The Root Verses on the Middle Way

Why This Text

If you read one work of Buddhist philosophy, it is usually this one. Almost every later Mahāyāna school — Chan, Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land's doctrinal defenders, the whole of Tibetan scholasticism — traces some part of its thinking back to these 446 verses.

What makes the Middle Treatise singular is not its conclusion but its method. Nāgārjuna almost never asserts a position of his own. He takes a claim his opponent already holds, follows it out with complete seriousness, and shows that it does not survive contact with itself. Chapter after chapter proceeds this way: motion, the senses, the aggregates, fire and fuel, time, karma, the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, nirvāṇa. Each is examined; each turns out to be unfindable as a fixed, self-contained thing; and each, crucially, keeps working perfectly well afterward.

That last point is the one most readers miss, so it is worth stating at the front door. Emptiness is not nothingness. To say a thing is empty (空, śūnya) is to say it has no svabhāva — no nature it possesses by and of itself, independently of causes, parts, and conditions. It is not to say the thing is absent, illusory, or unimportant. Nāgārjuna is explicit about this, and he becomes almost impatient about it in Chapter 24, when an opponent accuses him of destroying the entire Buddhist path.

Read that verse slowly and much of the difficulty dissolves. Things are empty because they arise dependently — the emptiness and the arising are the same fact, not competing claims. And because they arise dependently, they can be named, used, cultivated, and transformed. Nāgārjuna's counter-charge against his opponent is that it is fixed things which would make the Buddhist path impossible: something with a permanent nature of its own could never change, never be purified, never be liberated. His summary line is 以有空義故，一切法得成 — because emptiness works, everything works.

Nāgārjuna, and the treatise's afterlife

Little about Nāgārjuna's life is certain beyond the approximate dates — somewhere in the second or third century, in southern India. What is certain is the scale of his influence. The Middle Treatise was carried to China by Kumārajīva, the great Kuchean translator, who rendered it into Chinese in 409 CE at Chang'an; it became one of the three foundational texts of the Chinese Sanlun ("Three Treatises") school, and its arguments run underneath a great deal of Chan. Carried instead into Tibet, it became the object of a commentarial tradition that has not stopped since.

Two other texts on this site sit directly alongside it. Candrakīrti's Madhyamakāvatāra — "Entering the Middle Way" — was written precisely because this treatise is so hard to enter, and walks the reader up to Nāgārjuna's insight through the ten bodhisattva grounds. And the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, the vast commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom also attributed to Nāgārjuna and also translated by Kumārajīva, is the expansive counterpart to this compressed one.

How to actually read it

1. Start with Part 1 and do not skip it. Chapter 1 sets up the machinery — the eight negations, the four-cornered refutation of arising, the dismantling of the four conditions — that every later chapter reuses. If the tetralemma is familiar to you by the end of Part 1, the rest is much easier going.
2. Read the verses and the commentary as one text. Nāgārjuna's verses often state only a conclusion; Piṅgala supplies the argument that got there. On these pages both are translated, side by side with the Chinese.
3. If you only have an hour, read Chapter 24. It is in Part 8, and it is the chapter the other twenty-six exist to make possible — the objection that emptiness destroys Buddhism, and the reply that reverses the charge completely.
4. Expect repetition, and treat it as method. The same argument returns in a dozen vocabularies because grasping has a dozen hiding places. Piṅgala says so directly in Chapter 1: the extra negations exist not because the logic requires them but because people will not accept the first one.

Three questions Western readers ask

"If nothing has inherent existence, isn't this just nihilism dressed up?" It is the opposite, and Nāgārjuna anticipates the charge by name. Nihilism (ucchedavāda) says things do not exist; Madhyamaka says things exist dependently, which is the only way anything could exist at all. Chapter 15 puts both errors side by side — 定有則著常，定無則著斷, fixed existence is eternalism and fixed non-existence is annihilationism — and refuses both. The "middle" in the title is the refusal.

"Doesn't refuting causation make morality meaningless?" No, and the treatise is unusually blunt here. Chapter 1 argues that a genuinely causeless world would be monstrous: generosity would land you in hell and atrocity in heaven, since nothing would follow from anything. What is denied is not that acts have consequences but that causal power is a substance sitting inside a cause, findable there. Chapter 17 then spends thirty-three verses on exactly how karma works without a permanent self to carry it.

"Chapter 22 says the Buddha cannot be found. Is that an attack on the Buddha?" It is the reverse — it is the highest compliment the system can pay. The Tathāgata is empty in precisely the way everything else is empty, which is why Chapter 22 concludes that the nature of the Tathāgata and the nature of the world are one nature. A Buddha exempted from emptiness would be a Buddha exempted from dependent arising, and so from the very insight that makes him a Buddha.

Key Terms

All twenty-seven chapters, grouped by argument rather than by scroll — each part carries the Chinese and English side by side, Piṅgala's commentary in full, and reading notes. Read straight through, or start wherever your question starts.

All Twenty-Seven Chapters

Kumārajīva's translation is arranged in four scrolls (卷); the nine parts above regroup the chapters by argument. Verse counts are those given in the Chinese text itself.

About the Source

The Chinese on these pages is Kumārajīva's translation of 409 CE (鳩摩羅什, Taishō T1564), made at Chang'an and in the public domain for sixteen centuries. It has a feature the surviving Sanskrit does not: after each root verse it carries a prose commentary by an Indian teacher the Chinese sources call Piṅgala (青目, "Blue Eyes"), which Kumārajīva translated in the same undertaking as the verses themselves.

These pages translate both layers as the text proper — the root verses and the ancient commentary — rather than rendering the bare verses and leaving the reader to reconstruct the arguments compressed inside them. Nāgārjuna's verses frequently state only a conclusion; Piṅgala supplies the premises. He argues with the Abhidharma scholastics of his own day, in their vocabulary, about their problems — and he is what Chinese Buddhism actually read, for sixteen hundred years, whenever it read the Middle Treatise.

Chinese source: Kumārajīva's translation with Piṅgala's commentary (409 CE), public domain. English translation and reading notes written for Ru-Yi Meditation Center. See also this site's note on translation method.

Further Reading

• Kumārajīva's Chinese text · Taishō T1564 — the source text of these pages, at CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association).
• Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Oxford, 1995) — the standard English translation and commentary, made from the Tibetan; the usual entry point for philosophers.
• Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura, Nāgārjuna's Middle Way (Wisdom, 2013) — a careful translation from the Sanskrit with verse-by-verse analysis, the best current scholarly edition in English.
• Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford, 2009) — a topic-by-topic reconstruction of the arguments, for readers who want the philosophy laid out systematically.
• Candrakīrti, Madhyamakāvatāra — read on this site as reading notes on Entering the Middle Way, written expressly as a guide into this treatise.
• Nāgārjuna, Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra — his other great work also translated by Kumārajīva, on this site as the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom.