Mūlamadhyamakakārikā · the Root Verses

Nāgārjuna's "Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way" — twenty-seven chapters of dismantling, each taking one thing everyone assumes stands on its own and showing that it cannot. Nothing arises from itself, from another, from both, or from neither. The famous chapter on nirvāṇa concludes that there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa — the same world, seen without the grasping. Read beside the Sefer Yetzirah, the two books are exact opposites in method and mirror-images in ambition: the Yetzirah builds a cosmos out of twenty-two letters and ten numbers, and the Root Verses unbuild one, term by term, until nothing is left standing alone. Both believe reality is made of relations rather than of lumps. Only one of them draws the diagram.