A reference on the interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka — the “Middle Way” philosophy at the heart of Mahāyāna Buddhist thought — gathering in one place the primary texts, the great commentators, the central concepts, and the long-running argument over what these teachings actually mean.
What is Madhyamaka?
Madhyamaka (དབུ་མ་, the “Middle Way”) is the philosophical tradition founded by the Indian master Nāgārjuna around the second century CE. Its root text is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), the Root Verses on the Middle Way — a tightly argued set of verses whose central idea is emptiness (śūnyatā). To call something empty is not to say it is nothing. It is to say that it has no intrinsic nature (Svabhāva, རང་བཞིན་) — no independent, self-standing essence of its own — because everything arises in dependence on other things (dependent origination, pratītyasamutpāda). Nāgārjuna’s middle way is the path between two extremes: the extreme of existence, which takes things to be real in their own right, and the extreme of non-existence, which denies that anything is real at all.
To hold this together, Madhyamaka works with the Two Truths: a conventional (ཀུན་རྫོབ་) truth — the everyday world as it functions and is spoken of — and an ultimate (དོན་དམ་པ་) truth — the emptiness of that very same world. The two are not rival accounts of different things; they are two ways of understanding one and the same reality.
The difficulty — and the reason this wiki exists — is that the MMK is famously terse and has been read in radically different ways across eighteen centuries: as nihilism (nothing really exists), as a sceptical or pragmatic refusal of all theory, and as a rigorous systematic philosophy. The same verses have been made to support all three. Why?
Where the wiki came from
This wiki began as a sub-project of a research project, Comparative Analysis of Madhyamaka Interpretation, undertaken with Savitribai Phule Pune University (Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies) in collaboration with the Dzongsar Khyentse Chokyi Lodro Institute. What started as a private set of reading notes — one page per source, drawn from the books and articles studied for the project — grew into a cross-referenced wiki covering the Indian, Tibetan, and modern academic literature on the MMK. Every page is built from those sources, and the complete catalogue lives in the index.
The central argument
The research set out to answer the puzzle above: why does one text (MMK) generate such incompatible readings? Its thesis is that the divergence is not, at bottom, philosophical disagreement but hermeneutical — a matter of the context within which the MMK is read. Interpreters who situate the MMK within the Mahāyāna hermeneutical framework — the Two Truths understood as a teaching method, the distinction between provisional and definitive teachings (Provisional and Definitive), and the Three Turnings of the Dharma Wheel — consistently arrive at more coherent readings than those who treat it as a free-standing work of philosophy.
The evidence is drawn together from three directions:
- Nāgārjuna’s own words. MMK 24:8–10 warns that those who do not grasp the distinction between the two truths do not grasp the profound point of the Buddha’s teaching; the Śūnyatāsaptati (v. 44) goes further, making the framework an explicit instruction for interpreting everything the Buddha taught.
- The commentators. Indian and Tibetan masters from every school — Buddhapālita, Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, Gorampa, the Ninth Karmapa, Mipham — read the MMK inside this framework as a matter of course. Their sharp disagreements take place within it, and prove productive rather than incoherent.
- The modern readings that drop it. Where the framework is set aside, interpretations tend to collapse in predictable ways — into nihilism (Burton) or a deflationary pragmatism (Kalupahana).
This is offered as an argued case, held strongly but not as settled fact. The readings that genuinely cut against it — Kalupahana’s pragmatic, standalone reading and Burton’s nihilist appraisal — are engaged directly rather than waved away. So too are the harder-to-place voices: Walser’s social-historical account of Nāgārjuna, which the wiki treats as a complement working at a different level of explanation rather than a rival, and Westerhoff’s, which reads the MMK from inside the framework yet still arrives at a “sophisticated” nihilism.
What you’ll find here
The wiki is organised by page type; the index lists everything in each category.
- Primary texts — the root works themselves, walked through chapter by chapter (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Vigrahavyāvartanī, Madhyamakāvatāra, and more).
- Concepts — the central doctrines explained and, where contested, compared across thinkers (Emptiness, Svabhāva, Two Truths, Provisional and Definitive, self- and other-emptiness (Rangtong-Zhentong)).
- Scholars — a page each for the traditional commentators and the modern academics, from Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti through to present-day interpreters.
- Arguments — the heart of the project: the central thesis together with the supporting and opposing claims that bear on it.
- Comparisons — at-a-glance matrices showing exactly where the great masters part ways.
- Sources — one page per book or article studied, each with a summary and a critical assessment.
- Summaries — chapter-by-chapter walk-throughs of selected major works.
A note on perspective
The wiki aims to be non-sectarian: it presents the Indian, Geluk, Sakya, Kagyü, Nyingma, Jonang and modern scholar’s positions on their own terms, and resists collapsing genuine disagreements into a tidy consensus. Readers should nonetheless know that its sympathies lean towards the Sakya reading — in particular Gorampa’s insistence that the ultimate is a freedom from all extremes, and that a true Madhyamaka negation must apply to all four extremes without exception. That leaning shapes how some of the debates are framed here, and it is stated plainly so you can read accordingly.
Where to start
If you are new to the subject, begin with the concept pages — Emptiness, Svabhāva, and Two Truths — then read the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā text page, and finally the central argument. If you already know the territory, the arguments, the comparison matrices, and the individual source pages are the quickest routes into the substance.
Compiled and written by Tenpa Bhikshu (Nicolas Pettican) as part of the Comparative Analysis of Madhyamaka Interpretation research project — Savitribai Phule Pune University, in collaboration with the Dzongsar Khyentse Chokyi Lodro Institute.