Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductory Lectures on Buddhism.

Last time I introduced Nāgārjuna, author of the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, and its translator Kumārajīva. Now we enter the text itself.

The work usually circulates with commentaries. Piṅgala’s, used here, is earliest; others include Candrakīrti’s Clear Words, Bhāviveka’s Lamp of Wisdom, and Sthiramati’s Mahayana Commentary on the Middle Way. Candrakīrti survives in Tibetan and Sanskrit, Bhāviveka in Chinese and Tibetan, and Sthiramati only in Chinese.

Piṅgala opens with a question in another voice:Why did Nāgārjuna compose it?He answers:People hold different views of the world’s essence.In India some said Īśvara created the world; others that composites produced it—four elements made the world, parents made life. Some treated time as the absolute cause of everything, as if time made autumn leaves fall. Others proposed an inherent nature, law, or Dao from which things arise. Some said the world arose naturally without cause. Others resembled modern materialists, positing elements or infinitesimal matter like today’s fundamental particles.

Buddhism groups these errors asarising from false causes, causeless arising, and views of annihilation or permanence.False causation attributes things to creators, elements, or particles. Causeless arising requires no conditions. Both ultimately fall into permanence or annihilation.

Nāgārjuna wrote because emptiness was misunderstood, producing these errors. Five centuries after the Buddha, competing systems had arisen, and Buddhists too held distorted views. The treatise deepened emptiness and presented Mahayana’s middle way in which emptiness and existence coincide.

Lesser Vehicle impermanence suggests emptiness but remains incomplete. Analytic emptiness breaks things down to approach essencelessness. Yet if matter is divided to a smallest particle, does that particle exist? If yes, it remains divisible; if no, how is it a material particle?

Emptiness means things are dependently arisen phenomena, not permanent self-sufficient entities, though they retain functions. We assume inherent nature, so emptiness breaks attachment. Yet emptiness cannot be captured conceptually: saying it easily becomes either nonexistence or another substantial reality called emptiness.