Emptiness is Empty: Nāgārjuna

We rarely come across a book with the capacity to influence our way of thinking. Even more rarely when it happens to be a book we knew nothing about. But this is what happened to me recently.

I am not talking about an obscure text. On the contrary, it is a very famous one, discussed for centuries by generations of students, venerated even. I had not even heard of it, and I suspect that many Westerners are as ignorant of its existence as I was. The author’s name is Nāgārjuna.

It is a short, dry, philosophical text written eighteen centuries ago in India. It has become a classic reference work of Buddhist philosophy. Its title is one of those seemingly endless Indian words, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which has been translated in various ways, including ‘The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way’. I read it in the English translation by the philosopher Jay Garfield, accompanied by an excellent commentary that helps in coming to terms with its language. Garfield has a deep knowledge of Eastern thought, but his philosophical basis is in the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition and he presents the ideas of Nāgārjuna with the lucidity and concreteness typical of this school, connecting them with Western philosophy.

I didn’t come across this book by chance. Various people had asked me, ‘Have you read Nāgārjuna?’, often after a discussion about quantum mechanics or some other fundamental aspect of physics. Personally, I have never had much patience with attempts to link modern science and ancient oriental thought; they always seemed forced, and reductive with regards to both. But having heard my latest ‘Have you read Nāgārjuna?’, I decided to go ahead with what turned out to be for me quite a discovery.

Nāgārjuna’s thought is based around the idea that nothing has existence in itself. Everything exists only through dependence on something else, in relation to something else. The term that Nāgārjuna uses to describe this lack of essence per se is ‘emptiness’ (śunyātā): things are ‘empty’ in the sense that they do not have autonomous reality; they exist only thanks to, as a function of, with respect to, and in the perspective of something else.

If I look at a cloudy sky – to take a rather basic example – I can see a dragon and a castle. Do the dragon and the castle really exist there, in the sky? Obviously not: they grow out of an encounter between the appearance of the clouds and the sensation and thoughts in my mind; on their own, they are empty entities, they do not exist. So far, so easy. But Nāgārjuna also suggests that the clouds, the sky, our sensations, my thoughts and indeed the very head in which those thoughts are taking place are actually nothing but things which emerge from the encounter with other things: on their own, they are empty entities.

Is it me who sees a star? Do I exist? No, I am no exception to the rule. Who is it who sees the star then? No one, says Nāgārjuna. Seeing the star is a component of that whole, that set of interrelations, which I conventionally call being myself. He also writes that ‘What language expresses does not exist. The circle of thoughts does not exist’ (XVIII, 7). There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand that is the true essence of our being. ‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.

Centuries of Western concentration on the subject seem to vanish like morning mist.

Like much philosophy and science, Nāgārjuna distinguishes between two levels. On the one hand, apparent, conventional reality with its illusory and perspectival aspects; on the other, ultimate reality. But he takes this distinction in a surprising direction: the ultimate reality, the essence, is absence, is vacuity. It is not there.

Every metaphysical system looks for a primary substance, an essence upon which everything else must depend: this point of departure may be matter, God, spirit, Platonic forms, the subject, the elementary moments of consciousness, energy, experience, language, hermeneutic circles, or what have you. Nāgārjuna suggests that the ultimate substance … does not exist.

There are ideas more or less similar to this in Western philosophy, extending from Heraclitus to the contemporary metaphysics of relations … But what Nāgārjuna is proposing is a more radically relational perspective. The illusoriness of the world, its samsāra, is a general theme in Buddhism; to fully realize it is to reach nirvana, or liberation and beatitude. But for Nāgārjuna, samsāra and nirvana are one and the same thing: they are both empty; both non-existent.

So is emptiness the only reality? Is this the ultimate reality? No, writes Nāgārjuna, every perspective exists only by depending on another, it is never the ‘ultimate’ reality, and this includes his own perspective: emptiness is also devoid of essence; conventionally so. No metaphysics survives. Emptiness is empty.

Please don’t take literally my clumsy attempt to summarize Nāgārjuna: I have certainly not nailed him down. But for my part I have found this perspective surprisingly efficacious, and I keep thinking about it.

In the first place because it helps to give a shape to attempts to think in a coherent way about quantum mechanics, where objects seem to mysteriously exist only when influencing other objects. Nāgārjuna obviously knows nothing about quanta, but nothing prevents his philosophy from providing useful tools for imposing a degree of order on modern discoveries. Quantum mechanics cannot be squared with a naïve realism, still less with any kind of idealism. So how should we think of it? Nāgārjuna provides a potential model: we can think of interdependence without autonomous essence. In fact, true interdependence – and this is his key argument – requires that we forget autonomous essence altogether.

Modern physics swarms with relational notions, not just with regard to quanta: the speed of an object does not exist in itself, it only exists in relation to another object; a field in itself is not electric or magnetic, it is so only in relation to something else; and so on. The long search for the ‘ultimate substance’ in physics foundered on the relational complexity of the quantum theory of fields and of general relativity … Perhaps an ancient Indian thinker can provide us with some conceptual tools to extricate ourselves a little further. It is always from others that we learn, from others different from ourselves; and, despite millennia of unbroken dialogue, the East and the West still have a great deal to say to each other. As in all the best marriages.

But what’s fascinating about his thinking goes beyond the problems of modern physics. It seems to resonate with the best of much Western philosophy, both classical and modern. But it does not fall into the traps that so much philosophy ends up in, by postulating premises that always turn out in the long run to be unsatisfactory. He speaks about reality and of its complexity, screened off from the conceptual trap of wanting to discover its foundation. It’s a language close to contemporary anti-foundationalism. It is not extravagant metaphysics: it is simple sobriety. And it fosters an ethical attitude that is deeply comforting: to understand that we do not exist is something which may free us from attachments and from suffering; it is precisely on account of life’s impermanence, the absence from it of every absolute, that life has meaning.

This is Nāgārjuna as filtered by Garfield. There are other, different interpretations of his text available. After all, it has been written about for centuries. The multiplicity of possible readings is not a sign of the book’s weakness. On the contrary, it is testimony to the vitality and eloquence of this extraordinary ancient text. What really interests us is not what the prior of a monastery in India effectively believed almost two thousand years ago. That, so to speak, is his business. It is rather the strength of the ideas that emanate today from between the lines written by him, and how these lines, intersecting with our culture and our knowledge, can open up spaces for new thought. Because this is the nature of culture: an endless dialogue that enriches us by continuing to feed on experiences, knowledge and, above all, exchanges.