Madhyamaka Wiki

The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

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Thesis / main argument

This is Garfield’s complete English translation of the MMK (from the Tibetan, the dBu ma rtsa ba’i tshig le’ur byas pa shes rab) together with a verse-by-verse philosophical commentary. It is the work in which his reading of Nāgārjuna is stated in full — the application-paper garfield-causality-2001 presupposes it — and it is the single most influential analytic-philosophical commentary on the MMK in English.

The interpretive thesis has two load-bearing claims, both framework-internal:

  1. The two truths are Nāgārjuna’s greatest philosophical contribution. The “dual thesis of the conventional reality of phenomena together with their lack of inherent existence depends upon the complex doctrine of the two truths… and upon a subtle and surprising doctrine regarding their relation” (Introduction to the Commentary). Emptiness (སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་, śūnyatā) is the lack of intrinsic nature (རང་བཞིན་, svabhāva); to be empty is not to be non-existent but to be conventionally real, i.e. dependently arisen and dependently designated. Garfield reads MMK 24:18 — pratītyasamutpāda = śūnyatā = upādāya-prajñapti = madhyamā-pratipad — as “the climax of the entire text” containing “the entire Mādhyamika system in embryo.”
  2. The emptiness of emptiness is the architectural key, and it harmonises with Candrakīrti. Emptiness is itself empty: it is “not a self-existent void standing behind a veil of illusion comprising conventional reality, but merely a characteristic of conventional reality.” This doctrine — present already in the opening chapter on conditions, only made explicit at MMK 24 — is what “saves [Madhyamaka] from falling into metaphysical extravagance” and dissolves the apparent paradoxes of the two-truths account. It is “the interpretation that is definitive of the Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamika school,” and Garfield states that his own reading “never conflicts directly with that of Candrakīrti.”

The hermeneutical self-positioning is explicit and decisive for this wiki’s placement: Garfield situates his reading “squarely within a Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamika interpretation… more specifically… heavily influenced by the Tibetan Geluk-pa tradition that takes as central the commentaries of dGe-‘dun-grub, mKhas-grub-rje, and especially, Je Tsong Khapa,” supplemented by oral commentary from Drepung Loseling geshes (Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe, Gen Lobzang Gyatso). On the final chapter he “depart[s] from the most common Geluk-pa interpretation entirely in favor of a line more closely associated with the Nyingma-pa reading.” Garfield is therefore not a framework-external reconstructor; he is a Western philosopher reading the MMK through the Indo-Tibetan commentarial tradition, with a declared analytic audience.

Key claims

On the framework (Introduction + dedicatory verses)

  • The dedicatory verses are programmatic, not performative. Following Candrakīrti, Garfield reads the eight negations of the homage as the announcement that “the Mādhyamika philosopher will make no positive assertions about the fundamental nature of things” — qualified twice: the negation is of essence (whose coherence is denied), and the predications denied are those made from the ultimate standpoint. “Candrakīrti, in Prasannapadā, argues that the dedication determines the Prāsaṅgika reading of Nāgārjuna’s text.”
  • Two senses of “exist.” Throughout, Garfield insists on disambiguating inherent existence (in virtue of an essence, independently of convention) from conventional existence (dependent, nominal). “No phenomenon… exists in the first sense. But that does not entail that all phenomena are nonexistent tout court.” This ambiguity is “important to keep in mind throughout the text.”
  • The MMK is a single sustained argument. Chapter order is “often, though not always, important”: a chapter typically refutes the inherent existence of some phenomenon, and the next chapter answers the natural rejoinder that y must be inherently existent to ground x. (Ch I conditions → Ch II change, etc.)
  • Gadamerian “fusion of horizons,” not counterfactual modernisation. Garfield rejects both a purely traditional commentary and a “what Nāgārjuna would say as a twentieth-century philosopher” reconstruction; he reads “the evolving figure” Nāgārjuna through the Tibetan translation and commentaries, for a Western philosophical audience, “deliberately sympathetic.”

On causation — Chapter I (the same regularity reading as garfield-causality-2001)

  • hetu vs pratyaya. “Cause” (hetu, རྒྱུ་) names an event with a power (kriyā, བྱ་བ་) to bring about its effect as part of its essence; “condition” (pratyaya, རྐྱེན་) names an explanatorily useful event with no occult metaphysical link. Nāgārjuna rejects causes, accepts the four conditions (efficient / percept-object / immediate / dominant). The four conditions are the opponent’s-acceptable taxonomy emptied of causal power.
  • The regularity view. MMK 1:4–5: “it is the regularities that count… Adding active forces or potentials adds nothing of explanatory utility.” Explicitly “anticipatory of Wittgenstein’s… echo of Hume” (Tractatus 6.371–6.372 quoted).
  • The middle on causation (1:14). The reificationist extreme grounds explanation in real causal powers; the nihilist extreme denies any dependent origination at all; “to assert the emptiness of causation is to accept the utility of our causal discourse… but to resist the temptation to see these as grounded in… causal powers.” This chapter’s attack on reified causality is named the “principal philosophical move in Nāgārjuna’s demystification of emptiness” — the key kept in reserve for MMK 24.

On emptiness, the negation, and “view” — Chapters XIII–XV

  • Emptiness is wholly negative (XIII). “It is not an essence that things have instead of whatever essence naïve common sense… might have thought they had — rather, it is the total lack of essence.” The conventional is “deceptive” / “false” only insofar as it presents itself as more than conventional; seen as dependently arisen it is conventional truth.
  • MMK 13:8 — emptiness as a view is incurable. “View” (ལྟ་བ་, dṛṣṭi) means a thesis pitched at the level where reificationist–nihilist debates run, presupposing that to exist is to exist inherently. The analysis in terms of emptiness “is not a view at all in this sense.” To hold emptiness as a view is simultaneously to reify phenomena and to deny their conventional reality. Candrakīrti’s shopkeeper image is cited (asking to be sold the “no-wares”). Tied directly to MMK 24:18–40 and the closing verse XXVII:30.
  • MMK 15 — essence is by definition uncaused, independent, unfabricated; since all entities arise dependently, none has essence. Garfield reads MMK 15:7 as Nāgārjuna invoking the Discourse to Kātyāyana (Kaccāyanagotta Sutta) as “one of the fundamental suttas of the Pali canon for Mahāyāna philosophy”: reification springs from failure to note impermanence; nihilism from failure to note the empirical reality of arising phenomena; the middle path is conventional existence. MMK 15:10–11 read as the explicit refusal of both eternalism (“it is”) and nihilism (“it is not”).

On the self — Chapter XVIII

  • The neither-self-nor-non-self doctrine is tied to the emptiness of emptiness (18:6). “Self” and “no-self” are both conventional designations and antidotes; to neither corresponds an entity. The Humean “no substratum” argument (18:2) and the Treatise “fig” argument are invoked.
  • MMK 18:7, 18:9 — prapañca / the ineffable ultimate. “What language expresses is nonexistent… unarisen and unceased, like nirvāṇa is the nature of things”; the character of reality (tattva) is “not dependent on another, peaceful and not fabricated by mental fabrication, not thought, without distinctions.” Garfield reads this as Kantian-flavoured: the ultimate is inexpressible/inconceivable, yet “we must see that that is the ultimate truth about things.”
  • MMK 18:8 — the positive tetralemma; 22:11 gives the negative form. Garfield glosses “neither real nor not-real” as the law of the excluded middle, holding that both the positive and negative tetralemmas are deployed in the text at different junctures (conventional vs ultimate register).

On the Four Noble Truths and the two truths — Chapter XXIV (the climax)

  • The chapter “is really about the nature of emptiness itself.” Verses 1–6 are the opponent’s nihilism charge (= Burton’s and Wood’s thesis, voiced by Nāgārjuna’s interlocutor); 7–14 castigate the misunderstanding; positive work begins at 15.
  • The “forgotten horse” (24:15) and the twin-distortion mechanism (24:16–17). The reifier projects his own nihilism onto Nāgārjuna. Crucially: “nihilism about one kind of entity is typically paired with reification of another.” Reifying the conventional requires reading emptiness nihilistically; reifying emptiness requires nihilism about the phenomenal world. “A middle path must reify neither and hence must regard emptiness, as well as all empty phenomena, as empty.” Both extremes share the premise to exist = to exist inherently.
  • MMK 24:18–19 — the three-way identity of emptiness / dependent origination / verbal convention, and the relation between them, all dependent designations and hence empty. This is the textual seat of the emptiness of emptiness and of Nāgārjuna’s positionlessness: the apparent self-refutation reductio (“your own thesis is then ultimately nonexistent”) fails because everything, including the thesis, has only nominal truth — “one more point at which ladders must be kicked away.”
  • MMK 24:8–10 — the two truths, distinct yet later identified. “Understanding the ultimate nature of things is completely dependent upon understanding conventional truth” — both on the path (one must use conventions to teach emptiness) and at the terminus (understanding the ultimate just is understanding that the conventional is merely conventional). Nāgārjuna “is not disparaging the conventional.”
  • The turnabout reductio (24:20–40). Arising, ceasing, suffering, the path, the Sangha, buddhahood are possible only if empty; it is the reifier who, by denying emptiness, denies their existence and is impaled on both horns. “It is only in the context of ultimate nonexistence that actual existence makes any sense at all.”
  • The emptiness of emptiness, worked out at length (24:18 commentary). Analyse the emptiness of a table and one finds “nothing at all but the table’s lack of inherent existence… The emptiness is dependent upon the table and is therefore itself empty.” The regress is rendered harmless by Madhyamaka’s nominalism: “conventional” functions ontologically (a mode of subsistence), not as a logical negation-operator that would cancel itself. This is “the deep identity of the two truths… because emptiness is empty.” Ch I opens the text because the whole account “depend[s] upon the emptiness of dependent origination itself.”

On nirvāṇa — Chapter XXV

  • The fourfold negation of nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is not existent (25:4–6), not non-existent (25:7–8), not both (25:11–14), not neither (25:15–18); the predicates of MMK 25:3 are all negative particles, because “no ascription of any predicate to nirvāṇa… can be literally true.”
  • MMK 25:19–20 — saṃsāra = nirvāṇa, “not the slightest difference.” “Nirvāṇa is simply saṃsāra seen without reification, without attachment, without delusion.” Not a place one goes to but “a way of being here.” The reason nothing can be said of nirvāṇa “as an independent entity” is not that it is an ineffable hyper-real entity but that it is only “saṃsāra seen as it is, just as emptiness is just the conventional seen as it is.” (Vimalakīrti’s silence cited.)

On views — Chapter XXVII (the Nyingma departure)

  • The closing verse XXVII:30 (“the relinquishing of all views”) read two ways. The standard reading (which Garfield says all commentaries he knows give): “all views” = all false, inherent-existence views; Nāgārjuna’s own Madhyamaka is exempt and “not even a ‘view’ in the relevant sense.”
  • The second, additional reading (closer to the Nyingma line). A grammatical-poetic parallel between XXVII:30 and the dedicatory verses lets one read Nāgārjuna’s own view — and the Buddhadharma itself — as included under “all views” and “necessarily to be relinquished once it is understood and used.” Consistent with the raft and laxative metaphors (Candrakīrti on 13:8; Sextus); explicitly “the anticipation of Wittgenstein’s close of the Tractatus” (6.54, 7). Because the two truths are identical, the two readings are mutually entailing. “Even the emptiness of emptiness is empty…”

Methodology

Translation-plus-commentary in the analytic register, but not framework-bracketing. Garfield translates from the Tibetan and reads through Candrakīrti, Tsongkhapa, and living Geluk oral commentary; he frames arguments for Western philosophers (Hume, Wittgenstein, Kant, Sextus Empiricus, the Tractatus recurrently) while “situating those arguments in their Buddhist context.” He is “deliberately sympathetic” — expounding, not assessing — and openly Prāsaṅgika-partisan while declining to adjudicate intra-Geluk or intra-Tibetan disputes. The commentary is avowedly selective (it omits sustained engagement with the Indian-Buddhist controversies and the commentarial sequellae), which is the standing Buddhological complaint against it.

Notable quotes

  • “If the analysis in terms of emptiness is the substantive heart of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the method of reductio ad absurdum is the methodological core” (Introduction).
  • Emptiness “is not a self-existent void standing behind a veil of illusion… but merely a characteristic of conventional reality” (Introduction).
  • “Nihilism about one kind of entity is typically paired with reification of another” (on MMK 24:16) — the twin-distortion thesis in one line.
  • His reading “never conflicts directly with that of Candrakīrti”; on the final chapter he follows “a line more closely associated with the Nyingma-pa reading” (Introduction).

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