d Nagarjuna's influence to both Tian-tai and other Chinese schools.
Spread of Nagarjuna's philosophy in its early stage in China
Nagarjuna is one of the greatest philosophers the world has so far produced. In the Buddhist world of China and the Far East, Nagarjuna exerted a historical influence either in scope or depth that had been surpassed only by that of the Buddha. In fact, devout Buddhists of China (including Tibet and Taiwan), Japan and Korea consider him to be the second Buddha who once again set the Dharma in motion. In the integration of Mahayana and in providing it with a philosophical basis, Nagarjuna played an important role in founding Madhyamika Buddhism. The philosophy of him is somewhat a reconstruction and a new creative synthesis of the Buddha's teaching. Modern scholars drew a parallel between Nagarjuna's philosophy and Kant's philosophy. However, in the critical approach Nagarjuna's philosophy is even more critical than Kant's.
The theory of Madhyamika philosophy of Nagarjuna was carried forward later on by his great disciple Aryadeva. It was enhanced in vogue from the end of 5th century to the 6th century in India and which was split into two: the Prasangika school and Svatantrika school. The latter was divided further into two sub-schools: the Sautrantika Svatantrika and the Yogacara Svatantrika. Since the 9th century, Madhyamika Buddhism lost its power and influence in India and withered away completely in the 15th century. The original Sanskrit scriptures of Madhyamika were lost almost. However, the Madhyamika School was introduced into Tibet in the 8th century and even today the school plays still a dominant role in Tibetan Buddhism.
Buddhism was introduced into China around the beginning of the first century, and that for roughly a thousand years the Chinese mind was largely dominated by Buddhism. It was, however, during the Wei and Jun dynasties, when Xuanxue, the Chinese philosophical trend of the day based its doctrine on Taoism dominated the Chinese intellectual circle, the concept of parjna and sunyata were introduced into China successively. The metaphysic question of Xuanxue like "You" (existence) and "Wu" (non-existence) together with its relation were extensively discussed in the Chinese intellectual circle. For the Buddhist term sunyata (kong) or emptiness is literally quite close to that of Xuanxue, the devout Buddhist scholars interpreted Buddhism by making a farfetched comparison of some Taoist terms in order to propagate Buddhism. This kind of irrelevance caused a big quarrel in the Chinese Buddhist community and as a result several philosophic schools of Buddhism Called "Liu-jia-qi-zong" held in difference on the concept of sunyata were occurred one after another.
When the great Buddhist scholar Kumarajiva came to China and translated some important Buddhist books such as Mahaparjnaparamitasastra, Madhyamika Sastra, Dvadasamukha Sastra and Sata Sastra into Chinese, the so-called Xuanxuelized Buddhism was restored to order. Seng-zhao, a great disciple of Kumarajiva wrote a book Zhao-lun in which it has introduced systematically the origin of the concept of sunyata and criticized clearly the miscomprehension of Buddhism of the day. In order to avoid any confusion and to explain clearly the true concept of sunyata, Seng-zhao had created a term "bu-zhen-kong" (not real but empty) in terms of explaining Nagarjuna's philosophy. According to his philosophy, "bu-zhen" (unreal) is actually "conception" or "name". Either name or conception is nothing but man-made which is unreal in nature. What is unreal is actually empty (sunyata). By adapting this new term in explaining sunyata, it shows that Seng-zhao had apprehended correctly the real sense of Nagarjuna's philosophy. Although Seng-zhao took measure for thorough-going reform on study of the theory of prajna and sunyata, yet his philosophy had not broken away 100 percent from the influence of Chinese Xuanxue. That is to say that the situation in

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