The first and most persistent objection is the charge of self-refutation. If Nagarjuna says all things are empty, does that include emptiness itself? If so, why believe it? If not, why exempt it? The charge is not a cheap gotcha. It reaches the nerve of the whole enterprise, because any philosophy that dismantles all essences risks standing on a hidden essence of its own. Nagarjuna anticipated this problem by insisting that emptiness is itself empty, but critics have long asked whether that reply solves the difficulty or merely postpones it. In the history of Buddhist thought, that question has remained less an abstraction than a recurring test: can a doctrine that undermines fixed nature avoid turning into a new fixed nature at the very moment it explains itself?
That issue sharpened because Nagarjuna’s method is not a single thesis set out in the manner of a manual. It works through arguments, counterarguments, and reversals. The method of prasaṅga, or reductio, can be read as a disciplined refusal to let any position harden into a final metaphysical claim. Yet that same discipline leaves opponents wondering whether the philosopher has a view or only a solvent. In the hands of later interpreters, the danger became concrete: the more subtle the explanation, the more vulnerable it was to appearing evasive. Nagarjuna lives exactly on that fault line, where philosophical precision can be mistaken for a refusal to commit, and where refusal to commit can itself look like a hidden commitment to indeterminacy.
A second criticism comes from those who fear nihilism. If nothing has intrinsic nature, perhaps nothing is really real. Perhaps ethics becomes a convenient fiction, causation a practical story, and enlightenment a verbal sleight of hand. This worry has real force because Nagarjuna’s rhetoric is often so severe that it can sound as though he is emptying the world of substance altogether. Yet his defenders argue that the worry arises only if one confuses lack of inherent existence with lack of conventional efficacy. The tension is genuine: the doctrine can liberate, but it can also be misunderstood as flattening everything into unreality. This is one of the doctrine’s most consequential dangers, because the very insight intended to loosen attachment can be received as permission to dismiss the world. The stakes are ethical as much as metaphysical. If a listener takes emptiness to mean that distinctions no longer matter, then the teaching is no longer a middle way at all, but a collapse into indifference.
The Abhidharma interlocutors provide another important line of pressure. Their project sought to analyze experience into ultimate constituents with determinate characteristics. From that perspective, Nagarjuna looks like someone who wrecks a hard-won analytic clarity in the name of a higher skepticism. But that is too simple. He is not rejecting analysis as such; he is rejecting the claim that analysis uncovers metaphysical atoms. The debate is therefore not between thought and anti-thought, but between two kinds of explanation: one that seeks final constituents, and one that exposes their dependence. In this contest, the practical stakes were not minor. The Abhidharma attempt to secure a stable map of reality was not merely a scholastic exercise; it was a way of making experience intelligible through carefully distinguished elements. Nagarjuna’s intervention does not deny the utility of such distinctions. It asks whether they are being mistaken for final truths.
Later Buddhist philosophers also pressed him. Yogācāra thinkers, especially in some readings, worried that Madhyamaka risked leaving too much indeterminate and too little structure for explaining cognition. If everything is merely empty designation, what accounts for the vividness and organization of experience? Conversely, some interpreters thought Nagarjuna’s own method needed supplementation by a more explicit account of mind and representation. The dialectic here is sharp because both sides want to preserve the path while avoiding metaphysical excess. The question is not academic in the narrow sense. It concerns whether the path can explain why experience seems so structured even while its structures are said to lack inherent being. Once again, the problem is hidden precisely where the doctrine is most elegant: in the gap between explanation and reification.
There is also an internal ethical tension. If conventional distinctions do all the work, why not tolerate ordinary attachments as harmless conventions? The answer is that conventions are not harmless when they are mistaken for absolutes. Clinging hardens suffering. Still, the move from metaphysical humility to moral transformation is not automatic. A person may sincerely accept emptiness and remain cruel, detached, or smug. The teaching can expose illusion; it cannot by itself guarantee compassion. This distinction matters because it reveals what the doctrine can and cannot do. It can cut through the conceit that there are essences to possess and defend. It cannot mechanically produce wisdom in the person who hears it. The risk of moral misuse is therefore real: emptiness can become an alibi for passivity if its ethical consequences are not continually renewed in practice.
A striking historical detail underscores the vulnerability of the doctrine to misreading: later traditions made Nagarjuna into a patron of profound subtlety, but opponents sometimes used the very sophistication of his arguments as evidence that Buddhism had become too clever for its own good. Philosophical subtlety can be a sign of depth, yet it can also look like evasion. That ambiguity is built into the tradition’s reception. A thinker who denies essence must use language and reasoning to deny essence; in doing so, he inevitably risks appearing to rely on the very instruments that his doctrine destabilizes. The result is a durable suspicion that the argument has become too intricate, too refined, too self-protective. Nagarjuna’s legacy therefore includes not only admiration but irritation: admiration for how thoroughly he tests assumptions, irritation that the test never quite ends.
Another difficult question concerns method. If prasaṅga merely refutes others, does Nagarjuna have a positive view at all? Some scholars emphasize his anti-foundationalism; others see in his work a positive commitment to dependent origination as the middle way. Both are partly right. He does not build a metaphysical edifice, but he does defend a vision of reality as relational, workable, and empty of essence. The debate over how positive that vision is remains one of the central interpretive problems in Nagarjuna studies. What is at stake is not just classification but philosophical credibility. A purely destructive account can seem too thin to support a path; a positive doctrine can seem too thick to preserve emptiness. Nagarjuna’s lasting difficulty is that he seems to require both restraint and affirmation at once.
The most charitable critics therefore ask not whether Nagarjuna is clever, but whether his refusal of fixed ontology can bear the weight placed upon it. Can one really sustain ethics, language, liberation, and philosophical critique without some deeper ground? Nagarjuna’s answer is that the craving for ground is precisely the trap. But that answer carries a cost: it asks the thinker to live without the reassurance that metaphysics so often provides. For some readers, that cost is the doctrine’s strength, because it refuses false security. For others, it is the doctrine’s weakness, because it seems to leave too much suspended. The pressure point is the same in both cases: what can be built on a foundation that is itself said to be empty?
So the philosophy emerges from the fire neither untouched nor destroyed. It survives by refusing the very sort of survival philosophers usually seek. What it leaves behind is not a doctrine one can simply accept and file away, but a way of seeing that has kept returning, in different idioms, wherever thinkers have become suspicious of essence. That return is the story of its legacy. And the tensions surrounding it—self-refutation, nihilism, ethical misuse, rivalry with Abhidharma analysis, and the continuing dispute over whether it offers only critique or also a positive middle way—are not side issues. They are the means by which the tradition has remained alive, because each critique forces the same question back into view: can one speak about reality without turning reality into an idol?