Nagarjuna (seen in image to the right) is widely regarded as a “second Buddha,” as well as one of the greatest thinkers in the history of Asian philosophy. Credited with the founding of the Madhyamika (Middle Way) school, he and his main disciple, Aryadeva, provided the Mahayana tradition with a sophisticated and enduring philosophical framework. The Madhyamika is also referred to as Sunyavada, the “doctrine of emptiness (sunyata).” Nagarjuna’s inquiry started with the traditional Buddhist definition of emptiness as an absence of svabhava, and took him to an equation of emptiness with dependent origination (pratityasamutpada), a doctrine which the Buddha had put forward, but left relatively undeveloped. Dependent origination is also the philosophical concept underpinning the path of practice of the Two Truths, a Mahayana reformulation of the Middle Way.
We know very little for certain about Nagarjuna’s life circumstances and the works he wrote. One of the reasons for this is that there seems to have been at least two, perhaps three, Nagarjunas, a philosopher who lived in the Andhra region in the second to third centuries CE, a tantric adept who lived around 400 CE and an alchemist who lived in the 7th century.
Nagarjuna the philosopher (c. 150-c. 250 CE, based on his association with Satavahana king Yajna Sri Satakarni) is said to have lived in Sriparvata (present-day Nagarjunakonda [see picture to the right]), a mere 160 km from the site of the Amaravati Monastery, where the first Prajnaparamita Sutra is believed to have been composed. In fact, the region, where Buddhism had been introduced by Asoka, has recently attracted the attention of scholars, whose research papers have been published in Buddhism in the Krishna River Valley of Andhra. The introduction of this publication starts with the claim that, “such pivotally important Mahayana Buddhist thinkers as Nagarjuna, Dignaga, Candrakirti, Aryadeva and Bhavavika, among many others, formulated their theories while living in Buddhist communities in Andhra.”
