At the end of the 24th chapter of Mulamadhāyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna says, “Whoever understands dependent origination understands suffering, its cause, its cessation and the path.”  Earlier in that chapter, he identifies dependent origination with emptiness, and identifies that insight with the middle way taught by the Buddha.  So, for Nāgārjuna, the heart of understanding Dharma is the understanding of emptiness, and the heart of understanding emptiness is understanding that to be empty is simply to be dependently originated. When one really sees all phenomena—including external phenomena and one’s own mind—as completely empty, yet dependently originated, then one realizes Dharma.

Emptiness—in the sense of a lack of an individual essence—is the core teaching of Nāgārjuna. Although it’s tricky at first, especially for those with no background or interest in philosophy, to understand Nāgārjuna’s “emptiness,“ we can eventually get the idea that nothing exists “from its own side,” that everything depends on other things for its existence. We can get it in our heads, that is, as an idea. But what does it mean for practice, both on the cushion and in daily life?

There are three stages in realizing Dharma: hearing (or reading); contemplation; meditation.  Without first reading or hearing teachings of Dharma there is nothing to contemplate. So, study is important.  It represents the foundation of practice (at least in the Mahāyāna tradition as practiced in the great Indian universities such as Nalanda, Vikramsila and Taxisila, and preserved in Tibet).  But if one does not subject what one hears to careful rational analysis one never really understands it, and without this deep, discursive understanding, all the reading and listening in the world is just idle infotainment. But once one attains a real discursive understanding of Dharma, one must internalize it, to make it effective in how one engages with the world—with oneself, with others, and with the events and objects we encounter in daily life. Making it part of oneself in this way is the task of meditation. Without discursive understanding, there is nothing on which to meditate; without meditation, the discursive understanding is simply one more kleśa, a bit more fabrication in the way of genuine openness to reality.

Nāgārjuna’s philosophical ideas build directly on the Pali canon.  I think that we should see Madhyamaka not as an alternative to Pali Buddhist doctrine, but as a further development of it.  When we read in the Pali canon that the aggregates are “on fire,” that they are the fuel for saṃsāra, we may wonder how to extinguish that fuel.  Nāgārjuna’s understanding of the aggregates as empty, but as conventionally real, allows us to transform them from the basis of suffering into the basis of liberation.

Nāgārjuna was concerned both with reification and with nihilism, and his Madhyamaka is a middle path between them. Reification is a cognitive reflex: it causes us to posit substantial selves; to see objects around us as substantially existent, permanent, etc… That cognitive reflex is as much a part of our psyches today as it was a part of those with whom the Buddha was in dialogue 2500 years ago. Nāgārjuna saw that reification and nihilism go hand in hand: when you reify yourself, you take others less seriously; when you treat something as permanent, you deny the reality of change and dependency that are the basis of reality. So, I think that we reify just about everything we encounter; and that in virtue of doing so, we are also subtly nihilistic. The middle path is one that eschews both of these cognitive attitudes in an appreciation of the emptiness and dependent origination of all things.

To be empty is not to be non-existent; rather, to exist is to be empty. Emptiness is not an alternative to reality, it is the only kind of reality that anything can have. So, if you deny emptiness, you are in fact a nihilist, even though the route to that nihilism is the instinct of reification.

At one point Nāgārjuna says that what he means by emptiness is the same meaning or goal as the ending of the àsavas, or defilements, in the classical teachings in the Pali Canon. There is apparently some linguistic ambiguity about this distinction between “meaning” and “goal.” That is, he could be saying that both his teaching and the Buddha’s original teaching seek to liberate beings into nirvana (even though they have different meanings) or he could be saying that these are literally two different ways of saying exactly the same thing. Which do you think it is, and does the answer make any difference for a contemporary practitioner?

Both.  The term “artha” in Sanskrit can be translated as “meaning,” “goal,” “object,” “end,” or “purpose.” Nāgārjuna takes himself to be expounding the meaning of the teachings of the Buddha, and to be doing so for the same purpose as did the Buddha—to provide sentient beings with a means to attain liberation.

Here are a few of the charming but enigmatic verses from Nāgārjuna’s Mulamadhāyamakakārikā (MMK). What can we take away from them?

“Just as the teacher, by magic, Makes a magical illusion, and By the illusion Another illusion is created,

“In that way are an agent and his action: The agent is like the illusion, The action Is like the illusion’s illusion…”

“Afflictions, actions, bodies, Agents and fruits are Like a city of Gandharvas and Like a mirage or a dream.”

Ch. XVII, verses 31-33 transl. J. GarfieldMulamadhāyamakakārikā

Nāgārjuna here points out both that restraint (the control of attraction and aversion and the actions they occasion) and positive benefit (the cultivation of bodhicitta) is the essence of Dharma practice. Even though MMK seems to be preoccupied with metaphysics, the understanding of the nature of reality and ethical practice are inseparable.

This is a reply to the worry that even if actions are impermanent, dependent and hence empty, the agent must be real in order to perform them and to realize their karmic consequences. Nāgārjuna deploys the analogy of an illusion begetting an illusion to show that an empty agent can perform empty actions with empty consequences. While they all, like illusions, mirages and dreams, appear to exist in one way (with intrinsic reality) they in fact exist in quite another way (as empty and dependent). This is not to say that they ARE illusory but that like illusions they are deceptive. But deceptive illusions, like mirages, are real: they are real mirages.