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.

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.

Nagarjuna's response was to "catch" this metaphysical position of
Buddhist practice in the coils of the "four errors," demonstrating
that the change Buddhism was after was only really possible if people
did not have fixed essences. For if one really examines change, one
finds that, according to the catuskoti, change cannot produce itself,
nor can it be introduced by an extrinsic influence, nor can it result
from both itself and an extrinsic influence, nor from no influence at
all. All the logical alternatives of a given position are tested and
flunked by the "four error" method. There are basic logical reasons
why all these positions fail. It would first of all be incoherent (no
papadyate) to assume that anything with a fixed nature or essence
(svabhava) could change, for that change would violate its fixed
nature and so destroy the original premise. In addition, we do not
experience anything empirically which does not change, and so never
know of (na vidyate) fixed essences in the world about us. Once again,
the proponent's method has been taken up in an ingenious way to
undermine his conclusions. The rules of the philosophical game have
been observed, but not in this case for earning victory, but for the
purpose of showing all the players that the game had all along had
been just that, merely a game which had no tenable real-life
consequences.

And so, Nagarjuna has rightly merited the label of skeptic, for he
undertakes the dismantling of theoretical positions wherever he finds
them, and does so in a methodically logical manner. Like the skeptics
of the classical Greek tradition, who thought that resolved doubt
about dogmatic assertions in both philosophy and social life could
lead the individual to peace of mind, however, it is not the case that
for Nagarjuna skepticism leads nowhere. On the contrary, it is the
very key to insight. For in the process of dismantling all
metaphysical and epistemological positions, one is led to the only
viable conclusion for Nagarjuna, namely that all things, concepts and
persons lack a fixed essence, and this lack of a fixed essence is
precisely why and how they can be amenable to change, transformation
and evolution. Change is precisely why people live, die, are reborn,
suffer and can be enlightened and liberated. And change is only
possible if entities and the way in which we conceptualize them are
void or empty (sunya) of any eternal, fixed and immutable essence.
Indeed, Nagarjuna even on occasion refers to his special use of the
"four error" approach as the "refuting and explaining with the method
of emptying" (vigraheca vyakhyane krte sunyataya vadet) concepts and
things of essence. And like all properly Buddhist methods, once this
logical foil has served its purpose, it can be discarded, traded in as
it were for the wisdom it has conferred. Pretense of knowledge leads
to ruin, while genuine skepsis can lead human being to ultimate
knowledge. Only the method of skepticism has to conform to the rules
of conventional knowing, for as Nagarjuna famously asserts: "Without
depending on convention, the ultimate truth cannot be taught, and if
the ultimate truth is not attained, nirvana will not be attained."
3. Against Worldly and Ultimate Substantialism

By Nagarjuna's lifetime, scholastic Buddhism had become much more than
merely an institution which charged itself with the handing on of
received scripture, tradition and council-established orthodoxy; it
had grown into a highly variegated, inwardly and outwardly engaged set
of philosophical positions. These schools took it upon themselves not
merely to represent Buddhist teaching or make the benefits of its
practice available, but also to explain Buddhism, to make it not only
a reasonable philosophical discourse, but the most supremely
reasonable of them all. The ultimate goal of life, liberation from
rebirth, though in general shared by all soteriologies in Brahmanism,
Jainism and Buddhism, was represented uniquely by Buddhists as the
pacification of all psychological attachments through the
extinguishing (nirvana) of desires, which would lead to a consequent
extinguishing of karma and the prevention of rebirth. One particularly
unique doctrine of Buddhism in its attempt to thematize these issues
was the theory of no-self or no-soul (anatman) and what implications
it carried. In the empirical sense, the idea of no-self meant that not
only persons, but also what are normally considered the stable
substances of nature are not in fact fixed and continuous, that
everything from one's sense of personal identity to the forms of
objects could be analyzed away, as it were, into the atomic parts
which were their bases. In the ultimate metaphysical sense, it meant
that no one, upon release from rebirth, will live eternally as a
spiritual, self-conscious entity (atman), but that the series of
births caused by inherited karma will simply terminate, reducing, as
its cash-value, the total amount of suffering in the world. These
theories prompted sharp and deep questions and criticisms, such as,
"if the things and persons of the world are nothing more than atoms in
constant flux, how can a person have an orderly experience of a world
of apparent substances?", "if there is no enduring identity or self,
who is it that practices Buddhism and is liberated?", and "how should
we account for the differences between enlightened beings like the
Buddha and unenlightened ones, like ourselves?" Answering such
questions intelligibly for the inquiring minds of the philosophical
community were a number of distinct schools which came collectively to
be known as schools involved with the "analysis of elements"
(abhidharma). Nagarjuna received his philosophical training in the
texts, vocabulary and debates of the Abhidharmikas.

The two most prevalent schools of Abhidharma were the school of
"Universal Existence" (Sarvastivada) and the "True Doctrine" school
(Sautrantika). These schools held in common a theory of substantialism
which served as an explanation to both worldly and ultimate
metaphysical questions. This theory of substantialism, formulated in
slightly different ways by each school, had two fundamental linchpins.
The first was a theory of causality, or the strict necessity of one
event following from another event. The theory of causal necessity was
essential for all Buddhist thought, for Gautama Siddhartha himself had
firmly asserted that all suffering or psychological pain had a
distinct cause, namely attachment or desire (tanha), and the key to
removing suffering from one's life and attaining the "tranquility of
mind" or contentment (upeksa) of nirvana was to cut out its causal
condition. Suffering was brought about by a definite cause, but that
cause is contingent upon the human behaviors and practices of any
given individual, and if attachment could be exorcized from these
behaviors and practices, then the individual could live a life which
would no longer experience impermanence and loss as painful, but
accept the world for what it in fact is. Buddhist theory and practice
had always been based on the notion that, not just psychological
attachment, but all phenomena are causally interdependent, that all
things and events which come to pass in the world arise out of a
causal chain (pratityasamutpada). Buddhism is inconceivable without
this causal theory, for it opens the door to the diagnosis and removal
of suffering. For the Universal Existence and True Doctrine schools
however, the second linchpin was a theory of fundamental elements, a
theory which had to follow from any coherent causal theory. Causes,
their philosophical exponents figured, are not merely arbitrary, but
are regular and predictable, and their regularity must be due to the
fact the things or phenomena have fixed natures of their own
(svabhava), which determine and limit the kinds of causal powers they
can and cannot exert on other things. Water, for example, can quench
thirst and fire can burn other things, but water cannot cause a fire,
just as fire cannot quench thirst. The pattern and limits of
particular causal powers and their effects are therefore rooted in
what kind of a thing a thing happens to be; its nature defines what it
can and can't do to other things. Now in their theoretical models,
causal efficacy was contained not in any whole, unified object, but
rather in the parts, qualities and atomic elements of which any object
happened to be constituted, so in their formulation, it was not fire
which burnt but the heat produced by its fire molecules, and it was
not water which quenched thirst but the correspondence of its
molecules to the receptivity of molecules in the body. Indeed, fire in
these systems was only fire because of its molecular qualities, and
the same with water. But these qualities, molecules and elements had
fixed natures, and thus could emit or receive certain causal powers
and not others.

The basic difference between the Universal Existence and True Doctrine
schools in their advocacy of both Buddhist causal and fundamental
elements theories were their respective descriptions of how such
causes operated. For the Universal Existence school, the effect of a
cause was already inherent in the nature of the cause (satkaryavada).
My thirst is quenched not by any fundamental change in my condition,
but because the water that I drank had the power to quench my thirst,
and this power does not rest in me, but in what I am trying to drink;
this is why fire cannot quench thirst. Change here is only an apparent
transformation already potential in the actors who are interrelating.
For the True Doctrine school, on the other hand, any effect by
definition must be a change in the condition of the receptor of the
causal power, and as such, causal potential only becomes actual where
it can effect a real change in something else (asatkaryavada). Again,
using water as an illustration, the properties of water effect a
change in the properties of my body, transforming my condition from a
condition of thirst to one of having my thirst quenched. Change is
change of what is effected, otherwise it would be silly to speak of
change.

This seemingly abstract or inconsequential difference turns out in
these two opposed systems however to be quite relevant, for the
substantialist ideas of fixed nature and essence provide the basis not
only for conceptualizing the material, empirical world, but also for
conceiving the knowledge and attainment of ultimate reality. For just
as only metaphysical analysis could distinguish between phenomena and
their ultimate causal constituents, such analysis was also the only
reliable guide for purifying experience of attachments. Those causes
which lead to enmeshment in the worldly cycle of rebirth (samsara)
cannot be the same as those which lead to peace (nirvana). These
states of existence are just as different as fire and water, samsara
will quench thirst just as little as nirvana will lead to the fires of
passion. And so, it is the Buddha's words, for those who advocated the
theory of the effect as pre-existent in the cause, which had the
potential to purify consciousness, as opposed to the words of any
unorthodox teacher; it was the practices of Buddhists, for those who
championed the notion of external causal efficacy, which could
liberate one from rebirth, and not the practices of those who
perpetuated the ambitions of the everyday, workaday world. These
schools were, each in their uniquely Buddhist turns, true exemplars of
the age-old assumptions of the karma worldview in which a person is
what he or she does, and what one does proceeds from what type of
fundamental makeup one has inherited from previous lives of deeds, a
worldview that is which intimately marries essence, existence and
ethics. To be a Buddhist means precisely to distinguish between
Buddhist and non-Buddhist acts, between ignorance and enlightenment,
between the suffering world of samsara and the purified attainment of
nirvana.

In his revolutionary tract of The Fundamental Verses on the Middle
Way, Nagarjuna abjectly throws this elementary distinction between
samsara and nirvana out the door, and does so in the very name of the
Buddha. "There is not the slightest distinction," he declares in the
work, "between samsara and nirvana. The limit of the one is the limit
of the other." Now how can such a thing be posited, that is, the
identity of samsara and nirvana, without totally undermining the
theoretical basis and practical goals of Buddhism as such? For if
there is no difference between the world of suffering and the
attainment of peace, then what sort of work is a Buddhist to do as one
who seeks to end suffering? Nagarjuna counters by reminding the
Buddhist philosophers that, just as Gautama Sakyamuni had rejected
both metaphysical and empirical substantialism through the teaching of
"no-soul" (anatman) and causal interdependence (pratityasamputpada),
so Scholastic Buddhism had to remain faithful to this
non-substantialist stance through a rejection of the causal theories
which necessitated notions of fixed nature (svabhava), theories which
metaphysically reified the difference between samsara and nirvana.
This later rejection could be based on Nagarjuna's newly coined notion
of the "emptiness," "zeroness" or "voidness" (sunyata) of all things.

Recapitulating a logical analysis of the causal theories of the
Universal Existence and True Doctrine schools, Nagarjuna rejects the
premises of their theories. The basic claim these schools shared was
that causal efficacy could only be accounted for through the
fundamental nature of an object; fire caused the burning of objects
because fire was made of fire elements and not water elements, the
regularity and predictability of its causal powers consistent with its
essential material basis. Reviving and logically sharpening the early
Buddhist "four errors" (catuskoti) method, Nagarjuna attempts to
dismantle this trenchant philosophical assumption. Contrary to the
Scholastic Buddhist views, Nagarjuna finds that, were objects to have
a stable, fixed essence, the changes brought about by causes would not
be logically intelligible or materially possible. Let us say, along
with the school of Universal Existence, that the effect pre-exists in
the cause, or for example, that the burning of fire and the
thirst-quenching of water are inherent in the kinds of substances fire
and water are. But if the effects already exist in the cause, then it
would be nonsensical to speak of effects in the first place, because
in their interaction with other phenomena the pre-existent causes
would not produce anything new, they would merely be manifesting the
potential powers already exhibited. That is, if the potential to burn
is conceived to exist within fire and the potential to quench thirst
already inhered in water, then, Nagarjuna thinks, burning and
thirst-quenching would be but appearances of the causal powers of fire
and water substances, and this would make the notion of an effect, the
production of a novel change, meaningless. If, on the other hand, we
side with the True Doctrine school in supposing that the effect does
not pre-exist in the cause, but is a novel change in the world, then
the category of substance breaks down. Why? Because if fire and water
are stable substances which possess fixed natures or essences, then
what sort of relation could they bear to other objects which have
entirely different fixed natures? How could fire be thought to effect
a human being when the latter possesses a nature and thus takes on a
form that is entirely dissimilar to fire? For the person to be
effected by fire, his nature would have to change, would have to be
destructible, and this vitiates the supposition that the person's
nature is fixed. Stable, fixed essences (svabhava) which are conceived
to be entirely heterogeneous could have no way of relating without
their initially supposed fixed essences being compromised. The
conclusion is that neither of these two proffered substantialist
Buddhist explanations of causal efficacy can survive logical
examination.

We may be tempted, faced with these failures, to adopt alternative
theories of causality advocated outside the Buddhist tradition in
order to save the intelligibility of substance. We may suppose, along
with Jaina philosophers, the effects somehow proceed both from
inherent powers of substances as well as the vulnerabilities of
objects with which these substances interact. This obviously will not
do for Nagarjuna the logician, for it would be tantamount to
suggesting that things and events arise or come about due both to
their own causal powers and as effected by other things, that event A,
such as burning or thirst-quenching is caused both by itself and by
other things. This violates the law of excluded middle outright, since
a thing cannot be characterized by both A and not-A, and so will not
serve as an explanation. Exhausted by the search for a viable
substantialist principle of causality, we may wish to opt for the
completely anti-metaphysical stance of the Indian Materialist school,
which denies both that events are brought about through the inherent
causal powers of their relata and are caused by extraneous powers.
This thorough denial would have us believe that no cause-and-effect
relationship exists between phenomena, and Buddhists may not resort to
this conclusion because it militates against the basic teachings of
the Buddha that all empirical phenomena arise out of interdependence.
This was the teaching of the Buddha himself, and so no Buddhist can
allow that events are not caused.

What are we to draw from all this abstract logical critique? Are we to
infer that Nagarjuna's philosophy boils down to some strange
paradoxical mysticism in which there is some ambiguous sense in which
things should be considered causally interdependent but interdependent
in some utterly unexplainable and inscrutable way? Not at all!
Nagarjuna has not refuted all available theories of cause and effect,
he has only rejected all substantialist theories of cause and effect.
He thinks he has shown that, if we maintain the philosophical
assumption that things in the world derive from some unique material
and essential basis, then we shall come away empty-handed in a search
to explain how things could possibly relate to one another, and so
would have no way of describing how changes happen. But since both our
eminently common sense and the words of the Buddha affirm
unremittingly that changes do indeed happen, and happen constantly, we
must assume that they happen somehow, through some other fact or
circumstance of existence. For his own part, Nagarjuna concludes that,
since things do not arise because phenomena relate through fixed
essences, then they must arise because phenomena lack fixed essences.
Phenomena are malleable, they are susceptible to alteration, addition
and destruction. This lack of fixed nature (nihsvabhava), this
alterability of things then means that their physical and empirical
forms are built not upon essence, as both the Universal Existence and
True Doctrine schools posit, but upon the fact that nothing (sunya)
ever defines and characterizes them eternally and unconditionally. It
is not that things are in themselves nothing, nor that things possess
a positive absence (abhava) of essence. Change is possible because a
radical indeterminancy (sunyata) permeates all forms. Burning happens
because conditions can arise where temperatures become incindiary and
singe flesh, just as thirst can be quenched when the process of
ingestion transforms water into body. Beings relate to one another not
because of their heterogeneous forms, but because their interaction
makes them susceptible to ongoing transformation.

The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is a tour de force through
the entire categorical system of the Buddhist metaphysical analysis
(abhidharma) which had given birth to its scholastic movements.
Nagarjuna attacks all the concepts of these traditions which were
thematized according to substantialist, essentialist metaphysics,
using at every turn the logically revised "four errors" method. But
perhaps most revolutionary was Nagarjuna's extension of this doctrine
of the "emptiness" of all phenomena to the discussion of the
relationship between the Buddha and the world, between the cycle of
pain-inflicted rebirth (samsara) and contented, desire-less freedom
(nirvana). The Buddha, colloquially known as "the one who came and
went" (Tathagata), cannot properly be thought of for Nagarjuna in the
way the Buddhist scholastics have, that is, as the eternally pure seed
of the true teachings of peace which puts to rest the delusions of the
otherwise defiled world. The name and person of "Buddha" should not
serve as the theoretical basis and justification of distinguishing
between the ordinary, ignorant world and perfected enlightenment.
After all, Nagarjuna reminds his readers, all change in the world,
including the transformations which lead to enlightenment, are only
possible because of interdependent causality (pratityasamutpada), and
interdependent causality in turn is only possible because things,
phenomena, lack any fixed nature and so are open (sunya) to being
transformed. The Buddha himself was only transformed because of
interdependence and emptiness, and so, Nagarjuna infers, "the nature
of Tathagata is the very nature of the world/" It stands to reason
then that no essential delimitations can be made between the world of
suffering and the practices which can lead to peace, for both are
merely alternative outcomes in the nexus of worldly interdependence.
The words and labels which attach to both the world and the experience
of nirvana are not the means of separating the wheat of life from its
chaff, nor true cultivators of the soil of experience from the
over-ambitious "everyday" rabble. Rather, samsara and nirvana signify
nothing but the lack of guarantees in a life of desire and the
possibility of change and hope. "We assert," Nagarjuna proffers to say
on behalf of the Buddhists, "that whatever arises dependently is as
such empty. This manner of designating things is exactly the middle
path." A Buddhist oath to avoid suffering cannot be taken as a
denunciation of the world, but only as a commitment to harness the
possibilities which already are entailed within it for peace. Talk
about the Buddha and practices inspired by the Buddha are not
tantamount to the raising of a religious or ideological flag which
marks off one country from another; rather, the world of suffering and
the world of peace have the same extension and boundary, and talk
about suffering and the Buddha is only there to make us aware of the
possibilities of the world, and how our realization of these
possibilities depends precisely on what we do and how we interact.
4. Against Proof

The apparently anti-theoretical stance occupied by Nagarjuna did not
win him many philosophical friends either among his contemporary
Buddhist readers or the circles of Brahminical thought. While it was
certainly the case that, over the next seven centuries of Buddhist
scholastic thought, the concept of emptiness was more forcefully
articlulated, it was also hermeneutically appropriated into other
systems in ways of which Nagarjuna would not necessarily have
approved. Sunyata was soon made to carry theoretical meanings
unrelated to causal theory in various Buddhists sects, serving as the
support of a philosophy of consciousness for the later illustrious
Vijnanavada or Cognition School and as the explication of the nature
of both epistemology and ontology in the precise school of Buddhist
Logic (Yogacara-Sautrantika). These schools, deriding Nagarjuna's
skepticism, retained their commitment to a style of philosophizing in
India which allowed intellectual stands to be taken only on the basis
of commitments to thesis, counter-thesis, rules of argument and
standards of proof, that is, schools which equated philosophical
reflection with competing doctrines of knowledge and metaphysics. This
is all the more ironic given the overt attempt Nagarjuna made to head
off the possibility that the idea of emptiness would be refuted or
co-opted by this style of philosophizing, an attempt still preserved
in the pages of his work The End of Disputes (Vigrahavyavartani).

The End of Disputes was in large measure a reactionary work, written
only when philosophical objections were brought against Nagarjuna's
non-essentialist, anti-metaphysical approach to philosophy. The work
was addressed to a relatively new school of Brahminical thought, the
school of Logic (Nyaya) Philosophical debate, conducted in formalized
fashions in generally court settings, had persisted in India for
perhaps as much as eight hundred years before the time of the first
literary systematizer of the school of logic, Gautama Aksapada.
Several attempts had been made by Buddhist and Jaina schools before
Nyaya to compose handbooks for formal debate. But Nyaya brought to the
Indian philosophical scene a full-blown doctrine not only of the rules
and etiquette of the debate process, but also an entire system of
inference which distinguished between logically acceptable and
unacceptable forms of argument. Finally, undergirding all forms of
valid argument was a system of epistemology, a theory of proof
(pramanasastra), which distinguished between various kinds of mental
events which could be considered truth-revealing, or corresponding to
real states of affairs and those which could not be relied upon as
mediators of objective reality. Direct sensory perception, valid
logical argument, tenable analogy and authoritative testimony were
held by the Logicians to be the only kinds of cognitions which could
correspond to real things or events in the world. They could serve as
proofs to the claims we make to know. With some modifications, the
approach of Nyaya came to be accepted as philosophical "first
principles" by almost all the other schools of thought in India for
centuries, both Vedic and non-Vedic. Indeed, in many philosophical
quarters, before entering into the subtleties and agonism of advanced
philosophical debate, a student was expected to pass through the
prerequisites of studying Sanskrit grammar and logic. All thought, and
so all positive sciences, from agriculture to Vedic study to
statecraft, were at times even said to be fundamentally based on and
entirely specious without basic training in "critical analysis"
(anviksiki), which, according to Gautama Aksapada, was precisely what
Nyaya was.

The Logicians, upon becoming aware very early of Nagarjuna's thought,
brought against his position of emptiness (sunyata) a sharp criticism.
Certainly no claim, they insisted, should compel us to give it assent
unless it can be known to be true. Now Nagarjuna has told us that
emptiness is the lack of a fixed, essential nature which all things
exhibit. But if all things are empty of a fixed nature, then that
would include, would it not, Nagarjuna's own claim that all things are
empty? For one to say that all things lack a fixed nature would be
also to say that no assertion, no thesis like Nagarjuna's that all
things are empty, could claim hold on a fixed reference. And if such a
basic and all-encompassing thesis must admit of having itself neither
a fixed meaning nor reference, then why should we believe it? Does not
rather the thesis "all things lack a fixed essence, and are thus
empty," since it is a universal quantifier and so covers all things
including theses, refute itself? The Logicians are not so much making
the claim here that skepticism necessarily opts out of its own
position, as when a person in saying "I know nothing" witnesses
unwittingly to at least a knowledge of two things, namely how to use
language and his own ignorance, as in the cases of the Socratic Irony
and the Liar's Paradox. It is more the direct charge that a philosophy
which refuses to admit universal essences must be flatly
self-contradictory, since a universal denial must itself be
essentially true of all things. Should we not consider Nagarjuna as a
person who, setting out on what would otherwise be an ingenious and
promising philosophical journey, in a bit too much of a rush, tripped
over his own feet on his way out the front door?

Nagarjuna, in The End of Disputes, responds in two ways. The first is
an attempt to show the haughty Logicians that, if they really
critically examine this fundamental concept of proof which grounds
their theory of knowledge, they will find themselves in no better
position than they claim Nagarjuna is in. How, Nagarjuna asks in an
extended argument, can anything be proven to a fixed certainty in the
way the Naiyayikas posit? When you get right down to it, a putative
fact can be proven in only two ways; it is either self-evident or it
is shown to be true by something else, by some other fact or piece of
knowledge already assumed to be true. But if we assent to the very
rules of logic and valid argument the Vedic Logicians espouse, we
shall find, Nagarjuna thinks, that both of these suppositions are
flawed. Let us take the claim that something can be proven to be true
on the basis of other facts known to be true. Suppose, to use a
favorite example from the Logician Gautama, I want to know how much an
object weighs. I put it on a scale to measure its weight. The scale
gives me a result, and for a moment that satisfies me; I can rely on
the measurement because scales can measure weight. But hold on,
Nagarjuna flags, your reliance on the trustworthiness of the scale is
itself an assumption, not a piece of knowledge. Shouldn't the scale be
tested too? I measure the object on a second scale to test the
accuracy of the first scale, and the measurement agrees with the first
scale. But how can I just assume, once again, that the second scale is
accurate? Both scales might be wrong. And the exercise goes on, there
is nothing in principle which would justify me in assuming that any
one test I use to verify a piece of knowledge is itself reliable
beyond doubt. So, Nagarjuna concludes, the supposition that something
can be proven through reference to some other putative fact runs into
the problem that the series of proofs will never reach an end, and
leaves us with an infinite regress. Should we commit ourselves to the
opposite justification and propound that we know things to be true
which are self-evident, then Nagarjuna would counter that we would be
making a vacuous claim. The whole point of epistemology is to discover
reliable methods of knowing, which implies that on the side of the
world there are facts and on the side of the knower there are proofs
which make those facts transparent to human consciousness. Were things
just self-evident, proof would be superfluous, we should just know
straightaway whether something is such and such or not. The claim of
self-evidence destroys, in an ironic fashion which always pleased
Nagarjuna, the very need for a theory of knowledge!

Having tested both criteria of evidence and come up short, the
Logician might, and in fact historically did, try an alternative
theory of mutual corroboration. We may not know for certain that a
block of stone weighs too much to fit into a temple I am building, and
we may not be certain that the scale being used to measure the stones
is one hundred percent accurate, but if as a result of testing the
stones with the scale I put the stones in the building and find that
they work well, I have reason to rely on the knowledge I gain through
the mutual corroborations of measurement and practical success. This
process, for Nagarjuna, however, should not pass for an epistemologist
who claims to be as strict as the Brahminical Logicians. In fact, this
process should not even be considered mutual corroboration; it is
actually circular. I assume stones have a certain measurable mass, so
I design an instrument to confirm my assumption, and I assume scales
measure weight so I assess objects by them, but in terms of strict
logic, I am only assuming that this corroborative process proves my
suppositions, but it in fact does nothing more than feed my
preconceived assumptions rather than give me information about the
nature of objects. We may say that a certain person is a son because
he has a father, Nagarjuna quips, and we may say another person is a
father because he has a son, but apart from this mutual definition,
how do we know which particular person is which? By extension,
Nagarjuna claims, this is the problem with the project of building a
theory of knowledge as such. Epistemology and ontology are parasitic
on one another. Epistemologies are conveniently formulated to justify
preferred views of the world, and ontologies are presumed to be
justified through systematic theories of proof, but apart from these
projects being mutually theoretically necessary, we really have no
honest way of knowing whether they in fact lend credence to our
beliefs. Again, Nagarjuna has used tools from the bag of the logician,
in this case, standard argumentational fallacies, to show that it is
Brahminical Logic, and not his philosophy of emptiness, which has
tripped itself up before having a chance to make a run in the world.

This, as said above, was Nagarjuna's first response to the Logicians'
accusation that a philosophy of emptiness is fundamentally incoherent.
There is however, Nagarjuna famously asserts, another pettito
principii in the Nyaya charge that the thesis "all things are empty
and lack a fixed nature" is incoherent. The statement "all things are
empty" is actually, Nagarjuna says, not a formal philosophical thesis
in the first place! According to the Nyaya rules of viable logical
argument, the first step in proving an assertion true is the declared
statement of the putative fact as a thesis in the argument (pratijna).
Now in order for something to qualify as a formal philosophical
thesis, a statement must be a fact about a particular object or state
of knowable affairs in the world, and it is a matter of doctrine for
Nyaya that all particular objects or states of affairs are
classifiable into their categories of substances, qualities, and
activities. Nagarjuna however does not buy into this set of
ontological categories in the first place, and so the Logician is
being disingenuous in trying to covertly pull him into the ontological
game with this charge that the idea of emptiness is metaphysically
unintelligible. The Brahminical Logician is insisting that no person
can engage in a philosophical discussion without buying, at least
minimally, into a theory of essences and issues surrounding how to
categorize essences. It is exactly this very point, Nagarjuna demurs,
that is eminently debatable! But since the Logician will not pay
Nagarjuna the courtesy of discussion on Nagarjuna's terms, the
Buddhist replies to them on their terms: "If my statement (about
emptiness) were a philosophical thesis, then it would indeed be
flawed; but I assert no thesis, and so the flaw is not mine."

With the exception of his two major commentators four centuries later,
this stance of Nagarjuna satisfied no one in the Indian philosophical
tradition, neither Brahmanas nor fellow Buddhists. It was the stance
of the kind of debater who styled himself a vaitandika, a person who
refutes rival philosophical positions while advocating no thesis
themselves. Despite all their other disagreements, Brahmanas and
Buddhists in following centuries did not consider such a stance to be
truly philosophical, for while a person who occupied it may be able to
expose dubious theories, one could never hope to learn the truth about
the world and life from them. Such a person, it was suspected is more
likely a charlatan than a sage. Despite the title of his work then,
Nagarjuna's attempt to call into "first question" theories of proof
fell far short of ending all disputes. However, Nagarjuna closes this
controversial and much-discussed work by reminding his readers of who
he is. Paying reverence to the Buddha, the teacher, he says, of
interdependent causality and emptiness, Nagarjuna tells his audience
that "nothing will prevail for those in whom emptiness will not
prevail, while everything will prevail for whom emptiness prevails."
This is a reiteration of Nagarjuna's commitment that theory and praxis
are not a partnership in which only through the former's justification
is the latter redeemed. The goal of practice is after all
transformation, not fixity, and so if one insists on marrying
philosophy to practice, philosophical reflection cannot be beholden to
the unchanging, eternal essences of customary epistemology and
metaphysics
5. The New Buddhist Space and Mission

There may be some extent to which the age-old debate as to whether
Nagarjuna was a devotee of the traditional Theravada or Classical
Buddhism or the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) sect turns on the authorship
of the two letters attributed to him. Very little can be gleaned from
the other works in Nagarjuna's philosophical corpus that would lend
much support to the supposition that the second-century scholar was
even much aware of Great Vehicle doctrines or personages, even though
the ground-breaking notion of emptiness was the one which Mahayana
fixed on as its central idea. The two "ethical epistles" addressed to
the historical Satvahana liege Gautamiputra Satkarni (r. ca. 166-196)
would certainly give Nagarjuna a plausible historical locus. With
their abundant references to the supremacy of the Great Vehicle
teachings, they would also depict Nagarjuna as unequivocally within
this movement. However, the non-existence of original Sanskrit
versions of the Suhrllekha (To a Good Friend) and Ratnavali (Precious
Garland), as well as their obviously heavy redactions in the Tibetan
and Chinese editions, make any definitely reliable attribution of them
to Nagarjuna practically impossible.

The familiar distinctions between the Classical and Great Vehicles are
well-worn; the conservative scriptural and historical literalism of
the former pitted against the mythological revisionism of the latter,
the idealization of the reclusive ascetic pursuing his own perfection
in the former as opposed to the angelic and socially engaged
bodhisattva of the latter. Nagarjuna's other works are filled with
honorific passages dedicated only to the Buddha himself, while the two
epistles abound in praise of the virtues of angelic bodhisattva-hood,
though even these are found amidst passages extolling the perfections
of the eightfold path and the nobility of the four truths. Whatever
Nagarjuna's precise sectarian identification, he never loses sight of
the understanding that the practice of Buddhism is a new sort of human
vehicle, a vehicle meant not to carry people from one realm to another
realm, but a vehicle which could make people anew in the only realm
where they have always lived.

Nagarjuna's letters to the war-mongering Gautamiputra are somewhat
conspicuous for the relative paucity of advice on the actual art of
statecraft. Long sermons in To a Good Friend on the correct
interpretation of subtle Mahayana teachings are intermingled with
catechism-like presentations of the excellence of monastic virtues,
and these are so numerous that even the author concedes toward the end
of the correspondence that the king should keep as many of the
enumerated precepts as he can, since keeping all of them would tax the
fortitude of the most seasoned monk. But with all of these somewhat
disconnected sections of the letter which even internally are wont to
jump from one topic to another, a motif emerges which does seem to
cohere with the more thematic approaches to the idea of emptiness in
the other works, and that motif is the primacy of virtuous conduct and
practice, which takes on even a higher and more relevant role than the
achievements of wisdom.

This motif is surely significant, given the fact that the Classical
and Great Vehicles, while both submitting that ultimate wisdom
(prajna) and compassion (karuna) were the two paramount virtues,
argued over which one was highest, the Theravada opting for wisdom and
Mahayana for compassion. In these epistles, while Nagarjuna warns that
the intentions behind moral acts must be informed by wisdom lest the
benefits of the deed be spoiled, he stresses repeatedly the importance
of steadfastly ethical conduct. Dharma or behavior upright in the eyes
of the Buddha's law of existence has two aspects, one which is
characterized by meditative non-action and the other through positive
action, and the road to Buddhahood, he says, passes through the
positive action of the bodhisattva. For even though dharma is subtle
and hard to comprehend, particularly where the notion of emptiness is
involved and so easily misunderstood, its practice through the
cultivation of moral intentions and attitudes will lead unerringly
through the tangle of doctrinal debates. Beyond this general advice,
which would apply to any monk or nun, counsel is given to the king
that dharma as positive ethical conduct is also "the best policy," for
when one socially promotes adherence to ethical conduct, justice will
prevail in the kingdom and benefits will accrue to all, benefits which
rivals will envy beyond any transient material wealth and false senses
of power.

In the worlds of the present and the future, it is after all only
actions which matter. It is indeed the very physicality of deeds which
leads to the accumulation of either meritorious or detrimental karma,
and so one's fate lies squarely in ones own hands. But through acts
performed in the field of samsara, all conceivable changes are
possible. A prince can become a pauper, either willingly, like the
Buddha, or unwillingly. Young men become old, beauty morphs into
decrepitude, friendship descends into enmity. It is this piercing
contingency of samsara which is so often experienced with such
anguish. But, Nagarjuna quickly reminds his readers, all these
transformations can just as easily go in the opposite direction, with
material poverty blossoming into spiritual riches, fathers reborn as
sons and mothers as young wives, and the wounds of conflict sutured
with the threads of reconciliation. Interdependent causality and the
emptiness which change depends on mean that things can always go
either way, and so which way they in fact go depends intimately on
one's own deeds. And this leads one to grasp that the proper site of
practice for the Buddhist cannot be just the monastery, removed as it
tries to be from the machinations of state, economy, social class and
the other tumultuous and sundry affairs of suffering beings. As there
is no difference between samsara and nirvana owing to the emptiness
and constantly changing nature of both, so the change which a Buddhist
effects upon herself and those around her is a change in the world,
and this constant and purposeful change is the rightful mission of
Buddhism. With his own peculiar and visionary interpretation of the
concept of the emptiness of all things then, Nagarjuna has woven an
anti-metaphysical and epistemological stance together with an ethics
of action which was, true to its own implications, to transform the
self-understanding of the Buddhist tradition for millennia to come.
6. References and Further Reading

Nagarjuna's Works Addressed to Buddhists
Mulamadhyamakakarika, (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way)
translated as The Philosophy of the Middle Way by David J. Kalapuhana,
SUNY Press, Albany, 1986.
Sunyatasaptati, (Seventy Verses on Emptiness) translated by Cristian
Lindtner, Nagarjuniana: Studies in the Writings and Philosophy of
Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1987, 35-69.
Yuktisastika, (Sixty Verses on Reasoning) translated by Christian
Lindtner, Nagarjuniana: Studies in the Writings and Philosophy of
Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1987, 103-19.
Pratityasamutpadahrdaya, (The Constituents of Dependent Arising)
translated by L. Jamspal and Peter Della Santina in Journal of the
Department of Buddhist Studies, University of Delhi, 2:1, 1974, 29-32.
Bodhisambharaka, (Preparation for Enlightenment) translated by
Christian Lindtner, Nagarjuniana: Studies in the Writings and
Philosophy of Nagarjuna, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen, 1987, 228-48.

Nagarjuna's Works Addressed to Brahminical Systems
Vigrahavyavartani, (The End of Disputes) translated as The Dialectical
Method of Nagarjuna by Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, Motilal Banarsidass,
Delhi, 1978.
Vaidalyaprakarana, (Pulverizing the Categories) translated as
Madhyamika Dialectics by Ole Holten Pind, Akademisk Forlag,
Copenhagen, 1987.

Nagarjuna's Ethical Epistles
Suhrllekha, (To a Good Friend) translated as Nagarjuna's Letter to
King Gautamiputra by L. Jamspal, N.S. Chophel and Peter Della Santina,
Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1978.
Ratnavali, (Precious Garland) translated as The Precious Garland and
the Song of the Four Mindfulnesses by Jeffrey Hopkins, Lati Rimpoche
and Anne Klein, Vikas Publishing, Delhi, 1975.