Madhyamaka
A living tradition within Mahāyāna. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Madhyamaka is a living tradition within Mahāyāna. Also written Middle Way school, Sanlun / Sanron (East Asian form).
Origin
Founder named in the sources: Nāgārjuna. No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. Neumaier gives Nāgārjuna's birth as 150 CE and the school's flourishing from roughly the 2nd to the 11th centuries, mainly in Tibet and to a lesser degree in China. Nāgārjuna's dates are themselves contested in the wider literature; the figure here is reported as the source states it. McRae lists the Chinese transmission as the San lun ('Three Treatises') exegetical lineage, transmitted to Japan as Sanron, one of the six Nara schools.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Madhyamaka.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-madhyamaka.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-madhyamaka-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Madhyamaka},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-madhyamaka},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.