Does Anything Exist on Its Own? Nāgārjuna’s Challenge
The Apple That Isn’t Really “Apple”
Imagine you’re holding a smooth red apple. You can see it, feel it, maybe even taste it. It sure seems like the apple is just there — a thing that exists on its own, with its own nature. But what if that solid, independent apple is an illusion? Almost two thousand years ago, a Buddhist monk named Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE, probably in southern India) argued exactly that. Nothing, he claimed, exists with svabhāva — a Sanskrit word often translated as inherent existence, intrinsic nature, or substance. Everything is empty (śūnyatā).
To understand what Nāgārjuna meant, we need to look at the two ways philosophers talk about what something is. One is essence: fire’s essence is to be hot; water’s essence is to be wet. If fire stopped being hot, it wouldn’t be fire anymore. That kind of svabhāva wasn’t Nāgārjuna’s main target. The one he attacked is svabhāva as substance — the idea that an object is a fundamental, independent building block of reality, something that doesn’t depend on anything else for its existence.
Many Buddhist thinkers before Nāgārjuna believed in primary existents: tiny, irreducible units called dharmas that were the bedrock of the world. Chairs, trees, you, and me — all of those are just combinations of such dharmas, put together by our minds. Nāgārjuna went further: there are no primary existents. The search for a “rock‑bottom” foundation never finds one. Everything is empty of that kind of substance.
But that doesn’t mean nothing is there. Emptiness is not nihilism — it’s the absence of an independent, built‑in self. Think of the Müller‑Lyer optical illusion: even when you know two lines are the same length, they still look different. In the same way, even when we understand that things lack svabhāva, they still appear as if they have it. For Nāgārjuna, the point is not just to grasp the idea but to realize it so that the whole way things appear to us slowly changes.
The Domino Chain That Never Ends
If things had svabhāva, they would be like solo dominoes — completely independent, unchanged by anything else. But the world doesn’t look like that. Everything seems to be caught up in a web of causes and effects. Nāgārjuna examined four ways a cause might bring about an effect and found that none of them can work if cause and effect exist with svabhāva.
The first idea is self‑causation: the effect is already inside the cause, or cause and effect are identical. If that were true, the effect would have to exist at the same time as the cause, which doesn’t match our experience — the explosion doesn’t exist inside the petrol, oxygen, and spark before they come together.
The second is causation from something else: cause and effect are completely distinct. But if they’re truly independent, how could one influence the other? If they’re separate by their very nature, there’s no connection that could turn one into the other. A spark and an explosion, if they each had their own svabhāva, would just sit there, strangers.
The third option, combining both, says the effect is contained as a potential that gets triggered. That’s closer to how we talk, but it still doesn’t give us independent substances — everything involved relies on the other pieces.
The last idea is that causation doesn’t exist at all. But then we couldn’t explain why the world is orderly, why we can learn from experience, or even how we see anything at all (since seeing is a causal process).
Nāgārjuna’s conclusion is not that causation is impossible, but that it can’t work if cause and effect are imagined as independent, self‑contained things. Instead, they depend on each other. A cause is only a cause because of its effect, and an effect wouldn’t exist without its cause. More than that, what counts as a cause depends on the way we slice up the world. A “causal field” — the spark plus oxygen plus petrol — is a collection we put together for a purpose. The parts might exist separately, but the collection is a cognitive tool. So causation is not a mind‑independent feature of reality; it’s something we construct. And that means anything that is involved in a causal network is empty of svabhāva.
The Walker Who Can’t Be Found
Nāgārjuna loved to pick apart everyday terms to show that our concepts don’t match up with a world of substances. One of his favorite puzzles is the idea of a mover who moves. If you say “the mover moves,” how many motions are we talking about? There must be one motion that makes the person a mover in the first place, and then another motion by which that mover moves. But that’s absurd — we see only one motion.
This puzzle reveals a deeper problem. Usually we think of an individual and its properties as separate: the vase is one thing, its blueness is another. But with a mover, you can’t pull them apart. The mover isn’t a bare thing that later acquires motion; being a mover means being in motion. So the distinction between constitutive properties (what makes something the thing it is) and instantiated properties (what it happens to have) is just a convenience of language. We decide to call something a “vase” and then add “blue” — but there’s no deep, independent division out there in the world.
This matters enormously for how we think about ourselves. Many Indian philosophers believed in a substantial self — a unified, unchanging core inside us that is different from our body and our thoughts. Nāgārjuna, following the Buddha, disagreed. He saw the self as a shifting stream of five psycho‑physical aggregates (body, sensation, perception, intellect, and consciousness) with no fixed centre. If there is no permanent self, then all our mental qualities don’t need a solid owner. Just as “the mover” is nothing apart from the motion, “the self” is nothing apart from the stream of experiences.
But if the self is an illusion, do our actions matter? Nāgārjuna compared the self to a magical illusion that then creates another illusion. While we’re inside the illusion, we still have to follow its rules — just like in a dream, you’d still use the stairs instead of jumping out the window, even if you suspect you’re dreaming. Realizing emptiness doesn’t mean tossing aside ethics; it means gradually waking up from the mistaken belief in a solid, separate self.
How We Know: The Mirror and the Raft
How do we know anything? Indian philosophers listed epistemic instruments (pramāṇas) — like perception, inference, and testimony — that give us access to epistemic objects (prameyas). Nāgārjuna asked: how do we know those instruments are reliable? You can’t test them with themselves without going in circles, and you can’t step outside your own mind to check them against a mind‑independent world.
Nāgārjuna considered and rejected the idea that epistemic instruments are self‑established. Perception can’t perceive itself, he argued, any more than a finger can point at itself. Then he looked at mutual establishment: instruments and objects rely on each other. You see an apple; the apple is known through perception, and at the same time your perception counts as reliable because it successfully picks out apples. But this kind of success is never final — we might be deceived, and our tests for success themselves depend on other perceptions and beliefs. There’s no escape from the circle.
This leads to a radical view of truth. If nothing exists with svabhāva, there is no ready‑made world for our language to match up with. Nāgārjuna therefore rejected the classic correspondence theory of truth — the idea that a statement is true because it mirrors a mind‑independent fact. Instead, he seems to have favored an account where truth is tied to warranted assertability: a statement is true if the conditions that justify asserting it hold. There is no ultimate truth that describes things as they really are, entirely apart from human interests and concepts.
Even emptiness itself isn’t an ultimate truth. It’s a corrective, like medicine. If you mistakenly super‑impose svabhāva onto things, emptiness is the antidote. Once the illness is gone, you don’t keep taking the medicine. Buddhist texts compare the teaching of emptiness to a raft: you use it to cross a river, but you don’t carry it on your back after you reach the other shore. Emptiness is a tool, not a final description of reality.
A World Without a Floor
This is where Nāgārjuna’s philosophy gets unsettling — and exciting. If nothing has its own built‑in nature, then everything, including Mount Everest, depends on all our minds collectively. How can a mountain be mind‑dependent? Nāgārjuna’s point is not that the mountain vanishes when you look away. It’s that what counts as a mountain, what defines it, and even the very concept of a “mountain” as a unified object — all of that is shaped by our conceptual and linguistic practices. There is no way to investigate the world apart from those practices, because those practices generate the very idea of “the world” in the first place.
You might worry that if there’s no ultimate truth, then any belief is as good as any other. Nāgārjuna didn’t think so. Even though truth is conventional, we can still improve our conventions. Science, for instance, progresses not by matching an invisible reality, but by making our ways of talking about the world more useful and coherent. Sometimes it’s even useful to pretend there’s a mind‑independent truth out there, because that fiction encourages inquiry. But the fiction remains a fiction.
Nāgārjuna’s ideas remain alive in contemporary philosophy. They challenge the widespread realist view that most things exist objectively and mind‑independently. They raise tricky questions about how meaning and truth work without a fixed connection between words and things. And they push us to see that the search for a foundation — something that holds up everything else — might be a mistake from the start.
So think back to that red apple. It’s not that the apple is a hallucination. It’s that being an apple — being any thing — involves a web of dependencies: causes, parts, words, interests. The apple is real, but only within that web. Nāgārjuna’s emptiness isn’t a void. It’s an invitation to see how everything is connected, and how our minds are never passive observers but always active shapers of the worlds we live in.
Think about it
- If a table is empty of its own independent nature, does that mean it isn’t really there when no one is looking? What’s the difference between “existing” and “existing from its own side”?
- Can you imagine a world where nothing has a fixed essence? How might that change the way you treat other people or the natural world?
- If all truths are just agreements among people, can we ever say someone is simply wrong about a fact? How would you argue that your belief is better than someone else’s?
