Nagarjuna

Their life

The Buddhist philosopher who turned the Buddha's teaching into rigorous argument, and founded the Madhyamaka — the "Middle Way" school that shaped Mahayana Buddhism across India, Tibet, China and Japan. His Mūlamadhyamakakārikā argues, verse by verse, that nothing whatever possesses independent existence: everything arises in dependence on something else, and that dependence IS what emptiness means. He is claimed as a founding figure by Zen and by every school of Tibetan Buddhism, and almost nothing about his life can be established — the biographies are legend, and much of the vast corpus bearing his name was written by later men who shared it.

In their words

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From the Journal