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In this lecture, I plan to take the reader through one of the major works of Buddhist philosophy, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by Nāgārjuna. Its name translates to "Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way." The school that grew around Nāgārjuna's ideas is thus called the "Madhyamaka" or the "Middle Way" thinkers. I will refer to the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā as the MMK for short. The Indian philosophical tradition was not like the western one in that their scribes and archivers were rarely interested in biographical details about the philosophers whose works they preserved. This indicates a high level of devotion to what really matters most, the ideas, and not to the cults of personality that sprang up around them. That is quite respectable. However, it is a nightmare for historiographers. We know next to nothing about the lives of a lot of the major names in classical Indian thought. Even when we work at a broader level and study "schools" of thought rather than individuals, the chronology can be difficult to establish. Nāgārjuna is no exception to this rule. We are not even sure of the exact years of his life, except that it was most likely within the years 150 to 250 AD. And yet, his influence is felt very far and wide in the Buddhist tradition in all of East Asia and especially in Tibet. It has also been extremely influential on my way of thinking.
Note: This text will use Sanskrit terms rather than Pali ones unless otherwise indicated. Though the language that some of the earliest Buddhist texts were written is was Pali, Nāgārjuna wrote in Sanskrit, and for that reason it seems appropriate. It is almost certain that neither of them were the language that the Buddha himself spoke, in any case. I will try to maximize my use of adequate English translations for important terms when appropriate.
Next to nothing about Nāgārjuna's life is known. Therefore there is no need to devote much time to his biography. However, an overview of the Buddhist tradition that he inherited and in turn contributed to is necessary. While this overview is still far from complete, it will be thorough, because we must understand the presuppositions that Nāgārjuna's audience would have held and what exactly his philosophical work means in this context.
The man we call the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, was born and grew up in northern India (present-day Nepal) sometime in the late 6th or early 5th century BC. In this period, the so-called "Axial Age," India was already one of the epicenters of ancient philosopy alongside Greece and China, so anyone seeking the answers to life's big questions there had plenty of options, and for that reason perhaps plenty of confusion as well. One of these seekers was Siddhartha Gautama, who ended up founding his own tradition called Buddhism, which is variously called a religion, a philosophy, a self-help method, or even a science depending on who you ask.
The Buddha was quite pragmatic and focused in his teachings. The most famous example of this comes from the Cūḷamālukya Sūtra. According to the sutra, there was a monk who was a disciple of the Buddha and was given to constantly ruminate over the questions that other philosophical schools were debating over. To try to find some certainty, he asked these questions to the Buddha. He asked what the age and breadth of the universe was, how the cosmos came into being, whether the mind and the body were the same or different, what happens to us after death, and so on. The Buddha's response was to compare the monk who asked these questions to a man who had been shot in the neck with a poisoned arrow. The Buddha said that though he was acting as a doctor trying to help him remove the arrow from his neck before the poison spread, this monk was only asking him questions like who shot the arrow, what kind of bow it was shot from, what material the arrow was made out of, and not how to actually remove the arrow from his neck! [1]
This shows us both that the Buddha's teaching is pragmatically useful and that we are in dire need of it. What, then, is the equivalent of the medicine for our problems? It is the Four Noble Truths, which are at once the beginning and end of all Buddhist thought. These run as follows:
1. Life is characterized by dissatisfaction. (The Sanskrit term is "dukkha," which is often translated as "suffering," though this term sounds too harsh to adequately reflect "dukkha." "Dukkha" has more of a sense of "something not being quite right" or "not being totally satisfied.")
2. The cause of dissatisfaction is desire. (The Sanskrit term translated as "desire" is "taṇhā," which is perhaps more broad than the English word "desire" might imply. The term literally means "thirst" and implies a kind of wanting and longing after things. It is also closely associated with "clinging" to things or getting "attached" to things. This will be examined more closely in the rest of the lecture.)
3. It is possible to put an end to dissatisfaction.
4. The method to ending dissatisfaction is the Eightfold Path (which consists of Right Understanding, Right Intent, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration).
Of course, these seemingly simple Four Noble Truths hide a whole host of philosophical questions of their own and alone were enough to motivate a lot of debate. For that reason, I would say that it is a mistake to take the moral of the parable of the arrow to be that abstract, theoretical questions are never helpful in reaching enlightenment. The Eightfold Path itself involves Right Understanding, and the kinds of understanding that the Buddha clearly wanted his followers to have is often difficult to grasp and conceive of. For that task, Buddhists have a very rich and robust philosophical tradition. However, we should never forget that while truth is a central concern in Buddhism, the questions we find the true answers to are always ones that help us relieve ourselves from real, palpable suffering.
The Buddha did not write any of his teachings down. Even the earliest Buddhist texts seem to have been committed to writing a few centuries or so after the Buddha's death. Alongside the sutras that claim to recount the direct words of the Buddha, many followers began writing what are called Abhidharma texts. These are essentially the earliest "purely" philosophical treatises in the Buddhist tradition, which sought to systematize the teachings of the Buddha into a theoretical framework. In doing so, they had to address some fundamental questions about the "stuff" of our experience: What are "we" made out of? What are the aggregates that give rise to our living and hence to our suffering? What is the nature of the cause and effect relationship of desire and suffering? It turns out that establishing our "Right Understanding" would turn into a very philosophically rich endeavor.
The high point of all this philosophical upheavel was around the 3rd century BC. This was also around the same time that the Bhagavad Gita was probably written, and it is likely that much of this Buddhist philosophical activity was inspired by rivalry with a more robust and philosophically astute Vedic tradition seeking to recapture authority after Buddhism and Jainism emerged as viable alternatives. However, the attempt to refine and systematize the Buddha's teachings inevitably led to many schisms and disagreements in Buddhist communities. The only Buddhist school to survive to the present day from this earliest period of schisms is called the Theravāda. It remains the dominant branch of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and most of Southeast Asia and is considered the oldest and most conservative modern Buddhist tradition. As such, we look back on this period through a Theravāda lens, as it was their canons of scripture that have informed later developments in Buddhism. [2]
Now that this is clear, I will focus on three particular teachings which were more or less accepted among all these Abhidharma groups as "core" teachings of the Buddha. A proper understanding of all three will be essential to find out where Nāgārjuna ultimately is in agreement and where he differs and innovates.
"Anitya" or "impermanence" describes one of the Buddha's fundamental teachings which is essential for understanding the Four Noble Truths. All phenomena is transient. Things might seem to be stable at first glance, but eventually everything ceases to exist as we knew it. This is not a truth to be argued for with a logical proof, but one to be empirically observed by paying attention to our own experience. This is, of course, the reason that desire creates such suffering in our lives. We try to grasp on to things that we like and hope they never go away or change their state. But they always do. Our beautiful youthful looks will wither with old age. Our loved ones and friends will die. And so on. Of course, this means that unpleasant things also never last forever, but in a sense this makes the whole cycle seem all the more pointless and cruel: we constantly get let down, only to try to find new things to get attached to, and then are let down by those once more.
Of course, in the standard Buddhist conception, this cycle does not come to an end even in death, as the Buddhist belief is that all sentient beings reincarnate. We are all trapped in samsara, the concstant cycle of rebirth. While it might seem positive at first that we have "another chance" to achieve happiness, the Buddhist thought is that samsara only makes our condition more pitiable, as we never overcome our suffering. The process of being built up and then let down never comes to an end even in death. For that reason, the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice is to achieve nirvana.
What exactly nirvana means and what we can say about it is a difficult topic, but the minimum we can say about it is that it represents a state where we will no longer reincarnate into samsara or be plagued by any suffering. The most common metaphor of what happens in achieving nirvana is what happens to the fire when a candle is extinguished. It seems like a rather pessimistic view at first. But it would be a mistake to say that nirvana is a state of non-existence like death. There is more to say about nirvana, but only at the end of this lecture.
"Anātman" or "non-self" describes a more difficult concept to grasp. Most simply put, the doctrine claims that there is notihng like a "self," "soul," or "ego" as we are inclined to think of it that sits at the center of our experience and endures through time as a persistent object of personal identity.
It is often said that this doctrine is difficult to grasp for western thinkers as our traditions are conceptually opposed to it, but the truth is that the dominant Vedic philosophies of ancient India were just as positive about the idea of man having a substantial "soul" that was distinct from the body as the western philosophical tradition has been. As such, this idea was from the beginning controversial and bound to be misunderstood.
Perhaps the best way to introduce this concept is with a classic example from a Buddhist text known as the Milindapañha or "Questions of Milinda." In it, the monk Nāgasena asks King Milinda about his chariot. Does the chariot exist? It certainly seems like it does. But what is a chariot? Is it identical to all its parts? No, for a pile of chariot parts does not a chariot make. Nor does this problem get fixed even when all the parts are fit together. For we must think about this and be honest: would we really consider it to be a different thing altogether if we just replaced one of the chariot's wheels? No, we would think that the chariot is itself still the same chariot even if one of its wheels was replaced. Indeed, we would be inclined to think so even if every single part of it were replaced over time. But there is certainly nothing we find "beneath" all these chariot pieces that we could call the chariot. [3]
And just so it goes for us as human beings. We, too, cannot be found under all the stuff that "we" are supposed to exist on the basis of. The Buddhist tradition breaks down this existence in terms of five skandhas or "aggregates" [4]. These are:
1. Rūpa or "form," but perhaps better understood as "matter." Some texts refer to four elements of earth, water, fire, and air and some add space to make a fifth. We could replace these with our modern periodic table without losing the important point.
2. Vedanā or "sensations." Buddhists are unique in conceptualizing not five senses but six: vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind. In this sense, mind is considered a sense like any other. As vision apprehends visual things like colors and shapes, the mind apprehends mental things like ideas. Understanding that mind and its mental activity behaves just like the other senses and is not somehow more noble or grand is essential in understanding Buddhist thought.
3. Saṃjñā or "perceptions." Sensation refers to the raw actions of the sense-organs, but perception refers to the way we categorize and interpret the data of those sensations. There is a step where we take the raw input of a certain light shade and another where we classify it as "yellow," for example.
4. Saṃskāra or "mental formations," although this translation is somewhat misleading as it sounds like it is describing what we would think of as perception. It actually describes things like will, volition, intention, emotion, opinion, and all other things that drive us to act. And when I say "act" here, this includes mental actions like thinking or imagining. In Buddhist teaching, this is where karma is created. Mental formations are what embed us in the karmic nexus.
5. Vijñāna or "consciousness." The distinction that consciousness has from sensation and perception is quite subtle. We might want to think of it as the state between sensation and perception. Consciousness is the state of awareness of the presence of, for example, a color, a taste, or a sound but not yet at the state of labeling it as "red" or "sour" or "the croaking of a frog." There is, however, a state of awareness which is what distinguishes conscious beings from, say, infrared cameras and similar machines which are capable of "sensations" but without consciousness behind it.
These aggregates, then, are fairly exhaustive as far as what could count as an "I" or "self." And yet none of them are stable or constant. And we find no "self" hiding underneath all of them. Recognizing that all of the aggregates were temporary and transient but that a "self" was supposed to be endure and be continuous, the Vedic thinkers posited that the self or soul was separate from all of these aggregates and would return to the original, eternal oneness of the universe, Brahman, after enlightenment. The most common metaphor is of a drop of water falling into the ocean. Buddhists, being ruthless empiricists, immediately pointed out that there was no evidence of this apparent soul beneath all the aggregates. But even if it did exist, in what sense could we claim ownership of it? How could we say that it was really "us" if it was unrelated to all of these aggregates? In what sense could it possibly be "me" if nothing that makes up "me" in my phenomenal experience has anything to do with it?
Therefore, while it seems like a quite strange proposition at first glance, the most honest reflection on our experience reveals nothing like a self or a soul. But at this point, most students of Buddhism will put forward a very reasonable question: If there is no self or soul, what is it that reincarnates? In fact, we don't even need to entertain the conception of reincarnation for this argument. Why do we have any conception of "ourself" as persisting through time? What is the basis for the idea of karma? And if that word sounds too superstitious for the secular reader, you may simply think of it as experiencing the effect of an earlier cause. Take having a nightmare after seeing a scary movie as an example. How does all this happen without something like a self or subject persisting at the base of our experience? This is the task of the final point I would like to focus on: dependent arising.
"Pratītyasamutpāda" is translated as "dependent arising" or more commonly as "dependent origination." I will use "arising" in this text as it makes the point somewhat easier to understand in the text of the MMK proper. It is a concept which sounds extremely simple but has resulted in a rich and complex tradition of interpretation in Buddhist philosophy. Arguing for a correct interpretation of dependent arising is also central to Nāgārjuna's entire philosophical project. The simplest statement of the idea comes from the Buddha himself:
When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that.
When this isn't, that isn't. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of
that.
Assutavā Sūtra [5]
In some sense then, this is a theory of causation. Most simply, it states that things come into existence in dependence on other phenomena and pass out of existence in dependence on other phenomena. Some theory of causation is of course necessary for our second noble truth that suffering is "caused" by desire. Where there is desire, dissatisfaction inevitably occurs. With the cessation of desire, there is a cessation of dissatisfaction as well. Of course, when we understand this as one phenomenon followed by another succesively like links in a chain, we simplify it. A chariot does not spring into existence spontaneously. But nor does any ONE phenomenon create it alone. It comes into existence in dependence on the craftsmen who assemble its parts, the trees that grow into the wood used to build it, the king who comissions its construction, and so on. This is the central tenet of dependent arising: things arise in a whole nexus of causality. Things come to existence in dependence on a whole manifold of other phenomena.
With that in mind, what do we make of the "self" that seems to have some sense of coherence? Well, whether we accept the ultimate existence of something called a "self," we certainly can talk about it on conventional grounds. To use Jay L. Garfield's example, the mere fact that we can entertain a thought experiment where we "switch bodies" with someone else is proof that we have some conception of our "self" and that it cannot be reduced to physical matter alone. [6] However, the kind of self we want to find to be able to do this body-switching experiment with is an enduring, independent kernel of sorts at the bottom of the five aggregates. And we simply never discover something like this on inspection, nor does it accord with the way we actually conceive of the "self" in our everyday existence.
The "self" is illusory, but not false. This is an important distinction. Just as a chariot comes into existence in dependence of a whole set of factors, like the craftsmen who shape it, the tree its wood was carved from, the king who orders it to be built, and so on, the "self" comes into existence in dependence on the five aggregates. A common metaphor in later Buddhist texts is of a man who sees a piece of rope and mistakes it for a snake. This "snake" does not, in any real sense, exist. But the fear it causes persists as long as the man does not see correctly. In just the same fashion, our conception of a self persists and continues to have genuine effects, even across lifespans in the traditional Buddhist conception. And these effects are usually negative and concerned with unhealthy attachment and desire. But they, too, can simply evaporate when we learn to see in the correct way.
Around the 1st century BC into the early centuries AD, a new set of writings began to emerge in the Buddhist world. These complicated the idea of what it meant to be a Buddha as well as the above Abdhidharma foundations of impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising. Adherents of course claim that they were all directly taught by the Buddha. In fact, they are considered to be the highest teachings of the Buddha, only given to the world when we were finally ready for them. The philosophy surrounding them would not be totally systematized for several more centuries. These texts and the Buddhist traditions that abide by them are referred to as the Mahāyāna and see themselves as additive to the Theravāda and its Abdhidharma tradition. That is to say, they take everything in the Theravāda tradition as authoritative, but then see their additional teachings as a higher and more perfect sort of capstone to them. This is the Buddhist tradition that has spread over China, Korea, and Japan.
It is outside of the scope of this video to talk about it in full, but I should note the last major branch of Buddhism, the Vajrayāna tradition, as well. It is similarly "additive" and adds esoteric or tantric teachings to the Mahāyāna corpus as a similar sort of "capstone." Vajrayāna is sometimes considered a third branch and sometimes considered a subset of Mahāyāna. Vajrayāna is dominant in Tibet and the Tibetan diaspora, along with Bhutan and Mongolia. There are some notable Vajrayāna lineages in East Asia as well. The Vajrayāna emerged as a tradition long after Nāgārjuna's life, but it is also the tradition where Nāgārjuna is studied most explicitly, so there is a strong Tibetan influence in much of the scholarship on him.
It would take a long time to explain all the differences between the Theravāda and the Mahāyāna, even if I restricted it merely to what could be called "philosophical" differences and did not talk about differences of iconography, mythology, ritual, and so on. Nāgārjuna is one of the most important philosophers in this divide, as he is central to the development of many Mahāyāna schools but is completely ignored in the Theravāda tradition. In spite of that, it might be ahistorical to say that he was a Mahāyāna thinker in the same way it would be ahistorical to say that the apostles of Jesus were "Christians," as the term "Mahāyāna" refers to a tradition that in many ways relies on him for its philosophical basis.
One of the foremost Nāgārjuna scholars in the west, David J. Kalupahana, holds to an unorthodox but well-argued thesis that Nāgārjuna is decidedly NOT a Mahāyāna thinker as nothing in his works shows evidence of his having read Mahāyāna sūtras. [7] For the sake of this lecture, it really doesn't matter whether we consider him to be Mahāyāna or not. We are interested in his actual philosophical innovations. That will have to be done in an analysis of the MMK itself. However, it is necessary to set the context of his work, as the text will seem very abstract and hard to get a grip on if we do not.
Perhaps it a symptom of our crude occidental minds to tell the story of philosophy in terms of rivals fighting and battles won. In the Tibetan tradition, it is customary to teach it in a way that is not so negative and exclusionary and does not emphasize conflict and competition nearly so much. They work up to teaching Nāgārjuna's notoriously subtle and difficult thought by teaching these "rival" traditions not as heresies or antiquated models, but as stepping-stones, as if we are seeing the same picture but each time with a slightly clearer lens. These traditions by name are the Theravāda Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika schools and the Mahāyāna Yogācāra school, each of which build on the one before it before finally ascending to what Tibetans see as the most difficult and most sublime teaching. This is the Madhyamaka or "Middle Way" School, which is Nāgārjuna's. [8]
I find myself forced to perform a major faux-pas and blow right past these first three directly to Nāgārjuna. But I can only do this by at least setting the stage a bit. My explanation of these schools will skip much that is important. But I will get at the most important point by continuing to focus on those three key ideas: impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising. All three of these are related concepts that imply each other. When we see that we lack a "self," we see that the parts making "us" up are impermanent. When we see that something is impermanent, we see that it is dependently arisen. When we see that something is dependently arisen, we see that it has no selfhood. And so on.
Of course, this idea was already subject to divergent interpretations. What are we to make of this idea of "non-self?" If the idea of having a "self" is deluded, what should a more enlightened view of reality look like? Though the following is an extremely crude oversimplification of a rich philosophical tradition, I will attempt to describe the teachings of the Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika, who were the most consequential Theravāda schools of the time. Their ideas would likely look something like this:
We unconsciously presume the existence of a "self" or "ego" at the center of our experience, but when we look at ourselves more closely, the "self" disappears upon analysis. All we find are the five aggregates, none of which can be thought of as our "self" or a bearer of it. With this in mind, we have to ask what the "real" nature of phenomena is. What exists no matter what else is the case?
What is ultimately "real" cannot be anything like a self. But it also can't be something that is impermanent and contingent. There is regularity in nature and continuity in phenomena. So there must be something at the base that has some sort of self-essence. We think that there is something lurking constantly underneath "us" that makes us "who we are" despite how much our bodies and minds change. But there is nothing like that with regard to the self.
The Theravāda answer tends to be that upon thoroguh analysis we find nothing with an inherent, stable essence but indivisible atomic particles and infinitely small slices of time. These atomic particles of phenomena include both the natural elements as well as fundamental shreds of psychological data like taste, touch, smell, and so on. That might sound strange from a western point of view, but the idea is that without these existing at the most fundamental level there would be no way to move from lifeless matter to conscious experience. [9]
This process of trying to get down to what something "really" is at its core is a common philosophical urge. We might call it the "substance" or the "essence," but in Sanskrit the term used is "svabhāva." It's worth spending a bit of time on this term, as it really is one of the central terms for understanding Nāgārjuna's philosophical project. "Svabhāva" literally means something like "own-being," and most broadly stated refers to that which makes something what it is. "Svabhāva" is what is inherent and unchanging in any entity. The "tree-ness" of a tree is its "svabhāva." For the sake of this lecture, I will translate "svabhāva" as "self-essence." It is a central term in this text, so it is important to understand what it means.
An illustration may help us understand this. The "svabhāva" or self-essence of water is to be wet. Something could not be water if it were not wet. On the other hand, being less than 15 degrees celsius would not be the self-essence of water. This would be the case even if somehow all water in the universe was less than 15 degrees celsius, because it would still be possible for us to heat that water up and for it to remain water. [10]
For the Theravāda, these fundamental, indivisible particles and the momentary phenomena they create are all that is truly "real." Nāgārjuna completely disagrees with this.
This above Theravāda position is then the one that Nāgārjuna rejects: That there is no "self" but that the "real" self-essence of reality is a bunch of atomic particulars. In fact, Nāgārjuna's position is more extreme than merely a rejection of this candidate for self-essence. Nāgārjuna rejects the idea that there is any self-essence to any phenomena whatsoever. That is to say, in our imaginary universe where no water was over 15 degrees, not only would being under 15 degrees not be the self-essence of water, but being wet would not be the essence of water either! There is no self-essence, ground, or intrinsic nature in anything.
For this reason, the central word to his philosophy is "śūnyatā" or "emptiness." For Nāgārjuna, all phenomena in the world are empty of self-essence. Nevertheless, it is a critical error to think that this teaching of emptiness is somehow nihilistic. The idea that nothing has self-essence does not therefore mean that nothing exists. In fact, it is a necessary consequence of dependent arising to say that phenomena are empty. To understand exactly why this is the case, it is necessary to get clear about the concept of "dependence" and also about how unexpectedly strange the idea of "self-essence" really is.
When we say that phenomena are "dependent" on other phenomena, there are at least three ways to think of this dependence that Nāgārjuna makes use of, all of which make the idea of self-essence impossible. These are:
1. Causal dependence: We cannot have a conception of something like a chariot without a conception of the workers who built it, the trees that its wood was carved from, the king who comissioned its construction, and so on. For anything to have a genuine self-essence, it would have to not be dependent on any cause or effect. The moment it enters into a relation with something else in a causal way, it no longer exists independently or inherently.
2. Mereological dependence: "Mereological" is a fancy word which means "related to parts and wholes." We cannot have a conception of something like a chariot without a conception of all the parts that make it up, namely its seat, its harness, its wheels, and so on. A wheel further can be broken down into parts like axles and spokes. This continues on indefinitely. Something with self-essence would have to be indivisible into parts and not compounded by simpler phenomena in any way.
3. Conceptual dependence: We cannot have a conception of something like a chariot without a consciousness that interprets it in terms of conventional categories and labels. That is to say, in order to distinguish the "chariot" from the horse and rider that make use of it, the environment in which it is seated, and so on, we need to set up some kinds of barriers that abstract our experience into conventional labels. Something with self-essence would have to exist "from its own side," to use the phrasing common in the Tibetan tradition.
While it seems "intuitive" to speak of things having a nature or substance of their own that solidly inheres in them and keeps them what they are, the idea of self-essence actually seems very strange and disconnected from our daily experience when we sketch out these implications. Therefore, when we say that phenomena are "empty," we have to ask what they are "empty" of. And that is self-essence. But we will have to table these arguments for now and delve into them more in the text itself.
Part of the reason that it is so hard to get around the concept of non-self is that the idea of a "self" with self-essence is deeply embedded in our language. Whenever we say "I" or "you" or refer to someone by their name, we frontload the idea of a stable, inherent "self" onto them. We talk about our actions and our will as if they were directly controlled and managed by some singular, uncompounded soul-substance that lurks behind all our experiences. Certainly this is of supreme importance in Buddhism, where the karma of our actions is paramount to how we live our lives. But the language we use is tied to conceptual structures that are misleading.
If this is the case just with the concept of a "self," you can imagine how much more this is the case for Nāgārjuna. For him, ALL phenomena lack a self-essence, not just the self. There is not only no "I" or "you," but no "tree-ness" or "rock-ness" to trees or rocks, nor even a "this-tree-ness" or a "this-rock-ness" to individual trees and rocks! There is no self-essence no matter where we look.
For this reason, the idea of "two truths" has to be accepted from the very beginning. All Buddhist schools have some version of this doctrine. On one level, we can speak of "truth" in a very everyday, common-sense way: Grass is green and not purple. The sky is blue and not pink, and so on. But on another, "ultimate" level, none of these propositions are really true. That is because concepts like "grass" and "sky" have no real, ultimate self-essence. It is like how we can talk about what was or was not the case in a dream when we know nothing in the dream "really" happened, how we can distinguish the apparent "motion" of one optical illusion from another when in fact it is still, and how we can say that it is "correct" that Sherlock Holmes lives in London and not Paris in spite of the fact that he is a fictional character.
For that reason, we need to keep in mind that much of the MMK will seem to speak on two levels. This is intentional. If it strikes you as contradictory, you should keep in mind that modern science is guilty of the same tendency, such as speaking of certain substances as solid when in fact they are "really" composed of atoms which are mostly empty space. An exact assessment of Nāgārjuna's conception of ultimate truth and how this is related to conventional truth will have to come later. With this context, we can finally start to look at the text proper.
The MMK is a thorough, comprehensive philosophical attack on the idea of self-essence. Most of the text consists of Nāgārjuna refuting various metaphysical schemes that somehow involve self-essence. This means that Nāgārjuna's philosophical work is primarily negative. That is, most of the text consists in explaining why other philosophical positions are incoherent. The common denominator between all of these incoherent positions is, of course, that they presuppose self-essence in some way or another. However, the negation in question here exists against a classical Indian philosophical background of its own. It is necessary to spell some of this background out explicitly to reduce confusion. Much of this section is indebted to Jan Westerhoff's treatment in his book Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction.
To use Westerhoff's example, let's say I have the proposition "This is a brahmin." There are two potential ways I could negate this statement in classical Indian logic, which can be approximated fairly accurately in English as:
a. This is a non-brahmin
b. This is not a brahmin
If we go with negation a, it implies that the person under question is not a brahmin but is one of the other three castes. That is to say, it affirms certain presuppositions. In this case, it affirms the presupposition that there are four possible castes to sort a human being into. If we go with negation b, on the other hand, we do not imply that the subject must be any particular caste. In fact, we do not imply that the subject must be a human at all. I will call these two kinds of negation presupposition-affirming negations and presupposition-denying negations, respectively.
The main method of Nāgārjuna through most of the MMK is to demonstrate that the fundamental elements of our ontology are faulty because they somehow or other rely on the idea of self-essence. And this is why it becomes vital to distinguish between these two kinds of negation. If the proposition in question is "Love is purple," it would not be enough to say that love is not purple. This would imply that love could be some color or other, but purple happens not to be the color that it is. The error here is not in identifying one color or other to love, but in the presupposition that something like love could have a color in the first place. In that sense, it is equally wrong to say either that "Love is purple" or that "Love is not purple."
This, then, becomes the primary method of Nāgārjuna in demonstrating the faultiness of a concept. He will negate a proposition not by merely proposing the presupposition-preserving negation ("Love is not purple") but by demonstrating the incoherence of both the original proposition AND its presupposition-preserving negation. This is because if both are proved to be incoherent, it must mean that the entire framework is mistaken. [11]
Nāgārjuna most characteristically doesn't just refute the proposition and its negation. He refutes four different forms that a proposition could take rather than just two. This formulation is called the "catuṣkoṭi" or tetralemma. It is a staple of classical Indian logic. It is canonized in the Brahmajāla Sūtra, where the question arises whether the Tathāgata or Buddha continues to exist after entering into nirvana. [12] All four of the following are denied:
1. The Tathāgata continues to exist
2. The Tathāgata does not continue to exist
3. The Tathāgata both continues to exist and does not continue to exist
4. The Tathāgata neither continues to exist nor does not continue to exist
There are some immediately interesting features of this tetralemma for students of classical western logic. The first should be option three, which seems like a blatant contradiction at first. Interestingly, it is not rejected outright in the Indian logical tradition but must be argued against on its own terms. This third formulation may be used for cases like "This dog is big," since a dog might be considered big compared to other dogs but small compared to something like an elephant. While it does not operate according to the rules of western classical logic, hopefully you can see that it is not a kind of pure mysticism. In fact, it is quite comparable to the developments of paraconsistent logic in the west, only predating them by almost 2000 years.
When we try to formalize the tetralemma in logical calculus, it appears like this:
1. A
2. ~A
3. A v ~A
4. ~(A v ~A)
However, when put into this calculus, the third and fourth choices become logically equivalent. And it would be quite a surprise if two of the four alternatives were really the same and nobody realized this for over a thousand years. A better way to think of the fourth alternative is that the proposition is totally inapplicable and nonsensical. One cannot enage with the question in any way whatsoever. And Nāgārjuna rejects this one as well. This is quite a subtle distinction: Nāgārjuna argues that the presuppositions of the given proposition are faulty and mistaken by showing that all alternatives result in unwelcome and illogical consequences. But he does not argue that the proposition is completely meaningless in every way whatsoever. In the case of the question about the Tathāgata, it would be wrong to say that there was no way to make sense of the Tathāgata with reference to continued existence in any way at all. This is important for establishing the fact that there is at least conventional truth. But the only way it can be made coherent is by rejecting the presuppositions of the other three as well as not falling into the extreme of nihilism where we can say nothing at all.
Many important hinge points in the MMK rely on a thorough treatment of the tetralemma with regard to certain propositions, usually by showing the incoherence of all four of these alternatives. If all four alternatives are incoherent, it can only mean that the framework through which we think of the question is in error. Much of the MMK is devoted to arguing against rival positions. Many of these take the form of reductio ad absurdum arguments where Nāgārjuna adopts presuppositions that he does not in fact hold in order to show that they are incoherent even on their own terms. This can make the text maddening to follow, as it can be difficult to find a positive alternative to grasp onto during it. There is even debate as to the degree that Nāgārjuna's philosophy can be said to hold positive "positions" at all or whether it is suppoesd to be wholly negative in character. In fact, this is the central division between what are called the Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika traditions of Madhyamaka Buddhism. This debate began among Nāgārjuna's Indian commentators in the 6th-7th centuries and continues in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to this day.
The MMK is divided into 27 chapters. Jay L. Garfield breaks them into four basic "suites" or "movements" for the sake of charting the general structure of the work, and I find this very helpful. Of course, this is a modern imposition. In fact, even the division of the original verses into 27 chapters is an imposition by the 7th-century commentator Candrakīrti and not something that existed in Nāgārjuna's original text. But I believe that looking at the MMK as four successive dialogues of sorts is quite helpful.
There is a logic to how the four suites build on each other, but it is not always linear. They can be best described in the following way:
1. Chapters 1-7: A series of arguments for the emptiness of all the elements of traditional Buddhist ontology.
2. Chapters 8-13: A series of arguments for the emptiness of all the elements of subjective, first-person experience.
3. Chatpers 14-21: A series of arguments for the emptiness of all the elements of the external world and relation of the self to it.
4. Chapters 22-27: Extrapolations about the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, nirvana, and ultimate truth on the basis of an understanding of emptiness.
It appears to me that we more or less have Nāgārjuna's main "thesis" presented at the end of each of these "suites," but then the argument keeps being revised again from a different perspective in order to ensure that the understanding is richer and more thorough. Though the work is not written as a dialogue, I believe it almost reads like one, where different opponents keep trying to propose ways that phenomena could have self-essence and Nāgārjuna systematically dismantles each one's argument. In fact, the great Madhyamaka philosopher-poet Śāntideva added a miniature Socratic debate of just the sort I describe near the end of his beautiful treatise Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, so it seems as though it is a natural way to understand this relentlessly dialectical and exhaustingly argumentative work. However, to keep our perspective compassionate, we should understand the real "opponents" of this debate not to be those conscious beings who we are to love and cherish no matter who they might be, but rather the ignorance and karmic chains that keep us from developing a fully awakened mind.
Much of the following is deeply indebted to Jay L. Garfield's commentary and I will do my best to not merely repeat him word for word. I will refrain from citing him via footnotes except where I have most explicitly borrowed his language, but you can assume that just about every summary here has relied on his commentary at least a bit, along with the commentaries of Westerhoff and Kalupahana to a lesser extent.
The concept of dependent arising is central to Nāgārjuna's project. And we know that the essential point of dependent arising is that phenomena do not arise independently, but arise in dependence on other phenomena. We can call this a theory of causation. However, there is a sinister step here where we unconsciously interpret causation to be a sort of eternal law of the universe. In that sense, we become tempted to argue that the "real" self-essence of phenomena is that they are causes and effects.
The text, then, opens with the first tetralemma, which is an explicit rebuttal of this particular view of causation:
Neither from itself nor from another,
Nor from both,
Nor without a cause,
Does anything whatever, anywhere arise.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1:1
[13]
In other words, no phenomenon is "caused" either:
1. by itself
2. by another phenomenon
3. by both itself and another phenomenon
4. by nothing
This is very much not an argument that things come into existence with no reason or order whatsoever and that whatever we mean by "causation" is merely an illusion. What it is an argument against is that anything like a cause or effect exists in nature with self-essence as a sort of binary building block of the universe.
Cause and effect are like any other phenomena in that they depend on other phenomena to come into existence. It makes enough sense that an effect depends on its cause to exist. That is a matter of definition. But what sense does it make to say that a cause depends on its effect? I will use an example from Jan Westerhoff to make it clearer. What is the "cause" of a fire? When we look more closely, we don't find any one single phenomenon that we could call a "cause." We see sulphur, oxygen, friction, and a spark, for example. We can meaningfully say that all of these together are the cause. Westerhoff introduces the term "causal field." But what is it that holds all of these disparate phenomena together? What is it that unites them into a causal field? It is the fire itself that makes us delimit and carve out the causal field in particular as a cause. It then makes no sense to consider the cause as a cause without being directed by the effect. [14]
With this position made clear, we can say that the main problem with all four choices in the tetralemma is that they somehow believe that cause and effect can exist as "real" phenomena with self-essence. That is why all four schemes fail. And the exact way that they fail can now be made clear. The arguments against these four are very abbreviated and not very explicit. Most of them have been drawn out and refined by later commentators. They run something like this:
1. No phenomenon is caused by itself:
For any phenomenon to cause itself, it must come before itself in time. This makes no sense. Even if there was something that existed by its own volition and was eternally omnipresent, like the Vedic conception of Brahman, it doesn't seem like this mode of existence can be called "causal" in any sense.
2. No phenomenon is caused by another phenomenon:
The simple idea of cause A causing effect B seems like the most intuitive idea of how cause and effect could be related. But for this conception to make sense, the cause and effect must be totally distinct objects. And if that was the case, it would be impossible for them to existence in a relation of dependence with each other. That is because for them to be totally distinct, they must have self-essence. And they must have that essence independently of anything else. If that was the case, it makes no sense how they could influence each other.
Furthermore, it seems hard to explain how they could "touch" each other in a temporal sequence. That is to say, if the cause is truly distinct from the effect, it cannot overlap with it in time. Otherwise we will be unable to draw a boundary between the two. But if that is the case, the cause must go completely out of existence before the effect arises. And that means that the effect will arise without a cause there to give rise to it.
3. No phenomenon is caused by both itself and another phenomenon:
The common response at this point is to try to "split the difference" between these two views. In the classical language of Aristotle, we can distinguish between a material cause and an efficient cause. To use Jan Westerhoff's example, we can say that a marble statue is caused by the marble it is made from, in that the potential of the statue exists latent in the marble. This is its material cause. But it requires a sculptor to turn that potential into an actuality and actually bring about the statue. This is its efficient cause. The problem here is that simply multiplying these causes and naming them does not succeed in giving them self-essence. Now we have two causes that are dependent on the effect instead of one, for nothing can be a material or efficient cause on its own. We can only make these distinctions in virtue of the effect itself. [15]
4. No phenomenon is caused by nothing:
The idea that there is no causation whatsoever has been considered as a serious alternative given the problems with the above. But this simply does not accord with how we experience the world. The world around us has a remarkable consistency and regularity. If there was no connection at all between events, we could not come to make accurate predictions about the world, like fire burning our hand when we touch it.
Please do remember, however, that the only reason these options from the tetralemma fail is that we conceptualize cause and effect as having the nature of inherently being cause and effect. If we conceive of causation as a kind of metaphysical power that is the "real nature" of all phenomena or glue holding the universe together, we run into these problems. But in a conventional, everyday sense, we can absolutely explain things as arising in dependence on certain conditions. It is only when the idea of self-essence enters the picture that problems emerge.
To use Jay L. Garfield's example, someone could ask us "Why are the lights on?," and we could reply with "Because I turned on the switch" or "Because the wires are working" or "Because photons in the lightbulb are being emitted" or "Because I wanted to read," and these are all perfectly adequate answers. [16] And indeed, it would even be acceptable to say that any of these were the "cause" of the lights being on. But none of these answers presupposes that something called a cause or effect exists with self-essence as the fundamental nature of our experience. To again use Garfield's example, it is similar to saying we will do something for someone's "sake," despite knowing full well that the word "sake" does not refer to anything real in the world. A "sake" is an empty concept, but a functional one. Causation is just the same. [17].
An opponent may claim that the idea of causation is necessary to explain the regularity we observe between certain pairs of events, like turning on a lightswitch and the lights coming on. This is all backwards. We can never "explain" a regularity. In order to "explain" anything, we must appeal to regularities. We can only explain regularities in terms of other regularities. Why will the sun rise in the east tomorrow? Because it has every other morning until now. Why has it always risen in the same place every morning until now? Because the earth always rotates in the same direction. Why does the earth always rotate in the same direction? Because every time we have charted its rotation it has behaved in the same manner. And so on. Regularity is the bedrock of explanation.
And with that in mind, we should remember the Buddha's formulation of the truth of dependent arising: "When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that. When this isn't, that isn't. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that." There is no reference here to an ethereal system of forces called cause and effect that envelop everything around us. There is simply a statement of the regularity and coherence of the universe. It is "empty" because it has no ultimate "ground" that it speaks in reference to. But it does not need one either. [18]
The structure of most of the MMK consists of an opponent putting up another candidate for what could have self-essence and thus be ultimately "real" even if nothing else is. The next candidate is motion. Things must change. This is clear from our own experience and also from the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. And for things to change, there must be motion. Change implies a non-static universe. But Nāgārjuna says no. Motion itself cannot have self-essence either. The rest of this chapter deals with the concept of "motion" alone, but note that all change presupposes motion and that these two concepts are linked.
This chapter is quite difficult, but the best way to understand it is that it is based on proving the absurdity of two very "common-sense" assumptions about motion. The first is the assumption that what moves is the mover itself. The second is that the motion takes place in the space presently being traversed. These seem like natural assumptions. But they will soon be shown to be incoherent. And it is important to make note of these arguments, as they will be generally applicable for much of the MMK outside of the question of motion.
First, we will take the question of what it is that moves. It is the mover. But he claims that when we assume this, we have an unwelcome duplication of properties:
If a mover were to move,
There would be a twofold motion:
One in virtue of which he is a mover,
And one in virtue of which the mover moves.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 2:11
[19]
To explain exactly what this consequence means and why it is a problem, Jan Westerhoff makes a distinction between what he calls "thick individuals" versus "thin individuals." And to explain what those terms mean, we need to make a distinction between what he calls constitutive properties and instantiative properties.
Let's imagine an object that is blue, spherical, and glossy. These are its properties. When referring to the object, we will usually take one of those properties and "name" the object with it. That is, we will not say it is a blue, spherical, glossy thing but that it is a blue, glossy sphere. Of course, this is conventional. We could refer to it as a spherical, blue glossy thing. But which one we choose is colored by our pragmatic interests. In any case, however, we use one to name the thing, and this is what Westerhoff calls its "constitutive" property. If it is a blue, glossy sphere, it is by its very nature a sphere, but it just happens to also be blue and glossy, as we could imagine a sphere that was not blue or glossy. In this case, we call blueness and glossiness its "instantiative" properties. They do not make the thing what it is, but merely happen to be instantiated in the object.
The example of a blue, glossy sphere is easy to deal with because its constitutive and instantiative properties are distinct. We can imagine something being blue without being glossy and spherical, and the same applies for each of the properties. This is what Westerhoff calls a "thick individual." A "thin individual" on the other hand would only have instantiative properties that are constitutive for it or directly dependent on its constitutive properties. A good example is a clap of thunder. To be a clap of thunder is to be the roaring that is instantiated in it. It may have some contingent properties like being a certain volume or lasting a certain amount of time, but these are directly dependent on its roaring, not independent like blueness and glossiness are in regard to being spherical.
And a mover is also a thin individual. If we try to say that "motion is present in the mover" or "a mover moves," we naturally want to separate the thing we speak about into an individual (a mover) and its property (motion). But there is not more than one motion here. We end up splitting its single property of motion into two. We can speak about motion in terms of being an indivdidual or a property depending on our interests. And that is fine in and of itself. It is only a problem if we assume that one of them is the "real" nature of motion which is "out there." [20]
The point of this argument, then, is that motion as we normally think of it does not make sense when we try to describe things like a mover and motion with the assumption that they have self-essence. We should also note that the upshot of this even applies for something like our blue, glossy sphere. This is not a reflection of reality being carved up into ready-made categories. It all exists at the level of the conventions of our language.
Motion does not begin in what has moved,
Nor does it begin in what has not moved,
Nor does it begin in what is moving.
In what, then, does motion begin?
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 2:12
[21]
The next argument focuses on the location of motion. If we assume that motion has self-essence, it must exist either in the space that has already been traversed, the space yet to be traversed, or the space currently being traversed. And it only seems natural to assume that it is the last one, the space currently being traversed, that is the locus of motion. However, in order to understand this triple division, we need to locate the beginning of motion. The area that has already been traversed is only the set of moments before the moment where the motion is occurring. The area that has yet to be traversed is only the set of moments after the moment where the motion is occurring. And the moment where the motion is occurring is the middle between these two. But locating the beginning of motion proves harder than expected.
To make this argument as easy to follow as possible, we will assume that time and space can be reduced to atomic single instances (represented by t1, t2, etc. for time units and s1, s2, etc. for space units). Observe the following chart:
SPACE
s1 s2 s3 s4 s5
t1 X
T t2 X
I
M
E t3 X
t4 X
t5 X
Let us say that it is currently t3. Where does the motion of object X "start?" Clearly we cannot say that the beginning is at t4 or t5, as these are in the future and thus comprise a space that the object has not yet traversed. But it seems just as hard to say that motion "begins" at t3. At that point, it has already begun to move! So do we say it begins at t2? That seems strange, as it has yet to move at this location. We now arrive at a paradox: in order to find the beginning of motion, we need to be able to divide space into the space already traversed, the space presently being traversed, and the space which will be traversed. But in order to identify these, we need to already have a beginning of motion so we can create the correct boundaries.
The paradox is resolved if we abandon the idea that motion could have any kind of self-essence. We only have to stop believing that the beginning of motion can be found in a way that is findable by some inherent properties that are independent of our concerns. The truth is that we only identify the beginning of motion based on our own decisions and cognitive needs. Of course, this doesn't mean that absolutely anywhere could be a reasonable choice for the beginning of motion. It shouldn't be after the space presently being traversed, for example. But in the end, it is conventional. [22]
In fact, it is not just the boundaries of motion that are conventional, but the entire distinction between a mover and motion itself. The traditional idea would conceive of a "mover" as a distinct thing in which the property of "motion" instantiates itself. But there is no conception of what it means to be a "mover" without the concept of motion, nor any conception of motion without the concept of a mover. These two now provide the perfect illustration of what it means to be "interdependent," which for Nāgārjuna all phenomena ultimately are.
We cannot conceive of motion and the mover as identical. This would be absurd. It would mean that things that were in motion could never stop moving. And it would mean that things in motion couldn't perform two distinct actions, like running and sweating at the same time, for example. However, we cannot conceive of them as two totally separate things either. If this was the case, we have to give weight to the idea of a stationary mover or motion existing without objects that move.
Nature is not carved up into objects and properties that get instantiated in them, motion or otherwise. What is there is merely a flow of events that we split up according to our present needs. Nothing has an essence from its own side. Of course, the moral of this section is not that we live in a static universe where no motion ever occurs. Motion is clearly a part of our reality. But motion is "empty" in the sense that it only ever exists in a dependent way. That is to say, any conception of motion we have is relational: it depends on our choice to identify one entity as the same over time, which is conventional and further dependent on other phenomena. [23]
In a continued breakdown of possible choices for whatever is a kind of fundamental self-essence of reality, Nāgārjuna takes up the idea that it is ultimately sensation. One might argue that even if motion is not inherently real, our conception of it must be. When we talk about conception here, we are talking about what comes to us via our five senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but also mind. Remember that mind is considered a sense in the Buddhist tradition.
Nāgārjuna takes up the sense of vision as his example, but it applies equally for the other five. If vision inherently existed, it would not be dependent on external objects in order to see. But "vision" cannot see on its own. It can only emerge in relation to external objects as well as the organs that vision operates within. If vision exists inherently, why is it limited to only occur in certain things like people and not in others like stones? Vision, like all the other senses, only makes sense as something that emerges relationally and in dependence on other phenomena. So it cannot have self-essence.
Another possibility is that it is the aggregates that have self-essence. These came up in the opening discussion of non-self, but to reiterate: they are form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The argument against one will, once again, apply for the others, so Nāgārjuna only argues against "form." If the idea of "form" sounds too antiquated and abstract, one can replace the word with "matter" because that is really what the word means. I will continue to use the word "form," but don't be mistaken: "matter" is a 1:1 translation of it. At face value this seems like the most "solid" and "stable" of them all and thus as the best candidate for something with real, inherent existence.
If we accept the idea that nothing exists without a cause, then form itself would have to arise in virtue of a cause as well. But if this is the case, then the cause of form must either be form or non-form. If form is caused by form, we have an infinite regress and never actually explain how form emerges. If form is caused by non-form, we have an absurd consequence of something immaterial giving rise to something material.
Form itself without a cause
Is not possible or tenable.
Therefore, think about form, but
Do not construct theories about form.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 4:5 [24]
What ultimately confuses us is thinking of "form" as an entity in and of itself. We never find pure "form" or matter, but only find material THINGS in the world. "Form" itself is an abstraction that we create out of various things that are experienced as being material. There is no way to conceive of "form" from its own side because it has no self-essence. When we do try to put something called "form" into the causal picture of the world, we run into difficulties. But in an everyday sense, we can certainly say that our perception and experience of the material world is dependent on form. It is only when we try to take "form" as an entity with self-essence that we become confused.
An opponent at this point may accept the conclusion that form itself is empty, but argue that the characteristics that forms up are real. In an ancient Indian conception, this means the five classical elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space. Under this conception of the world, the most basic elements of experience are things like fire-atoms and water-atoms. This is where the title of this chapter can be a little misleading, for the ancient Indians these "elements" can be seen as basically consisting of characteristics, like heat for fire and wetness for water. Therefore, the propositions is that the atoms themselves cannot be said to have self-essence, but that something like heat inheres in the fire-atoms and wetness inheres in the water-atoms. It is this which allows us to distinguish these element-atoms from each other. The opponent thus argues that at least these characteristics must have self-essence.
The issue here is that these characteristics that had self-essence would have to inhere either in objects that had no characteristics or in objects that had characteristics. The first choice is immediately absurd. The argument here takes the same line as David Hume in arguing that it is impossible to conceive of an object that has no properties. Even if we imagine the most barren, indivisible, empty particular, it has the properties of being barren, being indivisible, and being empty. And when the bare particulars of experience already have characteristics, it doesn't make sense how they could combine with new free-floating ones or why they would need to.
In fact, the idea of characteristics being free-floating and detached from objects makes no sense in the first place. We cannot conceive of objects without characterististics, but we cannot conceive of characteristics without objects either. Properties like heat or wetness make no sense without something that they inhere in, even if the thing they inhere in is as minimal and basic as a fire-atom or water-atom.
At this point, it's worth making a slight bridge to the modern state of physics and think about its relation to this chapter. Clearly, the idea of fire-atoms and water-atoms is quaint today. When we look for a candidate for whatever the fundamental "stuff" of the world is today, we have continually found things that are more fundamental and basic, like electrons, quarks, gluons, and strings. Even "atoms" are dependent on more fundamental phenomena. It may be possible that we will discover some thing which is as far as we can go. But it is notable that the further we seem to go, the more dependent the phenomena become on our conception and theoretical input. No one will ever directly experience a string. As Westerhoff puts it, a fire-atom at least has the advantage of being somewhat related to the phenomenon it is supposed to provide the essence of. We could never say that about a string. In this sense, it seems that the discoveries of modern physics are quite consonant with Nāgārjuna's position in that they are totally dependent on the conceptualizer. [25]
From this it follows that there is no characterized
And no existing characteristic.
Nor is there any entity
Other than the characterized and the characteristic.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 5:5 [26]
This verse, which sounds like a contradiction, again hints at the difference between ultimate and conventional truth. We find no characteristics or things that are characterized when we assume that to exist they must have self-essence. But we have no way of conceiving of the world outside of characteristics and things characterized. And this itself is perfectly fine. Characteristics and the things that they characterize are interdependent and empty of self-essence. And for conventional speech, this is perfectly functional. We only run into problems when we try to ground one as being more fundamental than the other due to having self-essence.
Up until now, the content of the MMK has been very abstract and theoretical, but this chapter connects the above points to something more immediately troubling to the mind of the Buddhist practitioner: the problem of desire. As humans trapped in samsara, we are plagued with desire. It is what causes our suffering. But following the above examples, we can say that it is a mistake to think of desire existing on one side and a desirous individual existing on the other. A desirous individual, insofar as he is a desirous individual, cannot exist without desire. And desire cannot exist without a desirous individual to exist in.
When we try to think of desire and a desirous one as totally distinct, we run into problems. At first we might be tempted to think that "we" will remain while the "desire" which is alien to us will be expunged. But this makes no sense. Desire and a desirous one must occur together. And if they do always occur together, on what grounds do we say that they are totally separate phenomena? On the other hand, if they were totally identical, we couldn't speak of them occuring simultaneously at all, as it makes no sense to say that something occurs simultaneously with itself.
If we cannot say that desire and the desirous one are truly distinct or truly identical, what are they? They are interdependent. Insofar as desire exists, a desirous one also exists. And insofar as a desirous one exists, desire also exists. This point is important to dwell on: It means that desire, the scourge that keeps us from exiting samsara, is ultimately empty and dependently arisen. That is, it does not exist with any self-essence. And this is a point to rejoice in. If desire had self-essence, it would be impossible to get rid of. But because it comes into existence in dependence on certain conditions, it is possible to overcome.
This chapter is the one that Garfield reads as the conclusion of the first argumentative suite. It is quite a tour-de-force. Its arguments get very granular and abstract and can be difficult to keep track of. However, it also takes us to our first glimpse of the most important final points of the MMK and of the entire Madhyamaka philosophy. These insights are as subtle and fine as they are sublime. And the impetus for this is the last candidate at this stage for something with self-essence: Dependent arising itself.
Garfield notes that the opponent in this section argues two points that are very closely linked but not very clearly distinguished. The first point is that if all things are dependently arisen, then at the very least dependent arising itself must ultimately be real and inherent. The second point is that if dependent arising were empty of self-essence, there could be no phenomena at all. That is because a phenomenon is defined as that which arises, persists, and ceases. Phenomena come to arise, persist, and cease because they are dependently arisen. Since there are clearly phenomena at an empirical level, the opponent claims that dependent arising must have self-essence. [27]
If arising were produced
Then it would also have the three characteristics.
If arising is not produced,
How could the characteristics of the produced exist?
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 7:1 [28]
This extremely precise argument begins by arguing that dependent arising, as a phenomenon, must either be produced by conditions or not produced by conditions. If it is produced, it would have what Nāgārjuna calls the "three characteristics." The three in question are arising, persisting, and ceasing, which all phenomena, as dependently arisen, have. All phenomena that are dependently arisen arise, persist, and cease. But what about dependent arising itself?
Before dissecting what it would mean for dependent arising itself to have the three characteristics, it seems that the alternative of dependent arising not being produced is not a viable alternative. This would mean that it is uncaused and unproduced by anything else. But this contradicts the very thesis that everything is dependently arisen. It begs the question to say that dependent arising itself is not produced.
So it seems like the only viable option we have is to say that dependent arising must possess the three characteristics of arising, persisting, and ceasing. That is because if it had some other characteristics, we would then have to ask if THOSE characteristics had the characteristics of arising, persisting, and ceasing. And we have an infinite regress. For anything to exist, there must be arising, persisting, and ceasing.
With this in mind, an opponent proposes two tiers of arising: All phenomena are dependently arisen, meaning that they are interdependent and thus impermanent. But the inderdependence of any particular phenomenon depends on a more fundamental arising. That basic arising is the very fact that things are dependently arisen itself. That is foundational, and then all empirical phenomena in the world are dependently arisen in virtue of that original arising.
Of course, Nāgārjuna's reply is predictable: if there is a basic arising, does THAT arising arise in dependence on other phenomena, or is it non-arisen? If it arises in dependence on other phenomena, it must either arise in dependence on other dependently arisen phenomena or in dependence on phenomena that are not dependently arisen. This would mean that dependent arising is dependent on basic arising, which is dependent on dependently arisen phenomena, which makes the explanation circular. But if basic arising depends on phenomena that are not dependently arisen, then we have to ask what phenomena THOSE phenomena depend on, and we have an infinite regress.
If we sidestep this difficulty by saying that basic arising is non-arisen, this contradicts the entire reason that we proposed it: to explain that every phenomenon, including dependent arising itself, arises in virtue of something more fundamental. If basic arising can be non-arisen, why take the extra step? Why not just make dependently arisen phenomena themselves be non-arisen? Of course, that option still just begs the question.
At this point, the opponent proposes an analogy:
Just as a butterlamp
Illuminates itself as well as others,
So arising gives rise to itself
And to other arisen things.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 7:8 [29]
The analogy goes that a lamp illuminates both itself and other things around it. The opponent thus says that in just the same manner, dependent arising provides the ground for its own arising and for the arising of all other things. This would make all phenomena dependent on dependent arising, but dependent arising itself would have self-essence and inherently exist.
This analogy does not work for several reasons and Nāgārjuna dismantles it very thoroughly. To abbreviate it to the most important point: The analogy is supposed to prove that dependent arising is distinct from dependently arisen things in that dependent arising itself has self-essence while dependently arisen things are empty. But a lamp is illuminated in exactly the same manner as everything around it. So it does not make sense to say that dependent arising can have a different status than other things that are dependently arisen.
So we remain stuck with the original issue. The opponent claims that every dependently arisen thing depends on a more ontologically fundamental arising. We have two choices, neither of which have any explanatory power:
1. This fundamental arising arises in dependence on something more fundamental. We would then have to ask whether THAT more fundamental thing arises in dependence of anything, and so we have an infinite regress.
2. This fundamental arising is non-arisen. There is no reason to be found why THIS level can be non-arisen when everything else cannot be, and so we beg the question.
Now that the whole business of dependent arising possessing a self-essence has been shown to be incoherent, we can describe what it means for all phenomena to be empty, including dependent arising itself. The truth is that we have no need to suggest dependent arising as an entity in and of itself in the midst of dependently arisen phenomena. One reason for this is the quite obvious one that phenomena arise from other phenomena and not from arising itself. A hurricane arises from wind, rain, ocean water, warm temperatures, and so on, and not from dependent arising itself. But there is a less obvious reason as well. If we could isolate dependent arising from dependently arisen phenomena and make it more ontologically fundamental, it would no longer be necessarily connected to arisen phenomena and would thus no longer serve as an adequate explanatory ground for them in the first place.
Whatever is dependently arisen,
Such a thing is essentially peaceful.
Therefore that which is arising and arising itself
Are themselves peaceful.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 7:16 [30]
What does this curious passage mean when it says that what is dependently arisen and thus arising iself are essentially "peaceful?" It means something to this effect: In our unreflective, everyday grasping, we tend to think that things have a permanent, fixed essence of their own. Upon reflection, we understand that all phenomena arise, persist, and cease, and so that they are "really" impermanent, dependently arisen, and empty of self-essence. But at an ultimate level, we understand that precisely because they are empty, there are really no "phenomena" there to arise, persist, and cease in the first place.
Much like motion in Chapter 2, we can only understand arising, persisting, and ceasing as relations and thus as dependent, empty phenomena. For good measure, Nāgārjuna runs through proofs for each of these. In abbreviated form, they look like this:
Arising cannot occur in phenomena with self-essence or in phenomena that are non-existent. Phenomena with self-essence cannot arise, because they would have to be eternal and independent of anything else. Non-exisent phenomena cannot arise, because that would mean that they would exist after all. So arising can only be a property of phenomena that are conventionally existent but empty of self-essence. As such, arising also must be conventional and empty.
Persisting can only be the moment between arising and ceasing. As all phenomena are impermanent, as soon as a phenomenon is born, it begins ceasing. Persisting is then an infinitely small single instant. And this means it has no temporal extent in which to persist. This means that anything we conventionally say persists is not really the same thing and can only be said to persist to the degree that we assign a conventional identity to something that is in flux. As such, persisting also must be conventional and empty.
Ceasing must occur in things that persist or do not persist. If they persist, they must do so in virtue of having self-essence, which means that they could not cease. If they do not persist, they are not truly existent phenomena in the first place, wich also means that they could not cease. Ceasing can then only apply to phenomena that we conventionally identify as having existed and then not existed. As such, ceasing also must be conventional and empty.
Of course, we speak about things arising, persisting, and ceasing with perfect coherence in our everyday speech. That is because none of the above implies that there is no sense in which things arise, persist, or cease. The point is that arising, persisting, and ceasing cannot be understood as entities of their own with any kind of self-essence. Their mode of existence is nothing but conventional, because that is the only way that anything CAN exist.
This last point is key and deserves special attention. The crude understanding of the doctrine of emptiness is that things really exist out there in nature with an "essence" of their own, but that it just so happens that the essence of everything is empty when it could have been full instead. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. What Nāgārjuna seeks to do is to deny that the idea of essence is even a coherent concept at all. To say that things are "merely" empty is to recognize the validity of the idea of self-essence, which is precisely what is denied. To paraphrase Jay L. Garfield, Nāgārjuna's position is rather that no matter how much we look, we only find dependence, relativity, and emptiness, and the dependence, relativity, and emptiness of that very dependence, relativity, and emptiness. [31]
Chapters 1-7 constituted a coherent argument suite focused primarily on explaining the emptiness of all elements of traditional Buddhist ontology. Chapters 8-13 focus on it from a more "internal" angle, focused primarily on elements related to subjective, first-person experience and the nature of being a subject or agent. Opponents in this section include traditional non-Buddhists who somehow or another reify the concept of a "self," but also Buddhist schools that Nāgārjuna sees as essentially trying to reintroduce the concept of a self and thus of self-essence through the backdoor.
Though not named, the school under closest scrutiny here is the Yogācāra school, which is considered in the Tibetan tradition to be the school that is closest to the Madhyamaka in terms of realizing the truth of emptiness, but faulty in that they lapsed back into a form of idealism which claimed that a form of mind or consciousness was at the basis of all this emptiness. There are many parallels to idealism in the western tradition, both including the classical idealism of George Berkeley and also the more refined transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant.
This opponent will essentially agree with everything proposed thus far, but argue that at least one thing must have self-essence, which is the subject. This does not mean the "self" in the crude sense that all Buddhists reject, and the differences will become clear soon. The idea goes like this: By accepting that phenomena are empty of self-essence, we accept that they have a conventional or nominal existence. These are two sides of the same coin and are really two ways of saying the same thing. Nāgārjuna would of course wholeheartedly agree with this. But for things to exist conventionally means that there must be some act of conceptualizing them. And how can there be conceptualizing without a subject there to conceptualize? Of course, a subject conceptualizing something is just a special case of an agent performing an action. So we may broaden the question: How can there be an action without some agent to perform that action?
However, it would make no sense for an agent to have self-essence. If something had self-essence, it would have to be eternal and constant, which means that it could not change. But an agent by definition must be capable of change in order to perform an action! Of course, an agent cannot be totally non-existent either, as then there would be no way to understand what is referred to by the name of agent. If something exists but does not exist with self-essence, this means that it must exist on a conventional level and be empty, which of course Nāgārjuna claims is true for an agent.
The problem here is that we have an instinct to make the agent more ontologically fundamental than the action when they are in fact equally dependent on each other. This makes sense as we obviously cannot conceive of an action without an agent to perform it. But by the same token, we cannot conceive of an agent without action either. For this reason we should say that agent and action are interdependent. Neither one can be made more "real" than the other or come before the other ontologically.
As far as the subject goes, the same applies. But the fundamental misunderstanding is primarily due to the confines of our language. Whenever we talk about the process of a self being grasped at, we are forced to reify the concept of a self by saying that "we" are the ones who lay claim to various actions and thus appropriate them as a "subject." But this leads to the obvious question: WHAT is it that appropriates the phenomena if not a subject?
What is in fact the case is that insofar as phenomena are appropriated, there is a subject that appropriates them. And insofar as there is a subject, phenomena are appropriated. Neither comes before the other. And in fact this is the only way that real action could emerge. It is impossible to explain the emergence of action and agent if we conceive of either to have self-essence. The activity of agents can only occur if they are empty.
If activity, etc., are not possible,
Entities and nonentities are not possible.
If there are neither entities nor nonentities,
Effects cannot arise from them.
If there are no effects, liberation and
Paths to higher realms will not exist.
So all of activity
Would be without purpose.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 8:5-6 [32]
It is worth remembering the profound spiritual importance of what we are discussing at this point. The Sanskrit word generally translated as "desire" in English is "taṇhā," which literally means something like "thirst." For the Buddha, it is the sole cause of our suffering. I have translated it as "desire" in accordance with standard practice in this lecture, but a word I particularly like to use in translating it is "clinging" or "grasping." I prefer it because this point gets at its most subtle and refined meaning, and I can explain why more thoroughly at this point.
When we use the word "desire," we tend to think of the most crude and base ways that we experience this "grasping." We grasp after money, after fancy new products, after people we are attracted to, after pleasurable experiences, and so on. And we experience suffering at the end of the day, because these things are never promised and never last forever. But "grasping" means something much more far-reaching and subtle in its truest sense.
Why do we continue to be deluded and believe that we have a "self?" Because we continue "grasping" at certain phenomena. We continue to hold onto a certain phenomenon, or thought, or memory and lay claim to it as "mine," just as we might hold onto a physical item and lay claim to it as "mine." And both cause us suffering for the same reason: Because we get attached to them and want the object and our relation to it to never change, when both inevitably will.
And yet, the moral of this section is a positive one: Because there is no self-essence in the agent or in the action, change is possible. Because things are empty, we can become free of the attachment that keeps us bound in samsara.
A more subtle position might deny that agent or action has self-essence, but that subjective awareness itself must have a self-essence. The argument runs that if objects are "grasped," there must at least be a fact of subjectivity that allows that "grasping," even if it is not owned by any individual egos. This also does not necessarily mean that the subjectivity has to be a kind of eternal, all-seeing eye that lurks beneath all phenomena. The opponent may claim that it is a number of infinitesmal instances of perception that we falsely attribute numerical identity to. But that subjectivity is necessary for there to be any experience or objects that get experienced.
The rebuttal to this first denies that there is ample evidence to posit something called "subjectivity" on empiricist grounds. But even if there is this "subjectivity," it seems as though the very act of naming it and acknowledging it turns it into an object of experience. This is an issue when it is supposed to be the ground for all things to show up as objects of experience. That is to say, it is supposed to be the one thing that is not supposed to show up as an object.
This argument is also very one-sided. If subjectivity is supposed to exist by its own power by possessing self-essence, why can we not say the same thing about the object that it perceives? Don't be mistaken. Nāgārjuna is not arguing something as sophistical as all relations being symmetrical. As Garfield puts it, just because the book is on the table does not mean that the table is on the book. [33] But that is because we can imagine a book that is not on a table and a table that is not on a book. The opponent's argument for the ontological priority of the subject is that we cannot imagine an object of experience without it. But we cannot imagine a subject without an object of experience either.
Of course, this is precisely what Nāgārjuna believes: That both are mutually dependent on each other, because both are ultimately empty and only conventionally real. Neither can have self-essence because both depend on each other.
The idea of both subject and object being empty of self-essence proves a very hard one to accept. It is so difficult that Nāgārjuna dedicates an entire chapter to an argument from a particularly able opponent. This opponent accepts the conclusion that all perceptions, indeed just about all things that make up our experience of reality itself, are "empty," because they are all conceptually constructed. But this opponent does not accept the idea that the subject is dependent on the object perceived. The subject, he thinks, must have self-essence. Again, this concept of a "subject" need not be instantiated as an individual ego. But he claims that the subjectivity must exist as a ground for things to be perceived.
The analogy here is of fuel and fire. Fire is completely dependent on fuel to come into existence. But fuel can exist without fire. The opponent argues that just as fuel gives rise to fire without being dependent on it to exist, so the subject gives rise to perceptions without depending on them for its own existence. Why can subject and perception not be thought of in this way?
Nāgārjuna's reply is characteristically thorough and exhaustive, and much of it touches on points that the opponent's argument doesn't really hinge on. But the most important crux of the argument is this: If fuel exists with its own self-essence, how can it come to interact with fire and contribute to the process of burning? It makes no sense to think of fire and fuel as identical. This would mean that fuel could start burning on its own whether fire was present or not, which makes no sense. But they cannot be totally different either. That is because fuel cannot just set off a fire and then be disconnected from it. When fire exists, fuel must be there as a part of it. There is no way to explain how the two interact without them being mutually dependent.
The opponent might ask it this point how exactly fuel is supposed to be on an equal footing as fire when it comes to dependence. This seems strange to say as it is clear that fuel gives rise to fire but fire very much does not give rise to fuel. But this is a misunderstanding. Being mutually dependent does not mean that all their relations are exactly symmetrical. Fuel is dependent on fire in the sense that the concept of "fuel" makes no sense without the concept of fire. We can talk about logs or paper or gas or whatever else without the concept of fire, but those concepts on their own are not equivalent to the concept of "fuel" at all. But when we think of those things as "fuel," even if as fuel that is not yet creating fire, we already have fire in our mind as a conception. But we do this when we are trying to provide an explanatory ground for fire in the first place! In other words, we are begging the question.
Of course, this paradox only occurs when you believe that one of the two phenomena must be ontologically prior and more fundamental than the other via something like self-essence. For Nāgārjuna, it is a natural consequence of mutual dependence that we cannot think of fuel apart from fire or fire apart from fuel. And of course, this whole exercise has really been about the subject and the perceptions that it entertains. And these are, of course, similarly interdependent and empty.
Though there will eventually be more work done on the nature of the self in the MMK, for now we can see that the self is as empty as any other phenomenon. It appears as a conceptual construct. But one might think that certainly the fact of its impermanence and cyclical existence must have self-essence. "We" are born, age, and die, because we are "inherently" impermanent and subject to change. To deny this would be to deny the very fundamentals of the Buddha's teachings.
But this is a case of not seeing things from the perspective of ultimate truth. Nāgārjuna argues as follows: When we stop being attached to the "selfhood" of any object, including ourselves, we stop putting "boundaries" around the existence of that phenomenon in any way. For that reason, it makes no sense to say that anything is "impermanent," because there is no phenomenon to put boundaries around.
When asked about the beginning,
The Great Sage said that nothing is known of it.
Cyclic existence is without end and beginning.
So there is no beginning or end.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 11:1 [34]
An example will help illustrate the point: When is the moment when a tree stops being a tree and goes out of existence? When it falls over? When it starts decomposing? When it is cut up and turned into lumber? For that matter when does it start being a tree? When it first grows bark? When it sprouts branches? When it grows out of the ground as a sprout?
And the same point applies about our self as well. Of course, this point is even more prescient in a worldview that believes in reincarnation. But we do not even need to entertain the idea of reincarnation to make this point. When we stop existing? When our body ceases vitality? Why not see our decomposition and absorption into the earth as the next step of our existence? It's not like we count ourselves as not existing during our time asleep or during a coma even though there is a break in the continuity of our consciousness there as well. And our "beginning" is just as indistinct. Is it the moment we start to form memories? The moment we exit the womb? The moment the sperm enters the egg?
To set any boundaries as the beginning or end of our existence or the beginning or end of any other phenomenon is merely conventional. The very foundation of something existing as continuing across a bounded period of time cannot be established if we have no way of establishing its beginning or end. Nor can we even chart the "identity" of a phenomenon when even this is conventional. On what authority do we say that we are the "same" being now as we were when we were three years old if we cannot establish any boundaries to what "we" are?
On one level then, we can say that nothing truly persists and that its continued existence is a mere illusion. But we can say that by the same measure, its arising and cessation will be similarly illusory. We never observe something pass out of existence without giving rise to other phenomena that it is intertwined with. A tree does not suddenly disappear from the causal nexus upon its "end," but rots and gives rise to mulch. How do we draw boundaries between the tree and the mulch in any way that is more than convention? Indeed, the whole causal process would be incoherent if things really did pass out of existence. How could something give rise to something else if it completely stopped existing first?
Conventionally, things arise, persist, and cease. But from an ultimate perspective, nothing ever arises, persists, or ceases, because there are no phenomena to arise, persist, or cease in the first place. Nothing is ever "carved up" for us out of the nexus of interrelation and dependence. Thus, just as there is nothing there to be permanent, there is nothing there to be impermanent either outside of conventional designation.
The first Noble Truth claims that all existence is suffering. I will continue to translate "dukkha" as "suffering" here despite my qualms with the word sounding too harsh. To say that suffering is not ultimately real might seem to be the equivalent of denying another foundational claim of the Buddha: that life is characterized by suffering. Surely we must at least be able to say that suffering has self-essence, in that case.
Most of the argument in this chapter features a reframing of the tetralemma proving the incoherence of causation in Chapter 1 and arguments about individuals and properties in Chapter 2. In abbreviated form, the arguments read as follows:
1. Suffering is not caused by itself:
Suffering is the consequence of ignorance, grasping, action, karma, and so on. So it makes no sense to say that it is caused by itself.
2. Suffering is not caused by something other than itself:
To make this claim requires us to identify something that is totally distinct from suffering. Not only is there nothing that is not characterized by suffering according to Buddhist doctrine, but even if there was, it would be impossible to explain how something totally distinct from suffering could give rise to it, for all the reasons explained in Chapter 1.
3. Suffering is not caused by itself and something other than itself:
Neither can be causally relevant to suffering as per the above two arguments, so it makes no sense to combine the two to explain it.
4. Suffering is not caused by nothing at all:
No entity can arise from nothing at all, and we clearly see suffering arise from some very identifiable phenomena in our daily existence.
Of course, the moral is not that there is no suffering whatsoever. There is quite clearly plenty of suffering in our daily existence. But its existence, like the existence of all other phenomena, is conventional. And that result is something to rejoice over. Because it is empty and dependently arisen, it is something that we can become free of.
The second main argumentative suite ends in this chapter with our second glimpse of the most sublime and refined height of the argument. And it emerges out of the last and perhaps best candidate for something with self-essence: emptiness itself. Nāgārjuna has consistently argued that all things are empty. In this chapter, all things are considered to be "compounded" in that they are composed of simpler phenomena. This is one way that they are empty, along with being caused by other things and being conceptually constructed. The argument goes that even the smallest, indivisible atom at the very least has a left and right side, and its left and right sides also have left and right sides, and so on. All things, then, are compounded, which is enough of a reason to say that they are all empty. Should we not then say that the "real" nature of phenomena is that they are empty? And if we do not affirm that, do we not lapse into contradiction?
When we see an object like a chariot, we will mistake it for something real and substanial with self-essence. But this is an illusion. There is no "thing" there called a chariot. But at that point, we want to ask: What is it that causes that illusion? What are we having an illusion about if there is no "real" substantial thing lurking underneath? It cannot be a non-existent chariot, as that would essentially be arguing that the illusion would be caused by nothing.
The illusion is not caused by a chariot with real self-essence. Nor is it caused by a non-existent chariot. It is caused by an EMPTY chariot. This is a subtle but immensely important point. In fact, it is central to the entire MMK. The chariot, like all phenomena, is EMPTY but it is not FALSE. That is because the chariot exists as a matter of conventional TRUTH. We talk about ultimate truth and conventional TRUTH, not ultimate truth and conventional falsehood. Truth, at its most fundamental level, means something that has reliable predictive power. And conventional truth very much has that. Push over a glass, and the table will get wet with a remarkable regularity. And that does not change even when all of these concepts are empty constructs.
A similar argument asks what it is that constantly changes when there is really nothing but emptiness. But the whole way that this statement is phrased makes it impossible to answer. This statement is phrased in a way that conceives of "change" as we normally do: as something maintaining its identity but changing its properties. But that idea is incoherent. Something can only really be "identical" with itself. It makes no sense to say that two distinct phenomena are "identical" with each other, because if they can be distinguished, they must have some difference. But if something really was identical with itself, it could never change. To change is to become a different thing, but this means that we are really comparing two different things, not comparing the same thing over time! [35]
None of this presents a problem if we abandon the idea that there are real things in the world with their own self-essence. If we accept that everything is empty and dependently arisen, then it becomes very easy to talk about things changing in the way we normally do. We can only discuss change meaningfully when we accept that the entities under consideration are neither identical with other phenomena nor totally distinct from them.
The victorious ones have said
That emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.
For whomever emptiness is a view,
That one will accomplish nothing.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13:8 [36]
Now we can nail down the truly important point: The "real nature" of phenomena is not emptiness. Things do not have emptiness as their "real nature," because phenomena HAVE no "real nature" and CAN have no "real nature." This is a difficult point because our language makes it very hard to speak about emptiness without making it sound like a grounding, foundational theory, when it has to be the very opposite of that. Emptiness is not the way things happen to be when they could have been some other way. Emptiness is the only way that things can exist at all.
The doctrine of conventional truth and ultimate truth may have originally sounded strange, as if we are expected to believe in and abide by two contradictory things at once. But this is a complete misunderstanding. To say that things exist in a conventional sense IS to say that they are empty at the ultimate level.
To say that everything is empty is itself an empty statement. This does not refute the point that everything is empty; it confirms it. Everything is empty, including the statement that emptiness itself is the nature of all phenomena. Nāgārjuna's commentator Candrakīrti uses the analogy of someone who enters a shop and is told that there are no wares for sale and then asks to buy a "no wares." Ultimately then, Nāgārjuna does not affirm the "theory" of emptiness, because there is no "theory" of emptiness. There is only emptiness. [36]
At a certain level, however, this is a truth which cannot be conveyed in language. It can be shown but not said. I am not the first to compare this position with the end of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which says that to come to a clear view of the world, we must surmount the very propositions that got us there and "throw away the ladder after we have climbed up on it." But there is an equally applicable analogy in the Buddhist tradition itself, namely in the Alagaddūpama Sūtra. This sutra claims that to cross a treacherous river, we need a sturdy raft. But after we have crossed to the other side, the raft does us no good anymore. There is no need to burden ourselves by carrying it on our back. We can simply let it go. [37] And in just the same manner, although the teaching that everything is empty is necessary to get us to see the world properly, even that teaching ultimately must be thrown away.
The third argumentative suite seems repetitive and confusing at first glance, as it repeats some points from the second suite. The best way to think of it is that it focuses on the more "external" part of our experience of the world as opposed to the internal, subjective experience which was the focus of the second suite. Even if there is repetition, some of the points repeated are difficult enough that it is helpful to go over them multiple times from differen angles.
The suite opens with proposing yet another candidate for self-essence, namely "connection." Chapter 13 ended the second argumentative suite by arguing that all phenomena were empty because all phenomena are compounded. That is, they are made up of simpler phenomena that "connect" with each other in order to form more complex phenomena. The opponent argues that even if things like causation and change do not have self-essence, at the very least this compoundedness must have self-essence.
But this compoundedness cannot be a candidate for self-essence. Things can only be "inherently" compounded if we can say that the constituent parts that make up the phenomenon are distinct from the compounded phenomenon that they make up. But these cannot be totally identical nor distinct. Nāgārjuna uses the example of visual perception. It is a compounded phenomenon in that it is made up of a seer, sight, and the thing seen, for example. But these cannot be identical as visual perception itself. That would mean that a seer could never stop seeing. But they cannot be totally distinct either, as we cannot understand any of these components in isolation from each other and from visual perception itself.
Something compounded like visual perception lacks inherent identity. But if it lacks inherent identity, it must also lack inherent difference. The only way we can say that components are distinct from the whole is if the whole has an inherent identity of its own that they can emerge as different from. And that inherent identity never presents itself. The difference between the constituent components and the compounded phenomenon can only be understood relationally, like motion and the mover. And so we must say that not only are compounded phenomena empty of self-essence, but even their status as BEING compounded of parts is empty of self-essence.
The conclusion of the above section is that if there is no inherent identity to any phenomenon, there can be no inherent difference to any either. This is a powerful and important enough point that Nāgārjuna devotes a chapter to generalizing it. We know by now that no phenomenon has a nature that is eternal and independent of anything else. That means that no phenomenon has self-essence. But that also means that there cannot be anything whose essence is essentially different from any phenomenon either.
If the entity is not established,
A nonentity is not established.
An entity that has become different
Is a nonentity, people say.
Those who see essence and essential difference
And entities and nonentities,
They do not see
The truth taught by the Buddha.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 15:5-6 [38]
That is to say, if there is no essential "tree-ness" in a tree, there can be no essential "non-tree-ness" in any phenomenon either. The only way for there to be an essential "non-tree-ness" is for there to be "tree-ness." These are two sides of the same coin. And of course, the same applies for the concept of emptiness. A common misconception of emptiness is that it is a nihilistic way of thinking, where we only see void where things once really existed. But this is a way of thought that still affirms the mistaken idea of self-essence. The idea that things are "truly" empty and vacant is as mistaken as the idea that they are "truly" eternal and substantial.
Remember that Nāgārjuna's tradition is called the Madhyamaka or "Middle Way" school. And now we can see what two extremes his school charts a "middle way" between. One claims that things are eternal and substantial, and the other claims that nothing is real at all. Nāgārjuna ends this chapter by making this point explicit:
To say "it is" is to grasp for permanence.
To say "it is not" is to adopt the view of nihilism.
Therefore a wise person
Does not say "exists" or "does not exist"
"Whatever exists through its essence
Cannot be nonexistent" is eternalism.
"It existed before but doesn't now"
Entails the error of nihilism.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 15:5-6 [38]
Nothing with self-essence could change, because it would need to give up its inherent, eternal existence. But nothing that was non-existent could change either, since there would be nothing there to change in the first place. The only way one can understand the phenomenal world in a way that accords with our experience is to conceive of things as empty. The idea of emptiness might have seemed to be a nihilistic doctrine that destroyed the integrity of all our phenomenal experience and reduced it to void. But it is the opposite. It is the two extremes of eternalism and nihilism that destroy our everyday, conventional experience. It is emptiness that justifies and sustains it.
This insight was beautifully expressed by the Zen patriarch Qingyuan Weixin in a saying which is often erroneously attributed to Dougen:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains,
and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to
the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not
waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just
that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.
Qingyuan Weixin, The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp
22, Taishou Tripiṭaka 51.2077, [39]
The opponent contends that even if there are no inherently existent entities or non-entities, we have a conception of them which is deluded. It is our grasping after such conceptions that keeps us bound in samsara and unable to achieve release from that bondage, which is nirvana. As such, the opponent charges that this bondage at the very least must have self-essence. What else could be a cause for our delusion?
Nāgārjuna argues that the concept of bondage dissolves upon examination. The ones who are bound in samsara are us sentient beings. Sentient beings, as phenomena, must either be permanent or impermanent. If we are permanent, we cannot remain stuck in cyclic existence, as transmigrating through cyclic existence requires us to be able to change. And if we are impermanent, "we" cannot transmigrate either, as "we" do not endure as the same thing through time and thus lack an identity that continues to be in bondage.
The relation of bondage to the bound sentient being must be like motion and the mover. To the extent that there is a bound sentient being, there is bondage, and to the extent that there is bondage, there is a bound sentient being. Bondage cannot have self-essence of its own, just as the bound sentient beings cannot. And of course, this entails that release from bondage (nirvana) cannot have self-essence either. And the spiritual import of this is great:
"I, without grasping, will pass beyond sorrow,
And I will attain nirvāṇa," one says.
Whoever grasps like this
Has a great grasping.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 16:9 [40]
In order to escape the bondage of samsara, we must cease all grasping. But this even includes grasping to the idea of samsara and nirvana itself. Even these are conceptual constructs and are ultimately empty with no existence from their own side. The profound importance of this will be more thoroughly examined in Chapter 25.
In the process of laying out the ultimate emptiness of everything, including the foundations of the Buddhist worldview, we next come to the idea of karma. How do we explain the concept of karma if everything is empty? What is it that causes our actions to have certain effects that are "owned" and have real causal weight if everything is ultimately empty?
If this sounds too religious or dogmatic, you may simply think of it as asking why certain actions have certain effects and not others. We know that good actions and bad actions have different results. That is how we distinguish them as good or bad actions in the first place. Of course, we are usually deluded about what is truly good or bad in our unenlightened state. But this is not brought up to make an ethical point but an ontological one. Since some actions result in "good" outcomes and others in "bad" ones, the thought goes that there must be something "there" that remains in existence until its consequences are observed.
By this point, the opponent will not have recourse to the more gross mistaken views about how karma could exist and operate. For example, it would be absurd to suggest that an action is performed and that this action itself remains in existence until its consequences are observed. That is because actions clearly can have consequences long after the actions themselves have expired. For example, a soldier with trauma might still have a fear of loud noises caused by experiencing an explosion on the battlefield, even if the explosion itself in no way still occurs. This is, of course, even more potent in a Buddhist worldview which sees karma as reaching across innumerable lifespans.
The opponent crafts an allegory of action as being like a promissory note and its consequence as being like the debt entailed by it. The action of borrowing money was momentary and no longer exists in any real sense, but the consequence of the debt could be potentially infinite in terms of the scope of its influence.
This opponent is also careful to not be misunderstood: He very much is not arguing that the note itself puts out a kind of latent karmic seed that lies dormant and goes on to bloom in later states of affairs. This idea of karma as what Garfield refers to as a sort of cosmic system of "credit" is a grotesque over-simplification. He instead proposes that each individual moment in the continuum of existence is only caused by the moment directly before it. Our common-sense understanding of time entails that. But past actions continue to have influence in the sense that each moment is "moulded" by the total aggregate of previous moments as they are "summed up" in one particular state before it. [41] A fitting analogy might be the actions of previous millennia causing some effect to the topogrophy of a present landscape by the imprints they have left in the buildup of layers of sediment.
This position is brilliantly argued and is almost correct, but it has one fatal flaw: The opponent still grasps to the idea of actions as being inherently impermanent. In doing so, he allows a trace of self-essence to remain at the basis of the worldview. The reasoning here is reminiscent of Chapter 11. At first, we realize that phenomena lack permanence, and so we conclude that everything is inherently impermanent. But the more mature realization argues that because all actions are empty, they cannot be impermanent any more than they can be permanent. There is no way to draw a determinate scope of what counts as an action in space or time.
And the point applies for any karmic relation as well. All phenomena, including actions, their consequences, and the karmic links between them, are empty of self-essence. There is never any point at which an action expires and its consequence begins, because there is never anything more than a conventional distinction between an action and its consequence. No action ever ceases, because no action ever arises.
The best metaphor for this is the symbol of Indra's net, which first occurs in the Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra. It claims that high in the heavens, the great god Indra has fastened a net which has a single shining jewel hanging at each notch. The net is infinite in scope, so the jewels are infinite in number. And yet, each of the brilliantly shining jewels only shines so brightly because it reflects the infinite other number of shining jewels. And in just the same manner, any single phenomenon spreads out forever in interdependence on all other phenomena in the universe with no boundaries to put on them anywhere. They are empty precisely because it is impossible to set any limit.
Just as the teacher, by magic,
Makes a magical illusion, and
By that illusion
Another illusion is created,
In that way are an agent and his action:
The agent is like the illusion.
The action
Is like the illusion's illusion.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 17:31-32 [42]
Karma is an empty concept because it describes the empty links between empty actions performed by empty agents. To use Nāgārjuna's metaphor, all the consequences of our actions are like magical illusions produced by other magical illusions, only there is never a conjurer at the beginning of it all.
At first glance, this conclusion might seem troubling. It might seem that it implies that karma is really a sham and could rob us of the moral foundations of Buddhist practice. But this is again a false equivalence between something being empty and being false. The truth is that karma being empty is the only way it can exist in just the way we normally assume it does. Therefore, karma can only be morally efficacious if it is empty. If an action or its consequences had self-essence, they would have to be able to exist independently of an agent who performed or experienced them. And that would mean that people could potentially experience the consequences of actions they did not really do or not experience the consequences of actions they did really do. It is only because action and consequence are inderdependent with the agent that there is functional morality where actions and their consequences can be "owned."
It might seem out of place to address the question of the self at this point in the MMK, as most of the work involving elements of first-person experience were treated in the second argumentative suite. But this section is extremely important. On the one hand, it refines our conception of "non-self" on the basis of the insights gained in the last few chapters, and on the other hand, it uses this treatment to make a bridge to a more important and radical point about the nature of liberation itself.
The chapter then begins with a simple recapitulation of the idea of selfhood. If we think that the self is a real being with self-essence of its own, we must admit that it depends on the aggregates that make it up. In the Buddhist tradition, these are form, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. We can replace these with any modern scientific categories and not lose the essential point.
The self must be either identical to these aggregates or different from them. If the self was identical to any of the aggregates or to the sum of them, it would always be changing. But the self we want to posit is something stable and consistent. On the other hand, if it was totally distinct from these aggregates, there would be no way for us to lay claim to it. It would have just as much of a reason to belong to a rock on the side of the road as it would to belong to us. And that no longer seems to be a "self" by any definition.
It is to correct this mistaken view that the term "non-self" was created. And yet, Nāgārjuna at this point wants to deepen our understanding in just the same way he did with the conception of impermanence. At first, we realized that things were not stable and eternal, so we wanted to say that they were "really" impermanent and transient. But we can only really say that something is impermanent on the basis of the mistaken idea of permanent self-essence. From an ultimate perspective, no phenomena are impermanent any more than they are permanent, because there are no phenomena there in the first place.
And so it goes for the idea of "non-self." When we completely stop grasping at the idea of a self, the idea of "non-self" will cease along with the idea of a self. When we no longer frontload the idea of self-essence to phenomena, there is no need to frontload the idea of an inherent LACK of self-essence either. Because all we do is see things as they truly are.
What language expresses is nonexistent.
The sphere of thought is nonexistent.
Unarisen and unceased, like nirvāṇa
Is the nature of things.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18:7 [43]
The point made here is so extremely important that we should pause to really take in the ramifications of it. When we stop grasping at the concept of a "self" or "non-self," we begin to see things as they really are. And yet, at a fundamental level, nothing really changes. It is the same phenomena we are confronted with. And just as the division between self and non-self is a conventional designation that ultimately must be transcended, so is the designation between samsara and nirvana and between conventional reality and emptiness.
Everything is real and not real,
Both real and not real,
Neither real nor not real.
This is Lord Buddha's teaching.
Not dependent on another, peaceful and
Not fabricated by mental fabrication,
Nor thought, without distinctions,
That is the character of reality (that-ness).
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 18:8-9 [44]
The positive tetralemma here of course depends on a distinction between conventional and ultimate truth. Everything is conventionally real, ultimately non-real, both conventionally real and ultimately non-real, and neither ultimately real nor conventionally non-real. We remain stuck in samsara insofar as we attach self-essence to phenomena that do not really have it. But when we see things clearly, we see them as empty of anything but conventional existence. And at a fundamental level we realize that there was never anything "there" to be liberated in the first place.
When things are truly empty, there is no more arising, no more ceasing, and no more transmigration through cyclic existence. Dependent arising itself appears as a merely conventional truth, because from an ultimate perspective there are no phenomena that arise. But this is also nothing more than the way that things already are. Everything is already at peace. Nirvana comes in being able to realize that.
One possibility suggested is that even if actions and their consequences are empty, there must be time in which they are realized. For something to be a consequence of an action, it must follow the action. And that requires time for the causal chain to occur in. But Nāgārjuna denies that time can be a substantial entity with self-essence of its own. It can only be understood relatively.
The argument runs as follows: When we understand time, we have to understand it in terms of its three parts: past, present, and future. We can begin this argument by focusing on present and future. They must either be dependent on the past to exist or not. If they do depend on the past, they must emerge out of it in some way. This means that they must have already existed in the past. But that entails the simultaneous existence of mutually contradictory parts of time.
We might then want to deny that they already exist potentially in the past and somehow coincide with it. But then there would be no way to explain the nature of dependence. By the time the present emerged, the past would not be there to give rise to it. When the past was around, the present would not be there to emerge as a consequence of it.
There is a further problem: For parts of time to either succeed other parts of time or be simultaneous with them, they have to do this IN TIME! This requires us to propose a super-time within which the parts of time are sequentially ordered. And then we can ask about the parts of THAT super-time, and we have an infinite regress. The only way we could avoid this is to deny that time, as an entity, ever changed. And that would mean that the mutually contradictory parts of past, present, and future would all coexist simultaneously, which is incoherent.
To avoid the above problem, we might want to argue that the three parts of time are not dependent on each other. But this is similarly incoherent. If they were totally independent, there would be no way to explain how they could be ordered. We could not even say that they were part of the same time. Time, by definition, has to be dependent. We can only define what the present is because it exists in relation to the past and the present, and so on for the other parts.
None of these problems arise when we understand time in the proper way: Time, like motion, only has a definition in relative terms. We only understand time insofar as it is dependent for conceptualization on phenomena and their relations. And since all phenomena are empty of self-essence, time, which exists in dependence on them, must also have no self-essence.
At this point, the opponent argues that on the virtue of dependent arising, any phenomenon is dependent on a whole host of other phenomena. A tree is dependent on a seed, soil, sunlight, water, and so on. We know that no effect is inherently dependent on any single cause or condition. But this opponent proposes that what has self-essence is the dependence on the COMPLETE combination of all the phenomena it depends upon. The essence of a tree, therefore, would be its dependence on the seed, soil, sunlight, water, and so on.
Nāgārjuna begins with a quick argument against the idea of a complete combination of conditions bringing rise to an effect. For this to be the case, the effect must either already be present in the combination or not. It seems wrong to say that the effect is already present in the combination. We don't experience anything like a tree in the mere combination of a seed, soil, sunlight, water, etc. But even if it was present, it could then not be said to " arise" from those phenomena in any way at all, as it was already present in them.
Alternatively, we could say that the effect is not present in the combination of phenomena it depends upon before it arises. But then it becomes hard to say how that effect is inherently dependent on THAT particular combination of conditions. There wouldn't be an difference between that particular combination of conditions and any other random set of phenomena.
Note that this is only a problem for the opponent. For Nāgārjuna, nothing makes any particular set of conditions the cause of a phenomenon in an inherent way. The only thing that makes a set of conditions the set of conditions OF a particular phenomenon is that the phenomenon follows it with an acceptable degree of regularity. There is just regularity, but that regularity has nothing metaphysical to ground it. The opponent, however, suggesting that this dependence has self-essence, does need to provide an explanation which seems exceptionally difficult to do.
In any case, proposing a dependence on a combination of conditions is a very poor choice to ground a causal relation with self-essence. Something that served as the ground for such a relation would have to be produced by itself. Otherwise it would be dependent on other phenomena. But a combination of conditions by definition cannot be self-produced, as it depends on a whole assortment of other phenomena to come together. So while all things are dependent on a combination of conditions, that dependence cannot possibly be one with self-essence.
The third argumentative suite ends with the final suggestion for something that could have self-essence: Impermanence itself. We say that phenomena are empty precisely because they can be divided into infinitesmal moments of time that are in a constant state of coming into being and being destroyed. The final point to be made before transitioning into the final argumentative suite is that even arising and destruction are, at an ultimate level, empty.
The problem with this position is that becoming and destruction are mutually contradictory properties. At the same time, we know that all phenomena possess becoming and destruction. Nor can the two exist apart from each other. Anything that is being destroyed at one point must have come into being. And given that we have established the impermanence of all phenomena, anything that arises must also eventually be destroyed. If something was truly eternal and incapable of being destroyed, it would make no sense for it to come into existence in the first place.
Given that we cannot understand the becoming and destruction as distinct, separable processes but also cannot make sense of the two coexisting at the same time, this gives us the hint that something is mistaken in our conception. And that is precisely that we have not given up the idea that for becoming and destruction to exist, they must exist with self-essence. When we understand them as conventional designations, we can speak of becoming and destruction of conventional phenomena. But at the ultimate level, there is no becoming and no destruction, because there is no phenomena.
The fourth and final argumentative suite of the MMK is an incredible crescendo where Nāgārjuna manages to tie his work together to the most fundamental and core teachings of the Buddha. The intention is to show that his philosophical work, strange though much of it may sound, is not wild innovation but rather the work of someone who is faithful to the original teachings of the Buddha in their purest sense. And so this chapter asks what we can know and say about the Tathāgata, meaning the Buddha.
We know that the self of the Buddha, like the selves of all other humans, reveals itself to be empty upon closer examination. He cannot be identical to the aggregates, as the self is supposed to be single and stable while the aggregates are plural and subject to change. He cannot be distinct from the aggregates, as when the arm of the Buddha's body is raised, HE is the one whose arm is raised. There is an obvious connection between the self and the aggregates. He cannot be outside of the aggregates nor can he be inside of them nor can he possess them, as we never discover a single entity called the self when we strip away all the aggregates. For this reason we cannot say that the Buddha is identical to the aggregates nor distinct from them, because neither the Buddha nor the aggregates have any self-essence. So should we say that the Buddha is really empty?
"Empty" should not be asserted.
"Nonempty" should not be asserted.
Neither both nor neither should be asserted.
They are only used nominally.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 22:11 [45]
We may want to say that the Buddha is "empty," but from an ultimate standpoint the designation of "empty" is as incorrect as the designation of "non-empty." When one sees as a Buddha, one sees things as they really are, which means to see things independently of the conceptual categories we attach to them, even including the boundary of existence and non-existence. This makes it very hard to talk about someone like the Buddha who has achieved nirvana:
One who grasps the view that the Tathāgata exists,
Having seized the Buddha,
Constructs conceptual fabrications
About one who has achieved nirvāṇa.
Since he is by nature empty,
The thought that the Buddha
Exists or does not exist
After nirvāṇa is not appropriate.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 22:13-14 [46]
When one enters nirvana, one no longer identifies a self or aggregates. That sounds like merely ceasing to exist from our perspective. But that would make it difficult to talk about the Buddha as a genuine entity from a conventional level if he totally stopped existing upon entering nirvana. To correctly conceptualize of the Buddha, we must transcend these conceptions:
Those who develop mental fabrications with regard to the Buddha,
Who has gone beyond all fabrications,
As a consequence of those cognitive fabrications,
Fail to see the Tathāgata.
Whatever is the essence of the Tathāgata,
That is the essence of the world.
The Tathāgata has no essence.
The world is without essence.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 22:15-16 [47]
There is no fundamental nature to the Buddha. There is no fundamental nature to anything in the world, including ourselves. And that is precisely why it is possible to become enlightened. It only consists of realizing that there is really nothing there to overcome.
We are bound to samsara by some fundamental errors and defilements. And yet, they are ultimately empty as well. These errors are the beliefs that we have a genuine and substantial self, that there is real happiness in samsara, and the desire, hatred, and confusion that result from these beliefs. Samsara does not exist without these beliefs and the accompanying defilements.
We might think that these errors at the very least must have self-essence, as these errors very much are keeping us from realizing the truth. What is the transition from samsara to nirvana if not the overcoming of errors and the defilements associated with them? And yet, these errors themselves will ultimately be seen to be empty.
The truth is that errors only arise insofar as we attribute there to be real things in the world with self-essence. But when we realize that there is no inherent self to any phenomena, we realize that there is no inhernet basis for things to count as pleasant or unpleasant outside of our empty mental categorization. We realize that there is no self at the basis for the defilements to inhere in. If there is no persistent self, there is no substratum for error to persist in either. And thus from the ultimate perspective, there is never any overcoming of errors, because there are no errors, because there is no subject to have the errors or phenomena for the errors to be about.
This chapter is perhaps the highlight of the work as it addresses a particularly dangerous misunderstanding. It opens with a particularly damning indictment: If everything is empty, then even something as fundamental as the Four Noble Truths must not exist. And without the Four Noble Truths, the entire Buddhist enterprise collapses. There no longer is any point to any practice, to the sangha, or to any ethical behavior. This opponent brings Nāgārjuna the charge of teaching a dangerous antinomianism, preaching nihilism, and giving license to apathy and indifference.
The charge is severe, but not uncommon. It is for this reason that the doctrine of emptiness is a particularly subtle teaching which is potentially dangerous for someone without a deep background of lower-level ethical teachings. Nāgārjuna gives words to this difficulty:
By a misperception of emptiness
A person of little intelligence is destroyed.
Like a snake incorrectly seized
Or like a spell incorrectly cast.
For that reason--that the Dharma is
Deep and difficult to understand and to learn--
The Buddha's mind despaired of
Being able to teach it.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:11-12 [47]
A proper understanding of emptiness is dependent on a proper understanding of the distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth. However, the way these two are immediately misunderstood is to think that conventional truth is a kind of illusion and that the real nature of things is their ultimate nature. It is very much NOT Nāgārjuna's view that the reality underlying all phenomena is "actually" their emptiness. There can, in fact, be no "ultimate" nature of things independent of their "conventional" nature. It should be said rather that one understands the ultimate nature of things insofar as one understands that the conventional nature of things IS nothing more than conventional.
The following two verses are probably the best candidates to sum up the entire MMK in a short form:
Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation,
Is itself the middle way.
Something that is not dependently arisen,
Such a thing does not exist.
Therefore a nonempty thing
Does not exist.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:18-19 [48]
The Madhyamaka or "Middle Way" school must chart a course between two extremes: We should not believe that the phenomenal world has self-essence, nor should we believe that it does not exist at all. It can only exist conventionally. This is, in fact, the only way that anything can exist. The only way things can exist is to exist conventionally. The only way emptiness can be in conflict with the conventional truth is when we think that truth being conventional means that it is somehow false or imperfect. All phenomena are dependently arisen, which means that they only come to have any identity on the basis of convention. This means that everything is empty, because it has no identity "from its own side." To say that something is empty is to say that it is dependently arisen, which is to say that it is conventionally real. These three all mean the same thing.
This means that we should not only see phenomena as empty, but to see EMPTINESS ITSELF as empty as well. This is a confusing statement at first. It seems that if everything is empty, that emptiness must be what is essential for there to be phenomena at all. But when we say that something is empty, we say that it only exists in dependence on our convention and conception. When we look at a chariot and demonstrate that it does not have any "chariot-ness" of its own, we find only emptiness. But what we find is the emptiness OF CHARIOT-NESS. We never find an independent "emptiness" of its own. We only have a conception of "emptiness" on the basis of a mistaken conception of self-essence. [49]
This provides the ground to the refutation of a very high-level objection. The opponent here would argue that if even the idea of emptiness is empty from the ultimate standpoint, then Nāgārjuna's thesis is also nonexistent and groundless. For that reason, it cannot have any real authoritative weight. But this is just a sneaky way of making the same mistake again: That something being conventionally true somehow makes it optional or arbitrary.
The truth is that Nāgārjuna's position IS groundless. All truths are groundless. The entire conception of truth being "grounded" is what is incoherent. Nāgārjuna never claimed to have a thesis which is grounded or inherently true, and his thesis that all things are empty is definitely neither of these. The idea of something being "true" by linking up to some substantial fact with self-essence of its own out in the world is incoherent and is precisely what is rejected.
And on the basis of the above, we can finally have a thorough understanding of the Four Noble Truths and how they can only exist on the basis of emptiness and the emptiness of that very emptiness: Dissatisfaction is dependently arisen as it comes into being on the basis of desire. Desire itself is course also dependently arisen, like all phenomena. Because dissatisfaction and desire have no self-essence, thre can be an end to them.
This leaves the Eightfold Path. Somehow, there is a fear that understanding the Eightfold Path to be empty of self-essence means that we would abandon our duty to be compassionate and loving to each other. But why would this be the case? When we punch or kick a person, we cause them pain and discomfort. We would not want to have this done to us, so we should not do it to others. There is and can be no "ground" to this truth. But it does not need one either.
We now have to ask: What happens when we enter nirvana if there is no arising or passing away of anything from the ultimate view? This section runs up very close to the barriers of language in attempting to point towards what can only be shown. That is because there is very little we can positively say about nirvana at all. Namely, we can only speak of it in contrast with samsara. Insofar as we can talk about nirvana at all, we can only speak of it negatively.
We remain in samsara insofar as we believe that anything has self-essence. But the things themselves do not actually change from the perspective of nirvana. We simply stop seeing them AS things or AS entities at all. There is no characterization at all. None of the duality implied in language applies anymore. And that ultimately means that even the distinction between samsara and nirvana turns up as empty. There is no change and no transformation. Nirvana is simply seeing things as they truly are. We cannot speak of nirvana in terms of any properties or characteristics as it is not an entity at all, not even from the conventional standpoint.
Since all existents are empty,
What is finite or infinite?
What is finite and infinite?
What is neither finite nor infinite?
What is identical and what is different?
What is permanent and what is impermanent?
What is both permanent and impermanent?
What is neither?
The pacification of all objectification
And the pacification of illusion:
No Dharma was taught by the Buddha
At any time, in any place, to any person.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 25:22-24 [50]
At the level of nirvana, every entity and every duality disappears. And even the Dharma of the Buddha appears as what it is: an empty doctrine taught by an empty teacher to empty students. And yet, we could never get to this point without relying on it. The raft has to be left behind once we have crossed to the other shore.
This section simply reiterates the way that we achieve nirvana, which is by recognizing the twelve links of dependent arising. All of samsara is sustianed by ignorance, which results in the mental formations that karmically bind us. Consciousness arises from these formations and naturally causes us to appropriate forms with certain names. The six senses arise from this and come into contact with the objects of the world. When there is contact, some kind of sensation is experienced. Immediately, on the basis of sensation, we begin to have desires towards some objects or other, and we become attached to what gives us pleasure. This gives rise to the illusion of self-essence and ensures our birth in the sense of seeing ourselves as an embodied self. And that results in old age and death, continuing our cyclical existence.
That these twelve links are empty of any self-essence should go without saying at this point. But by the same token, they are certainly conventionally real. And we must make use of them without reifying them in order to escape the cycle. The core of it is the cessation of ignorance, but this does not merely come from scholarship. The truth of emptiness must also be seen directly, and that can only happen on the basis of meditative practice.
The final chapter of the text addresses some of the questions we are bound to wonder about in the world we live in. The point of doing this is to show that many of these questions are based on faulty constructs that continue to bound us to samsara. In a sense, now that the arrow has been completely removed from our neck, we can now safely answer the questions about where it came from and all those other curiosities. But now we can do so in a way where the answers will genuinely be edifying. The questions under consideration are ones about the ultimate limits of the self and the world. Unsurprisingly, the issues all arise when we think that either of these have any self-essence.
Whenever we take some entity to be the self, be it the body, consciousness, feeling, or whatever else, a dichotomy emerges between that which is appropriated and the appropriator. But these never stay the same. Appropriating is a momentary action which does not last forever, and the entity appropriated is also constantly changing. There is no identity between these entities over time, so there is no way to say that "we" existed in the past or will exist in the future.
It also would not make sense from a temporal point of view. We would say that the present self came into existence in virtue of the past self, but the past self would already be past and thus not exist to give rise to it anymore. The same applies for the future: How can the present self give rise to something that does not truly exist yet?
The Vedic schools argue that we continue as a self because the ātman or soul of man is divine in nature and partakes in the divine. It argues that our soul is the same as the unchanging, uncaused, and eternal Brahman, and that this accounts for the phenomenon of continuation when all the empirical phenomena of our experience are impermanent.
This is a mistaken idea. If the human is at all different from a god, which it obviously is, then the permanence of the divine would in no way guarantee the permanence of the person. If you tried to instead say that there was a permanent divine part and an impermanent human part, the whole would still be constantly changing and the problem of how to establish identity with self-essence from moment to moment would still not be answered.
Nothing can change and retain its identity. These are mutually contradictory. Given that change is empirically real but that there is also a very real empirical phenomenon of continued personal identity, we have to conclude that both of these are ultimately empty. There are ultimately no entities, so there is ultimately no basis for something to either change or be permanent.
To move to the question of the world or universe, it makes no sense to say that it is either limited or unlimited in space or time. Does the universe have spatial limits? That would suggest that there is something out there beyond it. But that just means that we haven't come to the end of the universe yet. The universe would have to include that which lies beyond this limit as well. So is the universe unlimited? All that really means is that everything that is in the universe is, in fact, in the universe. Which is so trivial as to be meaningless.
We cannot say that the universe has temporal limits either. That is because the universe does not exist in time as a single entity with self-essence. To use Jay L. Garfield's metaphor, it is more like the flickering of a flame which is made up of a series of distinct events. Each event is momentary, but the flickering continues. But there is no one entity persisting to be called eternal or momentary. [51]
We could only say that the "universe" was finite in time if it suddenly stopped existing and nothing else arose after it. And we could only say that the "universe" was infinite in time if its current state suddenly became permanent and continued forever. We cannot predict the future, but dependent arising makes both seem unlikely. The concept of the "universe" itself is empty because there is no one entity underneath all these moments and compounded parts to be called the "universe."The text ends with this verse:
I prostrate to Gautama
Who through compassion
Taught the true doctrine,
Which leads to the relinquishing of all views.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 27:30 [52]
This ends the chapter on "views," and so there is a way to read this verse as merely extolling the relinquishing of the above metaphysical "views" which are proved to be nonsensical and based on the mistaken idea of self-essence. But it should probably be read even more strongly as the relinquishing of even the views put forward in the MMK. Not even emptiness should be held on to as an ultimate view. From the perspective of nirvana, there are no views because everything is at peace.
Nāgārjuna's influence is deeply important in many Buddhist traditions, even if it often goes unnamed. My own tradition of Zen Buddhism is often characterized as sounding mystical and faith-based in the sense that much of it depends on the appreciation of silence and refusing to conceptualize. But the tradition of kouans and other "unanswerable questions" that are meant to tease the mind towards equanimical states has a robust philosophical tradition that it was born from. Nāgārjuna is one of the premier figures in this tradition.
In Nāgārjuna, I see many early hints at kouan-like speech, where statements that sound like paradoxes and sometimes come across as intentionally provocative are put forward to challenge our dualistic minds. For those who are more given to analytical processes to enter into enlightenment, Nāgārjuna is a very useful thinker. His method is ruthlessly dialectical and based on logical argument, but ultimately it gets us to the important state where we have overcome the boundaries of language and thought and see the world clearly. Thank you for reading.
1. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu [trans.], Dhammatalks.org, Pali Tripiṭaka, Sūtra Piṭaka, Majjhima Nikāya 63, Cūḷa Māluṅkyovāda Sutta
2. Nāgārjuna [trans. David J. Kalupahana], Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way, 1986, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers (1991), "Period of the Śrāvakas," p. 20-23
3. Jay L. Garfield, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, "What Does No-Self Really Mean?", 2020
4. Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught: Revised and Expanded Edition With Texts from Suttas and Dhammapada, 1959, Grove Press (2007), "The First Noble Truth: Dukkha," p. 20-23
5. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu [trans.], Dhammatalks.org, Pali Tripiṭaka, Sūtra Piṭaka, Saṁyutta Nikāya 12:61, Assutavā Sūtra
6. Jay L. Garfield, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, "What Does No-Self Really Mean?", 2020
7. Nāgārjuna [trans. David J. Kalupahana], Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way, 1986, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers (1991), "Nāgārjuna's Philosophical Enterprise," p. 87-93
8. Geshe Tashi Tsering, The Foundation of Buddhist Thought, Volume 2: Relative Truth, Ultimate Truth, 2008, Wisdom Publications (2008), "The Tibetan System of Study," p.34-42
9. Ibid., "Partless Particles and Partless Moments of Consciousness," p. 72-76
10. Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, 2009, Oxford University Press (2009), "2. Interpretations of Svabhāva," p. 23-30
11. Ibid, "4. The Catuṣkoṭi or Tetralemma," p. 68-73
12. Burma Pitaka Association [trans.], Nibbana.com, Pali Tripiṭaka, Sūtra Piṭaka, Dīgha Nikāya DN 1, Brahmajāla Sūtra
13. Nāgārjuna [trans. Jay L. Garfield], The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 1996, Oxford World's Classics, "Chapter I: Examination of Conditions," p. 3
14. Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, 2009, Oxford University Press (2009), "5. Causation," p. 95
15. Ibid, p. 110
16. Nāgārjuna [trans. Jay L. Garfield], The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 1996, Oxford World's Classics, "Chapter I: Examination of Conditions," p. 109
17. Ibid, p. 109
18. Ibid, p. 122
19. Ibid, p. 129
20. Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, 2009, Oxford University Press (2009), "6. Motion," p. 136-142
21. Nāgārjuna [trans. Jay L. Garfield], The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 1996, Oxford World's Classics, "Chapter II: Examination of Motion," p. 129
22. Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, 2009, Oxford University Press (2009), "6. Motion," p. 142-147
23. Nāgārjuna [trans. Jay L. Garfield], The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 1996, Oxford World's Classics, "Chapter II: Examination of Motion," p. 134- 135
24. Ibid, p. 146
25. Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, 2009, Oxford University Press (2009), "2. Interpretations of Svabhāva," p. 40
26. Nāgārjuna [trans. Jay L. Garfield], The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 1996, Oxford World's Classics, "Chapter V: Examination of Elements," p. 151
27. Ibid, p. 159
28. Ibid, p. 160
29. Ibid, p. 165
30. Ibid, p. 168
31. Ibid, p. 177
32. Ibid, p. 180
33. Ibid, p. 184
34. Ibid, p. 197
35. Ibid, p. 210
36. Ibid, p. 213-214
37. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu [trans.], Dhammatalks.org, Pali Tripiṭaka, Sūtra Piṭaka, Majjhima Nikāya 22, Alagaddūpama Sutta
38. Nāgārjuna [trans. Jay L. Garfield], The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 1996, Oxford World's Classics, "Chapter XV: Examination of Essence," p. 224
39. Qingyuan Weixin, Internet Sacred Text Archive, Zen Buddhism, "Zen Sayings"
40. Nāgārjuna [trans. Jay L. Garfield], The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 1996, Oxford World's Classics, "Chapter XVI: Examination of Bondage," p. 229
41. Ibid, p. 238
42. Ibid, p. 243
43. Ibid, p. 249
44. Ibid, p. 250-251
45. Ibid, p. 280
46. Ibid, p. 281
47. Ibid. p. 282
48. Ibid. p. 304
49. Ibid. p. 316
50. Ibid. p. 333-334
51. Ibid. p. 350
52. Ibid. p. 352