Nāgārjuna

Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) is the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself, revered across the Mahāyāna world as “the second Buddha”. He founded the Madhyamaka (“Middle Way”) school, and his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”) is one of the most rigorous, most compressed and most influential works of philosophy ever written. His central teaching is emptiness (śūnyatā): all things — persons, objects, causes, even the Buddha and nirvāṇa — are empty of svabhāva, intrinsic and independent existence, because everything exists only in dependence on other things. Through a relentless dialectic he showed that every attempt to describe reality as made of self-existent entities ends in contradiction; and he concluded that “there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa”. His thought shaped all later Mahāyāna Buddhism — in India, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan — and is studied today alongside Zeno, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein.

Life

Almost nothing certain is known about Nāgārjuna’s life. He seems to have lived in South India, in the Āndhra region, probably during the Sātavāhana dynasty; his Ratnāvalī (“Precious Garland”) is addressed to a Sātavāhana king, perhaps Gautamīputra Yajñaśrī. The great Buddhist site of Nāgārjunakoṇḍa in Andhra Pradesh bears his name, and Amarāvatī, with its famous stūpa, is associated with him by tradition.

The hagiographies — Chinese, from Kumārajīva’s biography (c. 405), and Tibetan, from much later — are full of legend. He was born a Brahmin; as a youth he learned the art of invisibility and used it to slip into the king’s harem with friends; when the friends were caught and executed, he renounced the world. He mastered all the Buddhist scriptures and found them incomplete. The nāgas, serpent-beings who live beneath the sea, took him to their palace and gave him the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, which the Buddha had entrusted to them until a person capable of understanding them should appear — hence his name, “Nāga-Arjuna”. He is also credited in Tibetan tradition with alchemical and medical knowledge and a lifespan of six hundred years; and in Indian tantric tradition a later Nāgārjuna appears as an alchemist and siddha, with whom he was often confused.

Works

Scholars agree that Nāgārjuna wrote the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), 450 verses in 27 chapters. Other works widely accepted as his include the Vigrahavyāvartanī (“Averting the Arguments”), a reply to critics, especially Naiyāyikas; the Śūnyatāsaptati (“Seventy Verses on Emptiness”); the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (“Sixty Verses on Reasoning”); the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa (“Pulverising”), an attack on Nyāya’s sixteen categories; and the Ratnāvalī, a letter of advice to a king on ethics, politics and the bodhisattva path, and the Suhṛllekha (“Letter to a Friend”). Many other works were attributed to him later.

Thought

Against svabhāva

The Abhidharma philosophers had analysed persons and things into ultimate constituents, the dharmas, each with its own intrinsic nature (svabhāva). Nāgārjuna argued that the very idea of svabhāva is incoherent. A thing with svabhāva would exist by itself, independent of causes and conditions. But then it could not arise (arising requires causes), could not change (change would alter its nature), and could not cease. The world of experience is a world of arising, change and cessation. So nothing in it has svabhāva; everything is empty. See Śūnyatā (Emptiness).

Emptiness is dependent origination

The key verse (MMK 24.18): “Whatever is dependently arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way.” Emptiness is not a void behind things, not nothingness, not a substance; it is simply the fact that things exist in dependence — on causes, on parts, on concepts. Emptiness and dependent origination (Pratītyasamutpāda (Dependent Origination)) are the same truth. And emptiness itself is empty: it is not an absolute to be grasped.

The dialectic

The MMK examines one concept after another — causation, motion, the senses, the aggregates, the elements, desire, the conditioned, action and agent, fire and fuel, the self, time, the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, nirvāṇa — and shows that each, understood as intrinsically real, leads to contradiction. Its first verse states the conclusion about causation: “Neither from itself, nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause, does anything whatever, anywhere, arise.” Its second chapter, on motion, argues that “the already-gone-over is not being gone over; the not-yet-gone-over is not being gone over; apart from these, there is no being-gone-over” — a paradox in the spirit of Zeno. The chapter on fire and fuel shows that fire and fuel cannot be either identical or different; so too the self and the aggregates. The method uses the tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi): of anything, one may say it is, it is not, it both is and is not, it neither is nor is not — and Nāgārjuna rejects all four, since each presupposes svabhāva.

Two truths

The Buddha taught by means of two truths: the conventional (saṃvṛti) and the ultimate (paramārtha). “Without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be taught; without understanding the ultimate, nirvāṇa is not attained” (24.10). The conventional world — persons, causes, ethics, the path — is not denied; it is true in its own domain. What is denied is that it has a deeper, self-existent foundation.

Saṃsāra and nirvāṇa

“There is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa; there is not the slightest difference between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra. The limit of nirvāṇa is the limit of saṃsāra; there is not even the subtlest difference between them” (25.19–20). Nirvāṇa is not another place but the end of grasping at this one as intrinsically real.

“I have no thesis”

When critics argued that his own words, if empty, have no power to refute anything, Nāgārjuna replied in the Vigrahavyāvartanī: “If I had any thesis, that fault would be mine. But I have no thesis (nāsti ca mama pratijñā), so the fault is not mine” (29). His words, like everything, are empty but effective — like a magically created man who stops another magically created man.

Ethics and politics

The Ratnāvalī shows another side of Nāgārjuna: a practical adviser who urges a king to build hospitals, rest houses and schools, to provide for the blind, the sick and the poor, to free prisoners after a short time, to treat criminals with compassion “as one would a disobedient son”, and to give generously — combining emptiness with the bodhisattva’s compassion.

Influence

Nāgārjuna’s followers — Āryadeva, Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti, Śāntideva, Śāntarakṣita — made Madhyamaka the dominant Mahāyāna philosophy in India. In China, Kumārajīva translated his works and the “Three Treatise” (Sanlun) school was based on them; Chan and Zen inherited his dialectic of emptiness and his identity of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. In Tibet, he is the root of all philosophical study. Among Hindu thinkers, Gauḍapāda‘s non-origination and Śaṅkara’s critics’ charge of “crypto-Buddhism” testify to his influence.

In modern philosophy, he has been read as a sceptic (like Sextus Empiricus), as a mystic, as an absolutist (T. R. V. Murti, who compared him with Kant), as an anti-metaphysical therapist (like Wittgenstein), as a deconstructionist (like Derrida), and as a metaphysician of relations. Jay Garfield’s translation of the MMK (1995) and Jan Westerhoff’s studies have made him a living presence in analytic philosophy.

Nāgārjuna in conversation

“Whatever arises dependently is empty” — and so emptiness is not nothing, but the condition of anything happening at all. His boldest line: there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa.