Nāgārjuna
All things are empty of inherent existence.
Nāgārjuna (vers 150 – 250, India (south, according to tradition)) : buddhist philosophy. For Nagarjuna, nothing exists by itself. A table, a person, an idea, a cause: everything depends on something else, on its parts, its causes, the name we give it. On AskPhilosophy: 3 reconstructed arguments, 5 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 2 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Who was he?
Very little is certain. Tradition makes him a Buddhist monk and scholar from southern India, around the 2nd-3rd centuries AD. The biographies we have are much later and full of legend. Several works are attributed to him (for example the Ratnāvalī, the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā, the Śūnyatāsaptati) and scholars do not agree on the list. The two texts we quote are the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, by far the most famous, and the Vigrahavyāvartanī, whose attribution is a little more debated.
Why he matters
He is the founder of the Middle Way (Madhyamaka), one of the great schools of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, which shaped India, Tibet and East Asia. His main book was translated into Chinese in 409 by Kumārajīva. Modern philosophers compare him with Hume (the self as a bundle of perceptions) or Wittgenstein (the limits of language); these comparisons are made by commentators, with no link of influence.
How to read him here
The text is the Sanskrit of the verses (GRETIL edition, partly reconstructed from the commentaries: verse numbers vary a little between editions). There is no free French translation: the French translations are ours, and each note says so. The English comes from two modern translations, Kenneth Inada (1970) for the Verses and Kamaleswar Bhattacharya (1971) for the Vigrahavyāvartanī; their digitised text is damaged (especially the Sanskrit words), so we only quote readable sentences. The Prasannapadā is Candrakīrti's commentary (7th c.), not Nagarjuna's.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceThe text we have does not speak of a creator God. But it refuses that a thing arises from another thing or without a cause (1.1), which leaves no room for an external creator, and the Buddha himself is said to be empty of own-nature (22.16). It is not atheism in the Western sense (the question is not his): the classification is our reading.
He does not ask the question in these terms. He reasons without starting from experience (he examines ideas by reductio), but he also asks how the "means of knowledge" (perception, inference) are themselves established (VV 31). Calling him empiricist or rationalist would force a Western question onto him.
No view, emptiness included, should become a position one clings to (13.8, 22.11), and he says he has no thesis (VV 29). But this is not general doubt: he keeps a valid conventional truth (24.8 to 24.10) and thinks reality can be seen as it is. Scholars argue about whether to call him a sceptic.
He does not ask the question "mind or matter?". In his list of aggregates, body, feelings and consciousness are all empty of own-nature, and even the Buddha is neither the aggregates nor something other than them (22.1). Neither materialism nor dualism: the question is set aside rather than solved.
Free will is not discussed in these terms. He shows that the agent and the act arise in dependence on each other (8.12): neither a free agent producing its acts nor a fate producing them.
He refuses that the good has a "good own-nature" existing by itself: that would, in his view, put the good beyond any cause and make practice impossible (VV 7, 54). But good and evil keep their value in conventional truth (24.10), and the law of action (karma), set out in 17.1, is not denied, even though actions and fruits are said to be "like a dream" (17.33). A debated reading.
He relies on the Buddha's teaching (15.7, 24.8) and on very tight argument. For him reason dismantles false views but does not replace the path: emptiness wrongly understood ruins slow minds (24.11).
The goal, the end of suffering (nirvāṇa), is given by the Buddha's teaching, not invented: seeing dependent origination is seeing suffering, its origin, its end and the path (24.40). But the world has no meaning "written in things", since things are empty of own-nature.
The text does not speak of human nature, and its thesis is precisely that no "own-nature" exists. It says that actions and defilements come from conceptual play (18.5), neither from a good nor from a bad core.
Nothing in our two texts about the individual and society. A counsel to a king (the Ratnāvalī) is attributed to him, but is not in our corpus. We do not classify.
The ethics is that of Buddhism: self-restraint, benevolence towards others, and action (karma) that bears fruit. Chapter 17 opens with this common doctrine (17.1), which most commentators read as set out by Buddhist interlocutors; Nagarjuna does not reject it at the conventional level, but concludes that actions, agents and fruits are like a mirage or a dream (17.33). Scholars read it sometimes as virtue ethics, sometimes as consequentialism. In our corpus neither is stated: we put "other" and flag the debate.