ABSTRACT
Nāgārjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the first century C.e., is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher. He is the founder of the Mādhyamika, or Middle Path, schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism. His considerable corpus includes texts addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and the set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemologica! treatises that represent the foundation of the highly skeptical and dialectical analytic philosophical school known as Mādhyamika. Most important of these is his largest and best-known text, the Mūlamādhyamikakārikā—in English, Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way. This text in turn inspires a huge commentarial literature in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Divergences in interpretation of the Mūlamādhyamikakārikā often determine the splits between major philosophical schools. So, for instance, the distinction between two of the three major Mahāyāna philosophical schools, Svātantrika-Mādhyamika and Prāsahgika-Mādhyamika, reflect, inter alia, distinct readings of this text, itself taken as fundamental by scholars within each of these schools.
