Examination of Motion

Walk across a room. Nothing seems simpler. There is you, there is the walking, and there is the floor you cross. You were at the door, and now you are at the window. The second chapter asks where, in that plain event, the moving is actually found. Is it in the part of the floor already crossed? In the part not yet crossed? In the spot under your foot right now? And who is the walker, apart from the walking?

Chapter 1 tested causes, the way one thing is supposed to bring about another. Chapter 2 turns to motion, the most vivid kind of change, and uses a pattern of analysis that Nāgārjuna will use again and again: divide the field into the done, the not yet done and the being done, and look for the event in each. It also gives the classic test of agent and action: is the doer the same as the deed, or different?

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).

Where is the moving?

The chapter opens with a simple division (2.1). Take the path of any movement, say your walk from the door to the window. At any moment the path falls into three parts. There is the stretch already crossed. There is the stretch not yet crossed. And there is, it seems, the stretch being crossed now. If motion is really happening, it must be happening in one of these.

It is not in the stretch already crossed. That part is finished; the moving there is over. It is not in the stretch not yet crossed. The moving there has not begun. So it must be in the third part, the stretch being crossed. But look for that stretch. Wherever you draw the line, the floor divides into what is behind the foot and what is ahead of it. The 'now' of the step has no width of its own. Take away the crossed and the not crossed, and no third strip is left over for the moving to live in.

The opponent replies (2.2): the movement of the feet is clearly happening, and it is not happening behind you or ahead of you. So going must be in the place being gone over. Nāgārjuna's answer (2.3–6) is subtle and worth slowing down for.

Two goings, two goers

What makes a stretch of floor 'the place being gone over'? Only the going happening on it. Without a going, it is just floor. So the name 'being gone over' already contains a going (2.3).

Now the opponent says the going is in that place. Then there are two goings: the one that made the place count as 'being gone over', and the one that is now said to happen in it (2.5). If the opponent denies the first, he has a 'place being gone over' that nothing is going over (2.4), which is no longer that place at all. And if he accepts both, a going needs a goer, so two goings need two goers (2.6). One person crossing a room has become two.

This sounds like word-play, but it exposes a real habit. We picture the going as a thing sitting somewhere, like water in a cup. Nāgārjuna shows that the cup (the place being gone over) is itself made of the water (the going). You cannot put the going into the place, because without the going there is no such place to put it in.

Who goes?

The same pattern is then applied to the person (2.8–11). Who is it that goes? Not a goer: someone already counted as a goer is already going, so 'the goer goes' says the going twice. Not a non-goer: someone who is not going does not go. And there is no third kind of person between the two (2.8).

The double counting is spelled out in 2.11. If 'the goer goes', there is the going by which he is called a goer, and the going he then performs. Two goings again. If you insist on a goer who then goes, you must first have a goer without going (2.10), which is not a goer.

The point is not that no one walks. It is that 'walker' and 'walking' are not two items, one of which picks up the other. The walker is named from the walking, and the walking is named as someone's. Our grammar, subject then verb, makes it look as if a walker stood ready and then started to walk. Look for that ready walker, and you find only someone already walking, or someone not walking at all.

Starting and stopping

If motion really happened, it would have to start somewhere (2.12–14). Where does going begin? Not on the stretch already gone over, for there it has already happened. Not on the stretch not yet gone over, for nothing is going on there. Not on the stretch being gone over, for that already has going in it. Before the going starts, there is no 'gone over' or 'being gone over' at all, only the 'not yet', and going is not in the not yet (2.13). And if no beginning of going is found, the three parts of the path, which were all defined by the going, have nothing to be defined by (2.14).

Stopping meets the same fate (2.15–17). A goer does not stop, since a goer is one who is going. A non-goer does not stop, since he was not going. And one does not stop from any of the three parts of the path. Nāgārjuna then generalises: going, starting and stopping are all analysed the same way (2.17).

Try it in slow motion. Lift a cup from the table. When did the lifting start? At the first tensing of the arm? When the cup's weight came off the wood? At every instant you choose, either the lifting is already under way, or it is not yet happening. The moment of starting, taken as a thing of its own, is not found. Yet the cup is lifted.

Same or different?

Verses 2.18–21 give one of the most important tests in the whole text. If walker and walking were real things, each with its own nature, they would have to be either the same thing or two different things. Neither works.

If they were the same (2.19), doer and deed would be one. Then 'the walker' and 'the walking' would be two names for one item, and it would make as much sense to say 'the walking walks' or 'the walker is being done'. If they were different (2.20), each could exist without the other: a walker who is never walking, and a walking with no one doing it, drifting about on its own. Neither is ever met.

Something that can be established neither as one with its partner nor as different from it cannot be established as a thing at all (2.21). This is the shape of the argument, not a trick about walking. Fire and fuel (Chapter 10), agent and action (Chapter 8), and the self and its parts (Chapter 18) will all be tested the same way.

Verses 2.22–23 close the gap from the other side. Going always means someone going somewhere: a goer, and something he goes to. Now take the going by which someone is recognised as a goer. It cannot be a going he goes, as if it were a road ahead of him, because there was no goer before it to set out on it. Nor can he go some other going, because one goer does not perform two goings at once.

Existent, non-existent or both

The chapter ends (2.24–25) with the four-cornered pattern met in Chapter 1. A goer who already exists, complete, does not need to go any of the three ways. A goer who does not exist goes nowhere. One who both exists and does not exist has both problems. Commentators read 'the three kinds of going' in different ways: as going over the three parts of the path, or as a going that is itself existent, non-existent or both. So going, goer and the place to be gone are not found (2.25).

'Not found' is the key phrase. Nāgārjuna is not saying, as Zeno of Elea was taken to say, that motion is an illusion and the arrow never flies. Zeno's paradoxes try to prove that motion is impossible. Nāgārjuna's analysis shows something narrower: that motion is not found as a thing of its own, located in a strip of path, carried by a walker who stands apart from it. In the reading of Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa, what the analysis refutes is going established by its own nature, not the going that the world sees.

What is left standing

You still walk to the window, and you get there. Trains run to timetables, and the timetable is right. Nothing in the chapter stops any of this. What it removes is the picture behind the words: a self-standing walker carrying a self-standing walking across a self-standing floor.

What remains is walking, met without those three pieces. Walker, walking and path are designated together, each in dependence on the others. The walker is called a walker because of the walking; the walking is a walking because someone is walking somewhere; the path is a path because it is walked. None stands first, waiting for the others to arrive.

Try it the next time you walk. Feel the walking itself: the shift of weight, the floor arriving under the foot, the room sliding past. Look for a walker standing behind it, steering. The walking is vivid and exact. The walker, as something apart from it, is not found. Nothing is missing.

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 'Motion and the Mover': verse 2.1 and the identity test of 2.18–20; and 'Hearing the Words Anew': 'mover, moving and path designated together'.
• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'Change Without a Changer': walker and walking designated together (2.18–20), and change met without a changer.
• The Collapse of the Observer (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness), the section 'Anatta as the Beginning, Not the End': walking unfolding without a walker separate from it.
• The Chariot Comes Alive, the section 'What the Chariot Did Not Do, and What It Did': walking owing nothing to a walker standing behind it.
• Appendix: From Rheomode to Relation, Section 1: why there is no inherently existing mover, and what that does to the grammar of subject and verb.

Talks on YouTube:

• Core Logic 3: Tripartite Temporal/Spatial Analysis, on the three parts of the path.
• Nāgārjuna's MMK: 5 Core Deconstruction Logics.
• Deconstructing: Who, What, Where and When.

Words to know

• Going (gamana, gati): moving, walking, travelling.
• Goer (gantṛ): the one who goes, the mover.
• Gone over, not gone over, being gone over (gata, agata, gamyamāna): the three parts of a path. The same threefold analysis is applied to time.
• Doer and deed (kartṛ, karma): agent and action. The identity test asks whether they are one thing or two.
• Same or different (ekatva, anyatva): if two things with their own natures were related, they would have to be one or the other.
• Not found (na vidyate): not found when looked for, which is not the same as 'does not happen'.