Madhyamaka

Madhyamaka (“the Middle Way school”; its followers are Mādhyamikas) is the school of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy founded by Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE). Its central teaching is emptiness (śūnyatā, see Śūnyatā (Emptiness)): all things — persons, objects, mental events, causes, even the Buddha and nirvāṇa — are empty of intrinsic existence (svabhāva), because they exist only in dependence on causes, parts and concepts. This is the “middle way” between the extremes of eternalism, which takes things to exist in themselves, and nihilism, which takes them not to exist at all. Madhyamaka is famous for its relentless dialectic, which reduces every philosophical position to absurdity, and for the doctrine of the two truths. It became the dominant philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism and is studied today by philosophers as one of the most radical critiques of metaphysics ever made.

History

Madhyamaka begins with Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”) and his other works — the Vigrahavyāvartanī (“Averting the Arguments”), the Śūnyatāsaptati, the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā and the Ratnāvalī. His disciple Āryadeva (3rd century) wrote the Catuḥśataka (“Four Hundred Verses”). In the sixth century, a dispute arose between Buddhapālita, who held that a Mādhyamika should only expose the absurd consequences (prasaṅga) of an opponent’s views, and Bhāviveka (Bhāvaviveka), who held that a Mādhyamika may put forward independent (svatantra) arguments for emptiness in proper logical form. Candrakīrti (c. 600–650) defended Buddhapālita in his Prasannapadā commentary and his Madhyamakāvatāra, and Tibetan scholars later labelled the two approaches Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika. Later Indian Mādhyamikas, notably Śāntarakṣita (8th century), combined Madhyamaka with Yogācāra; Śāntideva (8th century) wove it into a poem of the bodhisattva path. Śāntarakṣita and his student Kamalaśīla took the tradition to Tibet, where Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) made Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka the highest philosophical view of the Gelug school.

The teaching

Svabhāva and its absence

The Abhidharma schools had analysed persons and things into ultimate constituents, the dharmas, each with its own nature (svabhāva). Nāgārjuna argued that this was a mistake. If something had svabhāva — existed by its own nature, independently — it could not arise from causes, change, or cease, for it would not depend on anything. But everything we experience arises from causes and changes. Therefore nothing has svabhāva. Everything is empty. Emptiness does not mean that things do not exist; it means that they exist only dependently — on causes and conditions, on their parts, and on the concepts by which we designate them.

Emptiness is dependent origination

The key verse of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (24.18):

Whatever is dependently arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way.

Emptiness and dependent origination are the same thing described in two ways. And because emptiness is not a thing but the absence of intrinsic existence, emptiness itself is empty — it too exists only dependently, as a concept. “The victorious ones have said that emptiness is the relinquishing of all views. Those for whom emptiness is a view are incurable” (13.8). Emptiness is a medicine that must itself be expelled once it has done its work.

The dialectic

Nāgārjuna’s method is to examine a concept — causation, motion, the self, time, the agent and action — and show that every way of understanding it as intrinsically real leads to contradiction. His most famous argument concerns causation: “Neither from itself, nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause does anything whatever, anywhere, arise” (1.1). If an effect came from itself, it would already exist and arising would be redundant; if from something other, anything could come from anything; both together combine the faults of each; and arising without cause is absurd. So causation, understood as relation between intrinsically existing things, is impossible. Similarly with motion: the path already traversed is not being traversed, the path not yet traversed is not being traversed, and there is no third path between them on which motion occurs (chapter 2) — an argument often compared with Zeno’s paradoxes.

He often uses the tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi): a thing exists, does not exist, both, or neither — and rejects all four, showing that none applies to what is empty.

The two truths

How can a Mādhyamika talk about anything — including the Buddha’s teaching? Nāgārjuna answers with the two truths (24.8–10): conventional truth (saṃvṛti-satya), the truth of ordinary experience and language, in which there are persons, tables, causes and effects; and ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya), their emptiness. “Without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be taught; without understanding the ultimate, nirvāṇa is not attained.” The conventional is not false; it is true in its domain, and it is the only way to the ultimate.

Saṃsāra and nirvāṇa

The most startling conclusion is that “there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa” (25.19–20): both are empty. Nirvāṇa is not a place to escape to, but the end of grasping at the world as intrinsically real. This idea deeply influenced Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, where the identity of the everyday and the awakened became central.

Critics

Opponents — Naiyāyikas, Mīmāṃsakas, Yogācāras and even other Buddhists — accused Madhyamaka of nihilism: if everything is empty, nothing exists, and morality, karma and the path collapse. Nāgārjuna’s answer (chapter 24) is that it is the opposite: only because things are empty can they arise, change and be transformed; if suffering had svabhāva, it could never end. Opponents also argued that his own arguments, if empty, have no force. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, Nāgārjuna replies that his words are empty, like an illusory man who stops another illusory man — they work conventionally — and that “I have no thesis” (nāsti ca mama pratijñā).

Comparisons

Madhyamaka has been compared with Zeno’s paradoxes, Sextus Empiricus’s scepticism, Hume’s critique of causation, Kant’s antinomies, Hegel’s dialectic, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic philosophy, Derrida’s deconstruction, and process philosophy. Modern scholars — T. R. V. Murti (The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 1955), Jay Garfield, Mark Siderits, Jan Westerhoff — have translated it into the language of contemporary metaphysics.

In conversation

The single key sentence is Nāgārjuna’s: whatever arises dependently is empty — and that is the middle way. Emptiness doesn’t mean nothing exists; it means nothing exists on its own.