If Nagarjuna is the poet of emptiness, then Gautama, the Buddha, was its prophet. For the first five hundred years after his death, the Buddha was remembered as an emptiness. In the fragments of stone friezes that survive from the time, he is represented by an empty seat, a tree with no one beneath it, a pair of footprints, or the wheel of dharma that he set turning. While alive, he referred to himself as the Tathagata, the "One Thus Gone." It was not until Greek settlers in India converted to Buddhism shortly after the time of Nagarjuna that Gautama was first personified, in the form of the god Apollo.
---Stephen Batchelor---
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