Does emptiness mean that nothing exists?

Can something depend on other things and still be real?

Picture a footbridge over a stream. Its usefulness depends on timber, supports, construction and the banks it joins, and when a rotten plank is replaced, the crossing becomes safer. None of this makes the bridge imaginary; its dependence is part of how it works.

The bridge raises a question for Madhyamaka, the Buddhist tradition associated with Nāgārjuna, who probably lived around the second century CE: if things depend on conditions, what could it mean for them to possess a nature entirely their own? His Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, pursues that question through arguments with opponents. We will concentrate on chapter 24, with a brief clarification from chapter 15. [1] [2]

Lesson 7 introduced dependent arising, the idea that experiences and suffering occur through conditions, and not-self, the refusal to identify a secure self in the changing constituents of experience. Nāgārjuna carries the inquiry further, to the status of the very things through which we explain experience. [2]

What emptiness is empty of

The crucial term is svabhāva, here translated as intrinsic nature. It means more than a recognizable feature: a bridge can have a familiar shape without existing independently. To have svabhāva in the strong sense would be to have one’s being and identity independently of anything else. [2]

Verses 15.1–2 ask how a nature produced by causes could be intrinsic in that sense. Whatever is made through conditions owes its existence to them, so calling it independent would undo the very explanation just given. [1]

Śūnyatā, emptiness, names the absence of that intrinsic nature. On the interpretation followed here, emptiness leaves room for things to exist through causes, relationships and the ways we identify them. The bridge illustrates dependence, but it cannot establish that everything is empty; Nāgārjuna has to defend that wider claim by argument. [2]

Would emptiness make change impossible?

Chapter 24 opens with an opponent’s warning. If everything is empty, the opponent argues, nothing could arise or cease, and the Buddhist account of suffering, its origin, its cessation and the path would collapse. These are the four noble truths we met in lesson 7. Why cultivate a path if no one can suffer or be freed? [1]

Those opening verses voice an objection; they are not Nāgārjuna announcing that nothing exists. The opponent ties being real to having an intrinsic nature, so if Nāgārjuna removes that nature, the opponent sees nothing left to support teaching or action. The challenge is serious. An account that made all conduct pointless would also undermine its own purpose.

Nāgārjuna’s reply turns the argument around. In 24.20–24, it is intrinsic nature that would make arising, cessation and cultivation impossible. Suffering that existed independently could not depend on causes, or end when they changed, and a path fixed in its own nature could never be developed. [1]

Lesson 2’s distinction between premises and conclusion helps here, because what Nāgārjuna tests is a premise: that whatever exists must exist independently. If that premise makes the changes required by the four truths impossible, it threatens the very thing the opponent set out to defend. That, in reconstruction, is the direction of the argument, and a critic could still challenge Nāgārjuna’s account of intrinsic nature.

Why words and ordinary distinctions remain

Verses 24.8–10 distinguish conventional truth from ultimate truth, and insist that the ultimate cannot be taught without the conventional. Jay Garfield interprets the distinction as one between ordinary dependent reality and its emptiness of intrinsic nature. These are not two separate worlds, with a hidden substance behind the visible one. [1] [2]

On this reading, the statement that the bridge is damaged can be true and useful without naming any independent essence called Bridge; the bridge’s construction, condition and use give the statement its point. Calling rotten timber safe does not make it safe. Depending on language and convention does not put every description on an equal footing.

The same holds for philosophical teaching. A sentence can correct a misunderstanding even though its meaning depends on speakers, shared usage and a context. If words needed a wholly independent meaning, communication could never get started. Conventional discourse is how an explanation reaches anyone at all. [2]

Nor should emptiness be turned into a new invisible substance holding everything up. Garfield stresses that emptiness is itself empty: the bridge’s lack of independence is not another independent thing standing behind it. The argument challenges the demand for any such foundation. [2]

What this argument leaves open

Nāgārjuna connects emptiness with dependent arising in 24.18–19, and this lesson has followed a reading that preserves conventional existence while denying intrinsic nature. Interpreters disagree about how to understand his refusal of philosophical positions and the role his arguments play. The account here gives us a position to examine. It does not settle those disputes, and it does not speak for all Buddhism. [1] [2]

A critic might ask whether a thing could have a stable defining character and still depend on causes. Whoever makes that proposal must then say what it means. Does it give up the independence Nāgārjuna is attacking, or keep that independence and inherit its problems? The bridge makes the question easier to grasp, but it can’t answer it for every kind of thing.

Pause and try

Someone says, “If anger is empty, the person I hurt was never really hurt, so there is nothing to repair.” Explain the mistaken step. How does the possibility of change enter Nāgārjuna’s reply?

Read an explanatory answer

The mistaken step is the move from lacking intrinsic nature to having no effects or significance, which is exactly the move the interpretation followed here rejects. Anger and harm arise through conditions and have consequences, and it is their dependence that makes change intelligible: an independent, unalterable condition could not be changed. That is why emptiness does not cancel responsibility. It supplies neither a complete ethical theory nor a guarantee that any particular harm can be repaired.

Knowledge and a changed life: an optional checkpoint

This module has asked how understanding might change the way we live, and its answers have stayed distinct. Knowing the self, recognizing suffering, restraining injury, testing evidence, distinguishing consciousness from mind and interpreting sacred words are different proposals, not interchangeable names for one path.

Try connecting two of the module’s concepts to that question. A learner says, “Mīmāṃsā and Madhyamaka both distrust ordinary experience, so both ask us to accept an unseen reality.” Use dharma and emptiness to improve the comparison. Then leave one question open, and name one limit of the sources we have read. This exercise is optional.

Read a checkpoint response

Neither tradition asks us to distrust experience across the board. Mīmāṃsā assigns the Veda authority concerning dharma, what is to be done, while allowing perception to do its ordinary work. In the Madhyamaka reading followed here, emptiness denies intrinsic nature; it is not a hidden reality to believe in. Both connect an account of knowledge with conduct, but they defend different claims. Two questions stay open: how does a source of knowledge earn its authority, and does dependent reality need an intrinsic foundation? Our evidence consists of selected passages in particular translations and interpretations. Śaṅkara’s later commentary does not transparently disclose the earliest Vedānta, and our Nāgārjuna translation follows a much later Tibetan interpreter. A useful comparison keeps those limits in view.

Carry this forward

Here the module ends, though the South Asian debates do not: later lessons return to them. The next lesson, “Learning to become humane,” moves to early China and to selected passages of the Analects on relationships, cultivation and ritual.

Sources and limits

[1] Nāgārjuna, Verses from the Centre, Stephen Batchelor’s romanization and literal English translation of the Tibetan text, Sharpham College, April 2000, for the verses on intrinsic nature, emptiness and the two truths. The translation’s preface, chapter 15 and chapter 24 were read in full. The argument used here focuses on 15.1–2 and 24.1–10, 16–24 and 38–40. A number such as 24.18 means chapter 24, verse 18.

This is Batchelor’s preparatory literal translation, not his separately published poetic version. He identifies Tsongkhapa’s fourteenth-century commentary as his main interpretive authority. His “essence,” “contingent emergence” and “ambiguous truths” correspond in the lesson to intrinsic nature, dependent arising and conventional truth, explained with the help of Garfield’s account.

The online transcription consulted flags a Tibetan reading issue at 24.22. The lesson claims no resolution of that issue, no verification against page images and no independent collation of the Tibetan or Sanskrit. Selected Tsongkhapa comments appended to the translation were read, but not the full commentary.

[2] Jay L. Garfield, “Nāgārjuna,” chapter 31 in History of Indian Philosophy, edited by Purushottama Bilimoria, Routledge, 2018. Four sections were read: “Nāgārjuna’s life, times and corpus,” “Nāgārjuna’s philosophical context,” “Outline of Nāgārjuna’s philosophical views” and “Nāgārjuna’s major philosophical works.” The lesson uses his account of dependent conventional reality and emptiness while keeping the interpretive disagreement he describes. His approximate reconstruction of Nāgārjuna’s life is not a secure biography. The works he cites were not read independently, and neither the chapter’s remaining sections nor the book was read in full.

The footbridge, the anger exercise and the checkpoint case are original teaching examples. The checkpoint recalls the accounts already given in lessons 6–11 and claims no fresh research into them. The comparison offers no practice instructions, no personal diagnosis and no account of all Mahāyāna traditions.