Examination of Fire and Fuel

Light a log in the fireplace. There is the fire, and there is the wood it burns. Nothing seems simpler. Yet ask how the two are related and the simplicity goes. Is the fire the same thing as the burning wood, or something different that has taken hold of it? Which comes first: the fire, which needs fuel, or the fuel, which is called fuel only because it burns?

In Nāgārjuna's India, fire and fuel were the standard example for a much bigger question: how the self is related to the body and mind it seems to own. The Personalists (Pudgalavāda) said the person is to the aggregates as fire is to fuel: neither the same nor different, yet real in its own right. This chapter takes the example seriously and shows that fire and fuel, examined honestly, give no support to anything standing on its own. At the end it applies the result to the self, to pots and to cloth. It follows Chapter 9, on the person said to exist before seeing and hearing, and it uses the method of Chapter 2, on motion.

The verses

The translation is new, made from the Sanskrit for this site. The Sanskrit is given above each verse; it follows the GRETIL e-text (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The same, or different?

The chapter begins with a simple fork (10.1). If fire and fuel really are two things, each with a nature of its own, then they are either the same thing or different things. There is no third choice for two self-standing items.

The same. If the fire is the fuel, then what burns and what is burned are one. The cook would be the dinner; the cutter would be the bread. We could no longer say 'the fire burns the wood', because there would be nothing for the burning to pass between.

Different. If the fire is a separate thing, it should be possible to have it without fuel, as a cup can be had without a saucer. And then strange results follow (10.2–3). A fire that needs no fuel needs nothing to light it, so it would burn for ever. No one would ever have to light it again, and it would be a fire that burns nothing. A fire with no fuel is not a fire at all.

'Fuel is what is being burned'

An opponent tries to define the terms (10.4): fuel is simply what is being burned. Then fire and fuel are linked by definition. But this only moves the problem. If the fuel is just 'what is being burned', what is doing the burning? Either the fire is part of the fuel, and we are back to 'the same', or it is something else, and we are back to 'different'.

Verse 10.5 spells out what 'different' really costs. A fire wholly other than its fuel would never reach it. Not reaching it, it would not burn it. Not burning it, it would never go out, since a fire goes out when its fuel is used up. It would sit there for ever, unchanged, holding its own marks. That is not a description of any fire anyone has seen.

The opponent replies with an image (10.6): different things meet all the time, as a woman and a man meet. Nāgārjuna agrees, with a condition (10.7). Two people can meet because each exists without the other: she was somewhere before they met, and so was he. Fire and fuel are not like that. There is no fire waiting somewhere before it meets its fuel, and no fuel that is fuel before any fire. So the image does not fit.

Which comes first?

The heart of the chapter is about dependence itself (10.8–11). Everyone agrees that fire and fuel depend on each other. Fire needs fuel to burn; wood is called fuel only because it can burn or is burning. But if each depends on the other, which one is there first, so that the other can lean on it?

Take the first option: fire depends on fuel, and fuel is already there as fuel. Then fuel is fuel without any fire (10.9), which contradicts the starting point that fuel depends on fire. Take the other: fire is there first. Then the fire is already established, and depending on fuel would only establish what is already established (10.9). Verse 10.10 sums up the tangle: if each is established only by leaning on the other, there is nothing already standing for either one to lean on.

Verse 10.11 puts it in general form. A thing that becomes what it is by depending must either already exist when it depends, or not. If it does not yet exist, there is nothing to do the depending. If it already exists, it does not need to depend. Either way, dependence between two self-standing things cannot get started.

This is not an argument against dependence. It is an argument against two self-standing things depending on each other. When neither fire nor fuel is a finished thing waiting for the other, the puzzle goes away: 'fire' and 'fuel' are two names given together to one burning, as 'buyer' and 'seller' are two names given together to one sale. Nobody asks whether the buyer or the seller existed first.

Verse 10.12 states the result in all four directions. There is no fire that depends on fuel, and no fire that does not; no fuel that depends on fire, and no fuel that does not. The negations deny a self-standing fire and a self-standing fuel. They do not deny the fire in the grate.

The fivefold search

Verse 10.13 links the chapter to Chapter 2. Fire does not arrive from somewhere else, and it is not hidden in the wood waiting to come out. The same reasoning that found no 'going' in the road already gone over, the road not yet gone over, or the road being gone over applies here to burning.

Verse 10.14 then sets out a search in five places. Look for the fire in relation to the fuel:

The last three options are versions of 'different'. To own something, or to contain it, or to sit in it, two separate things are needed. Since fire separate from fuel has already failed, all three fail with it. Candrakīrti later adds two more places (the collection of parts and the shape of the parts) to make the sevenfold search of the chariot, which the companion book explores at length.

Self and body, pot and clay

Now the point of the example (10.15). Replace fire with the self and fuel with the body and mind it takes up (upādāna). The self is not the same as the body and mind: then it would come and go with every thought and every cell. It is not something apart from them: no one has ever found a self left over when body and mind are taken away. It does not own them, contain them, or sit inside them, for each of those needs two separate things. Yet 'I' is said, correctly, in dependence on them, as 'fire' is said in dependence on burning wood.

The same holds for a pot and its clay, a cloth and its threads, and everything else that is called a whole in dependence on parts. The Personalists were right that the self is like fire and fuel. They drew the wrong conclusion. The example does not show a self that is real in its own right. It shows a self, like a fire, that is real only as designated.

The chapter closes with a strong line (10.16). Those who teach that the self is real in itself, or that things are each separate and distinct, have not understood the teaching. The target is not only the self. It is the habit of seeing each thing as a separate unit with its own edges.

What is left standing

The fire still warms the room. You can still add wood, and the fire still goes out when the wood is gone. Nothing in the chapter stops a cook from cooking. What goes is the picture of two finished things, a fire-thing and a wood-thing, that meet and act on each other. In its place is one burning, described from two sides, with each name making sense only through the other.

That is also how the self is kept. 'I am tired', 'I will come tomorrow', 'I made a mistake': all of this remains true. The 'I' is designated in dependence on body and mind, works as designated, and is not found when looked for in any of the five ways. As the books put it, mutual dependence is not a circle that needs a first link; it is what being designated together means.

In the books

The two books take up this chapter's themes in several places.

• Interlude: Same Words, Different Worlds (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'Conditions and Causes': fire and fuel set beside the four conditions; neither the same nor different.
• Chapter 3, Unfindability and Freedom from the Eight Extremes, the section 'No Whereabouts: Neither Coming Nor Going': fire as fire only as burning, and fuel as fuel only as being burned.
• Chapter 4, Mutual Dependency and the Non-Hierarchy of Relation, the section 'Objection: Is Mutual Dependence Circular?': verse 10.8, which comes first, answered.
• Chapter 14, The Role of Function in Conventional Reality, the section 'Objection: Powers and Dispositions': powers co-defined with their partners, like fire and fuel.
• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'What 'Logic' Means Here': fire cannot be both one with its fuel and other than it (10.1). The analysis relies on ordinary logic; it does not suspend it.

Talks on YouTube:

• Core Logic 2: The Identity vs. Difference Paradox, on this chapter.
• You, Ice, Coldness DONT EXIST Before Interaction.

Words to know

• Fuel (indhana): what is burned; in the analogy, the body and mind the self is designated on.
• What is taken up (upādāna): the aggregates that the self is designated in dependence on.
• Identity and difference (ekatva, anyatva): the two ways two self-standing things would have to be related. Neither holds.
• Mutual dependence (parasparāpekṣā): each named only through the other, with neither first.
• Personalists (Pudgalavāda): an early school that held the person to be real, neither the same as nor different from the aggregates.
• The fivefold search: same, different, possessor, container, contained. Candrakīrti's chariot adds two more to make seven.