The Philosopher of Emptiness

Nagarjuna, who probably lived around the second century CE, is the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school and by wide agreement the most influential Buddhist thinker after the Buddha himself, revered across the Mahayana traditions as a bodhisattva and sometimes called a second Buddha. His central work, the Mulamadhyamakakarika (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), sets out with relentless logical rigour the doctrine of emptiness (shunyata): the teaching that nothing whatever possesses an independent, self-existent nature, that all things arise only in dependence on other things and on conditions, and that this holds even of the categories the Buddhist tradition itself had come to treat as ultimate. His method is not to assert a positive metaphysics of his own but to take up each proposed way that things might exist, as caused, as uncaused, as one, as many, as arising, as ceasing, and to show that each collapses into contradiction, so that all fixed positions dissolve.