Terms and sources

This page gathers the study’s key terms and explains the sources it reads. Each lesson explains its terms where they first matter, so you need not read this page first; come back to it when a word or a reference is unclear.

Key terms

Intrinsic nature (svabhāva). A nature a thing would have on its own, so that its having that nature is independent of facts about anything else. This is what Nāgārjuna denies that anything has. Jan Westerhoff calls this sense “substance-svabhāva” and distinguishes it from “essence-svabhāva”, a feature a thing cannot lose and still be the kind of thing it is, which the arguments leave untouched. Extrinsic nature (parabhāva) is a nature borrowed from something else, as a chariot’s shape is borrowed from its parts.

Emptiness (śūnyatā). The absence of intrinsic nature. To say that something is empty is to say that it lacks intrinsic nature, not that it does not exist. Whether emptiness is itself empty is the question of lesson 7.

Dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda). The Buddha’s teaching that things arise in dependence on conditions. Siderits and Katsura translate the term as “dependent origination”; the lessons use the guided course’s phrase except inside quotations.

Conventional and ultimate truth. A statement is conventionally true if acting on it reliably succeeds, as “this chariot will carry you to town” does. It is ultimately true if it describes reality as it is independently of our interests and concepts. Nāgārjuna’s opponents drew this distinction, and the study uses it from the first lesson to read every “there is no X” as “there is ultimately no X”. Lesson 6 asks what becomes of the distinction once nothing has intrinsic nature, and notes that reading the denials this way is itself an interpretation. The Sanskrit word Siderits and Katsura translate as “conventional” is saṃvṛti, which the classical commentator Candrakīrti, as they report him, explained in three ways.

Dharma. Written lowercase, a dharma is one of the simple, ultimately real elements that the Abhidharma schools thought would be left when analysis had taken every composite thing apart, such as a moment of consciousness or a particular occurrence of color. Capitalized, the Dharma is the Buddha’s teaching.

Abhidharma. The part of the Buddhist tradition that worked out, in systematic lists and analyses, the metaphysics behind the Buddha’s teachings. Nāgārjuna’s opponents are mostly Abhidharma thinkers.

Aggregates (skandha). The five groupings into which Buddhist texts analyze a person’s experience: form, feeling, perception, choices and consciousness. Translations of their names differ.

Appropriation (upādāna). Taking something as one’s own: regarding certain aggregates as “me” or “mine”. The aggregates so taken are called “the appropriated”, and the one supposed to do the taking is “the appropriator”.

Hypostatization (prapañca). Siderits and Katsura’s translation of a term they explain as “the tendency to reify what are actually just useful ways of talking”, that is, to treat a useful way of speaking as if it named a real thing.

The tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi). A list of four alternatives: that something is so, that it is not, that it both is and is not, and that it neither is nor is not. Buddhist texts use it in different ways. Nāgārjuna often rejects all four alternatives, and at 18.8 he appears to affirm all four as a “graded teaching”.

Two kinds of negation. Indian philosophers distinguished two kinds of negation, paryudāsa and prasajya, which Westerhoff interprets as “presupposition-preserving” and “presupposition-cancelling”. The first keeps the assumptions of what it denies; the second rejects them. Denying that a stone is angry could mean that it is calm, which keeps the assumption that stones have moods, or it could reject that assumption altogether. The difference matters for reading the tetralemma in lesson 7 and the opponent’s last move in lesson 8.

The sources

The primary text. Every quoted verse of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā comes from Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way, the translation with commentary by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Wisdom Publications, 2013), except one verse in lesson 8, quoted as it appears in Nāgārjuna’s own commentary on another work. They translate from the Sanskrit, using Louis de La Vallée Poussin’s edition and following Ye Shaoyong’s more recent edition where it differs substantially.

Verses are cited by chapter and verse: 15.2 means chapter 15, verse 2. Each verse has four quarters, labeled a to d, so “25ab” means the first half of verse 25. Page numbers refer to the printed edition.

Why a commentary matters. The verses were composed to be explained by a teacher, and they are hard to follow without one. Four classical Indian commentaries are known: the Akutobhayā, whose author is unknown, and those of Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti. They do not agree on everything, but they usually agree on what a verse argues and whom it is arguing against. Siderits and Katsura let the commentaries guide their translation. Words in square brackets are ones the commentaries show to be understood but the verse does not state. Their running commentary seldom goes beyond what at least one classical commentator says, and the lessons mark it as theirs. The translators admit that no one can be certain the commentaries reflect Nāgārjuna’s intentions. “But,” they add, “it would be presumptuous on our part to suppose that we knew better than they what Nāgārjuna really meant.”

A different translation in the guided course. The guided course’s short lesson on emptiness, “Does emptiness mean that nothing exists?”, quotes Stephen Batchelor’s literal translation of the Tibetan text of the same work. Batchelor names the fourteenth-century commentary of the Tibetan scholar Tsongkhapa as his main interpretive authority. The two translations reach the verses by different routes, from the Sanskrit through the Indian commentaries and from the Tibetan through Tsongkhapa, and they use different English words. Batchelor’s “essence”, “contingent emergence” and “ambiguous truths” correspond to Siderits and Katsura’s “intrinsic nature”, “dependent origination” and “conventional truth”. For the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā this study quotes Siderits and Katsura, not Batchelor, and leaves the shorter lesson and its sources as they are.

A modern reconstruction. Jan Westerhoff’s Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009) sets out Nāgārjuna’s arguments as philosophy to be assessed on its merits. Westerhoff aims to stay consistent with the commentarial tradition while reconstructing each argument “in the philosophically most successful way”. The result is one interpretation among several, and the lessons say when a reading is his. His later The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018) supplies historical context; the copy consulted is a corrected proof, so it is cited by section rather than page.

The Vigrahavyāvartanī. Lesson 8 takes its central objection from another work of Nāgārjuna’s, the Vigrahavyāvartanī, seventy verses with his own prose commentary, which it reads in Westerhoff’s translation with commentary, The Dispeller of Disputes (Oxford University Press, 2010). That translation renders svabhāva as “substance”, its word for what this study calls intrinsic nature. The work is cited by verse number.

What the study reads only at second hand. Several important voices reach this study only through the books above: the classical commentators, the Abhidharma treatises, the Personalist school, the Nyāya philosopher Vātsyāyana, the Buddhist critic Asaṅga, the Yogācāra philosopher Dharmapāla, Tibetan interpreters such as Tsongkhapa, and the modern interpreters whose readings lessons 6 to 8 report. The lessons name the book through which each is reported. No Sanskrit or Tibetan text was consulted, and the study makes no claim about the original languages beyond what its translators state.