Nagarjuna (c. 150—c.

250)
Often referred to as “the second Buddha” by Tibetan and East
Asian Mahayana (Great Vehicle) traditions of Buddhism, Nagarjuna
offered sharp criticisms of Brahminical and Buddhist substantialist
philosophy, theory of knowledge, and approaches to practice. Nagarjuna’s
philosophy represents something of a watershed not only in the history of
Indian philosophy but in the history of philosophy as a whole, as it calls
into questions certain philosophical assumptions so easily resorted to in
our attempt to understand the world. Among these assumptions are the
existence of stable substances, the linear and one-directional movement of
causation, the atomic individuality of persons, the belief in a
fixed identity or selfhood, and the strict separations between good and bad
conduct and the blessed and fettered life. All such assumptions are called
into fundamental question by Nagarjuna’s unique perspective which is
grounded in the insight of emptiness (sunyata), a concept which does not
mean “non-existence” or “nihility” (abhava), but rather the lack of
autonomous existence (nihsvabhava). Denial of autonomy according to Nagarjuna does not leave us with a
sense of metaphysical or existential privation, a loss of some hoped-for independence and freedom, but instead
offers us a sense of liberation through demonstrating the interconnectedness of all things, including human
beings and the manner in which human life unfolds in the natural and social worlds. Nagarjuna’s central
concept of the “emptiness (sunyata) of all things (dharmas),” which pointed to the incessantly changing and so
never fixed nature of all phenomena, served as much as the terminological prop of subsequent Buddhist
philosophical thinking as the vexation of opposed Vedic systems. The concept had fundamental implications for
Indian philosophical models of causation, substance ontology, epistemology, conceptualizations of language,
ethics and theories of world-liberating salvation, and proved seminal even for Buddhist philosophies in India,
Tibet, China and Japan very different from Nagarjuna’s own. Indeed it would not be an overstatement to say
that Nagarjuna’s innovative concept of emptiness, though it was hermeneutically appropriated in many
different ways by subsequent philosophers in both South and East Asia, was to profoundly influence the
character of Buddhist thought.

Table of Contents
1.Nagarjuna’s Life, Legend and Works
2.Nagarjuna’s Skeptical Method and its Targets
3.Against Worldly and Ultimate Substantialism
4.Against Proof
5.The New Buddhist Space and Mission
6.References and Further Reading

1. Nagarjuna’s Life, Legend and Works

Precious little is known about the actual life of the historical Nagarjuna. The two most extensive biographies of
Nagarjuna, one in Chinese and the other in Tibetan, were written many centuries after his life and incorporate
much lively but historically unreliable material which sometimes reaches mythic proportions. However, from
the sketches of historical detail and the legend meant to be pedagogical in nature, combined with the texts
reasonably attributed to him, some sense may be gained of his place in the Indian Buddhist and philosophical
traditions.

Nagarjuna was born a “Hindu,” which in his time connoted religious allegiance to the Vedas, probably into an
upper-caste Brahmin family and probably in the southern Andhra region of India. The dates of his life are just
as amorphous, but two texts which may well have been authored by him offer some help. These are in the form
of epistles and were addressed to the historical king of the northern Satvahana dynasty Gautamiputra Satakarni
(ruled c. 166-196 CE), whose steadfast Brahminical patronage, constant battles against powerful northern
Shaka Satrap rulers and whose ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful attempts at expansion seem to indicate
that he could not manage to follow Nagarjuna’s advice to adopt Buddhist pacifism and maintain a peaceful
realm. At any rate, the imperial correspondence would place the significant years of Nagarjuna’s life sometime
between 150 and 200 CE. Tibetan sources then may well be basically accurate in portraying Nagarjuna’s
emigration from Andhra to study Buddhism at Nalanda in present-day Bihar, the future site of the greatest
Buddhist monastery of scholastic learning in that tradition’s proud history in India. This emigration to the
north perhaps followed the path of the Shaka kings themselves. In the vibrant intellectual life of a not very
tranquil north India then, Nagarjuna came into his own as a philosopher.

The occasion for Nagarjuna’s “conversion” to Buddhism is uncertain. According to the Tibetan account, it had
been predicted that Nagarjuna would die at an early age, so his parents decided to head off this terrible fate by
entering him in the Buddhist order, after which his health promptly improved. He then moved to the north and
began his tutelage. The other, more colorful Chinese legend, portrays a devilish young adolescent using magical
yogic powers to sneak, with a few friends, into the king’s harem and seduce his mistresses. Nagarjuna was able
to escape when they were detected, but his friends were all apprehended and executed, and, realizing what a
precarious business the pursuit of desires was, Nagarjuna renounced the world and sought enlightenment. After
having been converted, Nagarjuna’s adroitness at magic and meditation earned him an invitation to the bottom
of the ocean, the home of the serpent kingdom. While there, the prodigy initiate “discovered” the “wisdom
literature” of the Buddhist tradition, known as the Prajnaparamita Sutras, and on the credit of his great merit,
returned them to the world, and thereafter was known by the name Nagarjuna, the “noble serpent.”
Despite the tradition’s insistence that immersion into the scriptural texts of the competing movements of
classical Theravada and emerging “Great Vehicle” (Mahayana) Buddhism was what spurred Nagarjuna’s
writings, there is rare extended reference to the early and voluminous classical Buddhist sutras and to the
Mahayana texts which were then being composed in Nagarjuna’s own language of choice, Sanskrit. It is much
more likely that Nagarjuna thrived on the exciting new scholastic philosophical debates that were spreading
throughout north India among and between Brahminical and Buddhist thinkers. Buddhism by this time had
perhaps the oldest competing systematic worldview on the scene, but by then Vedic schools such as Samkhya,
which divided the cosmos into spiritual and material entities, Yoga, the discipline of meditation, and Vaisesika,
or atomism were probably well-established. But new and exciting things were happening in the debate halls. A
new Vedic school of Logic (Nyaya) was making its literary debut, positing an elaborate realism which
categorized the types of basic knowable things in the world, formulated a theory of knowledge which was to
serve as the basis for all claims to truth, and drew out a full-blown theory of correct and fallacious logical
argumentation. Alongside it, within the Buddhist camp, sects of metaphysicians emerged with their own
doctrines of atomism and fundamental categories of substance. Nagarjuna was to undertake a forceful
engagement of both these new Brahminical and Buddhist movements, an intellectual endeavor till then
unheard of.

Nagarjuna saw in the concept sunya, a concept which connoted in the early Pali Buddhist literature the lack of a
stable, inherent existence in persons, but which since the third century BCE had also denoted the newly
formulated number “zero,” the interpretive key to the heart of Buddhist teaching, and the undoing of all the
metaphysical schools of philosophy which were at the time flourishing around him. Indeed, Nagarjuna’s
philosophy can be seen as an attempt to deconstruct all systems of thought which analyzed the world in terms of
fixed substances and essences. Things in fact lack essence, according to Nagarjuna, they have no fixed nature,
and indeed it is only because of this lack of essential, immutable being that change is possible, that one thing
can transform into another. Each thing can only have its existence through its lack ( sunyata) of inherent,
eternal essence. With this new concept of “emptiness,” “voidness,” “lack” of essence, “zeroness,” this somewhat
unlikely prodigy was to help mold the vocabulary and character of Buddhist thought forever.
Armed with the notion of the “emptiness” of all things, Nagarjuna built his literary corpus. While argument still
persists over which of the texts bearing his name can be reliably attributed to Nagarjuna, a general agreement
seems to have been reached in the scholarly literature. Since it is not known in what chronological order his
writings were produced, the best that can be done is to arrange them thematically according to works on
Buddhist topics, Brahminical topics and finally ethics Addressing the schools of what he considered
metaphysically wayward Buddhism, Nagarjuna wrote Fundamental Verses on the Middle
Way (Mulamadhyamakakarika), and then, in order to further refine his newly coined and revolutionary concept,
the Seventy Verses on Emptiness (Sunyatasaptati), followed by a treatise on Buddhist philosophical method,
the Sixty Verses on Reasoning (Yuktisastika).. Included in the works addressed to Buddhists may have been a
further treatise on the shared empirical world and its establishment through social custom, called Proof of
Convention (Vyavaharasiddhi), though save for a few cited verses, this is lost to us, as well as an instructional
book on practice, cited by one Indian and a number of Chinese commentators, the Preparation for
Enlightenment (Bodhisambaraka). Finally is a didactic work on the causal theory of Buddhism, the Constituents
of Dependent Arising (Pratityasumutpadahrdaya). Next came a series of works on philosophical method, which
for the most part were reactionary critiques of Brahminical substantialist and epistemological categories, The
End of Disputes (Vigrahavyavartani) and the not-too-subtly titled Pulverizing the
Categories (Vaidalyaprakarana). Finally are a pair of religious and ethical treatises addressed to the king
Gautamiputra, entitled To a Good Friend (Suhrlekha) and Precious Garland (Ratnavali). Nagarjuna then was a
fairly active author, addressing the most pressing philosophical issues in the Buddhism and Brahmanism of his
time, and more than that, carrying his Buddhist ideas into the fields of social, ethical and political philosophy.
It is again not known precisely how long Nagarjuna lived. But the legendary story of his death once again is a
tribute to his status in the Buddhist tradition. Tibetan biographies tell us that, when Gautamiputra’s successor
was about to ascend to the throne, he was anxious to find a replacement as a spiritual advisor to better suit his
Brahmanical preferences, and unsure of how to delicately or diplomatically deal with Nagarjuna, he forthrightly
requested the sage to accommodate and show compassion for his predicament by committing suicide.
Nagarjuna assented, and was decapitated with a blade of holy grass which he himself had some time previously
accidentally uprooted while looking for materials for his meditation cushion. The indomitable logician could
only be brought down by his own will and his own weapon. Whether true or not, this master of skeptical method
would well have appreciated the irony.

2. Nagarjuna’s Skeptical Method and its Targets

At the heart of what is called skepticism is doubt, a suspension of judgment about some states of affairs or the
correctness of some assertion. There are of course many things, both in the world and in the claims people make
about the world, which can be doubted, questioned, rejected, or left in skeptical abeyance. But in addition to the
many different things which can be doubted, there are also different ways of doubting. Doubt can be haphazard,
as when a person sees another person at night and is unsure of whether that other person is his friend; it can be
principled, as when a scientist refuses to take into account non-material or divine causes in a physical process
she is investigating; it can be systematic, as when a philosopher doubts conventional explanations of the world,
only in search of a more fundamental, all-inclusive explanation of experience, a la Socrates, Descartes or
Husserl (Nagarjuna was for the most part a skeptic of this sort). It can also be all-inclusive and self-reflective,
an attitude demonstrated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who doubted all claims including his own claim to
doubt all claims. Consequently, there are as many different kinds of skeptics as there can be found different
kinds or ways of doubting. Nagarjuna was considered a skeptic in his own philosophical tradition, both by
Brahmanical opponents and Buddhist readers, and this because he called into question the basic categorical
presuppositions and criteria of proof assumed by almost everyone in the Indian tradition to be axiomatic. But
despite this skepticism, Nagarjuna did believe that doubt should not be haphazard, it requires a method. This
idea that doubt should be methodical, an idea born in early Buddhism, was a revolutionary innovation for
philosophy in India. Nagarjuna carries the novelty of this idea even further by suggesting that the method of
doubt of choice should not even be one’s own, but rather ought to be temporarily borrowed from the very
person with whom one is arguing! But in the end, Nagarjuna was convinced that such disciplined, methodical
skepticism led somewhere, led namely to the ultimate wisdom which was at the core of the teachings of the
Buddha.

The standard philosophical interpretation of doubt in Indian thought was explained in the Vedic school of logic
(Nyaya). Gautama Aksapada, the author of the fundamental text of the Brahminical Logicians, was probably a
contemporary of Nagarjuna. He formulated what by then must have been a traditional distinction between two
kinds of doubt. The first kind is the haphazard doubt about an object all people experience in their everyday
lives, when something is encountered in one’s environment and for various reasons mistaken for something else
because of uncertainty of what precisely the object is. The stock examples used in Indian texts are seeing a rope
and mistaking it as a snake, or seeing conch in the sand and mistaking it as silver. The doubt that can arise as a
result of realizing one is mistaken or unsure about a particular object can be corrected by a subsequent
cognition, getting a closer look at the rope for instance, or having a companion tell you the object in the sand is
conch and not silver. The correcting cognition removes doubt by offering some sort of conclusive evidence
about what the object in question happens to be. The other kind of doubt is roughly categorical doubt,
exemplified specifically by a philosopher who may wonder about or doubt various categories of being, such as
God’s existence, the types of existing physical substance or the nature of time. In order to resolve this latter kind
of philosophical doubt, the preferred method of the Logicians was a formal debate. Debates provided a space
wherein judges presided, established rules for argument and counter-argument, recognized logical fallacies and
correct forms of inference and two interlocutors seeking truth all played their roles in the establishment of the
correct position. The point is that, according to traditional Brahminical thinking, certain and correct objective
knowledge of the world was possible; one could in principle know whatever one sought to know, from what that
object lying in darkness is to the types of causation that operated in the world to God’s existence and will for
human beings. Skepticism, though a natural attitude and a fundamental aid to human beings in both their
everyday and reflective lives, can be overcome provided one arms oneself with the methods of proof supplied by
common-sense logic. For Nyaya, while anything and everything can be doubted, any and every doubt can be
resolved. The Brahminical Logician, the Naiyayika, is a cagey and realistic but staunch philosophical optimist.

The early Buddhists were not nearly so sure about the possibility of ultimate knowledge of the world. Indeed,
the founder of the tradition, Siddhartha Gautama Sakyamuni (the “Buddha” or “awakened one”), famously
refused to answer questions about such airy metaphysical ponderings like “Does the world have a beginning or
not?”, “Does God exist?” and “Does the soul perish after death or not?” Convinced that human knowledge was
best suited and most usefully devoted to the diagnosis and cure of human beings’ own self-destructive
psychological obsessions and attachments, the Buddha compared a person convinced he could find the answers
to such ultimate questions to a mortally wounded soldier on a battlefield who, dying from arrow-delivered
poison, demanded to know everything about his shooter before being taken to a doctor. Ultimate knowledge
cannot be attained, at least cannot be attained before the follies and frailties of human life bring one to despair.
Unless human beings attain self-reflective, meditative enlightenment, ignorance will always have the upper
hand over knowledge in their lives, and this is the predicament they must solve in order to alleviate their poorly
understood suffering. The early traditional texts show how the Buddha developed a method for refusing to
answer such questions in pursuit of ultimate, metaphysical knowledge, a method which came to be dubbed the
“four error” denial (catuskoti). When asked, for example, whether the world has a beginning or not, a Buddhist
should respond by denying all the logically alternative answers to the query; “No, the world does not have a
beginning, it does not fail to have a beginning, it does not have and not have a beginning, nor does it neither
have nor not have a beginning.” This denial is not seen to be logically defective in the sense that it violates the
law of excluded middle (A cannot have both B and not-B), because this denial is more a principled refusal to
answer than a counter-thesis, it is more a decision than a proposition. That is to say that one cannot object to
this “four error” denial by simply saying “the world either has a beginning or it does not” because the Buddha is
recommending to his followers that they should take no position on the matter (this is in modern propositional
logic known as illocution). This denial was recommended because wondering about such questions was seen by
the Buddha as a waste of valuable time, time that should be spent on the much more important and doable task
of psychological self-mastery. The early Buddhists, unlike their Brahminical philosophical counterparts, were
skeptics. But in their own view, their skepticism did not make the Buddhists pessimists, but on the contrary,
optimists, for even though the human mind could not answer ultimate questions, it could diagnose and cure its
own must basic maladies, and that surely was enough.
But in the intervening four to six centuries between the lives of Siddartha Gautama and Nagarjuna, Buddhists,
feeling a need to explain their worldview in an ever burgeoning north Indian philosophical environment, traded
in their skepticism for theory. Basic Buddhist doctrinal commitments, such as the teaching of the
impermanence of all things, the Buddhist rejection of a persistent personal identity and the refusal to admit
natural universals such as “treeness,” “redness” and the like, were challenged by Brahminical philosophers.
How, Vedic opponents would ask, does one defend the idea that causation governs the phenomenal world while
simultaneously holding that there is no measurable temporal transition from cause to effect, as the Buddhists
appeared to hold? How, if the Buddhists are right in supposing that no enduring ego persists through our
experienced lives, do all of my experiences and cognitions seem to be owned by me as a unitary subject? Why, if
all things can be reduced to the Buddhist universe of an ever-changing flux of atoms, do stable, whole objects
seem to surround me in my lived environment? Faced with these challenges, the monk-scholars enthusiastically
entered into the debates in order to make the Buddhist worldview explicable. A number of prominent schools of
Buddhist thought developed as a result of these exchanges, the two most notable of which were the Sarvastivada
(“Universal Existence”) and Sautrantika (“True Doctrine”). In various fashions, they posited theories which
depicted causal efficacy as either present in all dimensions of time or instantaneous, of personal identity being
the psychological product of complex and interrelated mental states, and perhaps most importantly, of the
apparently stable objects of our lived experience as being mere compounds of elementary, irreducible
substances with their “own nature” (svabhava). Through the needs these schools sought to fulfill, Buddhism
entered the world of philosophy, debate, thesis and verification, world-representation. The Buddhist monks
became not only theoreticians, but some of the most sophisticated theoreticians in the Indian intellectual world.
Debate has raged for centuries about how to place Nagarjuna in this philosophical context. Ought he to be seen
as a conservative, traditional Buddhist, defending the Buddha’s own council to avoid theory? Should he be
understood as a “Great Vehicle” Buddhist, settling disputes which did not exist in traditional Buddhism at all
but only comprehensible to a Mahayanist? Might he even be a radical skeptic, as his first Brahminical readers
appeared to take him, who despite his own flaunting of philosophy espoused positions only a philosopher could
appreciate? Nagarjuna appears to have understood himself to be a reformer, primarily a Buddhist reformer to
be sure, but one suspicious that his own beloved religious tradition had been enticed, against its founder’s own
advice, into the games of metaphysics and epistemology by old yet still seductive Brahminical intellectual
habits. Theory was not, as the Brahmins thought, the condition of practice, and neither was it, as the Buddhists
were beginning to believe, the justification of practice. Theory, in Nagarjuna’s view, was the enemy of all forms
of legitimate practice, social, ethical and religious. Theory must be undone through the demonstration that its
Buddhist metaphysical conclusions and the Brahminical reasoning processes which lead to them are
counterfeit, of no real value to genuinely human pursuits. But in order to demonstrate such a commitment,
doubt had to be methodical, just as the philosophy it was meant to undermine was methodical.

The method Nagarjuna suggested for carrying out the undoing of theory was, curiously, not a method of his own
invention. He held it more pragmatic to borrow philosophical methods of reasoning, particularly those designed
to expose faulty argument, to refute the claims and assumptions of his philosophical adversaries. This was the
strategy of choice because, if one provisionally accepts the concepts and verification rules of the opponent, the
refutation of the opponent’s position will be all the more convincing to the opponent than if one simply rejects
the opponent’s system out of hand. This provisional, temporary acceptance of the opponent’s categories and
methods of proof is demonstrated in how Nagarjuna employs different argumentative styles and approaches
depending on whether he is writing against the Brahmins or Buddhists. However, he slightly and subtly adapts
each of their respective systems to suit his own argumentative purposes.

For the Brahminical metaphysicians and epistemologists, Nagarjuna accepts the forms of logical fallacies
outlined by the Logicians and assents to enter into their own debate format. But he picks a variation on a debate
format which, while acknowledged as a viable form of discourse, was not most to the Nyaya liking. The standard
Nyaya debate, styled vada or “truth” debate, pits two interlocutors against one another who bring to the debate
opposing theses (pratijna or paksa) on a given topic, for instance a Nyaya propoenet defending the thesis that
authoritative verbal testimony is an acceptable form of proof and a Buddhist proponent arguing that such
testimony is not a self-standing verification but can be reduced to a kind of inference. Each of these opposed
positions will then serve as the hypothesis of a logical argument to be proven or disproven, and the person who
refutes the adversary’s argument and establishes his own will win the debate. However, there was a variety of
this kind of standard format called by the Logicians the vitanda or “destructive” debate. In vitanda, the
proponent of a thesis attempts to establish it against an opponent who merely strives to refute the proponent’s
view, without establishing or even implying his own. If the opponent of the proffered thesis cannot refute it, he
will lose; but he will also lose if in refuting the opponent’s thesis, he is found to be asserting or implying a
counter-thesis. Now, while the Brahminical Naiyayikas considered this format good logical practice as it were
for the student, they did not consider vitanda to be the ideal form of philosophical discourse, for while it could
possibly expose false theses as false, it could not, indeed was not designed to, establish truth, and what good is
reason or philosophical analysis if they do not or cannot pursue and attain truth?
For his own part, Nagarjuna would only assent to enter a philosophical debate as a vaitandika, committed to
destroying the Brahminical proponents’ metaphysical and epistemological positions without thereby
necessitating a contrapositive. In order to accomplish this, Nagarjuna armed himself with the full battery of
accepted rejoinders to fallacious arguments the Logicians had long since authorized, such as infinite regress
(anavastha), circularity (karanasya asiddhi) and vacuous principle (vihiyate vadah) to assail the metaphysical
and epistemological positions he found problematic. It should be noted that later, very popular and influential
schools of Indian Buddhist thought, namely the schools of Cognition (Vijnanavada) and Buddhist Logic
(Yogacara-Sautranta) rejected this purely skeptical stance of Nagarjuna and went on to establish their own
positive doctrines of consciousness and knowledge, and it was only with later, more synthetic schools of
Buddhism in Tibet and East Asia where Nagarjuna’s anti-metaphysical and anti-cognitivist approaches gained
sympathy. There was no doubt however that among his Vedic opponents and later Madhyamika commentators,
Nagarjuna’s “refutation-only” strategy was highly provocative and sparked continued controversy. But, in his
own estimation, only by employing Brahminical method against Brahminical practice could one show up Vedic
society and religion for what he believed they were, authoritarian legitimations of caste society which used the
myths of God, divine revelation and the soul as rationalizations, and not the justified reasons which they were
purported to be.
Against Buddhist substantialism, Nagarjuna revived the Buddha’s own “four error” (catuskoti) denial, but gave
to it a more definitively logical edge than the earlier practical employment of Suddhartha Gautama. Up to this
point in the Indian Buddhist tradition, there had been two skeptics of note, one of them the Buddha himself and
the other a third century sage named Moggaliputta-tissa, who had won several pivotal debates against a number
of traditional sectarian groups at the request of the Mauryan emperor Asoka and had as a result written the first
great debate manual of the tradition. While the Buddha had provided the “four error” method to discourage the
advocacy of traditional metaphysical and religious positions, Moggaliputta-tissa constructed a discussion
format which examined various doctrinal disputes in early Buddhism, which, in his finding, represented
positions which were equally logically invalid, and therefore should not be asserted (no ca vattabhe). Perhaps
inspired by this logically sharpened skeptical approach, Nagarjuna refined the “four errors” method from the
strictly illocutionary and pragmatic tool it had been in early Buddhism into a logic machine that dissolved
Buddhist metaphysical positions which had been growing in influence. The major schools of Buddhism had
accepted by Nagarjuna’s time that things in the world must be constituted by metaphysically fundamental
elements which had their own fixed essence (svabhava), for otherwise there would be no way to account for
persons, natural phenomena, or the causal and karmic process which determined both. Without assuming, for
instance, that people had fundamentally fixed natures, one could not say that any particular individual was
undergoing suffering, and neither could one say that any particular monk who had perfected his discipline and
wisdom underwent enlightenment and release from rebirth in nirvana. Without some notion of essence that is,
thought Nagarjuna’s contemporaries, Buddhist claims could not make sense, and Buddhist practice could do no
good, could effect no real change of the human character.