about good works are real and true as samvriti but in absolute truth (paramartham) we attain Nirvana and then the world with its human Buddhas and its gods exists no more.  The word sunyam or sunyata, that is void, is often used as the equivalent of paramartham.  Void must be understood as meaning not an abyss of nothingness but that which is found to be devoid of all the attributes which we try to ascribe to it.  The world of ordinary experience is not void, for a great number of statements can be made about it, but absolute truth is void, because nothing whatever can be predicated of it.  Yet even this colourless designation is not perfectly accurate,[102] because neither being nor not-being can be predicated of absolute truth.  It is for this reason, namely that they admit neither being nor not-being but something between the two, that the followers of Nagarjuna are known as the Madhyamikas or school of the middle doctrine, though the European reader is tempted to say that their theories are extreme to the point of being a reductio ad absurdum of the whole system.  Yet though much of their logic seems late and useless sophistry, its affinity to early Buddhism cannot be denied.  The fourfold proposition that the answer to certain questions cannot be any of the statements “is,” “is not,” “both is and is not,” “neither is nor is not,” is part of the earliest known stratum of Buddhism.  The Buddha himself is represented as saying[103] that most people hold either to a belief in being or to a belief in not being.  But neither belief is possible for one who considers the question with full knowledge.  “That things have being is one extreme:  that things have no being is the other extreme.  These extremes have been avoided by the Tathagata and it is a middle doctrine that he teaches,” namely, dependent origination as explained in the chain of twelve links.  The Madhyamika theory that objects have no absolute and independent existence but appear to exist in virtue of their relations is a restatement of this ancient dictum.

The Mahayanist doctors find an ethical meaning in their negations.  If things possessed svabhava, real, absolute, self-determined existence, then the four truths and especially the cessation of suffering and attainment of sanctity would be impossible.  For if things were due not to causation but to their own self-determining nature (and the Hindus always seem to understand real existence in this sense) cessation of evil and attainment of the good would be alike impossible:  the four Noble Truths imply a world which is in a state of constant becoming, that is a world which is not really existent.