NAGARJUNA AND THE INTERMEDIATE SCHOOL

In the 2nd century A.D., Nagarjuna organized in India what came to be called the Madhyamika or Intermediate School, so called because it was intermediate between the realism of early Buddhism and the idealism of the later Yogacara School. 

The Buddha taught that there was no such thing as a soul, the doctrine of anatta, but rather a loose grouping of ever-changing skandhas or personality elements.  Nagarjuna went further by saying that anything at all, objects or existents of any kind, were in a similar way "a loose collection of pulsating, transitory elements."  These elements when closely examined, according to Nagarjuna, were no more than mental phenomena or phantasms.  They were "empty."

In this way, the substantiality of the external world was denied.  Everything was void, sunya, i.e. things were not what they seemed to be.  In reality, they lacked the characteristics assigned to them.

The early Buddhists, being Indians, found less difficulty than others perhaps in accepting the world as a kind of magical show in which what was seen was both true and not true.  This was not, they said, to argue that what was seen was non-existent but only that we took it for what it essentially was not. 

However, there was an inherent qualification in this view.  Implied was the idea of transcendental truth.  Only minds that had shed "ignorance" could apprehend it, which was to say that so long as minds and consciousnesses continued in the ordinary or usual way, they experienced only everyday or relative truth.