On Nāgārjuna’s Ontological and Semantic Paradox

Garfield and Priest have rationally reconstructed Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of emptiness as an endorsement of the contradictory nature of reality. According to them, Nāgārjuna can be seen to argue that the way in which things exist in reality and what we can truly say about them must be contradictory. What would be the reasons for thinking that Nāgārjuna would accept their radical interpretation? In raising this question, the main concern is not with how their interpretation coheres with Nāgārjuna’s texts but with the internal coherence (or consistency) within their interpretation. By identifying the incoherence within the resources that Garfield and Priest themselves find in Nāgārjuna, their interpretation will be rejected.