A tradition of argument that began with the Buddha's diagnosis of suffering and grew into one of the most analytically demanding systems ever built — no-self, momentariness, and a theory of mind worked out in Abhidharma abstraction and sharpened by Nāgārjuna's dialectic. From India it fanned out to Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, picking up a distinct vocabulary in each.
The Buddha's teaching — framed in the four noble truths — targets duḥkha and its cessation rather than metaphysics for its own sake.
Early schools systematize the discourses into Abhidharma: an inventory of momentary events (dharmas) that replaces enduring substances.
Around the second century CE, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka empties even those categories, arguing that all things lack intrinsic nature — śūnyatā.
Contemporaneously, the Yogācāra of Asaṅga and Vasubandhu analyzes consciousness and representation; the two schools become the twin poles of Mahāyāna philosophy.
Central Ideas
No-self: persons are streams of causally connected events, not owners of an enduring soul — the target is grasping, not just theory.
Dependent origination: whatever arises does so in dependence on conditions; Nāgārjuna reads this as equivalent to emptiness, sustained by a two-truths framework of conventional and ultimate discourse.
Mind and consciousness: Yogācāra's analysis of perception, memory and seeds in the mental stream anticipates modern debates about consciousness studies.
Epistemology: Dignāga and Dharmakīrti reduce knowledge to perception and inference, producing Buddhist logic that Indian and Tibetan philosophers argued with for a millennium.