Dogen Sangha Česko-Slovensko

Zenová prax a štúdium

Nagarjuna

This page is also available in Slovak.

Nāgārjuna was an Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher who probably lived between 150 and 250 CE. He is regarded as a foundational figure of Madhyamaka, the “teaching of the middle way,” and as one of the most influential thinkers in Mahayana Buddhism. His writings shaped Buddhist philosophy in India and later in Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan.

A life between history and legend

We know considerably less about Nāgārjuna’s life than about his teaching. Scholars generally agree only that he was a Buddhist monk, lived around the second or third century, and probably worked in southern India. We do not know his exact birthplace, the names of his teachers, or the chronology of his life. It is also possible that some works attributed to Nāgārjuna were written by other authors with the same name.

Later Buddhist biographies say that he was born into a Brahmin family, became an adviser to a king, and received the Perfection of Wisdom sutras from the nagas, mythological beings associated with water and serpents. These stories express the reverence in which the tradition held him, but they cannot be treated as a reliable historical biography. The texts whose authorship scholars consider probable therefore provide a firmer basis for understanding Nāgārjuna.

Nāgārjuna’s thought grew out of the Buddha’s teaching of dependent origination and the Mahayana Perfection of Wisdom sutras. He did not seek to replace the Buddha’s teaching with a new metaphysics. Instead, he used precise argumentation to examine what happens when concepts used by Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools are understood as names for fixed, independently existing things.

Root Verses on the Middle Way

His most important work is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or Root Verses on the Middle Way. Its twenty-seven chapters examine causes and conditions, motion, the senses, action, suffering, time, the Buddha, nirvana, and other fundamental concepts of Buddhist teaching. Rather than constructing a new theory, the text repeatedly reveals the problems that arise when we ascribe a fixed and independent essence to phenomena.

Other important works include the Vigrahavyāvartanī (The Dispeller of Disputes), the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (Sixty Stanzas on Reasoning), the Śūnyatāsaptati (Seventy Stanzas on Emptiness), and the Ratnāvalī (Precious Garland), a work on ethics and governance addressed to a ruler. The list of Nāgārjuna’s writings is not definitive: the Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions also attributed many later works to him.

The verses of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā are brief and deliberately condensed. Its chapters examine, for example, the relationships between fire and fuel, action and agent, or cause and effect. Each concept makes sense only in relation to the other; neither can be found as a completely independent foundation. The text’s very concision gave rise to an extensive commentarial tradition and several different interpretations of Madhyamaka.

Emptiness and dependent origination

At the heart of Nāgārjuna’s teaching is emptiness, or śūnyatā in Sanskrit. Here, “emptiness” does not mean that nothing exists or that the world we experience is a worthless illusion. It means that no thing or person possesses svabhāva—an intrinsic, unchanging essence independent of everything else. Things exist, change, and have effects, but only in dependence on causes, conditions, their parts, their relationships, and the concepts through which we distinguish them.

This is why Nāgārjuna connects emptiness with the Buddha’s teaching of dependent origination. If things possessed a fixed and independent nature, they could not change, arise from conditions, or affect one another. Their emptiness is therefore not a denial of everyday reality; it is what makes change, action, suffering, and liberation possible within it. Nāgārjuna’s middle way thus avoids two extremes: the idea of eternal, independent substances and the idea that nothing exists and nothing matters.

His teaching of the two truths should be understood in the same way. Conventional truth is the world of everyday experience, language, and practical distinctions: fire burns, actions have consequences, and suffering can be prevented. Ultimate insight shows that none of these phenomena exists by itself. The two levels do not contradict each other. Without conventional language, emptiness cannot be pointed out; without an understanding of emptiness, we tend to treat conventional distinctions as absolute.

Philosophy as a practical path

Nāgārjuna’s arguments are therefore not merely an intellectual exercise. Fixed ideas about ourselves, other people, and the world sustain attachment, aversion, and delusion. When careful examination reveals no independent essence, we do not need to adopt a new dogma called “emptiness” in its place. Emptiness itself is empty: it is a remedy for a mistaken way of grasping phenomena, not a hidden thing behind them. The aim is to loosen attachment to views and make freer, more compassionate action possible.

The Ratnāvalī and other practically oriented texts show that this insight does not lead to indifference. In them, Nāgārjuna connects wisdom with ethics, compassion, and responsibility for the consequences of action. Because persons and events arise in mutual dependence, our actions are not isolated. Emptiness therefore does not erase the everyday distinction between what is beneficial and what is harmful; it only prevents us from turning those distinctions into immutable essences.

The method of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā reflects this purpose. Nāgārjuna examines opposing possibilities and shows the contradictions that follow when they are treated as absolute. His formulations can therefore appear paradoxical. They do not abandon reason; instead, they use it to reveal the limits of concepts that we mistake for reality itself.

Influence on Zen

Through translations and commentaries, Nāgārjuna’s works became foundational to Madhyamaka in Tibet and to the Chinese Sanlun school. The ideas of emptiness, dependent origination, and freedom from attachment to concepts also entered the broader East Asian Buddhism from which Chan and Japanese Zen emerged. The relationship between Nāgārjuna and Dogen is not a simple transmission of a single philosophical system, but their works share a refusal to separate reality from concrete life and practice.

Within the Dogen Sangha tradition, Mike Luetchford explored this relationship. In his book Between Heaven and Earth: From Nagarjuna to Dogen, he translated and interpreted the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā from the perspective of Dogen’s teaching. It is a modern Zen interpretation that offers one way to read this ancient Indian text in relation to zazen and everyday experience.

Sources and further reading