Dependence and emptiness › A question within Buddhist practice

The work's religious purpose becomes explicit in chapter 24. An opponent objects that emptiness would undermine the four noble truths and the practices associated with them. If nothing could arise or cease, there could be no meaningful explanation of suffering, its origin, its cessation, or the path. Understanding and cultivation would lose their point. These are objections voiced within the text, not conclusions Nāgārjuna accepts.

His reply is that the objection misunderstands emptiness. The opponent treats absence of intrinsic nature as if it meant the absence of everything that functions. Nāgārjuna reverses the challenge: if things possessed independent natures, how could causes affect them? A suffering established through its own nature would not depend on conditions that could be removed. An independently fixed condition would make transformation difficult to explain.

The philosophical issue is therefore connected to liberation from suffering. In 18.4-5, the text links grasping at self and what belongs to self with clinging, action, and affliction; it connects the ending of conceptual fixation with emptiness. This is an account within a Buddhist path. It should not be presented as a clinical finding about the treatment of anxiety, or as proof that reading a philosophical argument will remove distress.

That purpose also explains why an apparently abstract dispute about existence matters to the text. Nāgārjuna is concerned with a way of understanding things that can sustain grasping. Giving an experience an independent nature can make it appear settled in a way that its dependence does not warrant. The argument asks us to examine that attribution rather than merely to replace one reassuring label with another.