Books Written by Nagarjuna

No one knows exactly. Many works in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese carry his name, but some come from later writers. Christian Lindtner lists 13 works as definitely his; other scholars rely only on the six or seven least disputed, led by the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. This page lists 12 English books that translate his works, covering the Fundamental Verses, the Dispeller of Disputes, the Vaidalyaprakaraṇa, the Precious Garland and the Letter to a Friend, plus Lindtner’s study of the shorter texts.

The order in which he wrote is unknown. The English books on this page, in order, are: Streng’s Emptiness (1967), Lindtner’s Nagarjuniana (1982), Kalupahana’s The Philosophy of the Middle Way (1986), Garfield’s The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), Tola and Dragonetti’s Refutation of Logic (1995), Hopkins’s Buddhist Advice for Living & Liberation (1998), Batchelor’s Verses from the Center (2000), Letter to a Friend (2005), Westerhoff’s The Dispeller of Disputes (2010), Siderits and Katsura’s Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (2013), Westerhoff’s Crushing the Categories (2018) and McClintock and Dunne’s Precious Garland (2024).

With the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way in Jay Garfield’s The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), which explains every verse for readers with little Buddhist background. If you want a quick first reading of the whole text, Stephen Batchelor’s Verses from the Center (2000) is the most readable version.

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, 448 verses in 27 chapters and the founding text of the Madhyamaka school. Its best-known verse is 24:18, which equates dependent arising with emptiness and calls it the middle way.

Probably around 150–250 CE, but the dates are uncertain; most historians place him in South India somewhere between the first and third centuries CE. The earliest biography comes from the circle of Kumārajīva, about two hundred years later, and the Tibetan accounts are later still and full of legend.

No. Several later authors shared or took his name, including a writer on alchemy and medicine and a Tantric author sometimes called “Nagarjuna II”. The vast Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa, known only in Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation, was doubted by Étienne Lamotte and is called a wrong attribution by Lindtner, and the Bodhicittavivaraṇa is also questioned. The Fundamental Verses, the Dispeller of Disputes and a few short treatises are the least disputed.

That nothing has svabhāva, an intrinsic nature that would let it exist on its own. Everything exists in dependence on causes, parts and the concepts we apply to it. Emptiness in this sense is not nothingness: things still function, and the Fundamental Verses (13:8) warn against turning emptiness itself into one more view to hold.

Some of his opponents said so, and the charge has been repeated by later critics. Nagarjuna answers it himself: chapter 24 of the Fundamental Verses opens with the objection that emptiness destroys the Four Noble Truths, and replies with the doctrine of two truths, conventional and ultimate. In the Dispeller of Disputes he answers the critic who says that his own words must then be empty and powerless. Most modern scholars read him as rejecting both eternalism and nihilism, which is what “middle way” means.

Serpent beings of Indian mythology. Later hagiographies say that Nagarjuna visited the nāga palace under the ocean and brought back the Prajnāpāramitā, or Perfection of Wisdom, sutras that had been kept there. Other legends make him a Brahmin who mastered the Vedas, a winner of magic contests and an alchemist who could turn stones into gold. None of this is historical evidence.

For a first reading with explanation, Garfield (1995), translated from the Tibetan. For the Indian commentators’ reading, Siderits and Katsura (2013). For plain English poetry, Batchelor (2000). For the Sanskrit text alongside the translation, Kalupahana (1986), though his interpretation is less mainstream. Reading two side by side shows where the verses are open.