Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way

Text · 8 readings

Chapter 24 answers an objection about what emptiness means for change and liberation, and chapter 15 adds a clarification.

A focused study on Nāgārjuna reads much more of the work, in Siderits and Katsura’s translation from the Sanskrit.

All readings

8 readings · Title A–Z

Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 12
Does emptiness mean that nothing exists?
Nāgārjuna replies to the objection that emptiness would make change impossible: intrinsic nature, he argues, is what would rule change out. Denying intrinsic nature leaves ordinary distinctions, actions and their consequences in place.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 7 of 8
Is emptiness empty too?
Is emptiness the true nature behind things, or is it empty too? The lesson follows the image of emptiness as a medicine that must leave the body with the illness, and explains how “neither empty nor non-empty” can be read without contradiction.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 4 of 8
Is the self its parts, or their owner?
Is the self the changing body and mind, or something other than them? Nāgārjuna rejects both, models the person on fire and its fuel, and still refuses to conclude that there is no self.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 6 of 8
What is left of the two truths?
Once no ultimately real elements remain, what do conventional and ultimate truth mean? The lesson compares three readings of ultimate truth and asks whether conventional claims can still be right or wrong.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 2 of 8
What makes a condition a cause?
Nāgārjuna examines the four ways something might be thought to arise and argues that nothing with intrinsic nature could be produced. The lesson names the assumptions the argument relies on and compares two readings of causal connection.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 1 of 8
What would it mean to exist on one’s own?
Nāgārjuna argues that nothing has intrinsic nature, a nature it would have independently of everything else. The lesson states the Abhidharma view he opposes as a serious theory, then reads chapter 15’s middle path between “it exists” and “it does not exist”.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 3 of 8
Where does the going happen?
Going cannot be found on the path already traversed, the path not yet traversed or the path being traversed, Nāgārjuna argues. The lesson compares two readings of the argument and explains why “ultimately, there is no going” does not say that nothing moves.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 5 of 8
Who acts, and who answers for it?
If agent and action lack intrinsic nature, can anyone answer for what they do? The lesson follows chapter 17 on action and its results and weighs the charge that Madhyamaka is a form of nihilism.

Study this in sequence

Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths
Follow Nāgārjuna’s arguments that nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, from causes and motion to persons, the two truths and the charge that the argument undermines itself. Ask what the arguments leave standing: can things exist, change and matter without such a nature?