Nagarjuna
3rd-century Indian Buddhist philosopher · Academics · Lived 150 to 250 · aged 100
Nagarjuna is read about 765 times a day, in 108 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 27 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A South Indian monk from the second century whose treatises on emptiness became the philosophical backbone of Mahāyāna Buddhism - called "the second Buddha" in Tibet, studied across Asia for nearly two millennia.
Also in Deutsch
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In their own words 10
, No suffering is self-caused. / Nothing causes itself. / If another is not self-made, / How could suffering be caused by another?
I, without grasping will pass beyond sorrow, / And I will attain nirvāṇa," one says. / Whoever grasps like this / Has great grasping.
If you think you see both / Destruction and becoming, / Then you see destruction and becoming / Through impaired vision.
About this person
Nāgārjuna lived in South India sometime between 150 and 250 CE, a philosopher-monk who rose as the foremost defender of the Mahāyāna movement when it needed intellectual foundation. He founded the Madhyamaka school - the Middle Way - and built it on the doctrine of śūnyatā, emptiness, a concept that would reshape Buddhist thought for a thousand years. His Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Root Verses, became the canon: it spawned commentaries in Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese, each tradition reading him as indispensable. He remains the most important Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself, his influence woven into every strand of Mahāyāna practice from East Asia to the Himalayas. The verses are still studied today, their precision undiminished.
Academics born in the 150s 5
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