that, merely a game which had no tenable
real-life consequences.
And so, Nagarjuna has rightly merited the label of skeptic, for he undertakes the
dismantling of theoretical positions wherever he finds them, and does so in a
methodically logical manner. Like the skeptics of the classical Greek tradition, who
thought that resolved doubt about dogmatic assertions in both philosophy and social
life could lead the individual to peace of mind, however, it is not the case that for
Nagarjuna skepticism leads nowhere. On the contrary, it is the very key to insight.
For in the process of dismantling all metaphysical and epistemological positions, one
is led to the only viable conclusion for Nagarjuna, namely that all things, concepts
and persons lack a fixed essence, and this lack of a fixed essence is precisely why and
how they can be amenable to change, transformation and evolution. Change is
precisely why people live, die, are reborn, suffer and can be enlightened and
liberated. And change is only possible if entities and the way in which we
conceptualize them are void or empty (sunya) of any eternal, fixed and immutable
essence. Indeed, Nagarjuna even on occasion refers to his special use of the “four
error” approach as the “refuting and explaining with the method of emptying”
(vigraheca vyakhyane krte sunyataya vadet) concepts and things of essence. And like all
properly Buddhist methods, once this logical foil has served its purpose, it can be
discarded, traded in as it were for the wisdom it has conferred. Pretense of
knowledge leads to ruin, while genuine skepsis can lead human being to ultimate
knowledge. Only the method of skepticism has to conform to the rules of
conventional knowing, for as Nagarjuna famously asserts: “Without depending on
convention, the ultimate truth cannot be taught, and if the ultimate truth is not
attained, nirvana will not be attained.”

3. Against Worldly and Ultimate Substantialism

By Nagarjuna’s lifetime, scholastic Buddhism had become much more than merely
an institution which charged itself with the handing on of received scripture,
tradition and council-established orthodoxy; it had grown into a highly variegated,
inwardly and outwardly engaged set of philosophical positions. These schools took it
upon themselves not merely to represent Buddhist teaching or make the benefits of
its practice available, but also to explain Buddhism, to make it not only a reasonable
philosophical discourse, but the most supremely reasonable of them all. The ultimate
goal of life, liberation from rebirth, though in general shared by all soteriologies in
Brahmanism, Jainism and Buddhism, was represented uniquely by Buddhists as the
pacification of all psychological attachments through the extinguishing (nirvana) of
desires, which would lead to a consequent extinguishing of karma and the prevention
of rebirth. One particularly unique doctrine of Buddhism in its attempt to thematize
these issues was the theory of no-self or no-soul (anatman) and what implications it
carried. In the empirical sense, the idea of no-self meant that not only persons, but
also what are normally considered the stable substances of nature are not in fact
fixed and continuous, that everything from one’s sense of personal identity to the
forms of objects could be analyzed away, as it were, into the atomic parts which were
their bases. In the ultimate metaphysical sense, it meant that no one, upon release
from rebirth, will live eternally as a spiritual, self-conscious entity (atman), but that
the series of births caused by inherited karma will simply terminate, reducing, as its
cash-value, the total amount of suffering in the world. These theories prompted
sharp and deep questions and criticisms, such as, “if the things and persons of the
world are nothing more than atoms in constant flux, how can a person have an
orderly experience of a world of apparent substances?”, “if there is no enduring
identity or self, who is it that practices Buddhism and is liberated?”, and “how should
we account for the differences between enlightened beings like the Buddha and
unenlightened ones, like ourselves?” Answering such questions intelligibly for the
inquiring minds of the philosophical community were a number of distinct schools
which came collectively to be known as schools involved with the “analysis of
elements” (abhidharma). Nagarjuna received his philosophical training in the texts,
vocabulary and debates of the Abhidharmikas.
The two most prevalent schools of Abhidharma were the school of “Universal
Existence” (Sarvastivada) and the “True Doctrine” school (Sautrantika). These
schools held in common a theory of substantialism which served as an explanation to
both worldly and ultimate metaphysical questions. This theory of substantialism,
formulated in slightly different ways by each school, had two fundamental linchpins.
The first was a theory of causality, or the strict necessity of one event following from
another event. The theory of causal necessity was essential for all Buddhist thought,
for Gautama Siddhartha himself had firmly asserted that all suffering or
psychological pain had a distinct cause, namely attachment or desire (tanha), and the
key to removing suffering from one’s life and attaining the “tranquility of mind” or
contentment (upeksa) of nirvana was to cut out its causal condition. Suffering was
brought about by a definite cause, but that cause is contingent upon the human
behaviors and practices of any given individual, and if attachment could be exorcized
from these behaviors and practices, then the individual could live a life which would
no longer experience impermanence and loss as painful, but accept the world for
what it in fact is. Buddhist theory and practice had always been based on the notion
that, not just psychological attachment, but all phenomena are causally
interdependent, that all things and events which come to pass in the world arise out
of a causal chain (pratityasamutpada). Buddhism is inconceivable without this causal
theory, for it opens the door to the diagnosis and removal of suffering. For the
Universal Existence and True Doctrine schools however, the second linchpin was a
theory of fundamental elements, a theory which had to follow from any coherent
causal theory. Causes, their philosophical exponents figured, are not merely
arbitrary, but are regular and predictable, and their regularity must be due to the fact
the things or phenomena have fixed natures of their own (svabhava), which
determine and limit the kinds of causal powers they can and cannot exert on other
things. Water, for example, can quench thirst and fire can burn other things, but
water cannot cause a fire, just as fire cannot quench thirst. The pattern and limits of
particular causal powers and their effects are therefore rooted in what kind of a thing
a thing happens to be; its nature defines what it can and can’t do to other things.
Now in their theoretical models, causal efficacy was contained not in any whole,
unified object, but rather in the parts, qualities and atomic elements of which any
object happened to be constituted, so in their formulation, it was not fire which burnt
but the heat produced by its fire molecules, and it was not water which quenched
thirst but the correspondence of its molecules to the receptivity of molecules in the
body. Indeed, fire in these systems was only fire because of its molecular qualities,
and the same with water. But these qualities, molecules and elements had fixed
natures, and thus could emit or receive certain causal powers and not others.
The basic difference between the Universal Existence and True Doctrine schools in
their advocacy of both Buddhist causal and fundamental elements theories were their
respective descriptions of how such causes operated. For the Universal Existence
school, the effect of a cause was already inherent in the nature of the cause
(satkaryavada). My thirst is quenched not by any fundamental change in my
condition, but because the water that I drank had the power to quench my thirst, and
this power does not rest in me, but in what I am trying to drink; this is why fire
cannot quench thirst. Change here is only an apparent transformation already
potential in the actors who are interrelating. For the True Doctrine school, on the
other hand, any effect by definition must be a change in the condition of the receptor
of the causal power, and as such, causal potential only becomes actual where it can
effect a real change in something else (asatkaryavada). Again, using water as an
illustration, the properties of water effect a change in the properties of my body,
transforming my condition from a condition of thirst to one of having my thirst
quenched. Change is change of what is effected, otherwise it would be silly to speak
of change.
This seemingly abstract or inconsequential difference turns out in these two opposed
systems however to be quite relevant, for the substantialist ideas of fixed nature and
essence provide the basis not only for conceptualizing the material, empirical world,
but also for conceiving the knowledge and attainment of ultimate reality. For just as
only metaphysical analysis could distinguish between phenomena and their ultimate
causal constituents, such analysis was also the only reliable guide for purifying
experience of attachments. Those causes which lead to enmeshment in the worldly
cycle of rebirth (samsara) cannot be the same as those which lead to peace (nirvana).
These states of existence are just as different as fire and water, samsara will quench
thirst just as little as nirvana  will lead to the fires of passion. And so, it is the
Buddha’s words, for those who advocated the theory of the effect as pre-existent in
the cause, which had the potential to purify consciousness, as opposed to the words
of any unorthodox teacher; it was the practices of Buddhists, for those who
championed the notion of external causal efficacy, which could liberate one from
rebirth, and not the practices of those who perpetuated the ambitions of the
everyday, workaday world. These schools were, each in their uniquely Buddhist
turns, true exemplars of the age-old assumptions of the karma worldview in which a
person is what he or she does, and what one does proceeds from what type of
fundamental makeup one has inherited from previous lives of deeds, a worldview
that is which intimately marries essence, existence and ethics. To be a Buddhist
means precisely to distinguish between Buddhist and non-Buddhist acts, between
ignorance and enlightenment, between the suffering world of samsara and the
purified attainment of nirvana.
In his revolutionary tract of The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, Nagarjuna
abjectly throws this elementary distinction between samsara and nirvana out the
door, and does so in the very name of the Buddha. “There is not the slightest
distinction,” he declares in the work, “between samsara and nirvana. The limit of the
one is the limit of the other.” Now how can such a thing be posited, that is, the
identity of samsara and nirvana, without totally undermining the theoretical basis and
practical goals of Buddhism as such? For if there is no difference between the world
of suffering and the attainment of peace, then what sort of work is a Buddhist to do
as one who seeks to end suffering? Nagarjuna counters by reminding the Buddhist
philosophers that, just as Gautama Sakyamuni had rejected both metaphysical and
empirical substantialism through the teaching of “no-soul” (anatman) and causal
interdependence (pratityasamputpada), so Scholastic Buddhism had to remain faithful
to this non-substantialist stance through a rejection of the causal theories which
necessitated notions of fixed nature (svabhava), theories which metaphysically reified
the difference between samsara and nirvana. This later rejection could be based on
Nagarjuna’s newly coined notion of the “emptiness,” “zeroness” or “voidness”
(sunyata) of all things.
Recapitulating a logical analysis of the causal theories of the Universal Existence and
True Doctrine schools, Nagarjuna rejects the premises of their theories. The basic
claim these schools shared was that causal efficacy could only be accounted for
through the fundamental nature of an object; fire caused the burning of objects
because fire was made of fire elements and not water elements, the regularity and
predictability of its causal powers consistent with its essential material basis.
Reviving and logically sharpening the early Buddhist “four errors” (catuskoti) method,
Nagarjuna attempts to dismantle this trenchant philosophical assumption. Contrary
to the Scholastic Buddhist views, Nagarjuna finds that, were objects to have a stable,
fixed essence, the changes brought about by causes would not be logically intelligible
or materially possible. Let us say, along with the school of Universal Existence, that
the effect pre-exists in the cause, or for example, that the burning of fire and the
thirst-quenching of water are inherent in the kinds of substances fire and water are.
But if the effects already exist in the cause, then it would be nonsensical to speak of
effects in the first place, because in their interaction with other phenomena the pre-
existent causes would not produce anything new, they would merely be manifesting
the potential powers already exhibited. That is, if the potential to burn is conceived to
exist within fire and the potential to quench thirst already inhered in water, then,
Nagarjuna thinks, burning and thirst-quenching would be but appearances of the
causal powers of fire and water substances, and this would make the notion of an
effect, the production of a novel change, meaningless. If, on the other hand, we side
with the True Doctrine school in supposing that the effect does not pre-exist in the
cause, but is a novel change in the world, then the category of substance breaks
down. Why? Because if fire and water are stable substances which possess fixed
natures or essences, then what sort of relation could they bear to other objects which
have entirely different fixed natures? How could fire be thought to effect a human
being when the latter possesses a nature and thus takes on a form that is entirely
dissimilar to fire? For the person to be effected by fire, his nature would have to
change, would have to be destructible, and this vitiates the supposition that the
person’s nature is fixed. Stable, fixed essences (svabhava) which are conceived to be
entirely heterogeneous could have no way of relating without their initially supposed
fixed essences being compromised. The conclusion is that neither of these two
proffered substantialist Buddhist explanations of causal efficacy can survive logical
examination.
We may be tempted, faced with these failures, to adopt alternative theories of
causality advocated outside the Buddhist tradition in order to save the intelligibility
of substance. We may suppose, along with Jaina philosophers, the effects somehow
proceed both from inherent powers of substances as well as the vulnerabilities of
objects with which these substances interact. This obviously will not do for
Nagarjuna the logician, for it would be tantamount to suggesting that things and
events arise or come about due both to their own causal powers and as effected by
other things, that event A, such as burning or thirst-quenching is caused both by
itself and by other things. This violates the law of excluded middle outright, since a
thing cannot be characterized by both A and not-A, and so will not serve as an
explanation. Exhausted by the search for a viable substantialist principle of causality,
we may wish to opt for the completely anti-metaphysical stance of the Indian
Materialist school, which denies both that events are brought about through the
inherent causal powers of their relata and are caused by extraneous powers. This
thorough denial would have us believe that no cause-and-effect relationship exists
between phenomena, and Buddhists may not resort to this conclusion because it
militates against the basic teachings of the Buddha that all empirical phenomena
arise out of interdependence. This was the teaching of the Buddha himself, and so no
Buddhist can allow that events are not caused.

What are we to draw from all this abstract logical critique? Are we to infer that
Nagarjuna’s philosophy boils down to some strange paradoxical mysticism in which
there is some ambiguous sense in which things should be considered causally
interdependent but interdependent in some utterly unexplainable and inscrutable
way? Not at all! Nagarjuna has not refuted all available theories of cause and effect,
he has only rejected all substantialist theories of cause and effect. He thinks he has
shown that, if we maintain the philosophical assumption that things in the world
derive from some unique material and essential basis, then we shall come away
empty-handed in a search to explain how things could possibly relate to one another,
and so would have no way of describing how changes happen. But since both our
eminently common sense and the words of the Buddha affirm unremittingly that
changes do indeed happen, and happen constantly, we must assume that they
happen somehow, through some other fact or circumstance of existence. For his own
part, Nagarjuna concludes that, since things do not arise because phenomena relate
through fixed essences, then they must arise because phenomena lack fixed essences.
Phenomena are malleable, they are susceptible to alteration, addition and
destruction. This lack of fixed nature (nihsvabhava), this alterability of things then
means that their physical and empirical forms are built not upon essence, as both the
Universal Existence and True Doctrine schools posit, but upon the fact that nothing
(sunya) ever defines and characterizes them eternally and unconditionally. It is not
that things are in themselves nothing, nor that things possess a positive absence
(abhava) of essence. Change is possible because a radical indeterminancy (sunyata)
permeates all forms. Burning happens because conditions can arise where
temperatures become incindiary and singe flesh, just as thirst can be quenched when
the process of ingestion transforms water into body. Beings relate to one another not
because of their heterogeneous forms, but because their interaction makes them
susceptible to ongoing transformation.
The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is a tour de force through the entire
categorical system of the Buddhist metaphysical analysis (abhidharma) which had
given birth to its scholastic movements. Nagarjuna attacks all the concepts of these
traditions which were thematized according to substantialist, essentialist
metaphysics, using at every turn the logically revised “four errors” method. But
perhaps most revolutionary was Nagarjuna’s extension of this doctrine of the
“emptiness” of all phenomena to the discussion of the relationship between the
Buddha and the world, between the cycle of pain-inflicted rebirth (samsara) and
contented, desire-less freedom (nirvana). The Buddha, colloquially known as “the one
who came and went” (Tathagata), cannot properly be thought of for Nagarjuna in the
way the Buddhist scholastics have, that is, as the eternally pure seed of the true
teachings of peace which puts to rest the delusions of the otherwise defiled world.
The name and person of “Buddha” should not serve as the theoretical basis and
justification of distinguishing between the ordinary, ignorant world and perfected
enlightenment. After all, Nagarjuna reminds his readers, all change in the world,
including the transformations which lead to enlightenment, are only possible
because of interdependent causality (pratityasamutpada), and interdependent
causality in turn is only possible because things, phenomena, lack any fixed nature
and so are open (sunya) to being transformed. The Buddha himself was only
transformed because of interdependence and emptiness, and so, Nagarjuna infers,
“the nature of Tathagata is the very nature of the world/” It stands to reason then that
no essential delimitations can be made between the world of suffering and the
practices which can lead to peace, for both are merely alternative outcomes in the
nexus of worldly interdependence. The words and labels which attach to both the
world and the experience of nirvana are not the means of separating the wheat of life
from its chaff, nor true cultivators of the soil of experience from the over-ambitious
“everyday” rabble. Rather, samsara  and nirvana signify nothing but the lack of
guarantees in a life of desire and the possibility of change and hope. “We assert,”
Nagarjuna proffers to say on behalf of the Buddhists, “that whatever arises
dependently is as such empty. This manner of designating things is exactly the
middle path.” A Buddhist oath to avoid suffering cannot be taken as a denunciation
of the world, but only as a commitment to harness the possibilities which already are
entailed within it for peace. Talk about the Buddha and practices inspired by the
Buddha are not tantamount to the raising of a religious or ideological flag which
marks off one country from another; rather, the world of suffering and the world of
peace have the same extension and boundary, and talk about suffering and the
Buddha is only there to make us aware of the possibilities of the world, and how our
realization of these possibilities depends precisely on what we do and how we
interact.

4. Against Proof
The apparently anti-theoretical stance occupied by Nagarjuna did not win him many
philosophical friends either among his contemporary Buddhist readers or the circles
of Brahminical thought. While it was certainly the case that, over the next seven
centuries of Buddhist scholastic thought, the concept of emptiness was more
forcefully articulated, it was also hermeneutically appropriated into other systems in
ways of which Nagarjuna would not necessarily have approved. Sunyata  was soon
made to carry theoretical meanings unrelated to causal theory in various Buddhists
sects, serving as the support of a philosophy of consciousness for the later illustrious
Vijnanavada or Cognition School and as the explication of the nature of both
epistemology and ontology in the precise school of Buddhist Logic (Yogacara-
Sautrantika). These schools, deriding Nagarjuna’s skepticism, retained their
commitment to a style of philosophizing in India which allowed intellectual stands to
be taken only on the basis of commitments to thesis, counter-thesis, rules of
argument and standards of proof, that is, schools which equated philosophical
reflection with competing doctrines of knowledge and metaphysics. This is all the
more ironic given the overt attempt Nagarjuna made to head off the possibility that
the idea of emptiness would be refuted or co-opted by this style of philosophizing, an
attempt still preserved in the pages of his work The End of
Disputes  (Vigrahavyavartani).
The End of Disputes was in large measure a reactionary work, written only when
philosophical objections were brought against Nagarjuna’s non-essentialist, anti-
metaphysical approach to philosophy. The work was addressed to a relatively new
school of Brahminical thought, the school of Logic (Nyaya) Philosophical debate,
conducted in formalized fashions in generally court settings, had persisted in India
for perhaps as much as eight hundred years before the time of the first literary
systematizer of the school of logic, Gautama Aksapada. Several attempts had been
made by Buddhist and Jaina schools before Nyaya to compose handbooks for formal
debate. But Nyaya brought to the Indian philosophical scene a full-blown doctrine
not only of the rules and etiquette of the debate process, but also an entire system of
inference which distinguished between logically acceptable and unacceptable forms
of argument. Finally, undergirding all forms of valid argument was a system of
epistemology, a theory of proof (pramanasastra), which distinguished between various
kinds of mental events which could be considered truth-revealing, or corresponding
to real states of affairs and those which could not be relied upon as mediators of
objective reality. Direct sensory perception, valid logical argument, tenable analogy
and authoritative testimony were held by the Logicians to be the only kinds of
cognitions which could correspond to real things or events in the world. They could
serve as proofs to the claims we make to know. With some modifications, the
approach of Nyaya came to be accepted as philosophical “first principles” by almost
all the other schools of thought in India for centuries, both Vedic and non-Vedic.
Indeed, in many philosophical quarters, before entering into the subtleties and
agonism of advanced philosophical debate, a student was expected to pass through
the prerequisites of studying Sanskrit grammar and logic. All thought, and so all
positive sciences, from agriculture to Vedic study to statecraft, were at times even
said to be fundamentally based on and entirely specious without basic training in
“critical analysis” (anviksiki), which, according to Gautama Aksapada, was precisely
what Nyaya was.
The Logicians, upon becoming aware very early of Nagarjuna’s thought, brought
against his position of emptiness (sunyata) a sharp criticism. Certainly no claim, they
insisted, should compel us to give it assent unless it can be known to be true. Now
Nagarjuna has told us that emptiness is the lack of a fixed, essential nature which all
things exhibit. But if all things are empty of a fixed nature, then that would include,
would it not, Nagarjuna’s own claim that all things are empty? For one to say that all
things lack a fixed nature would be also to say that no assertion, no thesis like
Nagarjuna’s that all things are empty, could claim hold on a fixed reference. And if
such a basic and all-encompassing thesis must admit of having itself neither a fixed
meaning nor reference, then why should we believe it? Does not rather the thesis “all
things lack a fixed essence, and are thus empty,” since it is a universal quantifier and
so covers all things including theses, refute itself? The Logicians are not so much
making the claim here that skepticism necessarily opts out of its own position, as
when a person in saying “I know nothing” witnesses unwittingly to at least a
knowledge of two things, namely how to use language and his own ignorance, as in
the cases of the Socratic Irony and the Liar’s Paradox. It is more the direct charge
that a philosophy which refuses to admit universal essences must be flatly self-
contradictory, since a universal denial must itself be essentially true of all things.
Should we not consider Nagarjuna as a person who, setting out on what would
otherwise be an ingenious and promising philosophical journey, in a bit too much of
a rush, tripped over his own feet on his way out the front door?
Nagarjuna, in The End of Disputes, responds in two ways. The first is an attempt to
show the haughty Logicians that, if they really critically examine this fundamental
concept of proof which grounds their theory of knowledge, they will find themselves
in no better position than they claim Nagarjuna is in. How, Nagarjuna asks in an
extended argument, can anything be proven to a fixed certainty in the way the
Naiyayikas posit? When you get right down to it, a putative fact can be proven in only
two ways; it is either self-evident or it is shown to be true by something else, by some
other fact or piece of knowledge already assumed to be true. But if we assent to the
very rules of logic and valid argument the Vedic Logicians espouse, we shall find,
Nagarjuna thinks, that both of these suppositions are flawed. Let us take the claim
that something can be proven to be true on the basis of other facts known to be true.
Suppose, to use a favorite example from the Logician Gautama, I want to know how
much an object weighs. I put it on a scale to measure its weight. The scale gives me a
result, and for a moment that satisfies me; I can rely on the measurement because
scales can measure weight. But hold on, Nagarjuna flags, your reliance on the
trustworthiness of the scale is itself an assumption, not a piece of knowledge.
Shouldn’t the scale be tested too? I measure the object on a second scale to test the
accuracy of the first scale, and the measurement agrees with the first scale. But how
can I just assume, once again, that the second scale is accurate? Both scales might be
wrong. And the exercise goes on, there is nothing in principle which would justify me
in assuming that any one test I use to verify a piece of knowledge is itself reliable
beyond doubt. So, Nagarjuna concludes, the supposition that something can be
proven through reference to some other putative fact runs into the problem that the
series of proofs will never reach an end, and leaves us with an infinite regress. Should
we commit ourselves to the opposite justification and propound that we know things
to be true which are self-evident, then Nagarjuna would counter that we would be
making a vacuous claim. The whole point of epistemology is to discover reliable
methods of knowing, which implies that on the side of the world there are facts and
on the side of the knower there are proofs which make those facts transparent to
human consciousness. Were things just self-evident, proof would be superfluous, we
should just know straightaway whether something is such and such or not. The claim
of self-evidence destroys, in an ironic fashion which always pleased Nagarjuna, the
very need for a theory of knowledge!
Having tested both criteria of evidence and come up short, the Logician might, and in
fact historically did, try an alternative theory of mutual corroboration. We may not
know for certain that a block of stone weighs too much to fit into a temple I am
building, and we may not be certain that the scale being used to measure the stones
is one hundred percent accurate, but if as a result of testing the stones with the scale
I put the stones in the building and find that they work well, I have reason to rely on
the knowledge I gain through the mutual corroborations of measurement and
practical success. This process, for Nagarjuna, however, should not pass for an
epistemologist who claims to be as strict as the Brahminical Logicians. In fact, this
process should not even be considered mutual corroboration; it is actually circular. I
assume stones have a certain measurable mass, so I design an instrument to confirm
my assumption, and I assume scales measure weight so I assess objects by them, but
in terms of strict logic, I am only assuming that this corroborative process proves my
suppositions, but it in fact does nothing more than feed my preconceived
assumptions rather than give me information about the nature of objects. We may
say that a certain person is a son because he has a father, Nagarjuna quips, and we
may say another person is a father because he has a son, but apart from this mutual
definition, how do we know which particular person is which? By extension,
Nagarjuna claims, this is the problem with the project of building a theory of
knowledge as such. Epistemology and ontology are parasitic on one another.
Epistemologies are conveniently formulated to justify preferred views of the world,
and ontologies are presumed to be justified through systematic theories of proof, but
apart from these projects being mutually theoretically necessary, we really have no
honest way of knowing whether they in fact lend credence to our beliefs. Again,
Nagarjuna has used tools from the bag of the logician, in this case, standard
argumentational fallacies, to show that it is Brahminical Logic, and not his
philosophy of emptiness, which has tripped itself up before having a chance to make
a run in the world.

This, as said above, was Nagarjuna’s first response to the Logicians’ accusation that a
philosophy of emptiness is fundamentally incoherent. There is however, Nagarjuna
famously asserts, another pettito principii in the Nyaya charge that the thesis “all
things are empty and lack a fixed nature” is incoherent. The statement “all things are
empty” is actually, Nagarjuna says, not a formal philosophical thesis in the first
place! According to the Nyaya rules of viable logical argument, the first step in
proving an assertion true is the declared statement of the putative fact as a thesis in
the argument (pratijna). Now in order for something to qualify as a formal
philosophical thesis, a statement must be a fact about a particular object or state of
knowable affairs in the world, and it is a matter of doctrine for Nyaya that all
particular objects or states of affairs are classifiable into their categories of
substances, qualities, and activities. Nagarjuna however does not buy into this set of
ontological categories in the first place, and so the Logician is being disingenuous in
trying to covertly pull him into the ontological game with this charge that the idea of
emptiness is metaphysically unintelligible. The Brahminical Logician is insisting that
no person can engage in a philosophical discussion without buying, at least
minimally, into a theory of essences and issues surrounding how to categorize
essences. It is exactly this very point, Nagarjuna demurs, that is eminently debatable!
But since the Logician will not pay Nagarjuna the courtesy of discussion on
Nagarjuna’s terms, the Buddhist replies to them on their terms: “If my statement
(about emptiness) were a philosophical thesis, then it would indeed be flawed; but I
assert no thesis, and so the flaw is not mine.”
With the exception of his two major commentators four centuries later, this stance of
Nagarjuna satisfied no one in the Indian philosophical tradition, neither Brahmanas
nor fellow Buddhists. It was the stance of the kind of debater who styled himself
a vaitandika, a person who refutes rival philosophical positions while advocating no
thesis themselves. Despite all their other disagreements, Brahmanas and Buddhists
in following centuries did not consider such a stance to be truly philosophical, for
while a person who occupied it may be able to expose dubious theories, one could
never hope to learn the truth about the world and life from them. Such a person, it
was suspected is more likely a charlatan than a sage. Despite the title of his work
then, Nagarjuna’s attempt to call into “first question” theories of proof fell far short
of ending all disputes. However, Nagarjuna closes this controversial and much-
discussed work by reminding his readers of who he is. Paying reverence to the
Buddha, the teacher, he says, of interdependent causality and emptiness, Nagarjuna
tells his audience that “nothing will prevail for those in whom emptiness will not
prevail, while everything will prevail for whom emptiness prevails.” This is a
reiteration of Nagarjuna’s commitment that theory and praxis are not a partnership
in which only through the former’s justification is the latter redeemed. The goal of
practice is after all transformation, not fixity, and so if one insists on marrying
philosophy to practice, philosophical reflection cannot be beholden to the
unchanging, eternal essences of customary epistemology and metaphysics

5. The New Buddhist Space and Mission

There may be some extent to which the age-old debate as to whether Nagarjuna was
a devotee of the traditional Theravada or Classical Buddhism or the Mahayana (Great
Vehicle) sect turns on the authorship of the two letters attributed to him. Very little
can be gleaned from the other works in Nagarjuna’s philosophical corpus that would
lend much support to the supposition that the second-century scholar was even
much aware of Great Vehicle doctrines or personages, even though the ground-
breaking notion of emptiness was the one which Mahayana fixed on as its central
idea. The two “ethical epistles” addressed to the historical Satvahana liege
Gautamiputra Satkarni (r. ca. 166-196) would certainly give Nagarjuna a plausible
historical locus. With their abundant references to the supremacy of the Great
Vehicle teachings, they would also depict Nagarjuna as unequivocally within this
movement. However, the non-existence of original Sanskrit versions of
the Suhrllekha (To a Good Friend) and Ratnavali (Precious Garland), as well as their
obviously heavy redactions in the Tibetan and Chinese editions, make any definitely
reliable attribution of them to Nagarjuna practically impossible.
The familiar distinctions between the Classical and Great Vehicles are well-worn; the
conservative scriptural and historical literalism of the former pitted against the
mythological revisionism of the latter, the idealization of the reclusive ascetic
pursuing his own perfection in the former as opposed to the angelic and socially
engaged bodhisattva of the latter. Nagarjuna’s other works are filled with honorific
passages dedicated only to the Buddha himself, while the two epistles abound in
praise of the virtues of angelic bodhisattva-hood, though even these are found amidst
passages extolling the perfections of the eightfold path and the nobility of the four
truths. Whatever Nagarjuna’s precise sectarian identification, he never loses sight of
the understanding that the practice of Buddhism is a new sort of human vehicle, a
vehicle meant not to carry people from one realm to another realm, but a vehicle
which could make people anew in the only realm where they have always lived.
Nagarjuna’s letters to the war-mongering Gautamiputra are somewhat conspicuous
for the relative paucity of advice on the actual art of statecraft. Long sermons in  To a
Good Friend on the correct interpretation of subtle Mahayana teachings are
intermingled with catechism-like presentations of the excellence of monastic virtues,
and these are so numerous that even the author concedes toward the end of the
correspondence that the king should keep as many of the enumerated precepts as he
can, since keeping all of them would tax the fortitude of the most seasoned monk.
But with all of these somewhat disconnected sections of the letter which even
internally are wont to jump from one topic to another, a motif emerges which does
 seem to cohere with the more thematic approaches to the idea of emptiness in the
other works, and that motif is the primacy of virtuous conduct and practice, which
takes on even a higher and more relevant role than the achievements of wisdom.
This motif is surely significant, given the fact that the Classical and Great Vehicles,
while both submitting that ultimate wisdom (prajna) and compassion (karuna) were
the two paramount virtues, argued over which one was highest, the Theravada opting
for wisdom and Mahayana for compassion. In these epistles, while Nagarjuna warns
that the intentions behind moral acts must be informed by wisdom lest the benefits
of the deed be spoiled, he stresses repeatedly the importance of steadfastly ethical
conduct. Dharma or behavior upright in the eyes of the Buddha’s law of existence has
two aspects, one which is characterized by meditative non-action and the other
through positive action, and the road to Buddhahood, he says, passes through the
positive action of the bodhisattva. For even though dharma  is subtle and hard to
comprehend, particularly where the notion of emptiness is involved and so easily
misunderstood, its practice through the cultivation of moral intentions and attitudes
will lead unerringly through the tangle of doctrinal debates. Beyond this general
advice, which would apply to any monk or nun, counsel is given to the king
that dharma as positive ethical conduct is also “the best policy,” for when one socially
promotes adherence to ethical conduct, justice will prevail in the kingdom and
benefits will accrue to all, benefits which rivals will envy beyond any transient
material wealth and false senses of power.
In the worlds of the present and the future, it is after all only actions which matter. It
is indeed the very physicality of deeds which leads to the accumulation of either
meritorious or detrimental karma, and so one’s fate lies squarely in ones own hands.
But through acts performed in the field of samsara, all conceivable changes are
possible. A prince can become a pauper, either willingly, like the Buddha, or
unwillingly. Young men become old, beauty morphs into decrepitude, friendship
descends into enmity. It is this piercing contingency of samsara which is so often
experienced with such anguish. But, Nagarjuna quickly reminds his readers, all these
transformations can just as easily go in the opposite direction, with material poverty
blossoming into spiritual riches, fathers reborn as sons and mothers as young wives,
and the wounds of conflict sutured with the threads of reconciliation. Interdependent
causality and the emptiness which change depends on mean that things can always
go either way, and so which way they in fact go depends intimately on one’s own
deeds. And this leads one to grasp that the proper site of practice for the Buddhist
cannot be just the monastery, removed as it tries to be from the machinations of
state, economy, social class and the other tumultuous and sundry affairs of suffering
beings. As there is no difference between samsara and nirvana  owing to the emptiness
and constantly changing nature of both, so the change which a Buddhist effects upon
herself and those around her is a change in the world, and this constant and
purposeful change is the rightful mission of Buddhism. With his own peculiar and
visionary interpretation of the concept of the emptiness of all things then, Nagarjuna
has woven an anti-metaphysical and epistemological stance together with an ethics
of action which was, true to its own implications, to transform the self-understanding
of the Buddhist tradition for millennia to come.

6. References and Further Reading

Nagarjuna’s Works Addressed to Buddhists
 Mulamadhyamakakarika, (Fundamental Verses on the  Middle Way) translated as The Philosophy
of the Middle Way by David J. Kalapuhana, SUNY Press, Albany, 1986.
 Sunyatasaptati, (Seventy Verses on Emptiness) translated by Cristian Lindtner, Nagarjuniana:
Studies in the Writings and Philosophy of Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1987, 35-69.
 Yuktisastika, (Sixty Verses on Reasoning) translated by Christian Lindtner, Nagarjuniana: Studies
in the Writings and Philosophy of Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1987, 103-19.
 Pratityasamutpadahrdaya, (The Constituents of Dependent Arising) translated by L. Jamspal and
Peter Della Santina in Journal of the Department of Buddhist Studies, University of Delhi, 2:1, 1974, 29-
32.
 Bodhisambharaka, (Preparation for Enlightenment) translated by Christian
Lindtner, Nagarjuniana: Studies in the Writings and Philosophy of Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag,
Copenhagen, 1987, 228-48.
Nagarjuna’s Works Addressed to Brahminical Systems
 Vigrahavyavartani, (The End of Disputes) translated as The Dialectical Method of Nagarjuna  by
Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1978.
 Vaidalyaprakarana, (Pulverizing the Categories) translated as Madhyamika Dialectics  by Ole
Holten Pind, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1987.
Nagarjuna’s Ethical Epistles
 Suhrllekha, (To a Good Friend) translated as Nagarjuna’s Letter to King Gautamiputra  by L.
Jamspal, N.S. Chophel and Peter Della Santina, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1978.
 Ratnavali, (Precious Garland) translated as The Precious Garland and the Song of the Four
Mindfulnesses by Jeffrey Hopkins, Lati Rimpoche and Anne Klein, Vikas Publishing, Delhi, 1975.