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A. Overview

I continue drifting onward into Emptiness. I will rely on my own lineage as vehicle (Richard Owsley > Erwin Straus > Karl Jaspers). For a moment, I move nearby Nāgārjuna (b. ≈150 CE), the great thinkerer of the Buddha Dharma’s Great Vehicle (Mahāyāna). He articulated one of the most radical and subtle critiques of human attachment to certainty.

Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way offers a profound response to everyday life. It addresses a hazard like what Jaspers names as Anti-Reason. This danger is the transformation of thought into rigid, totalizing systems. These systems demand assent but refuse genuine questioning. Anti-Reason thrives on an endless proliferation of distinctions. These distinctions masquerade as “knowledge” and “certainty.” However, they serve only to obscure, dominate, and compel obedience.

In parallel, Nāgārjuna shows that making fundamental distinctions compulsively traps us. Distinctions like being and non-being, cause and effect, as well as self and other create conceptual prisons. This generates suffering and ignorance. Thus, his radical dialectic¹ does not reject reason. Instead, it is reason’s highest discipline. It is a systematic, critical exposure of contradictions in our everyday assumptions and dogmatic metaphysical claims. Nāgārjuna refuses to let any view harden into a universal and independent truth. Thus, his method demonstrates how to weaken the grip of dogmatic explications about the order of things.

His Middle Way rejects both essentialism and nihilism.

1. Essentialism is the belief that things have independent, permanent essence. This dictates that all meaning is fixed and unchangeable.
2. In contrast, nihilism at its most radical is the claim that nothing exists at all. This requires that there is no meaning whatsoever in any aspect of the world.

Instead, Nāgārjuna calmly centers emptiness (śūnyatā). This is the insight that all things arise dependently. They lack inherent (independent) nature (svabhāva).

This is not a doctrine of nothingness but a liberating vision. Nāgārjuna shows that all concepts must collapse under strict analysis. He clears a path beyond dogma and fixed views. His dialectical method systematically refutes every assertion, leaving no position on which to cling. This does not destroy meaning but reveals a freedom beyond conceptual entanglement.

Among contemporary practitioners, Nāgārjuna remains one of the most influential Dharma teachers. What follows is a very basic outline of Nāgārjuna’s thinkering to begin grasping the insights.

B. Going Down the middle

Even as [a phenomenon] only arises in dependence on the eye—[visual] form and [focused] attention—so too does consciousness arise in dependence on [ideational] form and [conceptual] name.²
(Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: 26:4)

1. Śūnyatā (Emptiness)

Nāgārjuna’s central insight is that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic, independent nature. Emptiness does not mean nothingness. Instead, the cipher reveals that things exist only in dependence on causes, conditions, and conceptual designation (pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination). This is a direct development of the Buddha’s teaching that all things arise as interdependent.

For Nāgārjuna, to see that things lack inherent nature is to free the mind from clinging to false ontologies:

Whatever is dependently arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way. (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 24:18)

This recognition of “contingent emergence” as a notion does not automatically reveal emptiness. The Middle Way truly unfolds only when centered thinkering connects dependent arising to emptiness. This connection must be a lived insight and already grounded in refuting inherent existence.

Imagine getting a gift from a relative, maybe a bookcase to house all your texts. It comes with instructions for assembly. However, rather than carefully following the manual, you use your conventional experience of how book cases always appear. When you finish, the case wobbles and leans to one side. It does not just “bookcase” because of a “bookcase-ness.” There are only dependent parts, as with all phenomena. You can follow this line of insight outward to absolutely everything.

Through disciplined practice, one understands how emptiness, dependent arising, and the Middle Way converge. They form one seamless experience (Tsongkhapa’s commentary, ibid). And Nāgārjuna locates this at the heart of Buddha’s Dharma.

 I honor the incomparable Buddha

Who teaches that Emptiness, contingent emergence

And the central path are one. (Ibid.)

2. Two Truths

Along the way, Nāgārjuna systematizes the Buddhist idea of two viewpoints:

1. Truth as Conventional Belief (saṃvṛti-satya): The everyday, practical world of appearances and linguistic conventions.
2. Truth as Transcendent Faith (paramārtha-satya): The realization that all these appearances are empty of inherent existence.

These two truths are not separate realities but different ways of seeing the same life-world.

According to the veiled truth, all the dharmas have a cause. According to the highest truth, they are perceived to be without cause. But the highest truth cannot be obtained independently of the veiled truth. (Jaspers, 1966: 420)

Recognizing emptiness doesn’t destroy the conventional—it liberates us from mistakenly taking it as ultimate. For Nāgārjuna, the ultimate truth is that even emptiness itself is empty (śūnyatā-śūnyatā).

3. Critique of Viewpoints

Nāgārjuna is famous for his singular method of consequential reasoning (prasaṅga). Most “professioinal thinkers” might denote this as a reductio ad absurdum. But it goes beyond demonstrating a logical fallacy.

The technique of refutation consists in methodically demonstrating that every possible statement can and must be refuted… The consequence is that everything can be formulated negatively and positively. (Jaspers, 1966: 419)

Again, he does not offer a positive metaphysical system. Rather, by the four-fold negation (catuṣkoṭi) the radical dialectic reveals an inconsistency. This functions as a form of reciprocal oscillation. Meaning that the method swings back and forth exposing paradox at the heart of essentialist thinking.

1. A bookcase is.
2. A bookcase is not.
3. A bookcase both is and is not.
4. A bookcase neither is nor is not.

Phenomena are “neither existent nor non-existent, neither both nor neither.” This method embodies the generative tension of paradox (revealing contradictions) and flux (dissolving static categories). In this way, Nagarjuna shows the inadequacy of binary logic to capture the graceful emergence of interconnectivity and dependent origination.

4. Emptiness of Emptiness

Since Nāgārjuna insists that emptiness is not a denial of everything, he promotes a faithful path for the life-world. His thinkering offers liberatory praxis, a training for letting-go. Like Buddha, he aims at freedom from frustration, suffering, and dissatisfaction. But care must be taken to not misapprehend emptiness as a thing to be possessed. That is what leads off the way and right back to the two extremes.

Treating emptiness as some absolute thing is another form of delusion. Such positioning replants the root of ignorance and suffering. Realizing emptiness itself as empty leads to non-attachment and the cessation of suffering.

This is the fundamental and radical idea: to detach myself from all things and then from detachment; to cling to nothing. (Jaspers 1966: 417)

Jaspers further describes this liberation:

Through passion and the deception of signs, all the dharmas bring about suffering. Once the emptiness of suffering is perceived, it is overcome. Now man has achieved a state free both from illusion and from torment. (1966: 426)

Emptiness is a tool, like a raft to cross a river. Once one discloses that all things are empty—including emptiness—one is free from all conceptual entanglement to drift along the Way.

5. Key Works

Nāgārjuna’s most famous text is the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way.³ In it, he systematically deconstructs views about causality, motion, the self, aggregates, and even nirvāṇa. Other attributed works include The Dispeller of Disputes,⁴ Seventy Verses on Emptiness,⁵ and A Strand of Dharma Jewels.⁶

C. Drifting-onward

Nāgārjuna does not propose a new metaphysics. As Karl Jaspers observed, Nāgārjuna uses logic to dissolve logic—a technique that reveals how all things, even doctrines, are dependently arisen and empty. In this, wisdom arises by letting go—even of the teaching itself. To wander with Nāgārjuna is to follow a profound path that diagnoses the root of suffering as ontological clinging. The truth of transcendent faith is the recognition of emptiness. This does not negate the everyday, conventional world. Rather, it allows us to see it without delusion, free from anti-reason. Through such analysis—showing the emptiness of all fixed positions—the Middle Way refuses every extreme. It opens the possibility of authentic liberation through radical non-attachment and open awareness. Ultimately, the heaviest thoughts transform into enlightened thought. This transition does not lead to despair. Instead, it leads to a deep tranquility free from conflict and clinging.

D. Bibliography

1. Stephen Batchelor, Ed. and Trans. (2000). Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime. New York: Riverhead Books. Translation of Nagarjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Full text at Wisdom Library. Accessed 13 July 2025.
2. Karl Jaspers. (1966). “Nagarjuna.” The Great Philosophers, Vol II: The Original Thinkers. H. Arendt, Ed.; R. Mannheim, Trans. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

e. endnotes

1. Indeed, it is so radical I would prefer to call it “rhizomatic dialectic”; or, to be too clever perhaps, rhizo-dialectics. ↩︎
2. Bracketed insertions are my own interpretation to help with the gist of Nagarjuna’s thinkering. ↩︎
3. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. ↩︎
4. Vigrahavyāvartanī. ↩︎
5. Śūnyatāsaptati. ↩︎
6. Rajā Parikhatā Ratnāvalī. ↩︎

TENTATIVE SERIES OUTLINE

• Whispering New Directions
• A Fourfold for the Current Empire [PREVIOUS]
• Decluttering Awareness: Nagarjuna and Emptiness [CURRENT]
• Showing-Up for Emptiness: Excellence Between Obsession and Apathy [NEXT]
• Responsive to Skillful Attention
• Care-Free Wandering (Zhuangzi)
• Traversing not Avoiding Nihilism (Nishitani)