Examination of Combination

A loaf of bread needs flour, water, yeast, an oven and a baker. No single one of them makes bread. Put them together, and bread comes out. So it seems natural to say that the bread is produced by the coming-together of its causes and conditions. This chapter asks what that coming-together (sāmagrī) actually does. Is the bread already in the gathering? Does the gathering hand something over to it? When the bread appears, are its causes still there, or already gone?

The chapter returns to the question of Chapter 1 from a new side. Chapter 1 asked whether single conditions can produce an effect. A natural reply is that no single condition does it, but the whole collection does. Chapter 20 tests that reply. It finds that the collection meets every problem the single conditions met, and a few more besides, as long as cause, collection and effect are each taken to exist on their own.

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).

Is the bread already in the gathering?

The opening verses set a simple choice. When flour, water, yeast and heat come together, either the bread is already somehow present in that gathering, or it is not (20.1–2).

Suppose it is present. Then it should be found there, in the bowl and the oven, before the baking is done (20.3). It is not. And if it were, nothing would be left for the gathering to do: you do not bake a loaf that already exists.

Suppose instead it is not present in the gathering at all. Then the gathering has no special link to bread. Flour and yeast would be no more the causes of bread than sand and gravel are, since neither contains it (20.4). Anything could come from anything.

This is the same fork as in Chapter 1 (1.11–12). It has only been moved from the single conditions to their sum. Adding things together does not help, because the question is not about how many causes there are. It is about how a cause that stands on its own could reach an effect that stands on its own.

Does the cause hand something over?

A second way to picture production is as a handover. The seed passes its power to the sprout, then dies away, like a runner handing on a baton. Verses 20.5–6 take this picture at its word.

If the cause gives its power to the effect and then ceases, the cause has split into two: the part that was handed on, which lives in the effect, and the part that ceased (20.5). A single thing with its own nature cannot both go on and stop. If instead the cause ceases without handing anything on, the effect appears after its cause is gone, with nothing joining them. That effect would have no cause at all (20.6).

Verse 20.9 adds a variant. Perhaps the cause does not hand over a power but turns into the effect: it passes over, like a person moving from one house to another. Then nothing new has arisen. The same thing, already born, has simply been born again in a new place.

Before, with or after?

The next question is about time. When the effect appears, where is its cause? There are only three answers. The cause is gone before the effect appears, or it is there at the same moment, or the effect came first.

The effect at the same time as its gathering (20.7). Then producer and produced exist side by side. Two things that are both already there do not stand as maker and made. A potter and a finished pot, both on the table, are not in the act of making.

The effect before the gathering (20.8). Then it owes nothing to causes that come later. It would be an effect without a cause.

The cause gone before the effect (20.10). A cause that has ceased and vanished cannot produce anything; it is no longer there to act. And a cause that is still present when its effect has arisen is, in the verse's word, covered or bound up with it: both are simply there, as in 20.7, and the producing has nowhere to happen.

Verse 20.11 closes the loop. If the cause is not joined to its effect at all, which effect would it produce? The verse uses the image of seeing: a cause does not produce an effect it has never met, and it does not need to produce one it has already met.

Where do cause and effect meet?

Production seems to need contact. The match must touch the strip; the seed must be in the soil when the sprout begins. Verses 20.12–14 test this contact (saṃgati) across the three times: past, present and future, for the cause and for the effect.

Meeting needs two things present together. Whatever is past is gone; whatever is not yet born has not come. So in eight of the nine pairings one side is missing, and there is nothing to meet. In the remaining case both are present, and they can touch. But then the effect is already there, so the touching does not produce it (20.15). Without contact, how could a cause produce anything? With contact, what is left for it to produce?

Empty of the effect, or full of it?

Verse 20.16 restates the problem with the word 'empty'. Either the cause is empty of the effect, lacking it entirely, or it is full of it. If it lacks it entirely, how can it give rise to it? If it already contains it, how is anything new produced?

Verses 20.17–18 push one step further. Something that is not empty, in the sense of having its own fixed nature, could never arise or cease. It would simply be what it is, always. So a non-empty effect would be unarisen and unceasing. But the opponent also cannot rescue arising by calling the effect empty, if 'empty' means a kind of nothing. A nothing does not arise or cease either.

This is a delicate pair of verses. Nāgārjuna is not saying that emptiness, rightly understood, makes arising impossible. In Chapter 24 he says the opposite: only because things are empty can they arise and cease at all (24.14, 24.18–20). What 20.18 rejects is arising found under analysis. If 'empty' is taken as a blank, a kind of nothing, then a nothing cannot be produced or destroyed. And even an empty thing, rightly understood, when looked for, is not found arising or ceasing in its own right; that is why Chapter 18 calls the nature of things 'unarisen and unceasing' (18.7). Arising and ceasing are kept, but as dependent designations, not as events found in things. Both pictures of the cause, as full of the effect or empty of it in the sense of a blank, keep a self-standing thing in play, and that is what blocks arising.

The same, or different?

Verses 20.19–20 bring in the pair of identity and difference, one of the pairs among the eight extremes of the homage (Chapter 1).

If cause and effect were one thing, the parent and the child would be the same person, and the seed would be the sprout. Nothing would have been produced. If they were two wholly separate things, the seed would be as unrelated to the sprout as a stone is, and a cause would be no different from a non-cause (20.20). Rice comes from rice seed and not from barley, which already shows that the relation is neither sameness nor separateness.

Without an effect, no cause

The last verses gather the threads. If the effect exists by its own nature, it is already there, and a cause has nothing to do. If its very nature is to be non-existent, like a flower in the sky, there is nothing for a cause to bring about (20.21). Both horns treat the effect as having a fixed nature, of being or of not being. But something that brings about nothing is not a cause (20.22). Being a cause is not a property a thing has on its own. It is a name given because an effect arises in dependence on it, as Chapter 1 found (1.5). Take away the effect and the cause goes with it.

The same holds for the gathering. A coming-together of conditions does not make itself; it too depends on its parts and on the effect it is named for (20.23). So the chapter ends: there is no effect made by a gathering, and none made without one. And without an effect, there is no 'gathering of conditions' to speak of (20.24).

What is left standing

None of this stops the bread from being baked. Flour, water, yeast and heat still go into the oven, and a loaf still comes out. A baker who leaves out the yeast still gets a flat loaf. Every craft and science that tracks what follows from what is left exactly as it was.

What goes is a picture laid over the baking: a collection of self-standing ingredients that either contains the loaf or hands it something across a gap in time, as one solid thing acts on another. When cause and effect are taken as designated together, each named in dependence on the other, the puzzles of contact, handover and timing never arise. The loaf is present when its conditions are present, and is called their effect because of them. As Tsongkhapa puts it, what reasoning negates is production established by its own nature, not production as the world speaks of it.

This can be checked in the kitchen. Look for the moment when the dough becomes bread. Look for the place where the yeast's power passes into the loaf. Every moment is full of change, and at no moment is a finished loaf handed across from one thing to another. Yet the bread is there, warm, and it feeds you.

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': a cause pictured as a thing with power that acts on another thing, and why condition and effect are designated together.
• Chapter 3, Unfindability and Freedom from the Eight Extremes, the section 'Present Without Being Produced': no backstage where the conditions assemble a flame and push it out; production kept as a designation that works.
• Chapter 4, Mutual Dependency and the Non-Hierarchy of Relation, the sections 'The Problem of Interaction' and 'How Things Meet: Neither One Nor Two': how two things could touch if each stands on its own, the question behind verses 20.12–15.
• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'The Eight Extremes Turned Over': identity and difference, with 'not identical: the sprout is not the seed; not wholly other: rice yields rice'.

Words to know

• Coming-together (sāmagrī): the gathering of a cause and its conditions, said to produce an effect.
• Cause (hetu) and conditions (pratyaya): the main cause, like a seed, and the helping conditions, like soil and water.
• Effect (phala): literally 'fruit', what arises from a cause.
• Meeting (saṃgati): the contact between cause and effect that production seems to need.
• Passing over (saṃkramaṇa): the idea that a cause moves across into its effect.
• Own-nature (svabhāva): a nature a thing would have from its own side, apart from everything else.