Nāgārjuna's Middle Way · Chapter 16
Examination of Bondage and Liberation
Buddhism speaks of beings bound in saṃsāra, the round of birth and death, and of liberation from it. The words suggest a picture: someone is tied up, wanders from life to life, and one day is set free. This chapter asks who that someone is, what binds them, and what it would mean to be released. It looks for the traveller, the rope and the moment of untying, and finds none of them standing on its own.
The chapter carries forward the search for the self in Chapter 9 and the analysis of going in Chapter 2. It leads directly into Chapter 17 on action and its fruit, and its last verse prepares the famous claim of Chapter 25 that saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not two places.
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).
saṃsaranti ca nānityāḥ sattve 'py eṣa samaḥ kramaḥ ||
If it is formations that wander through saṃsāra, they do not wander if they are permanent, and they do not wander if they are impermanent. The same reasoning applies to a living being.
pañcadhā mṛgyamāṇo 'sau nāsti kaḥ saṃsariṣyati ||
If the person wanders, then when it is sought in five ways among the aggregates, the sense bases and the elements, it is not there. Who, then, will wander?
vibhavaś cānupādānaḥ kaḥ sa kiṃ saṃsariṣyati ||
Passing from one taking-up to the next, it would, in between, be without existence. And without existence and without a taking-up, who is it, and what would wander?
sattvasyāpi na nirvāṇaṃ kathaṃ cid upapadyate ||
The nirvāṇa of formations makes no sense in any way. The nirvāṇa of a living being makes no sense in any way either.
saṃskārāḥ pūrvavat sattvo badhyate na na mucyate ||
Formations, whose nature is to arise and pass away, are not bound and are not freed. In the same way as before, a living being is not bound and is not freed.
badhyate nānupādānaḥ kimavastho 'tha badhyate ||
If grasping is the bond, one who already has grasping is not bound by it, and one without grasping is not bound. In what state, then, is anyone bound?
na cāsti tac cheṣam uktaṃ gamyamānagatāgataiḥ ||
A bond could indeed bind, if it existed before the one to be bound. But it does not. The rest has been answered by the analysis of what has gone, what has not gone and what is going.
syātāṃ baddhe mucyamāne yugapad bandhamokṣaṇe ||
One who is bound is not freed, and one who is not bound is certainly not freed. If the bound were being freed, bondage and release would be at the same time.
iti yeṣāṃ grahas teṣām upādānamahāgrahaḥ ||
'Free of grasping, I shall reach nirvāṇa; nirvāṇa will be mine.' Those who hold on in this way have a great hold of grasping.
yatra kas tatra saṃsāro nirvāṇaṃ kiṃ vikalpyate ||
Where nirvāṇa is not added on and saṃsāra is not taken away, what saṃsāra is there, and what nirvāṇa is conceived?
Who wanders?
Saṃsāra literally means 'wandering on'. If there is wandering, something must wander. Verse 16.1 tries the most obvious candidates: the formations (saṃskāra), the changing physical and mental events that make up a life, and the living being made of them.
Suppose the formations wander from one life to the next. Are they permanent or impermanent? A permanent thing cannot wander. To go from here to there is to change, and what is permanent does not change. An impermanent thing cannot wander either. It is gone the moment after it appears, so it never makes the journey. A wave does not carry the same water across the ocean. The same holds for a living being taken as a thing with its own nature: fixed, it cannot move on; momentary, it is not there to arrive.
The person is not found
Perhaps it is the person (pudgala) who wanders, rather than the passing events (16.2). Some early Buddhist schools, the Pudgalavādins, held exactly this: there is a person who is neither the same as the aggregates nor different from them, and it carries karma from life to life.
Nāgārjuna answers with the fivefold search already set out with fire and fuel in Chapter 10 (10.14–15), which Chapter 22 later applies to the Buddha himself. Look for the person in five ways. Is it the same as the aggregates (body, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness)? Is it different from them? Is it inside them? Are they inside it? Does it own them as one owns a coat? Each answer fails. If the person were the aggregates, it would be as many as they are and would end when they end. If it were different, it could be found apart from them, and it never is. 'In', 'containing' and 'owning' all need two separate things, and the second thing is just what cannot be found. The same search can be run on the sense bases and the elements, the other two lists into which experience was divided. Nowhere is there a someone to make the journey.
The gap between two lives
Verse 16.3 adds a sharper point. Grasping, or taking-up (upādāna), is what keeps a life going: the body, the mind and the sense of self are 'taken up' again and again. Suppose a being passes from one taking-up, this life, to the next. Between letting go of the first and taking up the second, what is it? At that point it has no body, no aggregates, nothing it has taken up. It would be without existence (vibhava). And a being with no existence and nothing taken up is not anyone. There is nothing there to do the passing.
This is not a denial that one life is conditioned by another. It is a denial that the link is a traveller. The books use Nāgasena's image: the flame of the last watch of the night is neither the flame of the first watch nor a different flame, and nothing passes from one to the other. Continuity is real and designated; a carrier is not found.
Then who is bound, and who is freed?
If no one is found to wander, the same difficulty meets the goal. Verse 16.4 says that nirvāṇa makes no sense for the formations or for a being, taken as things with their own nature. A momentary event is gone before it could be liberated. A permanent self could never change its state from bound to free.
Verse 16.5 says the same about bondage. Events that arise and pass away are not bound and not freed: there is nothing lasting in them to be held and then released. And a living being, sought as before, is not found to be bound or freed either.
Verses 16.6 to 16.8 look at the bond itself, with the same pattern Chapter 2 used for going. Say the bond is grasping. Is the one bound by it already grasping, or not? If already grasping, already bound, the bond has nothing to add. If not grasping, it is not bound. There is no third state in which the binding takes place (16.6). A bond would have to exist before the one it binds, as a rope exists before the hands it ties. But grasping is not found apart from the one who grasps. For the rest, the verse simply points back to Chapter 2's analysis of gone, not gone and going (16.7). And release has the same shape: one who is bound is not, as bound, free; one who is not bound has nothing to be freed from; and to be 'being freed' while still bound would put bondage and release at the same moment (16.8).
The great grasping
Verse 16.9 turns from logic to practice, and it is the heart of the chapter. 'Free of grasping, I shall reach nirvāṇa; nirvāṇa will be mine.' This sounds like the very attitude a practitioner should have. Nāgārjuna calls it 'a great hold of grasping'.
The reason is simple once seen. The sentence keeps everything that liberation was meant to release: an I who will arrive, a nirvāṇa that will be mine, a future state to be acquired and kept. It turns the path into a project of the self. The more earnestly it is held, the tighter the hold. The owner's article The Logic of Dependency describes the same trap: under the logic of substance, the path becomes a journey made by a traveller toward a goal to be owned, and effort hardens into grasping at progress and at experiences.
This does not mean practice is useless or that one should not aspire. It means that what frees is the seeing that the one who grasps and the thing grasped are not found as they are taken to be, not a better object for the same grasping.
Nothing added, nothing removed
The last verse (16.10) says what is left. Liberation is not adding nirvāṇa to a being, like a prize, and it is not taking saṃsāra away, like a stain. If nothing is added and nothing removed, what saṃsāra is there, and what nirvāṇa is being conceived as its opposite?
Candrakīrti reads this as the point of the chapter: since bondage and liberation are both empty, there is no saṃsāra to be cut off and no nirvāṇa to be gained as a separate thing. What ends is the conceptual construction (vikalpa) that built them into two places. Chapter 25 will say it in its boldest form: there is not the slightest difference between the two.
What is left standing
The chapter does not say that no one suffers or that practice makes no difference. Suffering is real as it is lived, and it has causes; grasping is what keeps the round going, and when grasping ends, the round ends. All of this holds as dependent arising. What the chapter removes is the picture of a self-standing someone who wanders, wears a self-standing rope and is one day untied. Ordinary language keeps working: 'she was freed from that fear' is true, and the path is walked. It is walked well when it is not held as the journey of a traveller toward a possession. The companion book puts it plainly: conventional reality never required liberation from ontology; only conceptual thought did.
In the books
The two books take up this chapter's themes in several places.
- The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'A Different Path: Conditions and Openness': the path seen as a traveller in bondage moving toward a goal, and how effort then hardens into grasping (verse 16.9).
- Chapter 9, The Reconceptualization of Continuity (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'The Problem of the Invariant Bearer': no carrier is needed for continuity, as no wanderer is found in verses 16.1–3.
- Interlude: Same Words, Different Worlds, the section 'Nirvāṇa': nirvāṇa not as a second world but as this world no longer misread (verse 16.10).
- The Last Refuge of Ontology (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness), the section 'The Final Reversal': conventional reality never required liberation from ontology; only conceptual thought did.
- Beyond the Extremes: Why Life and Death Were Never the Right Words: no subject who was bound and has now become free survives the analysis.
Read also: Neither Carried Nor Cut, on continuity with nothing carried over and nothing cut off.
Words to know
- Saṃsāra: 'wandering on', the round of birth and death driven by grasping.
- Formations (saṃskāra): the changing physical and mental events that make up a life.
- Person (pudgala): the one who seems to live, act and wander. Here it is sought and not found apart from what it is designated on.
- Taking-up, grasping (upādāna): the holding-on by which a life and a self are taken up again and again.
- Bondage and liberation (bandhana, mokṣa): being held in the round, and release from it.
- Conceptual construction (vikalpa): the mind's building of things, including saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, into separate places.