Nagarjuna

Nāgārjuna (Sanskrit, from Nāga and Arjuna; known in Chinese as Lóngshù and in Tibetan as Klu sgrub) was an Indian scholar-monk, philosopher, and teacher (acharya) of Mahayana Buddhism, originally from the southern part of the subcontinent. He is credited with founding the Madhyamaka school, also called the Centrism or Middle Way tradition. In Tibetan Buddhism, he is referred to as the "second Buddha," and he is widely considered the most significant Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself. His treatises (śāstras) serve as the core texts for the philosophy of emptiness (Śūnyatāvāda), or Madhyamaka, and he remains an essential figure across all modern Mahāyāna traditions. His writings on emptiness shaped Indian philosophy for roughly a thousand years and are a key doctrinal source for Mahāyāna in both East Asian and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

Nāgārjuna’s most important work is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Root Verses on Madhyamaka, or MMK), which focuses on the Madhyamaka philosophy of emptiness. This text inspired numerous commentaries in Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese, and it is still studied today.

**History**

During the first and second centuries CE, India was politically fragmented into various states, including the Kushan Empire and the Satavahana Kingdom. By this time, the Buddhist community had already split into multiple schools and spread across India. A small, early Mahāyāna movement existed, but its ideas were held only by a minority of Buddhists. As scholar Joseph Walser notes, Mahāyāna before the fifth century was largely invisible, likely existing as a minority and mostly unrecognized movement within the broader nikāya Buddhism. By the second century, early Mahāyāna sūtras, such as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, were already circulating among certain Mahāyāna circles.

**Life**

Very little is reliably known about Nāgārjuna’s life, and modern historians disagree on his exact dates and birthplace (multiple locations in India have been suggested). Most scholars place him somewhere in South India between the first and third centuries CE. The surviving accounts were written in Chinese and Tibetan centuries after his death and are largely hagiographical, making them historically unverifiable. The earliest accounts, from the time of the translator Kumārajīva (350–409 or 344–413), are sparse in detail, while Tibetan accounts date from much later, starting in the 11th century.

Some scholars, including Joseph Walser, argue that Nāgārjuna served as an advisor to a king of the Sātavāhana dynasty, which ruled the Deccan Plateau in the second century. This claim is supported by most traditional hagiographical sources. Archaeological evidence from Amarāvatī suggests that, if true, the king may have been Yajña Śrī Śātakarṇi (around the latter half of the second century). Based on this association, Nāgārjuna is conventionally placed around 150–250 CE.

Walser also believes that when Nāgārjuna wrote the Ratnavali, he likely lived in a mixed monastery—one that included both Mahāyānists and non-Mahāyānists—where Mahāyānists were the minority. The monastery’s most likely sectarian affiliation, according to Walser, was Purvasailya, Aparasailya, or Caityaka (all sub-schools of the Mahāsāṃghika). He further argues that it is plausible Nāgārjuna wrote the Ratnavali within a thirty-year period at the end of the second century, in the Andhra region near Dhanyakataka (modern-day Amaravati).

**Traditional accounts**

The earliest biographical sources on Nāgārjuna come from the Kuchan translator monk Kumārajīva (344–413) and his circle. These include the Zhu weimo-jie jing (a commentary on the Vimalakirti), the Maming pusa zhuan (a combined biography of Nāgārjuna and Aśvaghoṣa), and various prefaces to Chinese translations of Nāgārjuna’s works, such as the preface to the Zhong lun (Madhyamaka-śāstra) and the preface to the Da zhidu lun.

These writings offer a minimal portrait of Nāgārjuna, depicting him as the greatest bodhisattva since Śākyamuni. He is described as living during a time when the Dharma was "decadent and weak" and as reviving the Mahāyāna by championing its teachings through debate and writing. According to Huiyuan’s preface to the Da zhidu lun, Nāgārjuna was a virtuous man who, saddened by the delusion of the masses, took monastic vows and "dwelt in seclusion in the woods and swamps, lived as a hermit and practiced dhyāna. He stilled his mind and studied the subtle, his thoughts penetrating the supranormal." Huiyuan also recounts that Nāgārjuna had an awakening, traveled to the Himālayas to receive Mahāyāna teachings from a śramaṇa, and then went to the palace of the nāgas, where "there was no important canon or secret text that he did not master." After his impediments were removed, his name "crowned the stages of the [bodhisattva] path," and non-Buddhists esteemed him while famous gentlemen submitted to his dictates. From that point, the enterprise of the Greater Vehicle flourished again. This basic narrative—of Nāgārjuna as a great Mahāyāna revivalist—is echoed in the writings of Sengzhao and Sengrui, both students of Kumārajīva. For instance, Sengrui writes that at the end of the age of Semblance Dharma, false teachings flourished, and Nāgārjuna’s writings "opened the great road in such a manner that the carriage of the..."