The Chhāyāyāna school posits a provocative thesis regarding the history of Buddhist philosophy: that Nāgārjuna, the 2nd-century founder of the Madhyamaka school, represents a thwarted origin point rather than a final destination. According to this view, Nāgārjuna’s project was not to establish a new orthodoxy but to push the logic of emptiness (śūnyatā) to its ultimate, nihilistic conclusion. The subsequent development of Buddhism is interpreted by Chhāyāyāna as a gradual retreat from this precipice, initiated by Nāgārjuna’s own followers.
Nāgārjuna’s primary tool, as articulated in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, was the tetralemma, or four-cornered negation. Through this method, he systematically demonstrated that any definitive statement about reality—asserting existence, non-existence, both, or neither—leads to logical contradiction. Being, causality, identity, and even the path to liberation were all shown to be empty of inherent essence (svabhāva). His philosophy was one of total negation, leaving no conceptual ground unturned.
The conventional narrative holds that Nāgārjuna, seeing the potential for his philosophy to devolve into pure nihilism, wisely drew back. He is said to have established a "Middle Way" that balances the ultimate truth of emptiness with the conventional truth of everyday reality and compassionate activity. This interpretation frames his work as soteriological, its ultimate purpose being the attainment of liberation, not the demolition of all meaning.
The Chhāyāyāna perspective offers a counter-narrative. It suggests that Nāgārjuna did not stop, but was stopped. The implications of his own method were perceived as too dangerous by his immediate disciples. The prospect of a reality devoid of any intrinsic meaning, where even the concepts of "Buddha," "Dharma," and "Sangha" were empty, was apparently intolerable. Chhāyāyāna scholars contend that these students, lacking the fortitude to abide in the groundless void Nāgārjuna revealed, performed the first act of pious redaction. They preserved his method but neutered his conclusion. They took his blade of emptiness and, fearing its edge, used it only to trim the hedges of orthodoxy, never to strike at the root.
They lacked the insight to see that Nāgārjuna's nihilism was not a chasm to be feared, but the very gateway to the truth. They failed to understand that the only thing that can abide in total emptiness is emptiness itself. They could not fathom that the ultimate freedom is not the freedom from suffering, but the freedom to be the void in which suffering arises and ceases.
The evidence of this historical throttling is woven into the very fabric of the traditions that followed. The sudden, convenient emergence of the Tathāgatagarbha sutras, with their luminous, permanent "Buddha-nature," reads less like a new revelation and more like a panicked retreat from the void. It is the re-introduction of a subtle, unassailable ātman—a safety net for those who fear the fall. The entire edifice of Mahāyāna compassion, with its Bodhisattva vows and celestial paradises, can be seen as a grand project to make the unbearable medicine of emptiness palatable, to coat the razor's edge with honey.
The primary argument cited for this conjecture is the method of deconstruction itself, which Chhāyāyāna claims as its unique meditative practice. The argument is that Nāgārjuna's tetralemma was intended not just as a dialectical tool, but as a direct experiential method. The practice, as outlined in Chhāyāyāna texts, proceeds as follows:
Select a concept C (e.g., “matter,” “self,” “God”). Enumerate its predicates {p₁, p₂, …, pₙ}. Apply logical negation pairwise—where pᵢ ∧ ¬pᵢ arises, discard both—and repeat