Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, argued that no phenomenon has svabhāva — inherent, self-sufficient existence. Everything that appears solid is actually a knot of relationships, meaningful only in contrast to what it is not. Scientists tend to treat this as poetry. But consider how measurement actually works: a result is only intelligible against a baseline, a control, a prior expectation. The number means nothing alone. What Nagarjuna mapped as ontology — the claim that existence itself is relational, not absolute — turns out to describe the infrastructure of scientific knowledge. A finding doesn't stand; it stands in relation. The practical consequence is sharper than it sounds: when a result surprises you, the surprise is almost never in the data. It lives in the relationship between the data and whatever you implicitly held as the norm. The norm is where the interpretation is happening. Scrutinize that — not just the numbers.

In the last week, what have you treated as a neutral baseline that was actually a choice you made — and when did you last examine whether that choice still holds?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)