The Two Truths, and the Retrieval of the Sutras

The point of this dismantling is not nihilism, a misreading Nagarjuna explicitly rejects, but freedom: to see the emptiness of all things is to loosen the grasping that binds beings to suffering. He is famous for the teaching of the two truths, a conventional truth, on which ordinary language, causation and the practice of the path all validly operate, and an ultimate truth, in which no thing is found to have inherent existence, and for the striking further claim that emptiness itself is empty, not a hidden absolute standing behind appearances but simply the absence of independent existence, so that emptiness and dependent arising are two ways of saying the same thing.

Around the historical thinker gathered legend, most famously the story that Nagarjuna descended to the undersea realm of the nagas, the serpent-beings, and brought back the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, which the Buddha was said to have entrusted to them until the world was ready. Whatever the history, the tale marks his role as the one who brought the teaching of emptiness fully into the light. His thought is foundational for the Madhyamaka of Tibet and for the Chan and Zen, Tiantai and other traditions of East Asia.