Summary
Mahāyāna philosophy collapses the dualisms that were set out in the Pāli canon, and
regards all teachings expressed by the Buddha and his followers as merely conventional
truths.
Being ineffable, ultimate truth is described only approximately and it is
approached precisely through identification of one pole of a dualism with its opposite, or perhaps, through the negation of their difference. Nāgārjuna‘s method, in fact, is to
negate the distinction between ultimate truth and conventional reality, by showing that
neither can be thought of as independently existent, unitary entities with a fixed essence.
If we conceive of reality this way, he argues, then none of our ordinary concepts and
experiences can be made sense of; we cannot account for causality, change, or any sort of relation between things. Nāgārjuna‘s arguments, that is, are intended to address a
common way of misconceiving reality, and to bring about a radically new way of
experiencing the world and ourselves, which is what nirvana entails.
It was emphasized that this too is not to be reified, and must not be thought of as
something fixed, or as entirely different from saṃsāra. Instead, it was claimed that
emptiness just is seeing the conventional as such. Thus, Nāgārjuna comes to blur the
distinction he had introduced between conventional and ultimate truth, and ultimately
identifies one with the other. Experiencing ultimate truth involves the 'not finding‘ of the independence, unity, and fixed nature that we had attributed to reality.
Therefore, it is evident that Nāgārjuna‘s approach was to negate, and it was pointed out that such negations are different from ordinary negative sentences, which often imply their opposite. Nāgārjuna often emphasized that he advanced no thesis whatsoever, and that he subscribed to no view at all, and this coincides with the Buddha‘s advice, given in the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta, to avoid making claims about either existence or nonexistence.
As we shall see in the next section, however, affirmation does have a role to play within Buddhism, which is vital when it comes to avoiding the two extremes and finding the Middle Path.