Wikipedia
Madhyamaka ( Sanskrit: मध्यमक, Madhyamaka, ; also known as Śūnyavāda) refers primarily to a Mahāyāna Buddhist school of philosophy founded by Nāgārjuna. According to Madhyamaka all phenomena (dharmas) are empty (śūnya) of "nature," a "substance" or "essence" ( svabhāva) which gives them "solid and independent existence," because they are dependently co-arisen. But this "emptiness" itself is also "empty": it does not have an existence on its own, nor does it refer to a transcendental reality beyond or above phenomenal reality.
Usage examples of "madhyamaka".
The Madhyamaka, or Centrist, view adopted by Tibetan Buddhism at large challenges the assumption that any phenomena that comprise the world of our experience exist as things in themselves.
This tendency is known as reification, and according to the Madhyamaka view, this is an inborn delusion that provides the basis for a host of mental afflictions.
The Madhyamaka, or “Centrist,” view is so called because it seeks to avoid the two extremes of reifying phenomena on the one hand, and of denying the existence of phenomena on the other.
The Madhyamaka view, which the Dalai Lama endorses and which in Tibet is generally considered the pinnacle of Buddhist philosophy, maintains that humans have an innate tendency to reify both the contents of experience as well as ourselves as experiencing agents.
Thus, the Madhyamaka view explicitly refutes Cartesian substance dualism, which has been so roundly condemned by contemporary neuroscientists.
Madhyamikas, or proponents of the Madhyamaka view, declare that if the mind and body did each exist inherently—independently of conceptual designations—they could never interact.
The Madhyamaka, or Centrist, view is so called for it seeks to avoid the two extremes of reifying phenomena on the one hand, and of denying their existence on the other.
To return to the First Noble Truth, both physical and mental suffering are to be recognized, but according the Madhyamaka view, neither exists as a thing-in-itself, and therefore the dualism between them is of a relative, not an absolute, nature.
According to the Madhyamaka view, such ignorance is to be countered by realizing the manner in which all phenomena, including oneself, exist as dependently related events as described earlier in this essay.
Specifically, the Sautrantika system, which advocates a kind of metaphysical realism and substantial dualism that is refuted in the Madhyamaka school, which is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Buddhist thought in Tibet.
But not only the extraordinary flowering of Mahayana and Vajrayana rests on Nagarjuna's shoulders: his dialectic was a major influence on Shankara, Vedanta's greatest philosopher-sage (Ramana Maharshi being one of Shankara's many descendants), and Shankara's Nondual (Advaita) Vedanta revolutionized all of subsequent Indian philosophy/religion (so similar was it in many respects to Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka that Buddhism simply died out in India, being almost, as it were, reabsorbed in essentials back into Hinduism).