Nāgārjuna

If nothing has a nature of its own, his critics objected, then the Buddha's teaching has nothing to stand on: no suffering to end, no path out of it, no nirvana at the end of the path. Nāgārjuna wrote that objection into his own verses to answer it. The charge that he emptied the world into nothing was first made in ancient India, and his answer to it is the claim he is remembered for. Things are empty, he argued, because they exist only in dependence on their causes, their parts and the names that pick them out, and that dependence is what lets them arise, change and end. A world of things fixed by a nature of their own, svabhāva, could do none of that.

His first opponents were fellow Buddhists. The Abhidharma schools, the scholars who had turned the Buddha's teaching into a system, had broken experience down into its smallest elements and credited each one with a nature of its own; the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy names the Sarvāstivāda and the Sautrāntika among the schools he targeted. Behind him stood the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, a body of Mahāyāna scripture that declared all things empty. Nāgārjuna gave that claim its arguments, taking up causation, motion, the self, time and nirvana one by one and showing that each, taken as self-standing, ends in contradiction. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, seventy verses with his own prose commentary, he answered objections from fellow Buddhists and from the Nyāya, the Hindu school of logic.

Of the man himself little is certain. Historians place him between about 150 and 250 CE, a monk who lived mainly in southern India, and Joseph Walser, a historian of Buddhism, argues that he advised a king of the Sātavāhana dynasty. Two letters of advice to a king are ascribed to him, the Ratnāvalī and the Suhṛllekha, known in English as Letter to a Friend. Scholars disagree over which other works are his, partly because more than one author bore the name. The tradition tells more. A biography translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva around 405 makes him a Brahmin by birth and the greatest bodhisattva since the Buddha. Later Tibetan accounts tell that the nāgas, serpent beings who live beneath the waters, gave him the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras from their realm, that he lived six hundred years and that he gave his head to a prince.

His verses, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā or The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, founded Madhyamaka, the school of the middle way. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy records unanimous agreement that he is the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha. Kumārajīva put the verses into Chinese in 409. In Tibet, where he is called the second Buddha, a reading of his thought known as Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka became the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism.