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The Dispeller of Disputes
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In seventy verses with his own prose commentary, Nāgārjuna answers objections to the claim that everything is empty, including the charge that the claim undermines itself. A focused study on Nāgārjuna reads it in Jan Westerhoff’s translation.
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Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 8 of 8
Does the argument undermine itself?
If the claim that everything is empty is itself empty, can it refute anything? The lesson reads the Vigrahavyāvartanī’s dilemma and Nāgārjuna’s replies, compares three readings of “I do not have any thesis” and ends with the study’s final checkpoint.
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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?