Nagarjuna, often recognized as a foundational figure in Mahayana Buddhism, approached the concept of self with the paradoxical precision of a master deconstructing reality itself. In his assertion that “to seek a self in the self is like searching for a fire in the fire,” Nagarjuna invites us into a unique koan—a paradox where the logical mind collapses in on itself, leaving only the ashes of insight. This isn’t merely an invitation to understand the self as a “lack” but as something that has, under scrutiny, a kind of fathomless absence—void not of existence but of isolated identity.
When we look for the self within ourselves, the quest presumes a substantial core, an enduring witness seated behind the mind and its many shifting states. But Nagarjuna suggests that the self, like fire, has no definable, stable substance to be found. Fire exists only through its combustion, its continuous process—form and function, without remainder. When fire ceases to burn, it vanishes entirely, leaving no trace of an enduring flame but only the remains of what has passed through it. In this way, he proposes that a self could only exist as a dynamic confluence of perceptions, sensations, and thoughts, not as an enduring “thing.”
If the self were to resemble anything, it might be like this fire: nothing to be “found” apart from its operation, nothing intrinsic but for its process. Nagarjuna’s fire does not “hide” a hidden ember of true identity. Instead, he emphasizes the deceptive illusion of solidity—an illusion that we, through habit, take as enduring substance. His fire is an insight into emptiness, a concept often misinterpreted as nihilism when, in fact, it aims to reveal the ungraspable quality of all phenomena, including the “I.”
Nagarjuna’s critique is not aimed at eradicating self-awareness, nor does he call for an empty passivity. Rather, he points to the illusions we cultivate around an imagined “self” that stands apart from the interwoven processes of perception, thought, and world. By seeing that our “self” is the fire and not something behind or beneath it, we become free from the grasping impulse to establish protective identities that mask our fears, and from the compulsive drive to seek an isolated core within these identities.
In the fire, Nagarjuna urges, let us cease to look for anything apart from its nature as a flame, a composite arising dependent upon fuel, heat, and space. And in the same way, in the self, let us abandon the illusion of a hidden, enduring entity separate from the dynamic and unfathomable flow of awareness.