The forefather of Madhyamika Buddhism was Nagarjuna. T.P. Kasulis writes in his book, Zen Action, Zen Person that Nagarjuna was a predecessor to the development of Zen Buddhism. Nagarjuna is regarded though as a patriarch of the Zen tradition. He was the affecting principle to demonstrate logically the “emptiness”, or rather sunyata of philosophical distinctions. Kasulis also explores Nagarjuna’s “Logic of Emptiness.” The Buddhist claimed that “to be concerned with speculative questions is like being concerned with the origin of a poisoned arrow while it is still in one’s flesh, contaminating the bloodstream.” Kasulis writes that a conflicting group supposed that nothing at all continued from the cause into the effect, that the two where completely distinct. The Abhidharma Buddhist scrutinized the principles behind the Buddhist teachings. Zen Action, Zen Person states that these became almost as important as practicing the teachings; that is the scrutnization of the principles. With all this wrangling over the principles and the debate on them, Nagarjuna came up with his “Logic of the Middle.” The origin of this came from the doctrine of sunyata or rather emptiness, which Kasulis states is the “Logic of Emptiness.” Nagarjuna showed what was wrong the Abhidharma argument. He stated that the multiple philosophical divisions of Buddhism were created on “distinctions that must be seen as tentative rather than absolute.” Kasulis writes that Nagarjuna came up with a resolution to this argument. This solution was pure and simple. Nagarjuna wrote down all the key distinctions that the diverse philosophical “groups” assumed. He then took these distinctions and went through them one by one and showed that they had to be considered absolute. He went on to state that these distinctions lead the way to “ineluctable absurdities.&#...
