Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna, the fourteenth Indian patriarch and one of the most important figures in the entire Buddhist tradition, was the founder of the Madhyamaka school of philosophy. He lived in southern India around the second or third century CE and composed numerous treatises, including the Mulamadhyamakakarika, which systematically demonstrates the emptiness of all phenomena through rigorous logical analysis. His philosophical contribution cannot be overstated: the doctrine of sunyata, or emptiness, as he articulated it became the foundation of virtually all subsequent Mahayana philosophy.

In the Chan lineage, Nagarjuna holds a special place because his understanding of emptiness is seen as pointing directly to the nature of mind itself. Emptiness, in his analysis, is not nothingness but the absence of fixed, independent existence—which means that all phenomena arise in dynamic interdependence, free from the burden of intrinsic selfhood. This is precisely what direct experience in Chan meditation reveals. Nagarjuna received transmission from Kapimala and transmitted to Aryadeva, his foremost student, continuing the lineage through one of the most philosophically fertile periods in Buddhist history.