Nāgārjuna

Nāgārjuna, who likely lived in South India around the second century CE, is perhaps the most influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself. Little is known of his life with certainty, later traditions embellished his biography with miraculous stories, but his philosophical writings transformed Buddhist thought forever. His masterwork, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), consists of roughly 450 verses that systematically examine the concepts we take for granted, causation, motion, time, self, perception, and show that none of them can withstand rigorous analysis. But Nāgārjuna's purpose was not skeptical destruction; it was liberation. By demonstrating that all phenomena are 'empty' (śūnya) of inherent, independent existence, he revealed that emptiness is identical with dependent arising: things exist only in relation to other things, and because nothing has fixed essence, everything is possible.