I agree with P. Strongman. Just want to add some more nuance and detail 🧵:

1/The Mahābhārata does not merely compare Karṇa to a demon slain by Indra. It says a demon Kṛṣṇa once killed was living inside Karṇa. And it records a standing plan, renewed nightly, to kill Kṛṣṇa himself. 1/11

https://x.com/MRavinderReddi/status/2077078615003635713

2/After Karṇa falls, Kṛṣṇa embraces Arjuna and says: Vṛtra was slain by the destroyer of Bala, Karṇa by you, Dhanaṁjaya. People will tell the death of Vṛtra and Karṇa as a doublet. 2/11

1/Around 150 BCE a Greek king cornered a Buddhist monk with a single question: if there is no soul, what is it that gets reborn? Buddhism spent the next centuries giving two very different answers to that one question. The second, from Nāgārjuna, is the stranger of the two. A thread. 🧵☸️🪷👇 1/20 2/The question bites because of Buddhism's founding claim: there is no soul. No ātman, no permanent self that slips from body to body the way the Gita pictures it, shedding old bodies like worn out clothes.
(And no, you cannot just drop rebirth and keep the ethics; the modern secular version of that is a non starter, but save it for another thread.)
So nothing permanent. Then what carries on? 2/20

My last thread was about how the Nyāya logicians tried to trap Nāgārjuna over the word svabhāva, self-existent essence.
Here is round two, and this time they came armed with his own favourite image: the mirage, the mṛgatṛṣṇā.

Their claim looked airtight. The moment you try to deny the water in a mirage, you accidentally prove that real, self-existent things exist. Here is how he turned it around. 1/14 2/ Quick recap for anyone new. Nāgārjuna's whole school, the Madhyamaka or Middle Way, rests on one claim: nothing has svabhāva, a fixed independent essence. Everything is empty, śūnyatā.

The Nyāya jab lands right there. You are like a child who sees water in a mirage, they say. You are treating something that does not even exist, svabhāva, as if it were sitting there waiting to be denied. 2/14

Around 1800 years ago, the Nyāya logicians set a trap for Nāgārjuna that looked unbeatable.

Their claim: the moment you say "svabhāva does not exist," you have already lost the argument.

Here is how he fought his way out. 🧵1/14 2/First you need their theory of negation, and it is genuinely wild.

For us, "there is no pot here" simply means the pot is missing. Nothing is sitting there.

For the Nyāya, that absence was a real entity, a category they called abhāva, a padārtha that the spot actually holds. The empty table literally carries a pot-shaped hole in the world. 2/14