All phenomena lack intrinsic nature (svabhava)

Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika builds its case for universal emptiness not from a single sweeping declaration but from chapter after chapter of narrow, specific analysis, examining causation, motion, the self, time, and a long list of other candidates one at a time and showing, in each case, that the thing in question cannot be found to exist independently once it is properly examined. His method turns on identifying dependent origination, the Buddhist teaching that everything arises in reliance on causes and conditions, with emptiness itself, arguing that these are not two separate doctrines but one claim stated twice: because nothing arises except in dependence on something else, nothing possesses svabhava, a fixed nature belonging to it on its own account and requiring nothing beyond itself to be what it is. The verses proceed almost entirely through terse logical argument rather than through scriptural citation or narrative, examining and discarding each proposed exception in turn, which is part of why the text has always been read together with commentary rather than alone. What Nagarjuna's analysis treats as its conclusion is not a limitation of human reasoning that a sharper argument might one day overcome, it is presented as a finding about how things actually are, that dependent existence and independent nature are simply incompatible wherever the analysis is turned.

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.