Nagarjuna

• 1. Introduction

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  Nagarjuna is one of those rare thinkers whose ideas are still actively argued over nearly two thousand years after he wrote them. In Tibetan Buddhism, he carries the title "second Buddha" - a designation that places him above every other philosopher in the tradition, second only to the Buddha himself. Yet almost nothing certain is known about his life. His dates are contested, his birthplace is disputed, and many of the texts attributed to him may have been written by entirely different people who happened to share his name. What we do have are his words, above all the Mulamadhyamakakarika, a collection of aphoristic Sanskrit verses that dismantled the entire philosophical landscape of his era. The questions those verses raise are still live: Can anything truly exist on its own? Can we trust what we know? What is the relationship between suffering and reality? This documentary follows the life Nagarjuna probably lived, the philosophy he almost certainly wrote, and the centuries of debate those writings set in motion.

• 2. A World of Competing Schools

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  India in the first and second centuries CE was a place of deep political and philosophical fragmentation. The Kushan Empire and the Satavahana Kingdom were among the powers dividing the subcontinent, and the Buddhist community had already split into numerous competing schools, spread widely across the region. Mahayana Buddhism, the tradition Nagarjuna would come to champion, was at that point a small and largely unrecognized movement. As the scholar Joseph Walser has written, Mahayana before the fifth century was "largely invisible and probably existed only as a minority and largely unrecognized movement within the fold of nikaya Buddhism." Early Mahayana sutras such as the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita were already circulating among certain circles by the second century, but they reached only a small audience. It was into this divided world that Nagarjuna arrived, and his writing would do more than any other single body of work to change the balance of that competition.

• 3. The Life Behind the Legend

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  Most of what is known about Nagarjuna's life cannot be verified. The surviving biographical accounts were written in Chinese and Tibetan centuries after his death, and modern historians do not agree on a specific date or place. The earliest accounts date to the time of Kumarajiva, a Kuchan translator monk who lived from roughly 344 to 413 CE, and even those accounts are sparse. Based primarily on Nagarjuna's association with a king of the Satavahana dynasty, which ruled the Deccan Plateau in the second century, scholars conventionally place him at around 150-250 CE. Walser has argued that archaeological evidence at Amaravati points specifically to a connection with the king Yajna Sri Satakarnī, who ruled in the second half of the second century. Walser further suggests that when Nagarjuna wrote the Ratnavali, he was living in a mixed monastery in the Andhra region around Dhanyakataka - a community in which Mahayanists were actually the minority, most likely affiliated with one of the Mahasanghika sub-schools. Traditional hagiographies portray something far more dramatic: a Brahmin who mastered the Vedas and then converted to Buddhism, travelled to the palace of the nagas beneath the ocean to retrieve hidden scriptures, practised alchemy, and could turn rocks into gold. Buton Rinchen Drub, Taranatha, and Xuanzang all record that alchemical tradition. Nagarjuna is depicted in religious art as a composite of human and serpentine forms, reflecting his legendary connection to nagas - the snake-like supernatural beings associated in Indian mythology with rain, lakes, and great wisdom. The name Nagarjuna itself combines naga with arjuna, the hero of the Mahabharata.

• 4. The Problem of the Texts

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  The Chinese Canon includes over 22 texts attributed to Nagarjuna, while the Tibetan Tanjur contains over 140. That disparity points to a fundamental problem: many of these texts come from much later periods and are likely pseudepigrapha. Scholars have worked to identify the authentic core. According to David Seyfort Ruegg, a commentary attributed to Candrakirti, who lived around 600-650 CE, refers to eight texts as genuinely Nagarjuna's. The scholar Christian Lindtner compiled a more expansive list of works he considers definitively written by Nagarjuna, including the Mulamadhyamaka-karika, the Sunyatasaptati, the Vigrahavyavartani, the Ratnavali, and several others. Other scholars have pushed back. David F. Burton noted that Lindtner was "rather liberal" with his attributions. Jan Westerhoff settled on six works - the MMK, the Vigrahavyavartani, the Sunyatasaptati, the Vaidalyaprakarana, the Yuktisastika, and the Ratnavali - all of which, he argued, "expound a single, coherent philosophical system." A further complication is the name itself: Nagarjuna remained popular in Andhra Pradesh for centuries, and several distinct figures may have written under it. Lindtner identified what he called a tantric Nagarjuna - sometimes referred to as "Nagarjuna II" - who lived much later and wrote the esoteric texts attributed to the name in Vajrayana tradition. There is also a separate Ayurvedic writer of the same name and even a Jain figure whose legendary travels to the Himalayas may have bled into Buddhist accounts.

• 5. Emptiness and the Middle Way

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  The Mulamadhyamakakarika opens with the problem of causation. Nagarjuna identifies four possible ways a thing might arise: from itself, from something else, from both, or from neither. He then refutes each in turn. A thing cannot arise from itself because we do not observe effects already contained within causes. It cannot arise purely from something else because cause and effect cannot be genuinely distinct - the effect depends on the cause to exist, and the cause depends on the effect to be a cause at all. The third and fourth possibilities fail for related reasons. After eliminating all four, Nagarjuna concludes that causes and effects are not independent substances. They are mutually interdependent and cannot be separated from the minds of those who conceptualize them. This argument anchors his central concept: sunyata, usually translated as emptiness. For Nagarjuna, all things are empty of svabhava - of inherent, independent existence. This is not nihilism. Nagarjuna insists that emptiness is precisely what makes the world work. A famous verse in chapter 24 of the MMK states: "All is possible when emptiness is possible. Nothing is possible when emptiness is impossible." Substance theories, by contrast, actually lead to absurdity, because truly independent entities could never interact or cause anything. Nagarjuna dismantles these theories using a logical tool called the catuskoti, or tetralemma, which examines four possible positions on any claim - existence, non-existence, both, and neither - and systematically negates them all. The term Madhyamaka, or Middle Way, was not coined by Nagarjuna himself; the scholar Bhavaviveka introduced it in the sixth century. But the idea it names - a path between the extremes of eternalism and annihilationism - is what Nagarjuna argued throughout the MMK.

• 6. Two Truths and the Limits of Language

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  Chapter 24 of the MMK contains one of Nagarjuna's most influential formulations. There he writes that the Buddha's teaching rests on two levels of truth: the conventional truth of ordinary discourse and the ultimate truth, which is emptiness. Without grasping the distinction between the two, he argues, one cannot understand the Buddha's teaching, and without conventional truth as a stepping stone, the ultimate truth cannot be taught at all. Nagarjuna quotes an early Buddhist source, the Katyayanagotrasūtra, to support a middle position between existence and non-existence. The interpretation of what he meant has generated centuries of debate. Some scholars, including Murti writing in 1955, read Nagarjuna as proposing an ineffable metaphysical noumenon beyond rational discourse - something like Kant's thing-in-itself. Modern scholars including Mark Siderits, Jay L. Garfield, and Jan Westerhoff argue for a different reading: that the ultimate truth for Nagarjuna is precisely that there is no ultimate truth. Siderits puts it directly - "the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth." Emptiness, on this reading, is not a deep metaphysical reality lying beneath appearances. It is a corrective to wrong thinking. It dissolves the conceptual impositions we make on phenomena and then dissolves itself. Nagarjuna warns that treating emptiness as a metaphysical ground is itself a dangerous error: it is, he writes, "like a serpent wrongly held or a spell wrongly executed," destroying the dull-witted. Even nirvana and the Buddha are not exempt. In chapter 25, Nagarjuna analyses nirvana to show it cannot have svabhava. In chapter 22, he subjects the Buddha to the same examination. And in one of his most striking passages, he declares that samsara and nirvana are not ultimately distinct: "There is no distinction whatsoever between samsara and nirvana... What is the limit of nirvana, that is the limit of samsara. There is not even the finest gap to be found between the two."

• 7. Ethics, Faith, and the Bodhisattva Path

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  The Ratnavali, or Precious Garland, was probably addressed to a Satavahana king. In it, Nagarjuna presents a framework in which ethics and faith are not secondary to philosophy but prerequisites for it. He distinguishes two dimensions of the Dharma: the Dharma of ascendance, which covers the practices leading to good rebirths and worldly happiness, and the Dharma of transcendence, which is liberation obtained through wisdom. The first leads to the second. Nagarjuna writes in the Ratnavali: "In whom there is first the Dharma of ascendance, afterward arises the highest good, since after reaching ascendance, one proceeds gradually to the highest good." Faith, he continues, is the prerequisite for wisdom: "Through faith one partakes of the Dharma; through wisdom, one truly understands. Of these two, wisdom is foremost, yet faith is its prerequisite." The scholar Rafal Stepien calls this an eirenic ethics - an ethics of peace - grounded in emptiness. What makes this framework unusual is how it derives ethical behaviour not from a metaphysical foundation but from its absence. Emptiness dissolves the boundary between self and other, making selfish motivation philosophically incoherent. Virtuous actions are understood as skilful means that lead toward nirvana, a state in which there is no karma at all. In that sense Nagarjuna's ethics, like his metaphysics, ultimately dissolves itself: truly compassionate action unravels all craving and attachment, just as the wisdom of emptiness unravels all fixed views. Nagarjuna also closes the Suhrlekha - his Letter to a Good Friend - with a dedication of merit toward rebirth in the pure land of Amitabha Buddha, expressing the aspiration: "May you be born in a buddhafield, freed from illness, old age, attachment, and hatred, and may you become equal to Amitayus, Protector of Worlds."

• 8. Afterlife of an Argument

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  Nagarjuna's refutations of Nyaya and Vaisesika philosophy triggered a centuries-long response from those traditions. Vatsyayana argued that denying the instruments of knowledge undermined philosophical discourse itself. Uddyotakara strengthened inferential theory to resist Nagarjuna's regress-based objections. Vacaspati Misra developed refined accounts of error and cognition to preserve realism. Jayanta Bhatta argued that if Madhyamaka emptiness was extended beyond conventional discourse, it would collapse practical intelligibility. Each response was sharpened by the pressure Nagarjuna's arguments applied. In China, the MMK was transmitted through Kumarajiva's translation, the Madhyamakasastra, which merged Nagarjuna's verses with a commentary by a figure called Qingmu. In Tibet, Nagarjuna's works formed the backbone of philosophical education, and he became a patriarch figure in both the Pure Land and Esoteric traditions. Yijing, the Chinese monk who lived from 635 to 713, recorded that Nagarjuna had passed down teachings from the Vidyadharapitaka, a legendary canon of mantras and dharanis, to his disciple Nanda. In modern times, the analytical philosopher Graham Priest engaged with Nagarjuna's logic in Beyond the Limits of Thought, published in 2002. Jan Westerhoff's The Non-Existence of the Real World, published in 2020, draws directly on Nagarjunian anti-foundationalism. The Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his book Helgoland, credits Nagarjuna's thought as an influence on his relational interpretation of quantum mechanics - a line running from second-century South India into contemporary physics.