Nagarjuna takes the Buddha’s diagnosis of dukkha and illuminates it through the twin lenses of emptiness (śūnyatā) and dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). Suffering, for him, is not an intrinsic feature of reality but a dependently arisen process, coming into being only through causes, conditions, and conceptual designation. Because it lacks any fixed, independent essence (svabhāva), suffering is empty, just as all phenomena are empty. This does not render suffering illusory or irrelevant; rather, it situates it within a dynamic web of conditions, where it can arise and also cease. If suffering possessed inherent existence, it could neither be produced nor brought to an end, and the transformative power of the path would be impossible.

The root of suffering, in Nagarjuna’s analysis, lies in ignorance understood as the deep habit of reifying self and phenomena as inherently existent. From this misperception spring attachment and aversion, the very forces that sustain dukkha. By clinging to “I,” “mine,” and to supposedly solid realities, fluid processes are frozen into sources of frustration and pain. Nagarjuna’s logical analysis shows that notions such as self, identity, and inherent existence cannot ultimately be sustained, and this insight undermines the very foundation upon which suffering stands. When both the sufferer and the suffering are seen as empty of inherent nature, the grip of dukkha naturally loosens.

This vision also reframes the Four Noble Truths. Suffering, its causes, its cessation, and the path are all empty and dependently originated, and precisely for that reason they can function. The causes of suffering—ignorance, craving, and the rest—are not fixed realities; because they are conditioned, they can be transformed. The path itself is a dependently arisen process, not an absolute entity, and its efficacy rests on this very lack of inherent existence. Thus emptiness does not negate conventional reality but clarifies its impermanent and interconnected character, allowing a more skillful relationship to experience.

Nagarjuna’s teaching on emptiness therefore serves a profoundly therapeutic role. It charts a middle way between the extremes of nihilism, which would deny the reality of suffering, and eternalism, which would treat suffering and the self that suffers as permanently real. Suffering exists conventionally as a functional, experiential reality, yet ultimately it is empty of any fixed nature. To realize this is to see that samsaric experience and liberative experience concern the same empty phenomena, differently apprehended: under ignorance, they manifest as bondage and pain; under wisdom, they no longer give rise to clinging and are free from suffering.