Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths

A loaf of bread depends on flour, water, an oven and a baker. A promise depends on two people and a shared language. Almost everything we know depends on something else. Yet it is tempting to think that somewhere, underneath all this dependence, there must be things that are what they are on their own. This study reads a philosopher who argued that there are none, and asks what his arguments leave standing: can things exist, change and matter without possessing an independent nature of their own?

Nāgārjuna’s verses are the founding text of Madhyamaka, the Buddhist philosophical tradition whose followers describe their view as a “middle way”. Almost nothing about his life is secure. Legendary accounts exist, but scholars agree on hardly any details. His translators Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura date him to about 150 CE. Jan Westerhoff, whose reconstruction of his arguments this study also uses, thinks some time in the first three centuries CE most likely, and reports one scholar’s tentative suggestion that another of his works was written between 170 and 200 CE, in the region of present-day Amarāvatī in India.

His best-known work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), is a set of short verses in twenty-seven chapters. Earlier Mahāyāna scriptures had declared that everything is empty, meaning that nothing has an intrinsic nature, but, as the translators put it, they did not defend the claim. Nāgārjuna set out to supply the arguments, addressing fellow Buddhists who held that the world is built from simple elements that do have natures of their own. The verses were written to be memorized and explained by a teacher, so they are compressed and often obscure on their own. We read them the way they were meant to be read: with commentary.

The eight lessons proceed in three stages:

• Things and their changes. “What would it mean to exist on one’s own?”; “What makes a condition a cause?”; “Where does the going happen?”
• Persons and action. “Is the self its parts, or their owner?”; “Who acts, and who answers for it?”
• Truth, emptiness and challenge. “What is left of the two truths?”; “Is emptiness empty too?”; “Does the argument undermine itself?”

Nāgārjuna’s conclusions can sound startling: there is no going, no cause, no self. They sound less absurd once we see a distinction his opponents themselves relied on, between what is conventionally true, the ordinary claims that reliably guide action, and what is ultimately true, the claims about how reality is independently of our interests and concepts. His arguments deny that anything is ultimately real in the opponents’ demanding sense, and each lesson asks what still works conventionally, as walkers still reach the top of a hill. The sixth lesson asks what becomes of the distinction itself.

Verses are cited by chapter and verse: 15.2 means chapter 15, verse 2. The lessons quote the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā in Siderits and Katsura’s translation from the Sanskrit, which is guided by four classical Indian commentaries. Lesson 8 also reads another of Nāgārjuna’s works, the Vigrahavyāvartanī, in Westerhoff’s translation, and meets one verse of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā there as that work quotes it. Westerhoff’s books serve as one modern philosopher’s reconstruction, and the lessons say when a reading is his. Where interpreters disagree in ways that change the argument, the lessons present more than one reading. The page “Terms and sources” explains the translations and the key terms, including why the guided course’s short lesson on emptiness uses a different translation.

This study does not survey the Buddhist schools, give an account of liberation or offer any practice or meditation instruction, and no single interpretation in it speaks for all of Madhyamaka. The aim is understanding, with no assent required: a careful objection to Nāgārjuna shows that you have understood him as clearly as a defense does. Each lesson explains its terms as they become useful, and explanatory answers show how its exercise can be reasoned through; you may read them without first writing a response. Begin with the first lesson.