What this site produces is resolution rather than a stock of facts. One undifferentiated lump of feeling bad gets split into a few places you can work on separately.
This page gathers every distinction on the site in one spot.
Install this one first. It is a way of reading, not a piece of content. Once it is in place, every "what you assume X is / what X actually is" that follows has common ground to stand on.
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā runs to some 450 verses. Nāgārjuna spends three of them on this. Those three are the master key for reading all of Mahāyāna Buddhism.
What holds at the level of shared convention: there is you and there is me, there are tables and there is money, there is good and bad, cause and effect, rebirth.
The key point: conventional truth is correct at its own level. Filing it under "false" gets it wrong. It is the entire basis on which language can carry anything at all.
The situation at the final level: nothing has intrinsic nature, nothing stands on its own independent of conditions. What gets called "me" and what gets called "a table" are temporary assemblies of conditions with a name attached.
It leaves conventional truth standing. What it does is explain how conventional truth comes to hold at all.
The first two verses only set the two levels out. The weight of the whole theory sits on the third, which is also the least intuitive line in it:
Read it slowly. There is no route to the ultimate that skips the conventional. The conventional is not a lower deck for slower people while the clever go straight to the final view. The ultimate can only be said, and only be walked to, through the conventional.
That one line closes off two familiar dead ends. The first is looking down on the conventional: taking Buddhism to mean seeing through everything, with ordinary life demoted to the cheap seats. The second is more dangerous and gets its own heading below.
This is the most common abuse of the two truths, and Nāgārjuna warns about it himself in the same chapter.
It sounds like this: "everything is empty, so good and evil are empty too", "there is no self, so who did it does not matter", "cause and effect is a teaching device, at the final level there is none". What all of these have in common is ultimate truth being cashed in as a release from liability at the conventional level.
Buddhism has its own name for this: misgrasped emptiness, grabbing emptiness by the wrong end. It is held to be worse than clinging to existence, because someone clinging to existence at least knows they have to answer for things, while misgrasped emptiness cancels answering for things altogether.
Emptiness gets compared here to a venomous snake. Grip it in the right place and it is medicine; grip it in the wrong place and it kills you. This is the heaviest warning Buddhism has ever attached to its own central concept.
So there is a usable test. If some "final-level statement" has the practical effect of letting you carry a little less responsibility, extend a little less patience to someone, or repay a little less of what you owe, then it is being used wrongly. Real ultimate truth never loosens the conventional. It leaves you with less grasping and more room while you do the conventional work.
If you have a technical background, the two truths are levels of description.
"This table is solid" and "this table is over 99.99% empty space" are both correct, each precise at its own level. No physicist stops putting cups on tables because he knows atoms are mostly gaps. And none of them calls the "solid" sentence a lie.
Software is the same. An engineer holds "this is a button" and "this is bytecode being interpreted" at the same time. Both are true and neither is optional. With only the bytecode you cannot describe the interface to a user; with only the button you cannot fix a bug. The two truths are the Buddhist version of this, arriving 1,800 years earlier.
So emptiness does not amount to nothing being there. What is empty is intrinsic nature. The phenomenon stays. The table still works, and you still have a mortgage to pay.
The left column is the reading that travels furthest. The right is how the source texts and the scholarship put it. Most of the differences are about precision rather than right and wrong: the coarse version cannot be put to work.
Grouped by use rather than alphabetically. Come back and look a word up when it turns up unfamiliar.
No blurbs here. If you want to go deep into one branch, the school pages carry better targeted recommendations. For the Chan primary texts, look for the Red Pine and Thomas Cleary translations. One piece of advice: do not start with the Diamond Sutra or the Heart Sutra.
What the Buddha Taught · Walpola Rahula
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind · Shunryū Suzuki
The Miracle of Mindfulness · Thich Nhat Hanh
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
In the Buddha's Words · Bhikkhu Bodhi
Saṃdhinirmocana Sutra
Vimalakīrti Sutra
Larger and Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha Sutra, Contemplation Sutra
Lotus Sutra
The Lesser Zhiguan · Zhiyi
The Six Wondrous Gates · Zhiyi
Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification) · Buddhaghosa
Shōbōgenzō · Dōgen
Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara · Ben Connelly
Living Yogacara · Tagawa Shun'ei
Triṃśikā (Thirty Verses), with a modern commentary
Cheng Weishi Lun (advanced)
The Gateless Barrier (Wumenguan)
Blue Cliff Record
The Record of Linji
Zen's Chinese Heritage · Andy Ferguson
Lamrim Chenmo (Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path) · Tsongkhapa
The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa
Majjhima Nikāya, selections
Being You · Anil Seth
Why Buddhism Is True · Robert Wright