emang-nya "Theravada" pada saat itu sudah tidak berdasarkan pada anattalakkhana sutta ?
At this point some general introductory remarks concerning Nāgār juna’s goals and strategies might not be amiss. In MMK Nāgārjuna is addressing an audience of fellow Buddhists. (In the other work generally accepted as by Nāgārjuna, the
Vigrahavyāvartanī , his interlocutors also include members of the non-Buddhist Nyāya school.) Of particular importance is the fact that his audience holds views that are based on the fundamental presuppositions behind the Abhidharma enterprise. Abhidharma is that part of the Buddhist philosophical tradition that aims at filling out the metaphysical details behind the Buddha’s core teachings of nonself, impermanence, and suffering. A number of different Abhidharma schools arose out of significant controversies concerning these details. They held in common, however, a core set of presuppositions, which may be roughly sketched as follows:
1.There are two ways in which a statement may be true, conventionally and ultimately.a. To say of a statement that it is conventionally true is to say that action based on its acceptance reliably leads to successful practice. Our commonsense convictions concerning ourselves and the world are for the most part conventionally true, since they reflect conventions that have been found to be useful in everyday practice.
b. To say of a statement that it is ultimately true is to say that it corresponds to the nature of reality and neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of any mere conceptual fiction. A conceptual fiction is something that is thought to exist only because of facts about us concept-users and the concepts that we happen to employ. For instance, a chariot is a conceptual fiction. When a set of parts is assembled in the right way, we only believe there is a chariot in addition to the parts because of facts about our interests and our cognitive limitations: We have an interest in assemblages that facilitate transportation, and we would have trouble listing all the parts and all their connections. The ultimate truth is absolutely objective; it reflects the way the world is independently of what happens to be useful for us. No statement
about a chariot could be ultimately true (or ultimately false).
2. Only dharmas are ultimately real.a. To say of something that it is ultimately real is to say that it is the sort of thing about which ultimately true (or false) statements may be made. An ultimately real entity is unlike a mere conceptual fiction in that it may be said to exist independently of facts about us.
b. The ultimately real dharmas are simple or impartite. They are not products of the mind’s tendency to aggregate for purposes of conceptual economy. They are what remain when all products of such activity have been analytically resolved into their basic constituents. They may include such things as indivisible material particles, spatio-temporally discrete occurrences of color and shape, pain sensations, particular occurrences of basic desires such as hunger and thirst, and individual moments of consciousness. (Different Abhidharma schools give somewhat different accounts of what dharmas there are.)
c. All the facts about our commonsense world of people, towns, forests, chariots, and the like can be explained entirely in terms of facts about the dharmas and their relations with one another.
The conventional truth can be explained entirely in terms of the ultimate truth.
3. Dharmas originate in dependence on causes and conditions.While not all Abhidharma schools hold that all dharmas are subject to dependent origination ( pratītyasamutpāda), all agree that most dharmas are. And since anything subject to origination is also subject to cessation, most (or all) dharmas are also impermanent.
4. Dharmas have intrinsic nature (svabhāva).a. An intrinsic nature is a property that is intrinsic to its bearer—that is, the fact that the property characterizes that entity is independent of facts about anything else.
b. Only dharmas have intrinsic nature. The size and shape of a chariot are not intrinsic natures of the chariot, since the chariot’s having its size and shape depends on the size, shape, and arrangement of its parts. The size and shape of the chariot are instead extrinsic natures (parabhāva) since they are not the “its own” of the chariot but are rather borrowed.
c. Dharmas have only intrinsic natures. A characteristic that a thing can have only by virtue of its relation to another thing (such as the characteristic of being taller than Mont Blanc) is not intrinsic to the thing that has it. To suppose that the thing nonetheless has that characteristic is to allow mental construction to play a role in our conception of that which is real. For it requires us to suppose that a thing can have a complex nature: an intrinsic nature—what it itself is like apart from everything else—plus those properties it gets by virtue of its relations to other things.
To the extent that this nature is complex, it is conceptually constructed by the mind’s aggregative tendencies.
d. A given dharma has only one intrinsic nature. Since dharmas are what remain at the end of analysis, and analysis dissolves the aggregating that is contributed by mental construction, a given dharma can have only one intrinsic nature.
5. Suffering is overcome by coming to realize the ultimate truth about ourselves and the world.a. Suffering results from the false belief that there is an enduring “I,” the subject of experience and agent of actions, for which events in a life can have meaning.
b. This false belief results from failure to see that the person is a mere conceptual fiction, something lacking intrinsic nature. What is ultimately real is just a causal series of dharmas. Suffering is overcome by coming to see reality in a genuinely objective way, a way that does not project any conceptual fictions onto the world.
Nāgārjuna does not deny that this is what dharmas would be like.
Instead he rejects the further implication that there actually are dharmas. His position is that if there were ultimately real things, they would be dharmas, things with intrinsic nature; but there cannot be such things. Not only are the person and other partite things devoid of intrinsic nature and so mere conceptual fictions, the same holds for dharmas as well. This is what it means to say that all things are empty.
Given the nature of this claim, there can be no single argument that could establish it. Such a “master argument” would have to be based on claims about the ultimate natures of things, and given what would be required to establish that such claims are ultimately true, this would involve commitment to intrinsic natures of some sort or other. Nāgārjuna’s strategy is instead to examine a variety of claims made by those who take there to be ultimately real entities and seek to show of each such claim that it cannot be true. Indeed the commentators introduce each chapter as addressing the objection of an opponent to the conclusion of the preceding chapter. The expectation is that once opponents have seen sufficiently many of their central theses refuted, they will acknowledge that further attempts at finding the ultimate truth are likely to prove fruitless.
http://www.wisdompubs.org/sites/default/files/preview/Nagarjuna%27s-Middle-Way-Book-Preview-R.pdf