 The core claim of Madhyamaka is generally acknowledged to be that nothing in the universe has any svabhāva. This Sanskrit term has a complex cluster of meanings that make it extraordinarily difficult to translate. Many scholars have now adopted the translation “intrinsic nature” for svabhāva, but it has also been rendered at various times as “essence”, “substance”, “own-being”, and “intrinsic existence”, among many other attempts. If something had svabhāva, then it would be possible fully to understand that thing’s nature as it is in itself, independently of any relations it might bear to anything else, and independently of the conceptual or linguistic activities of sentient beings. Following Nāgārjuna, though, Mādhyamika teachers argued that nothing could possibly have svabhāva as just described. If something did have svabhāva, it would be permanent, unchanging, and independent; and Buddhists argue that nothing in the world has these qualities. Instead, everything that arises in our experience, or could so arise, is impermanent, constantly changing, dependent on causes and conditions, and understood within a conceptual framework. We cannot say or think how or what anything is except by making overt or covert reference to other things; nor can anything be how or what it is except in relation to other things. Thus, everything is empty of intrinsic nature. In the Madhyamaka, this claim is taken to be equivalent to the statement that nothing can exist at the ultimate level of truth; instead, everything that exists, arises or happens does so at the conventional level. Conventional existence, on this view, is actually the only kind of existence that anything has, and the only kind that anything could have.