The Core Tenets of the Madhyamaka (Cabezón)

Whatever differences may have existed between Indian Madhyamikas, there is nonetheless a certain core around which a Madhyamika identity as a whole can be structured. Madhyamikas generally agree, for example, on the following points.
1) Things are empty (shunya): they lack essences or inherent existence. Neither persons nor phenomena exist independently, from their own side, but exist in a web of interdependent relationships.
2) Ordinary beings constantly err. Instead of seeing things as empty of inherent existence, they see them (to use a term not found in the texts) as 'full', which is to say as being more real than they are. This misperception (or, more accurately, misconception) of the world - this tendency to reify phenomena - is the chief cause of suffering.
3) Since the basic problem is one of attributing an excess of reality to a world that lacks it, the corrective, according to the Madhyamaka, necessarily involves negating something. It involves mentally 'substracting out' or 'emptying out' the excess reality we involuntarily attribute to things so as to bring the mind to an understanding of the way things are.
4) Because negation is a conceptual operation, language and conceptual analysis play a substantial role in this process of correcting our misconceptions about the world.
While such views are held in common by most Indian and Tibetan Madhyamikas, there existed (and exists) a great deal of controversy among Middle-Way philosophers concerning the implications of these core tenets. (from Language and the Ultimate: Do Madhyamikas Make Philosophical Claims?, by José Ignacio Cabezón, in Buddhist Philosophy, Essential Readings, ed. by William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield, Oxford 2009)