Philosophy
Nāgārjuna tests fixed essences through dependent arising, with Garfield translating and commenting through the Tibetan transmission.
If a thing had a fixed essence of its own, it could not come into being: not from itself, not from something else, not from both, and not from nothing. Every way of explaining how such a thing arises collapses under scrutiny. So whatever does arise cannot have a fixed essence.
Things are real, but only through their relations to other things. That includes the conditions that produce them and the human habits, like language, that pick them out. To be 'empty' means to lack a self-standing nature. It does not mean to be absent.
Emptiness is not a hidden absolute lying behind ordinary things. It too exists only in dependence and has no essence. This blocks any attempt to turn the critique of fixed natures into a new fixed nature.
The choice between 'there is a true absolute reality' and 'nothing is real' only looks forced if reality must be described in fixed-essence categories. Drop that assumption, and both extremes lose their footing together. Showing those categories fail neither proves reality is beyond words nor proves nothing exists.
Denying fixed essences does not quarrel with ordinary practice, speech or action. It quarrels only with a philosophical theory about what lies beneath them. People can go on using things and words as before, without the belief that those things have self-standing natures.
Everyday reality and the deepest analysis are not two separate realms. Seen through the analysis, things are empty. That emptiness is nothing other than the fact that they exist in ordinary, dependent ways. Ultimate emptiness and conventional existence are the same thing seen two ways.