Madhyamika (Sanskrit, ‘middle way’), a variety of Mahayana Buddhism that is a middle way in the sense that it neither claims that nothing at all exists nor does it embrace the view that there is a plurality of distinct things. It embraces the position in the debate about the nature of things that holds that all things are ’empty.’ Madhyamika offers an account of why the Buddha rejected the question of whether the enlightened one survives death, saying that none of the four answers (affirmative, negative, affirmative and negative, neither affirmative nor negative) applies.
The typically Buddhist doctrine of codependent arising asserts that everything that exists depends for its existence on something else; nothing (nirvana aside) at any time does or can exist on its own. From this doctrine, together with the view that if A cannot exist independent of B, A cannot be an individual distinct from B, Madhyamika concludes that in offering causal descriptions (or spatial or temporal descriptions) we assume that we can distinguish between individual items. If everything exists dependently, and nothing that exists dependently is an individual, there are no individuals. Thus we cannot distinguish between individual items. Hence the assumption on which we offer causal (or spatial or temporal) descriptions is false, and thus those descriptions are radically defective.
Madhyamika then adds the doctrine of an ineffable ultimate reality hidden behind our ordinary experience and descriptions and accessible only in esoteric enlightenment experience. The Buddha rejected all four answers because the question is raised in a context that assumes individuation among items of ordinary experience, and since that assumption is false, all of the answers are misleading; each answer assumes a distinction between the enlightened one and other things. The Madhyamika seems, then, to hold that to be real is to exist independently; the apparent objects of ordinary experience are sunya (empty, void); they lack any essence or character of their own. As such, they are only apparently knowable, and the real is seamless.
Critics (e.g., Yogacara Mahayana Buddhist philosophers) deny that this view is coherent, or even that there is any view here at all. In one sense, the Madhyamika philosopher Nagarjuna himself denies that there is any position taken, maintaining that his critical arguments are simply reductions to absurdity of views that his opponents hold and that he has no view of his own. Still, it seems clear in Nagarjuna’s writings, and plain in the tradition that follows him, that there is supposed to be something the realization of which is essential to becoming enlightened, and the Madhyamika philosopher must walk the (perhaps non-existent) line between saying two things: first, that final truth concerns an ineffable reality and that this itself is not a view, and second, that this represents what the Buddha taught and hence is something different both from other Buddhist perspectives that offer a mistaken account of the Buddha’s message and from non- Buddhist alternatives. See also BUDDHISM , NA AGAARJUN. K.E.Y.