The strongest criticism of Madhyamaka is not that it is obscure, but that it risks sawing off the branch on which it sits. If all claims are empty, then why should the claim that all claims are empty be exempt? Opponents across Indian philosophy pressed this point in different ways. Some argued that without intrinsic natures, causation, knowledge, and language become impossible. Others said Madhyamaka merely plays a trick with words, denying in the conclusion what it depends on in the premise.
This critique has teeth because Madhyamaka often speaks in a tone of demolition. The school’s arguments against motion, causation, selfhood, and time can seem to leave only silence. A Nyāya philosopher, devoted to realism and logic, could reasonably ask whether the Buddhist has explained the world or merely renamed it away. If inference, perception, and ordinary designation are all conventional, what stops skepticism from eating the entire enterprise? The concern is not trivial. If the doctrine undermines confidence in the very means by which it is stated, perhaps it is self-defeating.
That pressure becomes sharper when Madhyamaka is read not as a quiet meditation on language, but as a public challenge to the inherited habits of thought that organized debate in classical India. The school did not argue in a vacuum. It entered a world of competing systems, each with its own account of what counts as real, what counts as proof, and what counts as a successful explanation. In that setting, the charge that Madhyamaka destroys the basis of knowledge was not an abstract puzzle. It was a direct challenge to whether the school could survive in argumentative company at all. If its reasoning depended on the very distinctions it dissolved, then the critique suggested, it could not be more than a sophisticated form of rhetorical self-sabotage.
A second tension comes from the relation between emptiness and ordinary life. Madhyamaka insists that convention is indispensable, yet it also insists that convention lacks ultimate status. For many critics, this looks like having it both ways. If the world is empty, why do compassion, karma, and moral responsibility retain their force? If they do retain force, is emptiness more than a philosophical ornament? The school’s defenders answer that convention is precisely where beings live and suffer. Denying conventional truth would be nihilism. Yet the worry persists that the theory depends on a fine line that may be hard to police in practice.
This is not a merely theoretical unease. It is the kind of problem that can alter how a community understands action, obligation, and deliverance. A doctrine that empties the self and all its possessions of intrinsic nature can be emancipatory, but only if it does not drain away the reasons to care about suffering, discipline, and ethical restraint. Madhyamaka’s insistence that conventional reality continues to operate is therefore not an afterthought. It is the fragile bridge on which the whole project crosses from philosophy into lived moral life. Critics saw the bridge and asked whether it could bear the weight. If emptiness is misunderstood, it can sound like indifference. If convention is overemphasized, emptiness disappears. Either way, the balance is perilous.
There is also a subtler internal danger: the temptation to turn emptiness into a metaphysical Absolute. Once the doctrine becomes famous, later readers may reify it into the one true structure of reality. Madhyamaka anticipates this danger and resists it, but the danger remains. A doctrine designed to dissolve all essences can itself become an essence in the hands of the devoted. This is one reason some interpreters stress the therapeutic and methodological character of the school more than any ontological doctrine. The challenge is to say what emptiness is without making it a thing.
The risk of reification is especially acute because the language of negation can be strangely seductive. What begins as a corrective against dogmatism can harden into another dogma, now protected by the prestige of radical insight. The very force with which Madhyamaka insists that things are empty can encourage readers to treat emptiness as the final metaphysical answer rather than as a discipline for dissolving fixed views. That is precisely the sort of reversal the school tries to avoid. Yet history shows how quickly a liberating analysis can become a new object of attachment. The tension is not external to Madhyamaka; it is part of its internal logic.
A third line of criticism concerns the use of prasaṅga. By arguing through consequences rather than positive theses, Madhyamaka can appear parasitic on opponents’ assumptions. Does it have its own account of knowledge, or only an ability to expose others’ failures? Bhāviveka thought that more explicit reasoning was needed, especially in dialogue with non-Buddhists. Candrakīrti, by contrast, is often read as warning that autonomous proofs can too easily reintroduce the very substantialism one is trying to escape. The dispute reveals a live problem: how does a philosophy that distrusts foundations still convince rational interlocutors?
That debate was not a mere matter of style. It touched the practical mechanics of philosophical persuasion. If a school argues only by exposing contradictions in its rivals, it may win moments of embarrassment without establishing a durable position of its own. If, on the other hand, it offers too much positive architecture, it risks rebuilding the ontology it meant to dismantle. Madhyamaka’s argumentative strategy therefore sits on a narrow ridge. Too little structure, and it looks evasive; too much, and it ceases to be Madhyamaka in any recognizable sense. The controversy around prasaṅga shows why the school’s critics could claim that its power was also its weakness.
One of the deepest objections comes from later Buddhist epistemologists such as Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, whose sophisticated theories of perception and inference gave Buddhism a more analytic cast. They are not simple anti-Madhyamaka critics, but their work presses the question of whether emptiness can be defended without some positive theory of valid cognition. If every concept is merely conventional, what makes some conventions better than others? How do we distinguish skillful analysis from sloppy relativism? Madhyamaka can answer that conventions work when they reduce suffering and track dependence, but that answer itself invites further scrutiny.
The stakes of that scrutiny are visible in the very kinds of examples Madhyamaka likes to use. Consider the relation between motion and rest, or between a cause and its effect. The school’s analysis often proceeds by showing that if we search for intrinsic identity, we cannot find it in either pole. Yet ordinary life seems to depend on precisely these distinctions. People plan, remember, promise, and grieve because events unfold in time. If philosophical analysis dissolves the continuity that supports those practices, the resulting clarity may come at the cost of practical intelligibility. The criticism, then, is not that Madhyamaka asks difficult questions. It is that it asks them with such precision that it threatens to make ordinary life look incoherent.
A worked example shows the strain. Suppose one asks whether a flame at this instant is the same as the flame a moment later. If one says yes, change is denied; if no, continuity disappears. Madhyamaka uses such dilemmas to undo simplistic thinking. But a critic may respond that lived continuity is not a metaphysical puzzle to be dissolved. It is the condition for memory, promise, and responsibility. The doctrine risks asking the wrong question too elegantly. Yet that criticism does not simply defeat it; it reveals the school’s wager that our deepest confusions arise precisely where we feel most sure.
The surprising turn is that some of the sharpest resistance came from within Buddhist forms of thought. That should not be treated as betrayal. It shows that emptiness was never a slogan to be repeated, but a pressure point in a living argumentative culture. The school survived because it could not be ignored. It forced all sides to clarify whether they were defending reality, practice, logic, or liberation—and whether those aims could really be separated.
What remains after the fire is not an untroubled victory, but a more exact question: can a philosophy deny intrinsic nature everywhere, including in its own sentences, without becoming either empty chatter or mystical quietism? Madhyamaka’s later history is the record of attempts to answer that question by preserving the school’s rigor while widening its scope.