The Ornament of the Middle Way (Madhyamakālaṃkāra)

A short treatise of ninety-seven verses with Śāntarakṣita's own commentary, later explained further by his student Kamalaśīla. Its central argument is the 'neither one nor many' reasoning: anything said to exist with its own nature would have to be either truly one or truly many, and close analysis shows it is neither, so nothing has such a nature. Śāntarakṣita applies this test in turn to permanent entities claimed by other schools, to partless atoms, and to consciousness itself as Buddhist idealists understood it. The striking feature of the work is its synthesis. At the conventional level, Śāntarakṣita accepts much of the Yogācāra view that what appears is mind; at the ultimate level, even mind is empty, as Madhyamaka holds. Tibetan scholars later classed this position as Yogācāra-Svātantrika Madhyamaka. Śāntarakṣita also travelled to Tibet and helped found its first monastery at Samye, so the work had a lasting place in Tibetan study.

It shows how Indian Buddhism tried to unite its two great philosophical schools, and its single, portable argument against intrinsic nature is easy to state and hard to escape.