Nāgārjuna’s Empty Consciousness: Experience Without Essence

Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE), founder of the Madhyamaka or "middle way" school of Mahayana Buddhism and by wide agreement the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha, argues that every phenomenon whatsoever is empty (śūnyatā) of svabhāva—intrinsic nature, or existence from its own side or nature—because whatever arises in dependence on causes, parts, or concepts cannot possess a nature that is its own (Westerhoff, 2026). Applied to consciousness, the thesis is uncompromising: phenomenal experience is not denied, but it has no intrinsic nature, no ultimate subject to whom it belongs, and no self-illuminating core, arising only in dependence on faculty, object, and conditions, and thus as empty as the objects it discloses (Siderits and Katsura, 2013). This is not nihilism—conventionally, seeing, feeling, and suffering all occur—and it is equally not idealism, since consciousness is refused precisely the foundational status that would make it rock-bottom reality. Emptiness is itself empty; the upshot is less a rival theory of what consciousness is than a sustained demonstration that the demand for such a theory rests on a presupposition, intrinsic nature, that cannot be made coherent.

In other words, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka does not offer a causal theory of consciousness in the modern scientific or philosophical sense; it offers a radical ontological diagnosis of what consciousness—and everything experienced—can and cannot be. Conscious episodes occur conventionally, but neither consciousness, its phenomenal qualities, its objects, nor the subject who undergoes them possesses an intrinsic nature or independent foundation. Phenomenal consciousness is therefore dependently arisen and causally effective, yet empty: there is experience, but no self-grounding experiential substance, irreducible qualitative core, or enduring experiencer behind it (Nāgārjuna, 1995, 2013; Garfield, 1995; Westerhoff, 2009). (See entry on Buddhism's Empty, Illusory Phenomenal Consciousness.)

Emptiness and the Rejection of Svabhāva

Nāgārjuna's target is technically precise. Earlier Buddhist metaphysics distinguished primary existents (dravyasat), the irreducible dharmas (elements of reality) constituting the basic furniture of the world, from secondary existents (prajñaptisat), which depend on conceptual and linguistic practice; svabhāva marks the former, the end-point of a chain of ontological dependence (Westerhoff, 2026). Nāgārjuna denies that any such end-point exists. Mereological, causal, and conceptual dependence alike bottom out nowhere, and it is the third—dependence on the conceptualizing mind—that carries the full anti-foundationalist claim, since a mind-independent network of dependence relations would still amount to svabhāva (Westerhoff, 2009a). Because nothing has its nature intrinsically, there is no master argument for emptiness; refutation proceeds case by case against whatever an interlocutor takes to be substantial (Siderits, 2004). Two clarifications matter. First, the doctrine is expressly distinguished from the claim that nothing exists, which Madhyamaka authors reject as one of the two extremes (Westerhoff, 2016). Second, svabhāva is not merely a theoretical posit but a cognitive default—an automatic superimposition onto what lacks it—so that intellectual conviction does not by itself make phenomena stop appearing otherwise, much as measuring the Müller-Lyer lines does not make them look equal (Westerhoff, 2026). The aim is a shift in how the world appears, not only in what is believed about it.

Consciousness as Empty Dependent Arising

Nāgārjuna’s central concept is śūnyatā, emptiness. Emptiness does not mean blankness, nonexistence, or an underlying metaphysical void. It means absence of svabhāva: intrinsic nature, self-existence, substantial independence, or an identity that a thing possesses entirely “from its own side.” Something with svabhāva would exist and be what it is independently of causes, parts, relations, conceptual classifications, and cognitive practices. Nāgārjuna argues that no such entity can be found (Nāgārjuna, 1995, MMK 15; Garfield, 1994; Westerhoff, 2009).

Consciousness is included without exception. In inherited Buddhist analysis, vijñāna, discriminative consciousness or awareness, is one of the five psychophysical aggregates constituting a person and occurs in relation to six cognitive domains: the five sensory modalities and mind. Nāgārjuna does not deny that seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, remembering, and desiring occur. He denies that these events reveal an intrinsically existing consciousness—whether conceived as a substance, an enduring stream with its own ultimate identity, an immaterial witness, or an irreducible mental primitive.

Dependent origination explains the positive side of emptiness. A conscious event arises only through conditions: sensory capacities, objects, bodily processes, attention, previous cognitive events, concepts, language, memory, and practical context. Because consciousness depends on these conditions, it lacks independent essence. Conversely, because it lacks a fixed essence, it can arise, vary, interact, and cease. Nāgārjuna consequently identifies dependent origination with emptiness: whatever arises dependently is empty, and nothing escapes dependent origination (Nāgārjuna, 1995, MMK 24.18–19; Garfield, 1994). Emptiness thus preserves rather than abolishes causal efficacy; an intrinsically fixed phenomenon could not enter genuinely transformative relations.

Thus, consciousness enters as one conditioned item among others. In the chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) examining the sense faculties, Nāgārjuna endorses the canonical formula that consciousness arises in dependence on the eye and on visible form (MMK 3:7), and he argues that the faculty, its object, and the awareness they jointly occasion cannot be assigned intrinsic powers without incoherence: an eye seeing by its own nature would have to see independently of anything seen. The critique of causation reinforces the point. Examining whether things arise from themselves, from others, from both, or from neither, Nāgārjuna finds each alternative unworkable and concludes not that causation is unreal but that the assumption generating the trouble—that cause and effect exist independently, from their own side—must be abandoned (Garfield, 1995). Cause and effect are mutually dependent both notionally and existentially, and the causal field that individuates them is itself a cognitive artifact assembled for explanatory purposes (Westerhoff, 2026). Perceptual episodes are therefore doubly dependent: on the conditions that occasion them, and on the conceptual processes that make them the episodes they are. This distinguishes Madhyamaka sharply from the Abhidharma schools, for whom mental dharmas were causally produced yet still possessed svabhāva (Siderits, 2004).

The Seer, the Seeing, and the Problem of Reflexivity

The most direct engagement with phenomenal consciousness concerns whether awareness can be self-presenting. Nāgārjuna's opponents held that the instruments of knowledge (pramāṇa) are self-established, requiring no further instrument to validate them, an attractive view because it halts a vicious regress. Nāgārjuna objects that a self-established visual faculty would have to function as its own object; but as with motion, vision cannot see something existing simultaneously with it, itself included (MMK 3:2–3; Garfield, 1995). His broader argument in the Vigrahavyāvartanī is that no cognitive capacity can be identified as truth-conducive by inspecting its internal features alone, without reference to the objects it succeeds or fails in disclosing; instruments and objects must establish each other, and mutual establishment precludes intrinsic nature on either side (Westerhoff, 2010). The consequence is substantial. Experience is not self-intimating in any way that could ground certainty or supply a foundation, and awareness has no privileged reflexive access to itself. Later Madhyamaka authors developed this into an explicit rejection of reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana), which bears directly on modern self-representational and higher-order theories of consciousness.

No Substantial Self, No Substantial Basis

The critique extends to the subject. A substantial self would have to be distinct from body and from every mental state while featuring in all of them; Nāgārjuna presses the resulting tension: such a self must serve as cognitive subject yet be accessible as cognitive object, roles that cannot be jointly occupied (MMK 9:3). Nor does the inference from properties to a property-bearer succeed, since the distinction between constitutive and instantiated properties reflects our epistemic priorities rather than any ontological seam (Westerhoff, 2026). What remains is a temporally extended sequence of causally linked physical and mental events in which different components occupy the subject position at different moments—an account with evident affinities to Hume's bundle and to contemporary no-self models (e.g., Metzinger). Madhyamaka's distinctive move is the second denial: not only is there no substantial self, there is also no substantial basis out of which a merely imputed self could be constructed, since the aggregates, consciousness included, are themselves empty. The self is further characterized by systematic misapprehension, taking itself to be an unchanging unified agent; Nāgārjuna likens the agent to an illusion that conjures a further illusion (MMK 17:31–32). Yet conventional agency is preserved: one still takes the stairs rather than the window, and moral consequence is not dissolved by ultimate emptiness.

Two Truths and the Status of the Theory

Madhyamaka distinguishes conventional from ultimate truth, but on the reading that follows from Nāgārjuna's arguments the ultimate cannot be a description of how things stand independently of human interests and conceptual resources, since no such standpoint is available (Westerhoff, 2026). Correspondence accounts of truth are rejected along with the ready-made world they presuppose; conventional truth is not thereby a distortion, because "distortion" would require an unconceptualized reality to be distorted. Emptiness is accordingly a corrective to a misconception rather than a newly discovered ultimate nature—the emptiness of emptiness (Huntington, 1989; Garfield, 1995). This underwrites Nāgārjuna's most vexing statement, that he has no thesis at all (Vigrahavyāvartanī 29), variously explained as the relinquishing of all views, as a distinction between assertions with and without ontological import, or as a technical move within the debate conventions of second-century India (Garfield, 1996; Westerhoff, 2009b). Whether the resulting position can be stated without self-refutation, and whether it leads to genuine paradox at the limits of thought, remains actively contested (Priest and Garfield, 2002).

Assessment

For consciousness studies, Nāgārjuna occupies a position with few Western analogs: phenomenal consciousness is neither eliminated nor made fundamental, but held to be conventionally real and ultimately empty—so that illusionism and idealism are refused together, each for positing an intrinsic nature, one denied to experience and one attributed to it. The apparatus is also formally substantive, modeling an ontology without foundations that has been taken up in contemporary discussions of grounding and metaphysical dependence (Priest, 2009; Garfield, 2015).

Three objections recur. The nihilism charge has a long history and continues to find defenders, who argue that the denial of any ultimate existent leaves nothing for conventional truth to be about (Burton, 1999; Westerhoff, 2016). The no-thesis view invites the reply that emptiness is asserted, and asserting it appears to be doing exactly what the position forbids. And global mind-dependence is difficult to state precisely: it is clear enough for institutional facts, less clear how mountains depend collectively on minds that are themselves empty (Westerhoff, 2026). A fourth question is diagnostic rather than critical. Nāgārjuna does not answer the hard problem; he denies the framing that generates it, since a question about how intrinsic physical natures give rise to intrinsic phenomenal ones presupposes on both sides exactly what his arguments deny. Whether that constitutes a dissolution or an evasion is where his engagement with contemporary consciousness studies comes into play, and it can be assessed only in light of the ontological perspective of the assessor.

References

Burton, D. (1999). Emptiness Appraised: A Critical Study of Nāgārjuna's Philosophy. Richmond: Curzon.

Garfield, J. L. (1995). The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. New York: Oxford University Press.

Garfield, J. L. (1996). Emptiness and positionlessness: Do the Mādhyamika relinquish all views? Journal of Indian Philosophy, 24, 1–34.

Garfield, J. L. (2015). Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Huntington, C. W. (1989). The Emptiness of Emptiness: A Study of Early Indian Mādhyamika. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

Nāgārjuna. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK). Cited by chapter and verse; chapter and verse numbering follows Garfield (1995). See also Siderits and Katsura (2013).

Nāgārjuna. Vigrahavyāvartanī (VV). Cited by verse; verse numbering follows Westerhoff (2010).

Priest, G. (2009). The structure of emptiness. Philosophy East and West, 59(4), 467–480.

Priest, G., & Garfield, J. L. (2002). Nāgārjuna and the limits of thought. In G. Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (pp. 249–270). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Siderits, M. (2004). Causation and emptiness in early Madhyamika. Journal of Indian Philosophy, 32, 393–419.

Siderits, M., & Katsura, S. (2013). Nāgārjuna's Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Westerhoff, J. (2009a). Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Westerhoff, J. (2009b). The no-thesis view: Making sense of verse 29 of Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī. In M. D'Amato, J. L. Garfield, & T. J. F. Tillemans (Eds.), Pointing at the Moon: Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy (pp. 25–39). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Westerhoff, J. (2010). The Dispeller of Disputes: Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī. New York: Oxford University Press.

Westerhoff, J. (2016). On the nihilist interpretation of Madhyamaka. Journal of Indian Philosophy, 44, 337–376.

Westerhoff, J. (2026). Nāgārjuna. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision, May 31, 2026).