Nāgārjuna

Nāgārjuna is the founder of the Madhyamaka, the “middle way” school, and after the Buddha himself perhaps the most influential thinker in the history of Buddhism. Little is known of his life with certainty. He probably lived in South India in the second or third century CE, and letters attributed to him are addressed to a king usually identified as one of the Sātavāhana dynasty. Later legends, including the story that he recovered the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras from the realm of the nāgas, serpent beings beneath the sea, gather around his name.

His central work, and the one most securely attributed to him, is the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the “Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”. Several other philosophical works are usually accepted as his, among them the Vigrahavyāvartanī, a defence of his method against critics, and the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā; the Ratnāvalī, a letter of advice to a king, joins his philosophy to ethics and the bodhisattva path.

His disciple Āryadeva continued his work, and later Indian commentators, among them Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti, interpreted it in rival ways. In Tibet he is revered as a second Buddha, and in East Asia as a patriarch of several schools; modern philosophers have compared his arguments with those of Kant, Wittgenstein and the sceptics.