Nāgārjuna · नागार्जुन

The second-century philosopher the Mahāyāna calls its second Buddha, and one of the most rigorous minds any tradition has produced. His method is entirely negative: take any candidate for a thing that exists in its own right — motion, time, fire, the self, causation, even nirvāṇa — and show that the notion collapses under its own terms. What remains is śūnyatā, emptiness: not that nothing exists, but that nothing exists independently; everything is what it is only in relation. The Kabbalah has its own via negativa around Ein Sof — no attribute, no name, no predicate survives contact with it — but the two negations run opposite ways. The Kabbalist strips language away to protect a fullness too great to say. Nāgārjuna strips it away to show there was never an independent thing under any of the words. A negative theology, against a negative ontology.