Nagarjuna

When emptiness is possible, everything is possible. Were emptiness impossible,
nothing would be possible.~ Nāgārjuna

“In ancient India, there lived a young prince Shaktiman who desired to be King and was waiting for the day when he would take the throne when his father, the King, died. However for many many many years, the King showed no signs of ill health and looked as if he will live forever. Shaktiman was extremely frustrated at his long wait and went to his mother to lament his unhappiness. It seemed as if he will never ever be King before he died. The Queen found it unbearable to see her son suffer and decided to tell him a secret. “My son, Your father is a man with great merit and he is blessed with longevity because his life is linked to that of the great Pandit Nagarjuna who has attained the siddhi of immortality. For as long as Nagarjuna lives, so will your father. Resign to your fate that you will never be King”

Shaktiman was heartbroken at the news and collapsed onto the ground in grief. The Queen felt strongly for her son’s plight and made a suggestion. “Nagarjuna is a great bodhisattva. He has great compassion and has made vows to fulfill the wishes of anyone who asks of him. If If you ask him for his head, he will give it to you.” Desperate to be king, Shaktiman decided to try his luck. He went to see Nagarjuna and made his request. Nagarjuna meditated over the request and in his meditation, saw that he had already benefit all the beings that he possibly could – there was no need for him to remain in the world any longer. Seeing that Shakiman was the last person who has karmic conditions with him to be tamed, Nagarjuna consented to give away his head. He closed his eyes and told Shaktiman that he can severe his head anytime. The prince was overjoyed at Nagarjuna’s acceptance of his request. He immediately unsheathed his sword and took a swing at Nagarjuna’s head. However his sword could not severe Nagarjuna’s head. He tried a few times but each time, the sword did not even manage to make a single cut on Nagarjuna’s neck. In anger, he raised his sword high and struck at Nagarjuna’s head with all his strength. The sword broke.

At this time. Nagarjuna opened his eyes and spoke: “Dear Prince, I had exhausted all karma of being harmed by weapons. Your sword cannot sever my head.” Shaktiman was engraged and cried that Nagarjuna was a liar for agreeing to give up his head when he already knew that he could not be killed.
“Dear Prince, even though I have exhausted my karma to be harmed. There is still a karmic cause for me to give you my head. In a previous life, I accidentally cut off the head of an insect when I was cutting kushu grass. This is the only karma that I had yet to purify.  Due to this cause, the only way for me to die is if you take a stake of kushu grass and sever my head.”  Shaktiman took up a stalk of kushu that Nagarjuna was sitting on and struck again. This time, Nagajurna’s head fell off effortlessly and milk flow poured forth.

This is the story of how Nagarjuna used his death as a lesson in the certainty of karma.”

“Nearly two millennia ago, around the time Paul of Tarsus and his fellow apostles had begun to propagate the new and radical teaching of Jesus throughout the Roman Empire, the south Indian scholar and monk Nagarjuna was attracting a following at the great Nalanda Monastic University in Magadha by teaching a new way of understanding the six-centuries-old centuries-old message of Sakyamuni Buddha.' Like Paul, Nagarjuna had an impact that was widespread, enduring, and continues to provoke creative thought.

Little is known of Nagarjuna's life, except from a legendary account in a biography that survives only in Chinese translation.' He is said to have been so intelligent, and his memory so prodigious, that he was able to master the entirety of the enormous Buddhist canon (but of which school is uncertain) in only ninety days. He sought even more scriptures, obtaining several of the long-hidden Mahayana ("Great Vehicle") discourses from a monk in the Himalayas. He absorbed these and traveled widely, debating with many Strivers (gramana, the spiritual seekers of the forest) and seeking more texts. A Naga then appeared to him and took him to a place in the ocean where he was presented with the Vaipulya ("extensive," i.e., Mahayana) sutras; again he was able to memorize these in just ninety days, and was returned to south India where he taught the rerevealed Mahayana of the Buddha.

Through his teaching and writing, Nagarjuna articulated a point of view that came to be regarded as distinctive and resulted in his being regarded as the founder of the first philosophical school of the Mahayana, the Madhyamika ("Middle Way"). His followers, ancient and contemporary, regard his teachings as expressing the very essence of the Buddha's discourses on the Perfection of Wisdom… It is a spiritual path that falls neither to the extreme of "existence" or "permanence" nor to the extreme of "non-existence" or "annihilation"… The former extreme is a reification of things, conceiving them to exist exactly in the manner in which they appear-as if they existed in and of themselves, as if they could, for instance, be pointed to as the collection of their parts, or an individual part, or separate from them. The latter extreme of "nonexistence" is the nihilistic rejection of the cause and effect of actions and consequently of transmigration in a cycle of rebirth and the possibility of liberation from it…

(1) If things had their own inherent nature in the sense of being inherently existent, then, when Superiors realized that all phenomena lack inherent existence, their wisdom consciousnesses would have to observe those [inherently existent things]. However, because they are not observed, they are non-existent.' In that case, the later non-existence of a thing that existed earlier would be its disintegratedness, and since one would have to assert that those wisdom consciousnesses served as the cause of [the thing's] disintegration, it would [absurdly] follow that a Superior's meditative equipoise is the cause of the disintegration of things.

(2) If things were inherently existent, at the time of analysis with reasoning on the meaning of the designation of the verbal convention of "production," one would have to find, upon searching through reasoning, production in which the seed and sprout are either inherently one or inherently different, because otherwise they would be mere verbal conventions and would not be inherently existent. [This reason] flings the [absurd] consequence that conventional truths would be able to withstand analysis by reasoning.'

(3) If the conventional inherent existence of the production of things were not refuted by the reasoning that refutes production of the four extremes, ultimately established [production] also would not be refuted because if something inherently exists, it is necessarily ultimately established.' With respect to all three reasons, one must also know how the SvatantrikaMadhyamikas answer them and also understand the reasons why the Svatantrikas' replies are nevertheless unable to eradicate fallacies.

(4) If [phenomena] were inherently existent, it would [absurdly] follow that statements in many sutras such as the Kdshyapa Chapter Sutra4 that phenomena are empty of inherent existence would be incorrect. One must know in detail the reasons why [Prasahgikas say that] the view of those sutras as interpreted by the Cittamatrins and the Svatantrikas is not the final view.”

~ Daniel Cozort, Unique Tenets Of The Middle Way Consequence School

“There is unanimous agreement that Nāgārjuna (ca 150–250 AD) is the most important Buddhist philosopher after the historical Buddha himself and one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of Indian philosophy. His philosophy of the “middle way” (madhyamaka) based around the central notion of “emptiness” (śūnyatā) influenced the Indian philosophical debate for a thousand years after his death; with the spread of Buddhism to Tibet, China, Japan and other Asian countries the writings of Nāgārjuna became an indispensable point of reference for their own philosophical inquiries. A specific reading of Nāgārjuna's thought, called Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka, became the official philosophical position of Tibetan Buddhism which regards it as the pinnacle of philosophical sophistication up to the present day…

First of all there is the question of how to make sense of objects like Mt Everest depending on all our minds collectively. It is clear how we could say something like this about things existing merely by the force of convention, such as the objects traded on the stock market. But how could something like a mountain be merely conventionally existent? Secondly, given the Madhyamaka rejection of a correspondence-theoretic account of truth, how can it come up with a theory of meaning and truth that is not committed to some sort of structural isomorphism between word and world but still gives us a robust account of what distinguishes true from false sentences? Thirdly, if it is not facts out there that settle what is true how can the Mādhyamika avoid the unacceptable relativistic conclusion that we cannot criticize epistemic or ethical practices which differ from ours? Fourthly, how can we make sense of an ontology without foundations in which there are no substantially existent objects on which everything else depends? (For an interesting formal model of such an ontology see Priest 2009, 2014.) Many aspects of these questions have been addressed in vast body of commentarial literature that was written in the nearly two millenia since Nāgārjuna composed his key philosophical works. Others still remain to be addressed. The questions Nāgārjuna asked and the system of philosophy he founded in the second century remain very much alive in the twenty-first.”

~ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy