Mādhyamaka (“middle way” or “centrism”) or Śūnyavāda (“the emptiness doctrine”) from Śūnyatā, translated most often as “emptiness”, “vacuity”, and sometimes “voidness”, or “nothingness”, and Niḥsvabhāvavāda "the no svabhāva, meaning “own-being” or “own-becoming”, the intrinsic, essential nature or essence of beings, doctrine.
The foundational text of the Mādhyamaka tradition is Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Root Verses on the Middle Way”). More broadly, Mādhyamaka also refers to the ultimate nature of phenomena as well as the non-conceptual realization of ultimate reality that is experienced in meditation.
According to the classical Indian Mādhyamika thinkers, all phenomena (dharmas) are empty (śūnya) of “nature”, of any “substance” or “essence” (svabhāva) which could give them “solid and independent existence”, because they are dependently co-arisen. But this “emptiness” itself is also “empty”: it does not have an existence on its own, nor does it refer to a transcendental reality beyond or above phenomenal reality.
Pratītyasamutpāda, commonly translated as dependent origination, or dependent arising, states that all dharmas (phenomena) arise in dependence upon other dharmas: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”.
Dharma refers to “order and custom” that sustain life, “virtue”, or “religious and moral duties” (halachah)
the Sanskrit Kātyāyanaḥsūtra states that though the world “relies on a duality of existence and non-existence”:
Madhyamaka (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The Madhyamaka school of Buddhism, the followers of which are called Mādhyamikas, was one of the two principal schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India, the other school being the Yogācāra. The name of the school is a reference to the claim made of Buddhism in general that it is a middle path (madhyamā pratipad) that avoids the two extremes of eternalism—the doctrine that all things exist because of an eternal essence—and annihilationism—the doctrine that things have essences while they exist but that these essences are annihilated just when the things themselves go out of existence. The conviction of the Madhyamaka school, which can be called the Centrist school in English, is that this middle path is best achieved by a denial that things have any inherent natures at all. All things are, in other words, empty of inherent natures. This doctrine of universal emptiness of inherent natures (svabhāva-śūnyatā) is the hallmark of the school, which places the school solidly in the tradition associated with the Perfection of Wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) literature of Mahāyāna Buddhism.
There a number of points that all Mādhyamika thinkers have in common. In all of them one finds some version of the doctrine of two truths, according to which there is a level of understanding that consists of an accurate account of the world as it is experienced in everyday life and another level of understanding that is conducive to reaching the ultimate goal (paramārtha) of Buddhist practice, namely, nirvana, understood as the absence of attachment, aversion and delusion with no possibility of their return. There is also broad agreement that language is limited to the everyday level of understanding and that the truth of nirvana is beyond the reach of language and of the conceptualization that makes language possible.
the other main school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Yogācāra school, which Mādhyamikas present as advocating a kind of subjective idealism. Early Mādhyamikas tended to refute the Yogācāra doctrine that all the contents within awareness arise out of awareness itself and are thus ontologically at one with consciousness. Later Mādhyamikas found room for that view, usually by portraying Yogācāra as a philosophy that prepares one intellectually and emotionally for the difficult truth that all things are lacking in inherent natures and all that we think of as knowledge is ultimately without grounding.
The first hundred verses of the Four Hundred Verse Treatise deal with four illusions that must be dispelled by someone striving to achieve liberation from the root causes of dissatisfaction. The four illusions are the beliefs that there are permanent things in the world that escape destruction, that impermanent things can provide true satisfaction, that satisfaction can be derived from intrinsically impure things, and that satisfaction can be attained by being preoccupied with oneself. These are standard themes in Buddhist writings. The second set of one hundred verses also deal with standard Buddhist themes, namely, cultivating altruistic motivations, ridding the mind of the afflictions of desire, anger, and delusion, and developing habits of ethical conduct. While the first half of the treatise is essentially inspirational in nature, the second half provides arguments meant to prove that all things are conditioned and therefore impermanent, that nothing qualifies as an independent and enduring self, and that there are no uncaused causes. Most of the verses dealing with these topics are polemical in nature and are aimed at refuting the doctrines of Brahmanical schools, Jainism and some of the Buddhist scholastics. As is the case with other Mādhyamikas, Āryadeva focuses most of his attention on showing the incomprehensibility or absurdity of the doctrines under review. His motivation for doing this is suggested in 8.10 (the tenth verse in the eighth set of twenty-five), where he says attachment to one’s own views and disparaging the views of others is an obstacle to nirvana, and tranquillity is impossible for those who engage in doctrinal disputes. His exercise in showing the untenability of various positions, then, is presumably done not for the sake of refuting others in order to establish his own position, but to help his readers break the habit of firmly holding tenets.
Āryadeva (fl. ca. 225–250 C.E.)
The relation between a cause and its effect
There are only four possible relationships: the cause is the same as the effect, the cause is different from the effect, the cause is both the same as and different from the effect, or the cause is neither the same as nor different from the effect. This fourth position would be tantamount to saying that there is no cause, and that an effect therefore arises out of nothing at all. Each of these four possibilities is rejected in turn, each for a different reason. Buddhapālita argues that if an effect were identical to its cause, then it would already exist as the cause and would have no need of coming into being a second time. Identity of cause and effect defeats the very idea of causality. If the effect were different from the cause, on the other hand, then there would be no constraints on what could arise out of what, so long as the cause and the effect were different. The third possibility is untenable, says Buddhapālita, since it is merely the conjunction of the two hypotheses that have just been shown to be untenable. A proposition consisting of the conjunction of two false propositions cannot be true. The fourth possibility, like the first, undermines the very idea of causality. Moreover, says Buddhapālita, it would render all practice ineffectual; what he probably had in mind here was specifically Buddhist religious practice, which is predicated on identifying the root causes of dissatisfaction and then eliminating those root causes so that dissatisfaction disappears.