Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna was an Indian Buddhist philosopher, most often dated to around the second century CE though the precise period of his life remains uncertain, who founded the Madhyamaka, or "Middle Way," school of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy and is regarded as one of the most important Buddhist thinkers after the historical Buddha himself. His foundational text, the "Mulamadhyamakakarika" ("Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way"), develops in rigorous, often paradoxical argumentation the concept of shunyata, or emptiness, the idea that all phenomena lack independent, inherent existence and instead arise only in dependence on other conditions. This teaching was presented as a middle path between the extremes of asserting that things fully exist in their own right and that they do not exist at all, and it became a central pillar of later Mahayana Buddhist thought. Nagarjuna's philosophy exerted enormous influence on the subsequent development of Buddhism across India, and later Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, shaping major schools of Buddhist philosophy in each of those traditions, and he remains one of the most studied philosophers in the history of Buddhist thought worldwide.