Tibetans call him the second Buddha, yet almost nothing about Nagarjuna's life is certain
Nagarjuna's verses on emptiness steered Indian thought for a thousand years and still anchor Mahayana Buddhism from Tibet to Japan. His biography, though, is a thicket of legends: dragon palaces under the sea, elixirs of invisibility, rocks turned to gold, and more than 140 works carrying his name.
Most scholars put him somewhere in south India between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE, conventionally around 150 to 250. Joseph Walser suggests he advised a Satavahana king on the Deccan Plateau, possibly Yajna Sri Satakarni, and wrote his Ratnavali near Dhanyakataka, today's Amaravati, in a monastery where Mahayana followers were a minority. That fits the wider picture: before the fifth century, Mahayana was a small and largely unnoticed current inside mainstream Buddhist communities.
His Mulamadhyamakakarika, the Root Verses on the Middle Way, founded the Madhyamaka school and its doctrine of sunyata, or emptiness. Commentaries on it multiplied in Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Korean and Japanese. Several later traditions adopted him as a founder figure: East Asian esoteric Buddhism traced its spells back to him through a disciple named Nanda, and Pure Land writers claimed him as their first patriarch.
The oldest accounts come from the circle of the translator Kumarajiva in the late 4th and early 5th centuries and already cast him as the rescuer of a weakened Dharma. Later Chinese and Tibetan tales turn him into a Brahmin convert and wonder-worker who fetched the Prajnaparamita sutras from the nagas, serpent beings linked to water, which is why he is often shown with snake features.
Many of these stories collapse under scrutiny. Tibetan claims that he studied at Nalanda clash with evidence that it only became a strong monastery around 425. Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh bears his name, but its ancient inscriptions call it Vijayapuri, and excavation has found nothing tying him to it. Scholars suspect several different Nagarjunas, including an alchemist, a tantric author and even a Jain figure, were blended together, which explains why the Chinese canon credits him with more than 22 texts and the Tibetan Tanjur more than 140.
Source: Nagarjuna
