Examination of Becoming and Destruction

A wave rises and falls. A candle is lit and goes out. A person is born and, one day, dies. We picture these as things that first come into being and later pass out of it, with a stretch of existing in between. This chapter looks at that pair, coming-into-being (saṃbhava) and passing-away (vibhava), and asks how they relate. Can there be a passing-away without a coming-into-being, or the two at once? And what of the stream of lives that Buddhists say runs from one death to the next birth?

Chapter 7 examined arising, abiding and ceasing as marks of conditioned things, and Chapter 20 examined how causes produce effects. Chapter 21 brings these together. It shows that arising and dissolution cannot be held apart or together if they belong to something that exists on its own. It then answers an objection: does this not leave us with either eternalism or annihilationism? Nāgārjuna's reply is that only a belief in real existence forces that choice.

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).

Apart or together?

The first verse states the whole problem. Coming-into-being and passing-away are either found apart from each other or together with each other. Neither works (21.1).

Passing-away apart from coming-into-being (21.2). A wave cannot fall without having risen. Death without birth would be the death of nobody. Passing-away needs something that came into being.

Passing-away together with coming-into-being (21.3). A wave cannot rise and fall in the same instant. Birth and death are opposites; they cannot belong to one thing at one moment.

Coming-into-being apart from passing-away (21.4). A wave that rose and never fell would be permanent. But impermanence is never absent from conditioned things. Whatever arises carries its ending with it.

Coming-into-being together with passing-away (21.5). The same problem as 21.3, from the other side.

Verse 21.6 draws the conclusion. If two things cannot be established either together or apart, they cannot be established at all, as things in their own right. Notice the condition. Nāgārjuna is not saying that waves do not rise and fall. He is saying that 'arising' and 'dissolution' cannot be two separate events, each existing on its own and attached to a thing that exists on its own. They are identified only in relation to each other, and to the thing they are said of.

Chapter 3 of The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World turns verse 21.1 into a test anyone can try. Does this moment arise or cease? If it arises, it has not yet ceased. If it ceases, it has already arisen. If both, it carries opposites at once. The mind stalls, and it stalls because it is holding on to a 'this moment' that is supposed to do the arising and the ceasing.

Worn away or not worn away

Verse 21.7 tries the same pair on a different axis. Take something that is wearing away, like a burning log. Does it come into being? No: it is already on its way out. Take something not wearing away, something fixed. Does it come into being? No: something fixed does not begin. And neither can pass away: the log already passing away does not pass away a second time, and the fixed thing does not pass away at all. Whichever way the thing is described, coming and going have nowhere to attach.

Verse 21.8 shows why. Arising and dissolution are not found without a thing that arises and dissolves. And a thing is not found without arising and dissolution: a wave that neither rose nor fell would not be a wave. The thing and its arising and passing are identified together. None of them comes first, to which the others are added.

Empty or not empty, one or different

Verse 21.9 says that arising and dissolution make no sense for what is empty, and none for what is not empty. This is the same move as in Chapter 20 (20.17–18). A thing that is not empty, with a fixed nature of its own, could never arise or end. And if 'empty' is taken as a kind of nothing, a nothing does not arise or end either. Even what is empty in the right sense, dependent and without own-nature, is not found arising or ending when it is looked for. So arising and passing are not events found in things of either kind. They hold as designations, for what is empty in the sense Nāgārjuna intends: neither a fixed thing nor a blank (24.18).

Verse 21.10 adds the pair of identity and difference. Arising and dissolution are not one: rising is not falling. Nor are they two separate things: each is identified only against the other. They are neither the same nor different, which is the mark of things designated together.

Then the obvious objection: but we see things arise and pass away all the time (21.11)! Nāgārjuna's answer is short. They are seen through confusion (moha). He does not mean that nothing is seen, or that change is a hallucination. He means that what we see, change, is read as the coming and going of things that exist on their own. The seeing is real. The reading of it as the birth and death of self-standing things is the confusion.

Born from what?

Verses 21.12–13 repeat the argument of Chapter 1 with existence and non-existence as the terms.

A thing is not born from a thing: if the result already exists, it needs no birth; and one existing thing does not turn into another without losing its own nature. A thing is not born from a non-thing: nothing comes from nothing. A non-thing is not born at all: an absence has no birthday. So 'being born' has nowhere to happen, once both sides of the birth are taken to exist or not exist from their own side (21.12). Verse 21.13 then restates the opening verse of the whole work: not from itself, not from another, not from both. From where, then?

Permanence and annihilation

Now the chapter turns to its main concern. An opponent worries that this analysis leaves nothing. Nāgārjuna replies that it is the opposite view, belief in real existence, that leaves us stuck (21.14). If a thing exists by its own nature, it must be either permanent or impermanent. If permanent, it never changes: that is eternalism. If impermanent, then at some point what really existed must really cease to exist: that is annihilation. There is no third option for a thing with own-nature.

The opponent has an answer (21.15). Existence, they say, is not one lasting thing but a stream, or continuum (saṃtāna): causes rise and fall, each passing away as its effect arises. The stream is never permanent, because each moment ends. It is never annihilated, because each moment is followed by another. This is the Abhidharma's way of avoiding both extremes.

Nāgārjuna replies that the stream does not escape, as long as its moments really exist (21.16). Each cause really ends and never comes back. So each cause is annihilated, moment after moment. A string of real endings is a string of annihilations, however close together they sit.

And the end of the stream is worse (21.17). What exists by its own nature cannot coherently come not to exist; yet the path is supposed to end in nirvāṇa, where the stream of becoming is stilled. On the opponent's view, nirvāṇa would be the annihilation of something real. The Abhidharma's stream, taken as real, cannot give the Buddhist path a coherent end.

The stream from one life to the next

The last verses test the stream at its most important joint: death and rebirth. Buddhists speak of a continuum of becoming (bhavasaṃtati) that links the last moment of one life to the first moment of the next. Where is the link?

If the last moment of the old life has ceased, it is gone, and nothing remains to connect with the first moment of the new one (21.18). If it has not ceased, the old life is still going, and the new one cannot begin; there would be two lives at once (21.18). If the first moment is born exactly while the last is ceasing, then the ceasing one and the being-born one are two different things, and the stream is just two moments side by side (21.19). Or, if we refuse to separate them, the new being would be born in the very aggregates that are dying (21.20), which makes nonsense of birth and death alike.

So the stream of becoming is not found in the past, the present or the future (21.21). The book reads this as a key to death: the continuum is not denied as a convention, but it is not found as a thing that flows (Chapter 8).

What is left standing

Waves still rise and fall. Candles are lit and go out. People are born, grow old and die, and a later life can still be spoken of as following from an earlier one, the way the flame of the last watch of the night follows from the flame of the first. Nothing in this chapter removes the ordinary talk of beginning, ending and continuing.

What goes is the picture behind it: a thing with its own nature, which must either last for ever or be wiped out, and a stream made of such things, linked by a real hand-over at each joint. Seen as designated in dependence, arising and passing are named together, against each other, and the thing they are said of is named with them. Then there is nothing to be eternal and nothing to be annihilated. This is how Madhyamaka avoids both extremes: not by finding a middle object between them, but by not positing the object that the extremes are about.

This can be tried with any sound. It rises, it lasts a moment, it fades. Look for the instant it came into being and the instant it ceased. Look for the sound itself, apart from its rising and fading. The questions find no foothold. Yet the sound was heard, and its ending was heard too.

In the books

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

• Chapter 3, Unfindability and Freedom from the Eight Extremes (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'Non-Arising (Anutpāda)' and its part 'Does this moment arise or cease?': verse 21.1 as a question that stalls the substantialist mind, and why the question is released rather than answered.
• Chapter 8, States of Awareness, Deep Sleep, and Death, the section 'Death as a Conventional Designation': verse 21.21 and the continuum of becoming, not found in any of the three times.
• Chapter 9, The Reconceptualization of Continuity, especially 'Continuity Without Persistence' and 'Freedom from Permanence and Annihilation': continuity designated on a succession that is neither identical nor different, the answer to 21.14–17.
• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'The Eight Extremes Turned Over': arising and ceasing, permanence and annihilation, as questions about a thing with whereabouts.
• The Last Refuge of Ontology: Dependent Arising Dismantles Itself (The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness): arising and ceasing, the verb as well as the noun, dismantled together.

Words to know

• Coming-into-being (saṃbhava): arising, origination.
• Passing-away (vibhava): dissolution, ceasing.
• Permanence (śāśvata) and annihilation (uccheda): the two extremes. A thing lasts for ever, or what was real becomes nothing.
• Stream, continuum (saṃtāna): a series of moments, each arising as the one before passes away.
• Continuum of becoming (bhavasaṃtati): the stream said to link one life with the next.
• Confusion (moha): here, reading change as the birth and death of things that exist on their own.