Arun Chandrasekaran

Mūlamadhyamakakārika

March 26, 2026

Few texts in the history of human thought have dismantled the furniture of reality so thoroughly, and with such logical precision, as Nāgārjuna's great 2nd-century text on śūnyatā (emptiness), Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK). It literally translates to "Fundamental verses on the Middle Path". I started reading MMK a few months ago. It is by far the most difficult texts to unpack. I still have many chapters left to comprehend.

The translators Shoryu Katsura and Mark Siderits began their collaboration on translating MMK in 1999, when they pooled their independent research resources at a cottage on the island of Miyajima (Japan). While they initially were overly optimistic about the timeline, the project ultimately spanned approximately 14 years, culminating in the publication of the book Nagarjuna's Middle Way: Mulamadhyamakakarika in June 2013.

The translation process was extensive because the authors aimed to reconstruct an interpretation adhering as closely as possible to the earliest proponents by utilizing all four surviving Sanskrit commentaries. Their work, which was acknowledged for its philological reliability and readability won the 2014 Khyentse Foundation Translation Prize at the 17th Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies.

I'll try to explain its core ideas from what I've understood so far. If you find any mistakes, the mistakes are solely mine, as Nāgārjuna does not leave any room for logical or philosophical fallacies.

The basic puzzle it starts with

Think about a table. What is it, really? It's made of wood. The wood is made of fibers. The fibers are made of molecules. Molecules are made of atoms. Atoms are made of... and it just keeps going. You never find a "table-thing" that exists on its own, by itself, from its own side.

That's Nāgārjuna's point: nothing has svabhāva - its own inherent, independent existence.

The word he uses is śūnya (empty). Things are empty - not of existence, but of self-existence. The table exists! But it only exists in relation to other things: the carpenter, the tree, your mind calling it a table, the floor it rests on. Take all those relations away and there's no "table" left standing alone.

This is called dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) - everything arises in dependence on something else. Nāgārjuna's radical move was to say: emptiness is dependent origination. They are the same insight from two angles.

Earlier Buddhist schools said: okay, the table is empty, but it's made of tiny real atoms that do have inherent existence. Nāgārjuna goes all the way down and says: nope - even those atoms are empty. Even emptiness itself is empty (he says this explicitly). There's no bottom turtle (read about the pun on turtles all the way down). This is why it matters philosophically.

The famous two truths

The genius move: these two don't contradict each other. Because things are empty of fixed essence, they can function, change, and be caused. If the table had a locked-in "table-essence," it could never be built or destroyed.

Nāgārjuna doesn't assert a positive doctrine. He takes your position and shows it collapses into contradiction. "You say motion exists inherently? Then tell me: does the motion happen in the place the mover already is, or somewhere it isn't yet?" Either way, paradox. He's not building a castle - he's dissolving everyone else's castles, including his own.

One sentence version:

Everything exists only in relation to everything else, with no fixed essence of its own - and recognizing this clearly is the beginning of liberation.

What he was trying to prove

One core thesis: svabhāva (inherent existence) is incoherent. Not just spiritually wrong, but logically impossible. He wasn't content to assert emptiness. He wanted to demonstrate that any philosophical system built on inherent existence self-destructs under scrutiny.

But that one thesis had to be proven across every major category of reality that philosophers of his day argued about. That's why it's long.

He goes through basically every domain someone might hide a "real, inherent thing" in:

Each chapter is essentially: "You think THIS category escapes emptiness? Watch me destroy that logically."

Who he was arguing against

The volume reflects the philosophical landscape he was navigating. From what I have understood, he was in dialogue (often combatively) with:

Each chapter targets a specific stronghold where inherent existence was being defended. It's less a treatise written for a general reader and more a systematic dismantling of every available refuge for essentialism.

What makes it remarkable in hindsight

Nāgārjuna understood that the mind is extremely creative at finding new places to sneak essence back in. You concede the table is empty - but then quietly assume that emptiness itself is a real thing you have discovered. He anticipates this and demolishes it too.

The length is almost therapeutic in structure: every time the mind finds a new foothold, another chapter kicks it loose.

It's only ~450 verses - actually quite compressed. The apparent volume comes from how much is packed into each verse. Candrakīrti's commentary (Prasannapadā) alone runs to hundreds of pages just to unpack it. The MMK reads almost like a proof sketch - devastatingly efficient, but requiring enormous unpacking.

So: short text, infinite depth, covering every philosophical corner of his world. That's why it became the root text of the entire Madhyamaka tradition.