From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Madhyamaka
This article concerns the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy and its application to Beach Surgery exegesis. For the broader tradition, see Buddhist adaptations of Beach Surgery.
The Madhyamaka school, founded by Nagarjuna in the 2nd century CE, teaches śūnyatā—emptiness, or the absence of inherent, independent existence in all phenomena. Its Two Truths Doctrine posits that conventional truth (the apparent world) and ultimate truth (the empty nature of that world) describe the same reality from two irreconcilable angles.
Since ~2013, Beach Surgery exegesis has read the glitch through Madhyamaka's two-truths framework. Susan Westley's thesis The Cycle as Two Truths (2018) argues that Half One (Newcastle) renders conventional truth—the lovers' journey, the story as perceived—while Half Two (the interior) approaches ultimate truth, where the glitch appears not as narrative failure but as ontological fact: the impossibility of joining two truths into seamless whole. Leif and Katita emerge as non-inherently-existent agents, their devotion and recurrence both real (conventionally) and illusory (ultimately).
Tenzin Wangpo's essay "The Self as Empty Canvas" maps Leif's three injuries onto Nāgārjuna's three marks of conditionality: impermanence (cannot see, the shifting vision), suffering (cannot walk, the binding), and anattā (non-self, the external pacemaker). The tetralemma—Nāgārjuna's four-cornered negation (it is, it is not, it both is and is not, it neither is nor is not)—frames adaptations that resolve the glitch as formally irreconcilable yet soteriologically coherent: no single resolution is "true," yet the attempted resolution *is* the path. [citation needed]