India · c. 150 CE – today
Madhyamaka
Nothing has an intrinsic nature (svabhāva), because everything arises dependently; this ‘emptiness’ is the Middle Way between believing in essences and believing in nothing.
Does anything exist by its own nature?
Abhidharma scholars had broken the self down into ultimate elements (dharmas), which they took to have their own nature. Nāgārjuna, drawing on the new Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) sūtras, argued that this quietly reintroduced the fixation on essences the Buddha had warned against.
Whatever depends on causes and parts cannot have a self-standing essence, and anything with a fixed essence could never arise or change. So every thing—including the Abhidharma elements and emptiness itself—is empty: real at the level of convention, but without intrinsic existence at the ultimate level.
- Dependent origination is emptiness.
- There are two truths: conventional and ultimate.
- Emptiness is itself empty, not a hidden absolute.
Madhyamaka became the leading philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism and shaped East Asian schools such as Sanlun, Tiantai and Chan.
Thinkers
c. 150–250NāgārjunaFounder of Madhyamaka, revered as a ‘second Buddha’c. 600–650CandrakīrtiMadhyamaka commentator whose reading became orthodox in TibetKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofEarly Buddhism & AbhidharmaNāgārjuna radicalised the Buddha’s dependent origination and non-self, turning them against the Abhidharma belief that the basic elements have their own nature.
What it led to
Opposed byYogācāraYogācāra accepted emptiness but insisted that the flow of consciousness is in some sense real, to keep emptiness from being read as nihilism.Borrowed by
Advaita VedāntaGauḍapāda’s doctrine of non-origination echoes Madhyamaka arguments, which is why rival Vedāntins called Advaitins ‘crypto-Buddhists’.Borrowed by
Chan / Zen BuddhismChan took from Madhyamaka the emptiness of all things and a distrust of fixed concepts, which it turned into a practice of “no thought”.