The Dispeller of Disputes (Vigrahavyāvartanī)

A short work in seventy verses with Nāgārjuna's own prose commentary, written as a reply to critics of his claim that all things are empty (śūnya), lacking intrinsic nature (svabhāva). The first twenty verses state the objections, many from the Nyāya school. If everything is empty, then your own statement is empty, and an empty statement cannot deny anything. And if you claim to know that things are empty, you must rely on means of knowledge (pramāṇa), which in turn need to be established. The remaining verses reply. Nāgārjuna argues that empty words can still do work, as a magically created person can stop another illusion, and in a famous verse he says that he has no thesis of his own to defend. He then presses the Nyāya on how the means of knowledge are themselves proved: not by further means, which leads to regress, nor by themselves, as a fire is said to light itself. He closes by tying emptiness to dependent origination.

It is Nāgārjuna's most direct answer to the charge that emptiness refutes itself, and an early, sharp discussion of whether any theory of knowledge can justify its own foundations.