Two Ways to Argue for the Same Emptiness

Nagarjuna's later interpreters agreed on his conclusion and split over how a philosopher is entitled to argue for it. Bhavaviveka, writing in the sixth century, held that a Madhyamaka philosopher needs to state an independent syllogism, a positive argument with its own premises a Buddhist and a non Buddhist opponent could both accept, in order to establish emptiness rather than merely dismantling whatever position an opponent happens to bring forward. Buddhapalita, writing earlier, and Chandrakirti, defending Buddhapalita's method after Bhavaviveka's criticism of it, held that this concedes too much, since offering an independent syllogism at all requires assuming some subject exists in the very sense Madhyamaka reasoning is meant to deny; on their account the only honest method is a reductio, showing that an opponent's own position leads to consequences the opponent must reject, without a Madhyamaka philosopher ever asserting a competing positive thesis of their own. The dispute produced two named sub schools, Svatantrika for Bhavaviveka's independent argument approach and Prasangika for Chandrakirti's consequence only method, and later Tibetan scholasticism, the Gelug tradition prominent among the traditions that took a side, came down decisively for Chandrakirti's Prasangika reading as the more rigorous and more correctly Nagarjunian of the two.