Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka stands out within the Buddhist tradition through its uncompromising analysis of emptiness (śūnyatā) and intrinsic nature (svabhāva). Earlier Abhidharma schools, for example, often regarded persons as empty but still treated the basic constituents of reality—dharmas—as ultimately real. By contrast, Madhyamaka extends the critique of selfhood to all phenomena whatsoever, insisting that even the most subtle elements, and even emptiness itself, lack any independent, self-existing essence. This is not a slide into nihilism, but a refusal to grant anything a fixed, inherent core.

A distinctive feature of this vision is the way it identifies dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and emptiness. Many Buddhist schools affirm that things arise in dependence on causes and conditions, yet still assume that something ultimately real underlies this process. Nagarjuna’s analysis presses further: to be dependently arisen just is to be empty of svabhāva, and there is no hidden substance behind the web of interdependence. Ultimate truth, in this light, is not a separate realm or entity, but the clear seeing that all conventional phenomena lack inherent existence.

Madhyamaka also reconfigures the two truths doctrine and the Middle Way. Other schools may treat certain dharmas or nirvāṇa as finally existent, whereas Nagarjuna treats conventional truth as the everyday, functioning world and ultimate truth as the insight into its emptiness, without positing any additional, substantial reality. The Middle Way is thereby extended beyond the classic poles of eternalism and annihilationism to all conceptual extremes—existence and nonexistence, unity and multiplicity, coming and going—none of which withstands careful examination when taken as ultimately real.

Methodologically, this school is strikingly non-constructive. Where Abhidharma and Yogācāra elaborate positive ontologies and detailed taxonomies of mind and world, Madhyamaka employs prasaṅga reasoning and the tetralemma (catuṣkoṭi) to expose contradictions in any claim to inherent existence. Rather than offering a new metaphysical foundation, it systematically dismantles reified views, including those about nirvāṇa, which is not set apart as a separate, inherently existent state. From this perspective, saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not different in nature; both are empty, and what changes is the way they are seen—through ignorance or through wisdom.