Yogacara versus Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Rivalry

Yogacara developed as the second great systematic school of Indian Mahayana philosophy, after Madhyamaka, the "middle way" school founded by Nagarjuna (c. 150–250 CE) and his commentator Aryadeva, and the two schools engaged in a sustained, often sharply polemical rivalry over the correct interpretation of emptiness (sunyata) that continued for centuries and was eventually exported wholesale into Tibetan monastic education, where doxographical rankings of the two systems remain a standard topic of formal debate. From the Madhyamaka side, the sharpest and most influential critique of Yogacara came from Bhavaviveka (also transliterated Bhaviveka, c. 500–570 CE), whose Madhyamakahrdayakarika, with its own prose commentary the Tarkajvala, devotes an entire chapter to systematically refuting the Yogacara doctrine of the three natures and the reality claimed for the paratantra, arguing that any residual affirmation of a dependently real consciousness betrays the thoroughgoing emptiness that Nagarjuna had established for absolutely everything, without exception.