- Lived:
- c. 150–250 CE — almost certainly in south India, by strong and early tradition in the Andhra country of the lower Krishna river, under the Sātavāhana kings; every biographical detail beyond that is legend
- Field:
- philosophy — founder of Madhyamaka, the "Middle Way" school of Mahāyāna Buddhism; author of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the most argued-over philosophical text India ever produced
- The Big Idea:
- Nothing whatever — no thing, no self, no category, not even nirvāṇa — possesses its own independent essence; everything exists only dependently, by relation and convention. And this emptiness is not the end of the world but the reason the world works.
- In their words:
- "For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible; for whom emptiness is not possible, nothing is possible." (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.14, our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- The philosopher who argued that nothing has an essence — and, when told his argument refuted itself, replied "I have no thesis" — became the "second Buddha" of Tibet, the grandfather of Zen, and the only philosopher we know of with an excavated city bearing his name: a city drowned, with exquisite irony, by a dam that also bears his name.