Text: Vigrahavyavartani

Overview

Vigrahavyāvartanī, usually rendered "Refutation of Objections, " is a compact but intense Madhyamaka treatise attributed to Nāgārjuna. It pursues a tight dialectical program aimed at neutralizing charges that the Madhyamaka view collapses into nihilism or inconsistent metaphysics. The tone is polemical and analytical, using reductio arguments to show how rival positions presuppose what they criticize.

Purpose and scope

The text aims to defend the middle way by answering specific philosophical criticisms leveled against the denial of intrinsic existence (svabhāva). Rather than setting out a positive ontology, it probes opponents' claims about perception, inference, causation, and selfhood to expose underlying contradictions. Emptiness is presented not as a substantive thesis but as a corrective tool for dissolving reified assumptions that lead to logical impasses.

Epistemological focus

Epistemic concerns occupy a central place: the treatise examines the status of pramāṇas (valid cognition), the relationship between perception and inference, and whether knowledge requires positing enduring entities. Arguments show that every claim about cognition or its objects, when pressed to its consequences, either undermines its own grounds or smuggles in the very metaphysical commitments it rejects. The result is an insistence that epistemic claims be handled without covert ontological commitments.

Method and style

The method is forensic and succinct. Short aphoristic verses and pointed rejoinders are deployed to corner opponents into contradictions or absurdities. Rather than building up an alternative system, the text repeatedly takes rival positions to their logical conclusions, demonstrating either mutual inconsistency among rival doctrines or internal collapse. This negative strategy aims to clear conceptual space for a non-assertive understanding of dependent origination.

Key doctrines engaged

Critiques center on doctrines of causation, identity, and the self. The treatise contests any view that treats causes, effects, or persons as independently real. It also challenges the idea that conventions or linguistic designations can bear metaphysical weight beyond their practical role. By showing that reified explanations lead to regress, contradiction, or arbitrariness, the argument favors a reading of dependent origination as the operative explanatory principle without ontological surplus.

Relation to emptiness and dependent origination

Emptiness is defended as the logical upshot of dependent origination: nothing possesses self-subsistent being because everything arises interdependently. The text clarifies that emptiness does not amount to negation of conventional causal efficacy. Instead, it cautions against treating emptiness as an alternative metaphysical entity. This preserves the practical and ethical consequences of dependent arising while rejecting metaphysical absolutism.

Authorship and reception

Traditionally attributed to Nāgārjuna, the text has been influential in later Madhyamaka interpretation even as its precise dating and authorship have been debated. Commentators valued its concentrated polemical force and its utility for defending the middle way in debates with Nyāya, Sautrāntika, and other schools. Its terse style invited commentary and systematic unpacking by subsequent expositors.

Philosophical significance

Vigrahavyāvartanī stands as a paradigmatic example of the Madhyamaka dialectical ethos: rigorous, sceptical toward ontological claims, and careful to preserve pragmatic coherence. It sharpened the tools available for Buddhist philosophical debate and helped articulate how a view that denies intrinsic existence can nonetheless accommodate reliable cognition and causal practice. The work remains a touchstone for students tracing the interplay of logic, ontology, and soteriology in classical Indian thought.