Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna (c.150-250 CE) was the South Indian philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka (“Middle Way”) school and is arguably the most important Buddhist thinker after the Buddha. In his Mulamadhyamakakarika, he developed the doctrine of sunyata (emptiness): all phenomena lack inherent, independent existence (svabhava) because everything arises only in dependence on conditions and conceptual designation.

Nothing is a fixed, self-existing thing; reality is a web of interdependence, empty of any solid essence. Crucially, emptiness is not nihilism—it is precisely what allows change, transformation, and freedom, since nothing is locked into a fixed nature.

For the mind-power lineage, Nagarjuna is a foundational ancestor: by demonstrating that no object, self, or circumstance possesses a fixed inherent reality, he provides the philosophical bedrock for the claim that reality is malleable and conceptually conditioned rather than rigidly given.

The later “consciousness creates reality” current depends on exactly this prior move—dissolving the solidity of the external world. His emptiness teaching directly enabled the Yogacara “mind-only” school (which adds that what remains is experience/consciousness), and flows into Zen’s “originally not a single thing” and Tibetan Buddhism’s view of appearances as empty and mind-like.

He is the deep root of the idea that the apparently fixed world is open, constructed, and free.