Nāgārjuna’s thought is based around the idea that nothing has existence in itself. Everything exists only through dependence on something else, in relation to something else. The term that Nāgārjuna uses to describe this lack of essence per se is “emptiness” (śūnyatā): things are “empty” in the sense that they do not have autonomous reality; they exist only thanks to, as a function of, with respect to and in the perspective of something else.
