Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, the foundational text of the Madhyamaka school, proceeds by systematically examining candidate foundations for inherent existence, motion, causation, the self, time, even the Buddha and nirvana themselves, and argues in each case that the concept collapses into incoherence if taken to name something with a fixed, independent nature, while making perfect functional sense once understood as empty and dependently originated. His most famous formulation identifies emptiness directly with dependent origination: to say a thing is empty of inherent existence is not to say it does not exist at all, but to say that its existence is entirely a matter of dependence on causes, conditions, and conceptual imputation, never self-standing. This is crucial to how Madhyamaka avoids the charge of nihilism, a charge pressed against it from its earliest reception onward: emptiness is explicitly not nothingness, since conventional, functional existence, tables, persons, suffering, the path out of suffering, is fully affirmed; what is denied is only the further claim that any of these things possesses a fixed essence existing independently of causes and designation. Nagarjuna's method, the tetralemma, examining and rejecting four possible positions on any question, existence, non-existence, both, and neither, was itself designed to dissolve the attachment to fixed views rather than to install a new metaphysical thesis in their place.