Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, built his entire philosophical project around a single devastating observation: any framework used to analyze reality becomes incoherent when you turn it on itself. A mental model that explains everything — including the conditions of its own formation — is not a sign of its power. It's the first symptom of its collapse. His term for this was *prasanga* — reductio by following a position to its self-undermining conclusions. Product thinkers encounter this constantly without naming it: the jobs-to-be-done framework that can't account for why you adopted jobs-to-be-done in the first place; the north star metric that has no metric for whether you chose the right north star. The model works everywhere except on itself. What Nagarjuna's logic reveals is that this isn't a bug you fix with a better model — it's a structural feature of all conceptual frameworks. The practical implication isn't nihilism. It's maintenance hygiene: a mental model should be treated as load-bearing scaffolding, not as the building itself. The move is to keep one level of awareness outside the model — a perspective that holds the framework loosely enough to notice when its explanatory reach has quietly become its blind spot.

If you stripped your current product strategy of its core explanatory framework — the lens you use to justify prioritization — what evidence from the last quarter would suddenly look different?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna — Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (c. 150 CE), particularly his use of prasanga (reductio ad absurdum) to expose the self-undermining structure of any fixed conceptual framework