Dependence and emptiness › Emptiness cannot become the final substance

An apparent solution would be to say that ordinary things depend on something deeper called Emptiness. That would give emptiness the independent status denied to everything else. Chapter 13.8 warns against making emptiness itself into a view to grasp. Read alongside 24.18, the warning prevents us from treating emptiness as an ultimate material out of which the world is made.

The absence of an independent cup-nature is not another cup concealed behind the first. Likewise, an argument about the absence of intrinsic nature does not introduce a self-sufficient absence that must support every phenomenon. Its terms operate within the same practices of explanation that it examines.

This answers one version of the self-refutation objection. The teaching does not need to possess the independence it denies to other things in order to communicate a reason. Yet the objection also supplies a useful discipline: Nāgārjuna's arguments must work as arguments. We cannot defend an unsupported inference simply by declaring that all inferences are empty.