Nāgārjuna’s Undefined Referents

A Ruthless Non-Madhyamaka Reconstruction

By Bodhangkur Mahathero

The central problem exposed by the analysis of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka metaphysics system does not rest on one undefined term, but on a network of mutually supporting undefined referents. These terms do not function as precise concepts. They function as placeholders, as vacuous verbal tokens: flexible, relational, negative, and strategically unavailable to final capture (i.e. decided closure).

The issue is not that Nāgārjuna uses difficult words. All philosophy does that. The issue is that the decisive words in his system are never fixed with sufficient rigor to let the argument be tested. They are used, attacked, inverted, dissolved, and redeployed, but rarely stabilized.

Modern academic summaries acknowledge the same basic structure: Nāgārjuna’s philosophy is built around śūnyatā, but śūnyatā is emptiness of svabhāva, while svabhāva itself is rendered (i.e. circumscribed) through a range of terms—“inherent existence,” “intrinsic nature,” “essence,” “substance”—none of which fully captures its meaning accurately. And that is already the warning sign: the central term is not a defined object but an elastic semantic field.

The Main Undefined Referents

The principal undefined, or insufficiently defined terms are:

1. svabhāva — self-nature, own-being, intrinsic existence.
This is the chief target. Yet Nāgārjuna does not give a stable positive definition. He attacks svabhāva as if it meant permanent, independent, unconditioned essence. But he does not adequately consider the weaker possibility that things have temporary, functional, non-abiding identity. This is the key exclusion. He refutes fixed essence, then lets that refutation stand as if it refuted real conditioned identity.

2. śūnyatā — emptiness.
Emptiness is not defined independently. It means emptiness of svabhāva. But if svabhāva is unstable, then emptiness inherits that instability. The system says “things are empty,” but empty of what? Of permanent essence? Of independent substance? Of fixed identity? Of ultimate being? The answer shifts according to argumentative need.

3. rūpa — form.
In the famous Heart Sutra formula, “form is emptiness; emptiness is form,” rūpa is not analytically defined. It functions as the apparent world, the presented thing, the conventional object. But the exact referent remains fluid. If “form” is undefined and “emptiness” is undefined, the formula becomes rhetorically powerful but logically underdetermined.

4. pratītyasamutpāda — dependent origination.
This is treated as the great explanatory principle, but Nāgārjuna does not give a mechanistic account of dependence. What exactly is dependence? Causal dependence? Conceptual dependence? Linguistic dependence? Perceptual dependence? Ontological dependence? The term does enormous work while remaining procedurally vague. Nāgārjuna’s famous move is to identify dependent origination with emptiness, but that means one unclear term is used to explain another.

5. dharma — phenomenon, constituent, teaching, element.
This term is notoriously elastic in Buddhist discourse. It may mean object, event, teaching, mental content, constituent factor, or existential unit. Nāgārjuna attacks the supposed reality of dharmas, but the referent shifts between doctrinal and experiential uses.

6. saṃvṛti-satya — conventional truth.
This means ordinary, transactional, worldly truth. But its status remains unstable. Is conventional truth true? Merely useful? Linguistically constructed? Pragmatically valid? Delusive but necessary? Madhyamaka needs it to speak, argue, teach, and live, while also denying that it has ultimate grounding.

7. paramārtha-satya — ultimate truth.
Ultimate truth is even more unstable. If it is stated, it becomes conventional. If it is unstated, it cannot function as a truth-claim. Stanford’s Madhyamaka entry notes that only transactional truth is capable of articulation in language. That means “ultimate truth” becomes a prestige-term for something that cannot be directly specified.

8. nirvāṇa — liberation, cessation, release.
Nāgārjuna famously collapses the distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, but this depends on both terms being treated at high, detail excluded abstraction. If nirvāṇa is not defined procedurally, it becomes another final placeholder: neither existence, nor non-existence, nor both, nor neither. Moreover, the term nirvana is apophatic, hence essentially meaningless.

9. saṃsāra — cyclic existence.
If saṃsāra is the world of conditioned arising, and nirvāṇa is not other than saṃsāra, then the whole distinction becomes unstable. The terms survive ritually and rhetorically, but their referents dissolve under analysis.

10. upādāya-prajñapti — dependent designation.
This is perhaps the most revealing term. Things exist by designation. But what is designation? Naming? Cognitive imputation? Social convention? Functional classification? Linguistic convenience? Again, the term allows escape from both realism and nihilism without providing a positive account of how designation works.

The Pattern

Nagarjuna’s dubious modus operandi is consistent:

A term is introduced.
It is not rigorously defined.
It is used to dissolve another term.
When challenged, it is protected by saying that fixed definition would itself reify the term.
The result is a system that cannot be pinned down because pinning down is declared philosophically illegitimate.

This is not ordinary conceptual subtlety. It is a closed defensive loop.

The Madhyamaka defender says: “Nāgārjuna avoids fixed definitions because fixed definitions falsely imply essence.”

The non-Madhyamaka critic, in this case, the druid Finn, replies: “That is precisely the trick, the deception. The refusal to define becomes immune from criticism by making definition itself the alleged error.”

The Central Evasion: Non-Abiding Versus Non-Existing

The most important clarification concerns svabhāva. Nāgārjuna treats svabhāva as if it must mean permanently fixed, independent, self-grounded essence. He then shows that no such thing can arise from causes and conditions.

But that does not prove that things do not exist.

It proves only that things do not exist permanently, independently, or absolutely.

The excluded middle is obvious:

· not permanent essence,

· not non-existence,

· but transient, conditioned, functional identity.

A flame is not permanent. But it is not nothing.
A wave is not independent of water, wind, gravity, and motion. But it is not nothing.
A human being is not fixed from birth to death. But he is not nothing.
A thought is not abiding. But it occurs.
A tool has no eternal essence. But it functions.

So the key non-Madhyamaka objection is this: Nāgārjuna attacks permanence and then lets the corpse of permanence stand in for existence itself.

That is not a refutation of reality. It is a semantic overreach.

Vacuous Placeholder Mechanics

A vacuous placeholder is not a nonsense word in the crude sense (like the word nonsense itself). It is worse: it is a word that appears meaningful because it performs a role, but whose referent is never established, indeed decided.

In Nāgārjuna’s system/scholiastic game:

· svabhāva is the target-placeholder.

· śūnyatā is the dissolving-placeholder.

· pratītyasamutpāda is the explanatory-placeholder.

· saṃvṛti is the survival-placeholder.

· paramārtha is the prestige-placeholder.

· nirvāṇa is the promise-placeholder.

· upādāya-prajñapti is the escape-placeholder.

Each term rescues the others.

If emptiness is challenged, it is explained by dependent origination.
If dependent origination is challenged, it is explained as emptiness.
If ultimate truth is challenged, it retreats beyond language.
If conventional truth is challenged, it is restored as necessary for discourse.
If nihilism is alleged, designation is invoked.
If realism is alleged, emptiness is invoked.

The system is therefore not linear. It is circularly evasive.

The Non-Madhyamaka Verdict

A rigorous philosophy defines its referents before using them as instruments of destruction (or empowerment). Nāgārjuna does not do this. He uses undefined or underdefined terms to dismantle other undefined or underdefined terms, then presents the resulting absence as wisdom/truth.

From a sympathetic Buddhist perspective, this is therapeutic anti-reification.

From a ruthless non-Madhyamaka perspective, it is conceptual smoke, indeed, outright deception.

The final charge is severe but coherent:

Nāgārjuna’s dialectic does not discover emptiness. It manufactures it by refusing stable reference.

It first destabilizes the target, svabhāva.
Then it declares the target impossible.
Then it names the resulting absence śūnyatā.
Then it protects śūnyatā from definition by claiming that definition itself would betray emptiness.
Then it calls this maneuver the Middle Way.

That is not a completed philosophy. It is a self-sealing rhetoric of dissolution.

Nagarjuna’s deliberate deception, indeed his Mahayana power play, structurally speaking, lies here: the system asks to be treated as insight while denying the definitional obligations of argument. It wants the authority of philosophy without submitting to the discipline of fixed reference.

Or, in the druid Finn’s harsher formulation:

Nāgārjuna does not refute reality. He abolishes the dictionary, then declares the world empty because no word can be forced to stand still.

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