Madhyamaka

He separates two truths. On the everyday level, there are cups, rivers and persons, and they work as they do. On the ultimate level, none of them stands alone. The two are meant to be held together. Ignoring the everyday level makes us careless, and clinging to it makes us rigid. The middle way runs between eternalism, which treats things as fixed, and nihilism, which treats them as nothing.

Critics ask whether saying that everything is empty undermines the claim itself, and in his Vigrahavyavartani Nagarjuna replies that his own words are empty too, yet still do their work, as one conjured illusion can expose another, and that he puts forward no thesis of his own. Emptiness is not a new thing to grasp. The practical habit is to loosen fixed labels for yourself and others while still acting with care, since what you do is one of the conditions that shape what happens next.