Essays

Why Understanding Emptiness Doesn't Change How I Feel

Understanding emptiness and feeling changed are not two separate things with a gap between them. Madhyamaka shows why the search for a single transformative moment is the same grasping the practice is aimed at undoing — and why transformation arrives drop by drop, not all at once.

emptiness practice transformation view 4 min read · 26 April 2026

What does svabhava-grasping actually feel like?

Svabhava-grasping is the habit of treating experience as more solid than it is. Here is what that actually feels like from the inside, and what changes when you look directly at it.

practice view 3 min read · 17 April 2026

What Does Madhyamaka Bring to Meditation?

Madhyamaka transforms meditation by stripping away the illusion of a substantial self who meditates. Four key shifts reframe practice as unknotting, not therapy, not ritual, and never self-confirming.

practice meditation view 6 min read · 27 March 2026

How Madhyamaka Unknotted My Life

One person's fifteen-year path from a beginner's meditation course through Western and Buddhist philosophy to Madhyamaka.

transformation practice meditation 5 min read · 20 March 2026

You Exist. You Have No Self.

A substantially existing self cannot survive scrutiny, but rejecting it does not erase personhood. Madhyamaka philosophy shows that non-self frees you from the most deeply ingrained source of dissatisfaction.

non-self view emptiness 5 min read · 20 March 2026

How Does Madhyamaka Approach Ethics? Emptiness, Liberation, and Living Well

Madhyamaka ethics avoids both fixed moral rules and relativism. Instead, it orients ethical life towards liberation (soteriology), placing individual discernment, moral phenomenology, and other-centredness at the centre of how we live well together. Ethics is central to madhyamaka, not an afterthought.

view introduction ethics 7 min read · 5 February 2026

What Does Madhyamaka Claim? Emptiness, Logic, and the Two Truths

Madhyamaka claims that nothing has an unchanging essence (svabhava) — everything is empty (sunyata) and dependently originated. It proves this using four-cornered logic, the two truths, paradox, and ineffability. The consequences include anti-foundationalism, mereological nihilism, and anti(ish) realism.

view introduction emptiness logic 17 min read · 5 February 2026

What Is Madhyamaka? A History of Buddhist Philosophy's Most Radical Tradition

Madhyamaka is a Buddhist philosophical tradition founded by Nāgārjuna that demonstrates the emptiness (sunyata) of all phenomena. It emerged from the Mahayana movement and the Prajnaparamita literature around 2,000 years ago. This introduction traces its intellectual ancestry from the historical Buddha through the mahayana revolution to the discovery of sunyata.

view introduction 8 min read · 5 February 2026

Search