Nāgārjuna

Background

Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE), a Buddhist monk who lived probably mainly in southern India, is the founder of the Madhyamaka ("Middle Way," or "Centrist") school of Mahāyāna Buddhism and, after the Buddha himself, the most influential thinker in the Buddhist tradition. Very little can be established about his life beyond these bare facts (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §1). His central works are the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā (MMK) and the Vigraha-vyāvartanī (VV), neither in our corpus as body text.

Distinctive contribution

Nāgārjuna radicalizes the early-Buddhist doctrine of non-self (anātman) into the universal doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā): all things whatsoever are empty of svabhāva — inherent existence or intrinsic nature (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2). Where the early schools reduced conventional wholes (chariots, persons) to irreducibly real property-particulars (dharmas), Nāgārjuna denies that there is any ontological rock-bottom at all — no end-point to the chain of dependence (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2). Crucially, he insists this is not nihilism: emptiness is "a corrective to a mistaken view of how the world exists," and the Mādhyamikas are explicit that their position avoids both the extreme of substantial essence and its nihilistic opposite (SEP 'Nāgārjuna' §2).

Positions held in this wiki

• Buddhist Anatta (No-Self) vs the Imago Dei — the Middle-Way refinement of anatta, showing Buddhism's internal answer to the "no person at all" caricature.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: the MMK and VV are not ingested; the view is reconstructed from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Nāgārjuna and on Madhyamaka (both in corpus).

Principal critics

For the anthropology contrast, the Christian imago Dei tradition (Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas) is the principal counter-position: an enduring, God-imaging soul against emptiness of inherent nature.

See also

• Nagasena — the Milindapañha chariot-simile Nāgārjuna's two-truths framework systematizes.
• Buddhaghosa — Theravāda systematizer of the parallel anatta doctrine.