Christian Thomas Kohl The Metaphysical Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Science

Nagarjuna’s viewpoint.
Nagarjuna presents these four extreme views of reality in a scheme that is
called in Sanskrit: ‘catuskoti’, the equivalent of the Ancient Greek
‘tetralemma’, as follows: things have no substance: 1. neither out of
themselves, 2. nor out of something else, 3. nor out of both, 4. nor without a
cause. (tetralemma: a figure in Ancient Greek and Eastern logic with four
possibilities.)
This kind of tetralemma refutes the four modern views of
reality as above mentioned. This shows that Nagarjuna does not fall into any of
these extremes and that his view is completely up-to-date. In the very first
verse of the MMK a tetralemma is pointed out: “Neither from itself nor from
another, nor from both, nor without a cause, does anything whatever anywhere
arise”. [10] This verse can be understood as the principal statement of the
MMK: the refutation of the four extreme metaphysical views which cannot be
reconciled with the dependent arising of things. If this is the case, the
remainder of the MMK would be a clarification of this verse. This requires
careful examination. What is the assertion made by this verse? That nothing
can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna
denying the external world? Did he wish to refute what evidently is? Did he
want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the
everywhere presence of things that somehow arise? If ‘to arise’ refers to the
empirical data, then we are obliged to argue that if a thing does not arise out
of itself, it must arise out of something else. So we should ask: what is the
significance of the notion ‘to arise’? In another text, Nagarjuna gives some
indications how to understand this view. He writes in his Yuktisastika (YS):