Madhyamaka - Entering the Middle Way

Chandrakirti's Entering the Middle Way - Madhyamakavatara was composed by the Indian scholar Chadrakirti during the 6th century AD. It is designed as a commentary to the meaning of Nagarjuna's Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way, the principal treatise of the Madhyamika school of philosophy composed some four hundred years earlier. This work of Nagarjuna is, in turn, essentially an attempt to clarify systematically the concept of voidness propounded in the Buddha's Perfection of Wisdom sutras. The text comprises twelve chapters, which consist of a general description of the Bodhisattva levels, as well as the practice of the particular perfection associated with it. The major portion of the text is taken up with a detailed discussion of the practice of the Bodhisattva on the sixth spiritual level, ie the sixth Perfection, the Perfection of Wisdom. This principally entails a probing logical analysis that aims at establishing the voidness of inherent existence of both phenomena in general and persons in particular.