Mulamadhyamakakarika

The foundational text of the Madhyamaka ('Middle Way') school of Mahayana philosophy, twenty-seven chapters of terse verses subjecting core categories, causation, motion, the self, time, even nirvana, to relentless logical analysis, concluding each time that the concept cannot be shown to have independent, inherent existence (svabhava). Nagarjuna's biography, exact dates, and even his geographic base are unusually uncertain for so influential a figure; south Indian tradition and later Tibetan hagiography give different, not fully reconcilable, accounts. Nagarjuna's attested textual source is the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita, the earliest Perfection of Wisdom sutra, whose teaching on emptiness he takes as given and sets out to defend with rigorous philosophical argument rather than scriptural assertion alone, a methodological move that helped establish Madhyamaka as a distinct school of reasoned debate within Mahayana Buddhism.