- Length
- 352 pagesSiderits and Katsura, Nagarjuna's Middle Way, Wisdom, 2013
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Mulamadhyamakakarika
The most rigorous negative argument in world philosophy, and one of the few texts that can be read as a sustained attack on the idea that anything at all has a nature of its own. Nagarjuna argues that everything is empty, insists that emptiness is not nothingness, and spends twenty-seven chapters demonstrating the difference.
- Date
- c. 150-200
- Author
- Nagarjuna
- Region
- Southern India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 409 Chinese, Kumarajiva The basis of a Chinese school and through it of Korean and Japanese Buddhist philosophy Attested
- 1970 English, Kenneth Inada Early complete English version Consensus
- 2013 English, Siderits and Katsura With the Indian commentaries; current standard, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
The founding text of Madhyamaka and the basis of the philosophical curriculum in Tibetan monasteries to this day.
What the book says
Twenty-seven chapters of verse, each taking one thing everybody assumes is real and showing that it cannot be what it is assumed to be. The method never varies. Take causation: an effect cannot arise from itself, since it would already be there; nor from something else, since then anything could produce anything; nor from both, which combines the faults; nor from neither, which is no explanation. Therefore nothing arises in the way we think it does. The same four-cornered treatment is applied to motion - the moving thing is not moving where it has been or where it has not yet reached - and then to the senses, the elements, fire and fuel, agent and action, self, time, cause and effect, suffering, the Buddha, the four noble truths and nirvana. The conclusion in every case is emptiness, which the text is careful to say is not nothingness: things are empty of intrinsic nature, of being what they are independently, precisely because they arise in dependence on other things. The most radical chapters argue that nirvana and ordinary existence are not two different states, and the closing verses warn that emptiness misunderstood as a thing in its own right is like a snake picked up by the wrong end.
What it argues
That to exist dependently and to have an intrinsic nature are incompatible, and that everything exists dependently. If a thing had its own nature it would be unchangeable and unrelated, since a nature that could be affected by anything else would not be its own; but everything we encounter arises from conditions and changes. So nothing has intrinsic nature, and that is what emptiness means. The consequence is not that nothing exists - the text says explicitly that whoever takes emptiness for nothingness has misunderstood it - but that existence is always relational. The two-truths distinction carries the weight: conventionally, things function and can be spoken about; ultimately, none of them is found to be self-standing when examined.
What it answered
How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878Sarvastivada Abhidharma
The Abhidharma, which is to say his own tradition. Buddhist scholastics had analysed persons and objects into momentary constituents and treated those constituents as having intrinsic natures, which preserved a foundation. Nagarjuna's move is to apply the tradition's own analysis to its own foundation. He is emphatic that he is not introducing a new doctrine but drawing out what dependent arising already meant, and much of the text's rhetorical energy goes into refusing the charge of nihilism from fellow Buddhists.
What answered it
How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878Uddyotakara
The Nyaya realists, at length and for centuries, defending the means of knowledge against the charge that they cannot justify themselves. Inside Buddhism the reply was a division over method: whether the Madhyamaka position can be established by positive argument or only by reducing an opponent's premises to absurdity. That split, formalised in Tibet as the distinction between two Madhyamaka approaches, became the organising question of monastic philosophical education and remains so.
How it argues
By exhaustive elimination, and almost entirely negatively. The characteristic instrument is a four-cornered examination that runs through every possible position on a question and finds each incoherent, leaving nothing asserted. Nagarjuna repeatedly states that he has no thesis of his own, which is either the most consistent possible application of his method or an evasion, depending on the reader. The verses are compressed to the point of needing commentary on every line, and the commentarial tradition that grew around them is one of the largest in philosophy.
The moment
Southern India in a period when Mahayana texts were circulating and the scholastic schools were highly developed. Nagarjuna writes as a Buddhist to Buddhists, and the intensity of the argument reflects a dispute inside a tradition rather than between traditions - which is why the most hostile early responses came from other Buddhists.
How it travelled
Out of India and back only in fragments. Kumarajiva translated the text into Chinese in the early fifth century, and it became the basis of a Chinese school and through it of Korean and Japanese Buddhist philosophy. It went north into Tibet, where it was translated, commented on exhaustively and installed at the centre of the curriculum, and where it has been continuously studied ever since. In India itself Buddhism disappeared, and the Sanskrit of the verses survives only because Candrakirti quoted every one of them in his commentary. Western philosophy encountered the text seriously only in the twentieth century.
The strongest objection
That a position with no thesis cannot be a position. If every claim is empty, then the claim that every claim is empty is empty too, and Nagarjuna says as much - but a reader is entitled to ask what work the argument is doing if it dissolves itself. His answer, that emptiness is a medicine rather than a doctrine and that a medicine which stayed in the body would be a poison, is elegant and does not obviously meet the objection. The realist version of the complaint is Nyaya's: an argument that undermines the means of knowledge undermines its own premises, and the appeal to conventional truth to keep the argument running looks like taking back with one hand what was given with the other.
Why read it
Not alone, and not quickly. With a good modern edition that prints the verses with commentary, the first chapter on causation and the twenty-fourth on emptiness and the two truths are the ones to read, and they will repay more attention than almost anything else in this section. This is philosophy at maximum compression and maximum rigour, and nothing in the European tradition is quite like it.
- First printed
- 1903
- First in English
- 1970
- Digitised
- Yes
The Sanskrit survives only because Candrakirti quoted the whole text in his commentary, the Prasannapada; no independent Sanskrit manuscript of the verses is known.
The older English versions are superseded. Siderits-Katsura, Garfield and Westerhoff are in copyright and are what serious readers use.
Where it stands
Live in two quite different communities. It remains the core philosophical text of Tibetan Buddhism, studied by debate in the traditional manner, and since the 1980s it has been taken seriously by analytic philosophers, who have found the arguments about intrinsic nature, dependence and the limits of assertion to be recognisably about problems they already have.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain but every usable English translation is recent and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Nagarjuna's dates and the boundaries of his corpus are both unsettled, and several works attributed to him are probably by others. Whether his position is a form of scepticism, a species of anti-realism, a mystical apophaticism or a straightforwardly metaphysical thesis about the absence of intrinsic nature is the central interpretive dispute and remains unresolved. The claim that he has no thesis at all is taken literally by some readers and as rhetoric by others. And the relation between his argument and later Buddhist idealism is contested in both directions.