Nagarjuna (c. 150-c. 250)

A philosopher with no contemporary witness

As with most of the great founding figures of ancient Indian Buddhism, no contemporary and independent document of Nagarjuna's life has come down to us. The reference article of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy recalls this bluntly: "very little can be said with accuracy about the life of Nāgārjuna"^[7]. What is believed to be known of his biography comes almost exclusively from hagiographies written several centuries after his death, the earliest of which is the Biography of the Bodhisattva Nāgārjuna, compiled in Chinese by the translator Kumārajīva around 405 — about a century and a half after the philosopher's traditionally assigned death^[8]. The later Tibetan biographies by Bu ston (14th century) and Tāranātha (17th century) take up and amplify the legend, but "these accounts show surprisingly little agreement among themselves"^[9] — a clear methodological signal for any serious encyclopedia: history must distinguish what it can establish from what piety subsequently constructed, exactly as for Adi Shankara or for Siddhartha Gautama himself.

Contemporary scholars have nevertheless carried out, in the expression of the Stanford Encyclopedia, genuine "historical detective work" to reconstruct the plausible outlines of his life, notably Ian Mabbett (1998) and Joseph Walser (2005), while recognizing that these biographical details are, in the end, of "limited importance" for understanding Nagarjuna's philosophical contribution^[10]. The very place of birth remains uncertain: the Chinese sources place Nagarjuna in the region of Vidarbha, while the dominant tradition, relayed by Kumārajīva, has him born further south, near the present-day site of Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh — "modern historians do not agree on a precise date or place"^[11].

The debate over the dates: between the 1st and the 3rd century

The range most widely accepted by contemporary academic scholarship is "c. 150–250 CE"^[12], a dating that "is rarely disputed" for situating a Buddhist monk who lived "probably mainly in South India"^[13]. This range nevertheless remains broad — a full century — and certain elements internal to his work make it possible to refine it. The American historian Joseph Walser thus proposed, on the basis of a combined examination of textual sources and the epigraphy of the Buddhist site of Amaravati (Andhra Pradesh), that Nagarjuna may have served as adviser to sovereigns of the Sātavāhana dynasty during the 2nd century, which would provide a more precise chronological and geographical anchor than hagiographical tradition alone^[14]. This hypothesis connects directly with the tradition, developed further in this article, which makes Nagarjuna the friend and spiritual adviser of a Sātavāhana king, addressee of two of his ethical works.

The problem of the "several Nāgārjunas"

A further difficulty, decisive for any rigorous reading of his work, lies in the fact that the name "Nāgārjuna" was borne, or rather claimed, by several distinct authors over the centuries. The Stanford Encyclopedia puts it precisely: it is difficult to establish an exact list of the texts composed by Nagarjuna, "in part because different authors bearing the name 'Nāgārjuna' may have lived at different periods in the development of Buddhist thought in India, and in part because of the tendency to attribute newly composed works to the great authorities of the past"^[15]. The Chinese canon thus preserves more than twenty-two texts attributed to Nagarjuna, and the Tibetan Tanjur more than one hundred and forty — a corpus manifestly disproportionate for a single author of the 2nd–3rd century, including late tantric works attributed to a hypothetical "Nāgārjuna II", active several centuries after the philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka^[16].

The best documented case of this confusion concerns the alchemical treatise Rasaratnākara, long attributed to Nagarjuna in popular accounts of the history of Indian science. The Indologist Dominik Wujastyk established, as early as 1984, that this text is in reality the work of a distinct author, Nityanātha Siddha, and that the attribution to Nagarjuna resulted from a manuscript error taken up by the Indian historian of science P. C. Ray at the beginning of the 20th century — what the study literally calls an "alchemical ghost"^[17]. The Indologist David Seyfort Ruegg, in his reference study on the literature of the Madhyamaka school, was the first to systematize this necessary distinction between the philosopher of the 2nd–3rd century, author of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and the later figures — alchemist, tantric siddha — who subsequently claimed his authority^[18]. In this article Ignispedia retains exclusively the philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka.

Birth in South India into a Brahmin family

According to the biography transmitted by Kumārajīva, Nagarjuna was born into a wealthy Brahmin family in South India, "at the foot of an arjuna tree" — a hagiographical detail to which tradition links the second part of his name^[19]. As with other religious founders of ancient India, a topos of intellectual precocity accompanies his childhood: according to legend, he mastered all the traditional Vedic sciences in his teens, and by twenty his reputation as a scholar was already established^[20]. The account indicates, however, that despite this intellectual success, the young Brahmin remained unsatisfied with regard to sensual pleasures — a dissatisfaction that would precipitate the most dramatic and most discussed episode of his youth.

The palace episode and conversion to Buddhism

The oldest and most striking account of Nagarjuna's life, transmitted by Kumārajīva and later taken up by the Tibetan historiographers Bu ston and Tāranātha, tells that at twenty, Nagarjuna and three companions learned from a sorcerer an art of becoming invisible^[21]. Taking advantage of this power, they entered the private apartments of the royal palace and seduced the women there. Discovering the profanation, the king ordered his soldiers to sweep the room blindly with their swords, aiming systematically just above the footprints left in the dust by the invisible intruders: Nagarjuna's three companions were thus killed, while he alone escaped the massacre by standing close against the king himself^[22].

According to the traditional account, this experience of imminent mortal danger made the young Brahmin understand that sensual desire is the root of suffering: he fled into the mountains and became a monk, beginning the study of the Buddha's teachings^[23]. Whether this episode is an authentic memory or, more likely, a hagiographical parable constructed to legitimize a religious conversion as radical as it was sudden, it follows a narrative structure found in other founders' biographies — presenting as providential a rupture that overturned the social conventions of the time. The three preserved versions of this account (Kumārajīva, Bu ston, Tāranātha) "show surprisingly little agreement among themselves"^[24], which confirms the legendary rather than historical nature of this youthful memory.

The legend of the naga realm and the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras

The most famous episode associated with Nagarjuna in Mahāyāna devotion, which explains the first part of his name, tells that through the power of his meditation he travelled to the underground palace of the king of the nagas (the serpent-spirits of Indian traditions), to whom the Buddha had entrusted, during his lifetime, a set of sutras deemed too profound to be understood by the men of his time^[25]. Nagarjuna is said to have brought back to the surface the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras (Prajñāpāramitā), among which are the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra, texts which he then "systematized and deepened" in his own philosophical corpus^[26]. Wonderful as this legend is in its form, it encodes a real and verifiable doctrinal fact: Nagarjuna's work does indeed constitute the first great philosophical systematization of the Perfection of Wisdom literature, whose central teaching — the emptiness of all phenomena — becomes, under his pen, a rigorous argumentative system rather than a simple scriptural proclamation.

Friendship with a Sātavāhana king: the Suhṛllekha and the Ratnāvalī

Indian and Tibetan tradition agree in making Nagarjuna the counsellor and spiritual friend of a king of the powerful Sātavāhana dynasty, which dominated much of the Deccan in the first centuries of our era. Hagiographical sources most often name this king Gautamīputra, but the most rigorous dating — that defended by Joseph Walser on the basis of the Amaravati inscriptions — would fit better with a slightly later sovereign, Yajña Śrī Sātakarni, whose reign, at the end of the 2nd century, corresponds more closely to the chronological range retained for Nagarjuna^[27]. Whatever the exact name of the sovereign, two authentic ethical works by Nagarjuna are addressed to him: the Suhṛllekha ("Letter to a Friend"), a brief treatise in verse setting out the fundamental principles of Buddhist life and advising the king on his own conduct^[28], and the Ratnāvalī ("Precious Garland"), a more developed treatise which distinguishes two dimensions of Buddhist teaching: the "dharma of ascent", which procures happiness and good rebirths through the practice of virtue, and the "dharma of transcendence", which leads to liberation through wisdom^[29]. The Ratnāvalī further contains long concrete political counsels on the government of the kingdom, a sign that Nagarjuna — radical philosopher of emptiness — by no means disdained to address the concrete order of temporal affairs.

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, founding text

Nagarjuna's undisputed and most studied work is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā ("Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way", often abbreviated MMK), a text of about four hundred and fifty verses in twenty-seven chapters, which "expounds the whole of his thought" and constitutes the central text of Middle Way philosophy^[30]. Written in an extremely compressed, almost aphoristic style, it proceeds chapter by chapter with the systematic deconstruction of categories which common sense and rival philosophical schools — notably Abhidharma realism and the Nyāya logical school — held to be substantially real: causality, motion, time, the person, the aggregates constituting the individual, the Buddha himself, and even the four noble truths and Nirvana.

The minor argumentative treatises

Beside the MMK, a small corpus of briefer argumentative treatises completes and extends its argument, with an attribution judged "largely undisputed" by academic scholarship^[31]:

• The Vigrahavyāvartanī ("Dispeller of Disputes"), seventy verses accompanied by a prose autocommentary, which answers the logical and epistemological objections addressed to the doctrine of emptiness by rival schools, notably on the status of language and knowledge^[32].
• The Śūnyatāsaptati ("Seventy Verses on Emptiness"), which deal with agency and the two truths^[33].
• The Yuktiṣaṣṭikā ("Sixty Verses of Reasoning"), devoted to the articulation between emptiness and dependent origination^[34].
• The Vaidalyaprakaraṇa ("Treatise of Pulverization"), which refutes point by point the logical categories of the rival Brahmanical Nyāya school^[35].

The hymns and the Tathāgatagarbha ambiguity

A set of four hymns, known collectively as the Catuḥstava, develops for its part a more "positive" conception of ultimate truth, which approaches in places the later doctrine of Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha)^[36]. This tension between the strictly negative side of the MMK and the more affirmative side of certain hymns has nourished, within the Buddhist tradition itself, divergent readings of Nagarjuna's ultimate intention — a question which goes beyond the biographical scope of this article, but which it was fitting to note out of philological honesty.

How many texts are really by him? The authenticity problem

Faced with the hundred or even several hundred texts circulating today under the name of Nagarjuna, the philosopher David F. Burton has established a restricted list of works whose authenticity is the object of a quasi-general academic consensus: the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Vigrahavyāvartanī, the Śūnyatāsaptati, the Yuktiṣaṣṭika, the Catuḥstava, the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa and the Ratnāvalī^[37]. This philological discipline is not a gratuitous academic exercise: it directly conditions what an honest encyclopedia can attribute, without reservation, to the philosopher of the 2nd-3rd century rather than to the vast tradition of admirers and pseudepigraphers who continued, for more than a millennium, to write under his name.

Svabhāva: what has to be dismantled

To understand what Nagarjuna denies, one must first understand what he is targeting: svabhāva, a Sanskrit term variously rendered as "inherent existence", "intrinsic nature", "substance" or "essence"^[39]. The Stanford Encyclopedia distinguishes three ways of understanding what this technical term covers: a property which an object could not lose without ceasing to be that very object (in the sense of essence); an ultimate "ontological ground" on which the diverse world of phenomena would rest (in the sense of substance, the "primary reality"); or again an absolute reality, produced by no causal process, immutable and independent^[40]. In other words — to use a simple image before entering into the technicalities of the system — svabhāva is that by which a thing would be what it is by itself, independently of everything else (see, in the illustration opposite, the modern pedagogical example of the cup: an example which faithfully illustrates the point, but does not appear as such in the ancient text). Nagarjuna devotes his entire work to showing that no thing in this world, not even Nirvana, possesses such a ground. The recognition of this universal absence of svabhāva has, in his view, a directly soteriological bearing: it is "the path to liberation from existential suffering"^[41].

Emptiness as dependent origination: the key verse of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

The most quoted verse in all of Nagarjuna's work, the eighteenth verse of the twenty-fourth chapter of the MMK, condenses into a single formula the connection between the two central concepts of his thought:

"Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that we explain as emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way." — Nagarjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, XXIV, 18, trans. after Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Oxford University Press, 1995^[42]

This verse identifies three notions which the earlier Buddhist tradition held to be distinct: dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda — the principle according to which every phenomenon arises in dependence on causes and conditions), emptiness (the absence of svabhāva) and the "middle way" itself, which avoids both the error of eternalism (believing that things possess a permanent and independent existence) and that of nihilism (denying all existence, even conventional)^[43]. In other words, for Nagarjuna, to say that a thing is "empty" never means that it does not exist: it means that it exists only relationally, in dependence on causes, on parts, on concepts and on conventions — never by itself.

The tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi): neither this, nor that, nor both, nor neither

One of Nagarjuna's most characteristic dialectical tools, inherited from ancient Buddhist logic, is the catuṣkoṭi ("tetralemma" or "four corners"): for any assertion concerning a state of affairs, four logical positions are conceivable a priori — that it is, that it is not, that it both is and is not, or that it neither is nor is not^[44]. Nagarjuna applies this framework, from the very first chapter of the MMK, to the question of causality: a thing could be caused by itself, by something else, by both at once, or by neither^[45].

Nagarjuna's conclusion is not to choose one of these four positions against the other three, but to show that none of the four makes it possible to understand causality as a matter of svabhāva — which leads him to conclude that "there must be an error in the very supposition" that cause and effect would exist in this substantial manner^[46]. This mode of argument, which systematically ruins the four logically available outcomes, has prompted a lively contemporary philosophical debate: the logicians Graham Priest and Jay Garfield proposed, from 2009-2010 onwards, a "paraconsistent" reading of the tetralemma, drawing on non-classical logics which tolerate localized contradictions^[47] — an interpretation itself disputed by other logicians: in his chapter "Nāgārjuna's Logic", Aaron Cotnoir objects that the truth-value lattices proposed by Priest and Garfield do not capture the logic actually at work in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, particularly given the classical forms of reasoning — such as modus ponens — which Nagarjuna otherwise employs^[48]. This debate, far from settled, shows that the exact logical scope of the tetralemma remains, to this day, an open question in academic philosophy.

The two truths: conventional and ultimate

To reconcile everyday experience — in which the world, persons and objects do indeed appear real and causally ordered — with the thesis of universal emptiness, Nagarjuna distinguishes two levels of truth: conventional truth (saṃvṛti-satya), which "consists in agreement with commonly accepted practices and conventions", and ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya)^[49]. But here Nagarjuna's doctrine differs radically from that of Adi Shankara, for whom there exists an Absolute (Brahman) fully real at the ultimate level: for Nagarjuna, "there can be no ultimate truth in the sense of a theory describing how things really are, independently of our interests and our conceptual resources"^[50]. More radically still, emptiness itself cannot be promoted to the rank of ultimate truth: "emptiness must not be regarded as the ultimate truth either", the Stanford Encyclopedia specifies, for its role is not to describe a reality independent of human conventions, but only to "combat the erroneous attribution of svabhāva"^[51]. There is therefore, in Nagarjuna's system, no ultimate and positive metaphysical ground — neither Brahman, nor substance, nor even "emptiness" as an entity in its own right.

"I have no thesis": the problem of self-reference

This radical stance immediately exposes Nagarjuna to a classic objection, addressed to him already in his lifetime by an opponent of the Nyāya logical school, in the Vigrahavyāvartanī itself: if Nagarjuna asserts that all things are devoid of svabhāva, does this universal assertion itself possess a svabhāva? If so, it contradicts itself; if not, on what basis could it claim to describe reality universally? Nagarjuna replies, in the twenty-ninth verse of the treatise, with a dialectical turn that has remained famous:

"If I had any thesis, the [aforementioned] fault would consequently apply to me. But I have no thesis, so this fault does not apply to me." — Nagarjuna, Vigrahavyāvartanī, verse 29, quoted and analysed by Jan Westerhoff, "The no-thesis view: making sense of verse 29 of Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī"^[52]

The philosopher Jan Westerhoff calls this "no-thesis position" "one of the most immediately puzzling philosophical features of Nāgārjuna's thought", a feature which has fed, according to the interpreters, both sceptical and mystical readings of his work^[53]. The problem remains fully alive for a reader trained in classical logic and Thomist metaphysics: a doctrine which explicitly refuses to assert a propositional thesis about the world certainly escapes formal self-refutation, but at the cost of abandoning any claim to state a truth in the sense in which Catholic philosophy understands the term — an adequation of intellect and thing (adaequatio intellectus et rei). This difficulty, far from being a Catholic whim, is a living problem in contemporary academic research on Nagarjuna, as shown by the debate on the tetralemma discussed above.

Nirvana and samsara: a disconcerting identity

One of the most striking consequences of the doctrine of universal emptiness concerns the status of Nirvana itself. In the twenty-fifth chapter of the MMK, Nagarjuna asserts:

"Samsara is not in the least different from nirvana, and nirvana is not in the least different from samsara — not even the subtlest distinction exists between them." — Nagarjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, XXV, 19, trans. after Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Oxford University Press, 1995^[54]

As Garfield himself comments, "there is no more difference of entity between the conventional and the ultimate than there is between nirvana and samsara; nirvana is simply samsara seen without reification, without attachment, without illusion [...] Nagarjuna stresses that nirvana is not elsewhere"^[55]. This verse, one of the most commented in all Madhyamaka literature, sums up on its own Nagarjuna's philosophical ambition: it is not a matter of escaping from a world of illusion towards a separate Absolute (as with Shankara, where Brahman remains ontologically distinct from the sphere of maya), but of seeing correctly — that is, without projecting svabhāva — conditioned reality itself.

The charge of nihilism and Candrakīrti's reply

From late Antiquity onwards, realist Buddhist opponents (notably from the Abhidharma school) and Brahmanical philosophers accused Nagarjuna's doctrine of sinking into pure and simple nihilism: denying all svabhāva would amount, in their view, to purely and simply denying the existence of all things, including the moral law of the retribution of acts (karma). This is already the objection formulated by the opponent of chapter XXIV of the MMK himself: if all is empty, there is neither production nor cessation, and the Four Noble Truths do not exist^[56]. The classical reply of the school, formulated above all by the great commentator Candrakīrti (7th century) in the so-called Prāsaṅgika tradition, consists in distinguishing conventional existence, which Madhyamaka does not deny, from substantial existence (svabhāva), the sole target of the refutation: to deny svabhāva is to deny the independent and self-sufficient existence which ignorance projects onto things, without denying that these appear and produce their effects at the conventional level^[57]. For Candrakīrti, Madhyamaka's ambition is moreover not to defend one positive metaphysical thesis against another, but to use the mere logical consequence (prasaṅga) of opposing positions to refute them from within, without ever committing itself to a substantial doctrine — which directly echoes the "no-thesis position" of the Vigrahavyāvartanī^[58].

The "second Buddha": prophecies of the Lankāvatāra and the Mahāmegha

The Tibetan tradition bases Nagarjuna's exceptional status on a prophecy which the Lankāvatāra Sūtra would place in the mouth of the Buddha himself: in a future age, a great virtuous bhikṣu named Nāgārjuna will refute the views of existence and non-existence and proclaim the unsurpassed teaching of the Mahāyāna^[59].

A second prophecy, drawn from the Mahāmegha Sūtra ("Sutra of the Great Cloud"), is likewise invoked by tradition in support of the same exceptional status^[60]. It is on the basis of these two prophetic texts that the Tibetan and East Asian tradition came to designate Nagarjuna as the "second Buddha"^[61] — a title which, for a Catholic reader, must be understood for what it is: not a claim to divine incarnation comparable to that of Christ, but a recognition of the exceptional doctrinal authority which the Mahāyāna tradition grants to his philosophical system.

Transmission to China: Kumārajīva and the School of the Three Treatises

The spread of Nagarjuna's thought outside India owes almost everything to a single man: Kumārajīva (344-413), a monk of Indo-Kuchan origin active at the court of China, who translated the MMK into Chinese under the title of Zhong lun ("Treatise on the Middle")^[62]. This translation, together with that of two other Madhyamaka treatises, became the founding text of the Chinese school known as Sanlun ("School of the Three Treatises"), which dominated Chinese Buddhist scholasticism in the 5th and 6th centuries before spreading to Japan under the name Sanron^[63]. It is thus paradoxically thanks to a translator born well after Nagarjuna's death that his thought acquired, in the Far East, a scriptural authority almost equal to that of the sutras themselves.

The Tibetan reception: Svātantrika, Prāsaṅgika and Candrakīrti

Within the Madhyamaka tradition itself, two great rival readings of Nagarjuna's method developed from the 6th century onwards: the Svātantrika school, associated with the philosopher Bhāviveka, which admits the formulation of autonomous syllogisms (svatantra) to establish emptiness, and the Prāsaṅgika school, associated with Candrakīrti, which refuses any positive assertion in favour of the sole reduction to absurdity of opposing positions^[64]. It is this second reading, closest to the "position of no thesis" of the Vigrahavyāvartanī, which became "the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism", still regarded today as "the summit of philosophical sophistication"^[65].

What the Church can recognize

A Catholic can recognize, in Nagarjuna's approach, a real philosophical and spiritual demand: the refusal to rest content with appearances, a pitiless lucidity about attachment as the root of suffering, and an argumentative discipline of uncommon rigour. The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration Nostra Aetate (28 October 1965), provides the theological framework for appreciating such a quest without rejecting it wholesale, speaking precisely of Buddhism: "In Buddhism, according to its various schools, the radical insufficiency of this changeable world is acknowledged and a way is taught by which men, with a devout and confident heart, can acquire the state of perfect liberation"^[66]. The same text concludes, a few lines further on, with a principle that applies directly to the Catholic reading of Madhyamaka philosophy: "The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions [...] they often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men"^[67].

This openness echoes the patristic doctrine of the "seeds of the Word" (semina Verbi), taken up by the 1965 decree Ad Gentes, according to which elements of truth and goodness can be found, sown by Providence, in the great religious traditions of mankind, to be recognized, purified and fulfilled in Christ^[68]. Nagarjuna's intuition that attachment to created things, taken for what they are not — self-sufficient realities — necessarily begets suffering, is not without echo in the biblical teaching on the vanity of idols and of created things cut off from their Creator (Ecclesiastes 1:2; Ps 115:4-8).

Buddhist emptiness and Christian apophaticism: resemblance and radical difference

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who conducted one of the most serious dialogues between Christian mysticism and Buddhist thought in the twentieth century, noted in his Asian Journal, on encountering statues of the Buddha in Sri Lanka, that he had approached "peace, not of emotional resignation [...] but of Madhyamika, of sunyatā"^[69]. Merton thus drew a parallel between Buddhist emptiness and the tradition of Christian apophatic theology — the theology which, from Gregory of Nyssa to John of the Cross by way of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, successively denies every finite concept applied to God to make room for mystical union^[70].

This parallel, honest and fruitful for interreligious dialogue, must not however mask a decisive structural difference. Christian apophaticism denies concepts to make room for a positive fullness: God, says Dionysius, is "beyond every affirmation" precisely because he infinitely overflows every created category — negation is placed in the service of an excess of being, not of an absence. John of the Cross, in the "dark night", never seeks the extinction of the person, but his loving union with a personal God who remains, at journey's end, more intimately present than ever. Nagarjuna's emptiness, by contrast, opens onto no positive fullness of this kind: it stops, as we have seen, at the observation that "emptiness itself must not be regarded as ultimate truth"^[71] — there is, at the end of Madhyamaka negation, neither God, nor Absolute, nor anyone to meet, but only the dissolution of the illusion of svabhāva.

A God who IS, against the absence of all foundation

The deepest point of rupture between Nagarjuna's philosophy and the Catholic faith concerns the very question of whether there exists, or not, an unconditioned reality grounding everything conditioned. When Moses asks God his name at the burning bush, the answer is: "I am who am" (Ex 3:14) — God reveals himself as Being itself, not as one more thing among things, but as the subsisting source of all that is. Saint Thomas Aquinas systematizes this revelation in the formula according to which God is ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent Being, pure act with no unactualized potentiality — it is precisely because such an unconditioned foundation exists that the chain of contingent causes and effects, dealt with by the cosmological argument, does not lose itself in an endless regress with no term.

Yet it is exactly this term that Nagarjuna's system refuses to admit. Dependent origination, in his thought, goes back to no unconditioned first term: it is a web of relations with no ultimate knot, in which even Nirvana — which, in other Buddhist schools, might have played this role of the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta) — is itself emptied of all svabhāva and declared "in no way different" from conditioned samsara^[72]. A Catholic cannot, without renouncing the essentials of his faith, accept this radical and systematic absence of all foundation: God is not, for the Christian faith, a useful convention or a truth only relative to human interests, but the One who really creates the world from nothing, "with no need of any pre-existent matter or any help", as the Catechism recalls^[73]. Creation is neither a necessary emanation from an impersonal Absolute, nor a pure play of dependent designations with no term at all: it is the free gift of a personal God who really subsists, independently of the world he creates.

The following table situates Nagarjuna's position relative to that of Adi Shankara and to Catholic doctrine, on the four metaphysical questions which most clearly separate these three positions:

The judgment of John Paul II: a "negative soteriology"

In his book-length interview Entrez dans l'espérance (1994), Saint John Paul II devoted substantial and much-discussed pages to his reading of Buddhism. As the pagination of the French edition could not be verified, the content of this chapter is rendered here in paraphrase, presented as such: the pope describes Buddhism as a largely atheistic system^[75], whose tradition and derived methods would have an almost exclusively negative soteriology — a doctrine of salvation^[76]: to save oneself would mean, in this perspective, above all to free oneself from evil by becoming indifferent to the world, held to be the source of evil^[77]. He concludes with a direct comparison with the Catholic mystical tradition: Carmelite mysticism would begin where the Buddha's reflections and his instructions for the spiritual life leave off^[78] — that is, detachment, in Saint John of the Cross, is never an end in itself, but the path towards loving union with a personal God, whereas Buddhist detachment aims at the extinction of all thirst in Nirvana.

This severe judgment provoked, from its publication onwards, a major controversy: several Buddhist leaders, notably during the pope's visit to Sri Lanka, denounced what they saw as a caricatured presentation of their tradition, and the Tibetan master Thinley Norbu Rinpoche answered it with a whole book, Welcoming Flowers from across the Cleansed Threshold of Hope, reproaching the pontifical text with "serious and gratuitous misunderstandings" of Buddhist doctrine^[79]. An honest reading must therefore note, on the one hand, that John Paul II's judgment certainly simplifies the internal diversity of Buddhism (Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka school, in particular, itself explicitly refuses any "thesis", whether atheist or nihilist, as we have seen above); and, on the other, that the substantial point aimed at by the pope — the absence, in Buddhist soteriology, of a personal union with a God who loves and who saves — remains a real doctrinal disagreement, not a mere infelicity of translation.

Why universal emptiness cannot be true for a Catholic

The reasons why a Catholic cannot, without denying the essentials of his faith, adopt the Madhyamaka thesis of a universal emptiness with no unconditioned foundation must be named with clarity, by way of synthesis.

First, this doctrine by construction excludes the existence of a personal God, source and foundation of all that is — precisely what classical Catholic metaphysics, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to the Catechism, holds to be the very condition of possibility of a creation really distinct from its Creator, and of a genuine love between two really distinct terms. Second, it deprives the human person of all lasting substantial identity: if nothing, not even Nirvana, possesses svabhāva, then the person himself dissolves into a web of dependent designations with no stable subject — whereas the Catholic faith holds on the contrary that "each spiritual soul is immediately created by God [...] ; it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body"^[80], the human person remaining, in his irreducible singularity, the subject of the promised resurrection. Third, it makes the hope of a personal and eternal communion with God impossible: if the ultimate is, on principle, neither nameable nor graspable as a positive reality — since "emptiness itself must not be regarded as ultimate truth"^[81] — then no relation of personal love, no eternal face-to-face between the created "I" and the divine "Thou", can find a stable metaphysical foundation in this system.

Nagarjuna remains one of the most powerful and rigorous minds ever produced by human philosophy: a dialectician capable of dismantling, one by one, all the concepts common sense holds self-evident — causality, motion, time, the person, down to Nirvana itself — without ever letting himself be caught, in his own eyes, in the contradiction he denounces in his adversaries. His life and work challenge Christians on one precise point: do we too take sufficiently seriously the root of suffering in disordered attachment to created things, taken for what they are not?

But where Nagarjuna leads his reader, at the end of an uncompromising dialectic, to nothing but the dissolution of every claim to an ultimate foundation — not even Nirvana escaping it — Christians receive in Christ a hope of a wholly different nature: not the absence of all ground, but the encounter with a God who absolutely IS and who freely gives himself; not the extinction of the person in a web of dependent designations, but the glorious resurrection of a body and soul remaining, eternally, those of a loved and loving "I"; not a self-sufficient wisdom dispelling illusion by the sole force of argument, but a salvation freely received from Christ, "the same yesterday, today and for ever" (Heb 13:8). That is why the Church, while recognizing the austere rigour and real lucidity of Nagarjuna's quest concerning suffering and attachment, can proclaim but one Name given to men by which to be saved (cf. Acts 4:12).

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article "Nāgārjuna" — the most rigorous academic synthesis on Nagarjuna's dating, authentic works and philosophical doctrine.
• Jay L. Garfield (trans. and comm.), The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Oxford University Press, 1995 — the reference annotated translation of the founding text.
• Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009 — the reference philosophical study of the Madhyamaka system.
• David Seyfort Ruegg, The Literature of the Madhyamaka School of Philosophy in India, Otto Harrassowitz, 1981 — the reference study of the corpus and the problem of the "several Nāgārjunas".
• Joseph Walser, Nāgārjuna in Context: Mahāyāna Buddhism and Early Indian Culture, Columbia University Press, 2005 — a historical inquiry into Nagarjuna's dating and social context.
• John Paul II, Entrez dans l'espérance, Plon/Mame, 1994 — the much-discussed pontifical judgment on Buddhist soteriology.
• Second Vatican Council, declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) and decree Ad Gentes (1965) — the magisterial framework for the Catholic view of non-Christian religions.