Nagarjuna, the second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher, built his entire logical system around a disturbing idea: every concept you use to investigate reality subtly distorts it, because concepts are relational and reality isn't. He called this śūnyatā — the emptiness of inherent, fixed existence — but his practical point was sharper than the metaphysics: your explanatory framework doesn't just describe a phenomenon, it partially constitutes what you're able to see. This matters acutely in science because we tend to think the hard part is collecting data, when often the harder part is noticing that the vocabulary we inherited for interpreting it is quietly doing work we never authorized. A biologist trained in competition-based ecology and one trained in symbiosis-based ecology can stand in the same forest and, quite genuinely, observe different things — not because one is wrong, but because their conceptual nets have different holes. The practical move Nagarjuna suggests isn't to abandon concepts, which is impossible, but to hold them lightly enough to swap them out — to treat your current explanatory framework as a tool you're borrowing, not a window you're looking through.

Name one technical term or category you use constantly in your work — then ask: what does that label make invisible?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna