None of his books was put into Chinese, and for some three centuries after he wrote, Indian philosophers rarely took them up. Candrakīrti's work gained its wide influence later, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in Kashmir and in Tibet. Tibetan scholars then named him the founder of Prāsaṅgika, a reading of the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna that became the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism, and his Madhyamakāvatāra, an introduction to the Middle Way, is still the main textbook on the subject in most Tibetan monastic colleges.
The thought he defended was Nāgārjuna's. That monk of the second or third century, the founder of Madhyamaka, the school of the middle way, had argued that nothing has a nature of its own, svabhāva: things exist only in dependence on causes and conditions. Candrakīrti asked how a follower should defend that claim, and his answer is what he is remembered for. A follower of Madhyamaka, he argued, has no thesis of his own to prove. He takes up an opponent's position and draws out what follows from it until the opponent has nothing left to say. Philosophy, on this view, does not replace false beliefs with true ones; it loosens the habit of clinging to beliefs at all.
That answer put him against another reader of Nāgārjuna. Bhāviveka, an earlier commentator on Nāgārjuna's verses, held that a Mādhyamika, a follower of Madhyamaka, should state a thesis and support it with a formal proof, in the manner of the Buddhist logician Dignāga. Bhāviveka faulted a still earlier commentator, Buddhapālita, for only showing that rival views led to absurd consequences. In the first chapter of the Prasannapadā, his own commentary on the verses, Candrakīrti defended Buddhapālita. A formal proof, he argued, needs both sides to agree on what its terms refer to. A realist opponent holds that those things have natures of their own, so a Mādhyamika who argues on those terms has already conceded the point at issue. He called Bhāviveka a logician rather than a true Mādhyamika. Against Dignāga's school he asked what grounds the means of knowledge themselves. Against Yogācāra, the school that treated the mind as more real than its objects, he argued that consciousness is as empty as anything it perceives.
He did not, however, dismiss ordinary experience. Things do arise from conditions, and people do speak of a self; this is conventional truth, and Candrakīrti held that it needs no theory beyond what the world already agrees on. In the ultimate sense, he argued, nothing arises at all. Even so, he described conventional truth as a screen that blocks the view of the ultimate.
Of his life little is certain. Historians place him in the early seventh century. The Tibetan historians Bu ston and Tāranātha, writing many centuries later, tell that he was born in south India, studied under Kamalabuddhi, a pupil of Buddhapālita, and became abbot of Nālandā, the Buddhist monastic university in what is now Bihar. The tradition also tells of a debate at Nālandā with Candragomin, a defender of Yogācāra, that lasted seven years. Scholars distinguish him from later authors who wrote under the same name, among them a tantric commentator.
The Sanskrit of the Prasannapadā survived, and Louis de La Vallée Poussin, a European scholar of Buddhism, edited it between 1903 and 1913. The Madhyamakāvatāra reached most readers through the Tibetan translation that Patsab Nyima Drakpa, a Tibetan translator working in Kashmir, made in the late eleventh century. Apart from scattered quotations, its Sanskrit survives in a single palm-leaf manuscript of the verses and Candrakīrti's own commentary, kept at the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Li Xuezhu, a Chinese scholar of Sanskrit, published a critical edition of the verses of its sixth chapter in 2015.