Mulamadhyamakakarika (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way)

The Mulamadhyamakakarika is Nagarjuna's foundational text of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, systematically arguing for the doctrine of emptiness, sunyata, through a series of terse logical verses examining and refuting fixed conceptions of causation, self and phenomena. As the primary founding text of one of Mahayana Buddhism's most influential philosophical schools, it is the strongest possible source for Nagarjuna's own argument, cited here as content rather than through one particular modern edition, so it carries no publisher or fixed year the way a printed translation would. Its limit is that, like other extremely compressed philosophical verse texts, it was traditionally read alongside commentary to unpack its dense logical argument, so a specific difficult point of interpretation is best checked against a named commentarial or scholarly translation rather than the verses alone.