Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why Did Nagarjuna Start with Causation?

Nagarjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the first century C.E., is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mahayana Buddhist philosopher. He is the founder of the Madhyamika, or Middle Path, schools of Mahayana Buddhism. His considerable corpus includes texts addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and the set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises that represent the foundation of the highly skeptical and dialectical analytic philosophical school known as Madhyamika. Most important of these is his largest and best-known text, the Muilamadhyamikakarika-in English, Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way. This text in turn inspires a huge commentarial literature in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Divergences in interpretation of the Mulamadhyamikakarika often determine the splits between major philosophical schools. So, for instance, the distinction between two of the three major Mahayana philosophical schools, Svatantrika-Madhyamika and Prasargika-Madhyamika, reflect, inter alia, distinct readings of this text, itself taken as fundamental by scholars within each of these schools. The treatise itself is composed in very terse, often cryptic verses, with much of the explicit argument suppressed, generating significant interpretative challenges. But the uniformity of the philosophical methodology and the clarity of the central philosophical vision expressed in the text together provide a considerable fulcrum for exegesis. The central topic of the text is emptiness-the Buddhist technical term for the lack of independent existence, inherent existence, or essence in things. Nagarjuna relentlessly analyzes phenomena or processes that appear to exist independently and argues that they cannot so exist, and yet, though lacking the inherent existence imputed to them either by naive common sense or by sophisticated, realistic philosophical theory, these phenomena are not nonexistent-they are, he argues, conventionally real. This dual thesis of the conventional reality of phenomena together with their lack of inherent existence depends upon the complex doctrine of the two truths or two realities-a conventional or nominal truth and