I shall then go on to outline various arguments that are associated with the Madhyamaka refutation of svabhāva.
Besides arguing against svabhāva directly,Nāgārjuna‘s critique targets several philosophical concepts like causality, unity, and essential properties, as well as various Buddhist notions such as the Four Noble Truths, nirvana, and the Tathāgata. Yet, he does not intend to refute these altogether, but only to demonstrate that if we conceive of them in terms of svabhāva, such concepts cannot be rendered consistent, either with each other, or internally.
For example, if entities existed with svabhāva, then they could never arise, or give rise to anything else; they could not change, or ever come to an end. Therefore, when we seek the svabhāva of a tree, say, we never find it, we find only its emptiness of svabhāva, or in other words, we find that there is nothing other than the collection of fleeting impressions we receive, nothing permanent underlying the fluctuating parts and properties that we tend to think of as 'inessential‘ to the tree itself. Our regarding it as a 'hard-edged‘ individual has a lot to do, instead, with our language and other conventions.