Lesson · 4 min Stretch
Neither This Nor That
In one line Nagarjuna tested each answer, it is, it isn’t, both, neither, and showed that each one breaks down.
Nagarjuna lived in south India around the second century CE. Legend says he fetched lost scriptures from the serpent kings under the sea, which shows how highly later Buddhists ranked him. His Root Verses on the Middle Way became the founding text of Madhyamaka.
His method was to take a claim and draw out its consequences until it failed. For a question such as how things arise, he examined four options: from themselves, from something else, from both, or from no cause at all. Each, he argued, leads to contradiction. This fourfold pattern is called the tetralemma.
Critics asked what thesis he was defending. He answered that he had none to defend: emptiness is not one more view to cling to, but the letting go of views.
Go deeper
Nagarjuna’s style is often compared to the Greek method of reductio, which accepts an opponent’s premises in order to show they lead somewhere absurd. Later Madhyamaka thinkers split over whether one should ever argue for a positive position at all. Chandrakirti held that a Madhyamaka should draw out consequences and stop there, while Bhavaviveka allowed independent arguments of his own.
The two-option survey
A survey asks whether a new office policy is good or bad. Most staff feel stuck, since it helps some teams and hurts others.
A manager rewrites it with four choices: good, bad, both, or neither, since it misses the real problem. The last two get the most answers. Forcing two options had hidden what people thought.
Try this today When a debate offers two options, list all four, yes, no, both and neither, and test each before you pick.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Neither This Nor That.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/neither-this-nor-that. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Nāgārjuna” — Covers his dates, the Root Verses and the fourfold analysis of causation.
- Wikipedia, “Catuṣkoṭi” — Explains the tetralemma and how Nagarjuna used it.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Nāgārjuna” — Covers the legend of the recovered scriptures and his claim to assert no thesis.