Examination of the Conditioned

Everything around us seems to have a life story. A cup is made, it lasts for some years, and one day it breaks. A thought comes up, stays for a moment and is gone. Buddhist teachers of Nāgārjuna's time put this into a formula: whatever is conditioned has three marks, arising, abiding and ceasing. It is one of the most trusted descriptions in the tradition. Things begin, they last, they end. What could be more obvious?

This chapter, the longest so far, tests that formula. Chapter 1 asked whether causes can produce effects; Chapter 2 asked whether a goer can be found going. Here the same kind of search is turned on the life story itself. If arising, abiding and ceasing are real features that things have from their own side, we should be able to find them, say what they are and say when they happen. Nāgārjuna looks, one mark at a time, and none of them is found. At the end he says what they are like instead: a dream, a magic show, a city in the clouds.

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 three marks and their problem

The Abhidharma schools held that every conditioned thing (saṃskṛta) carries three marks: it arises, it abides and it ceases. Some added a fourth, decay. The marks were not just ways of talking. They were counted as real factors in their own right, little forces that act on a thing: one brings it into being, one holds it in being for a moment, one takes it out of being.

Nāgārjuna starts with a simple question about the marks themselves (7.1). Is arising conditioned or unconditioned? It must be one or the other.

Suppose arising is conditioned. Then it is one more conditioned thing, and every conditioned thing has the three marks. So arising must itself arise, abide and cease. Its arising must in turn arise, abide and cease, and so on without end (7.3). The account never gets started: before the cup can arise, the arising of the cup must arise, and before that, the arising of that arising.

Suppose instead arising is unconditioned. Then it is like space or nirvāṇa in the Abhidharma list, something that never comes and goes. But then how can it be the mark of things that come and go? A mark of change that never changes is a strange mark.

There is a further problem (7.2). Do the three marks act one at a time or all together? One at a time, none of them is enough to mark a thing as conditioned: a thing that only arose, and never lasted or ended, would not be what we mean by conditioned. All together, they clash. Nothing can be arising and ceasing in the same instant, any more than a light can be switching on and switching off at once.

Arising that produces itself

The Abhidharma had an answer to the regress (7.4). There are only two arisings, they said, not an endless series. The 'primary arising' produces the thing, and also produces a 'secondary arising', the arising of arising. The secondary arising, in turn, produces the primary one. Each produces the other, so the chain closes into a loop of two.

Nāgārjuna asks about the order (7.5–6). For the secondary arising to produce the primary one, the secondary must already exist. But it exists only because the primary one produced it. So the primary must come first. And the same reasoning, run the other way, says the secondary must come first. Each needs the other to be already there before it can be there itself.

Could one arising produce the other while it is itself still being produced (7.7)? Only if something not yet born could do things. A builder who has not yet been born cannot build a house, and an arising that has not yet arisen cannot produce anything.

The lamp that lights itself

The opponent now reaches for a famous image (7.8). A lamp lights up the room, and it lights up itself too: you do not need a second lamp to see the first. In the same way, arising could produce both the thing and itself. No regress, no loop.

Nāgārjuna examines the lamp closely (7.9). To light something up is to remove darkness from it. Is there darkness inside the flame? No. Is there darkness in the spot where the flame stands? No. So there is no darkness for the lamp to remove from itself. 'The lamp lights itself' turns out to describe nothing.

Then what about the darkness around it (7.10–11)? Either the light reaches the darkness or it does not. While the lamp is just catching, its light and the darkness never meet: where there is light there is no darkness, and where there is darkness there is no light. And if the lamp could remove darkness without reaching it, then a lamp lit here in this room would remove the darkness of every room in the world.

And the image cuts both ways (7.12). If light can light up itself as well as others, darkness should be able to hide itself as well as others. Then darkness would hide itself, and we could not even see that it is dark.

None of this stops anyone from reading by lamplight. 'The lamp lit the room' is true, and useful. What fails is the idea that the lamp is a thing with a power of its own, which crosses over and acts on a separate thing called darkness. Light and dark are named in relation to each other, like seed and sprout in Chapter 1.

Does arising arise?

With the lamp set aside, Nāgārjuna asks directly whether arising can produce itself (7.13). If arising has not yet arisen, it is not there to do anything. If it has already arisen, there is nothing left to produce. Producing yourself requires being there before you are there.

The next verse brings in the pattern of Chapter 2 (7.14). There, the road was split into the part already walked, the part not yet walked and the part being walked, and no walking was found in any of them. Here the same split is made for arising. What has already arisen does not arise again; what has not arisen is not there to arise; and 'what is arising' is not a third thing, half-born, standing between the two.

Verses 7.15 and 7.16 are compressed, and commentators unpack them differently. The thread is this. 'Something that is arising' is supposed to depend on 'arising'. But arising has not been found as anything separate from the arising thing. So we cannot say the thing arises in dependence on an arising, as if there were two items. And here Nāgārjuna gives his positive statement, one of the most important in the text (7.16): whatever comes to be in dependence is, as regards own-nature, at peace. 'At peace' (śānta) means quiet, empty of own-nature: not stirred by an arising of its own. This is the point of the whole chapter. Because things depend, they are free of the three marks taken as real forces.

Verses 7.17 to 7.21 tie up the remaining options. If there were an unarisen thing waiting somewhere, it might arise; but there is no such waiting thing (7.17). If arising produces the arising thing, what produces that arising? Another arising, without end; or no arising at all, and then anything could pop up anywhere (7.18–19). As Chapter 1 showed, arising fits neither what exists nor what does not (7.20). And arising does not fit a thing that is ceasing; but a thing that is not ceasing at all, an unchanging thing, does not exist (7.21).

Abiding: does anything stay?

The middle mark is abiding: a thing's staying in being for a while. It is the mark we rely on most. The table stays a table; you stay you. Nāgārjuna applies the same three-part test (7.22). A thing that is not abiding does not abide; that is what 'not abiding' means. A thing that already abides does not need to abide again. A thing in the act of abiding is not a third case between the two. And something unarisen cannot abide at all.

Then a point anyone can check (7.23–24). Abiding does not fit a thing that is ceasing. But every thing is always ageing. There is no stretch of time, however short, in which a cup is simply staying the same, untouched by the slow wear that will one day break it. Which thing ever stands still, outside ageing and death? None is found. So 'abiding' is not a separate state a thing is in, a pause between arising and ceasing.

Can abiding abide (7.25)? By another abiding, there is a regress. By itself, it has the problems of the lamp. Abiding fails in the same way arising failed.

Ceasing: does anything end?

The last mark is ceasing. Surely things end: the cup breaks, the candle goes out. The test again (7.26). What has not ceased is still there, intact. What has ceased does not cease again. What is ceasing is not a third, half-gone thing. And what was never born cannot cease.

Ceasing does not fit a thing that is abiding, because it is still abiding; nor a thing that is not abiding, because it is not there (7.27). Look at the change itself (7.28). A state cannot cease while it is still that very state: then it has not ceased. And it cannot cease when it is already a different state: then the ceasing is over. The edge where one becomes the other is not found as a thing in its own right.

Then the general step (7.29). Arising has been found to make no sense; ceasing is the ending of what arose; so ceasing makes no sense either. Two short images close the case. A thing that exists cannot cease while it exists, because existing and not existing would have to be one (7.30). And a thing that does not exist cannot cease, just as you cannot cut off a second head that someone does not have (7.31). Ceasing, like arising, does not happen by itself or by another (7.32).

Conditioned and unconditioned together

The chapter draws its conclusion (7.33). If arising, abiding and ceasing are not established as real marks, then 'the conditioned', defined by those marks, is not established either. And then a step that surprised Nāgārjuna's opponents: if the conditioned is not established, neither is the unconditioned. Nirvāṇa and space were defined as 'what has no arising, abiding or ceasing'. Their whole meaning was set against the conditioned. Take away one side of the contrast, and the other side has nothing to stand on.

This matters for practice. It means nirvāṇa is not a second, better realm standing on its own beyond the world of change. It is not found apart from what it is contrasted with. Nāgārjuna returns to this in Chapter 25.

A dream, a magic show, a city in the clouds

The last verse does not deny the life story of things. It describes it (7.34). Arising, abiding and ceasing are like a magic show, like a dream, like a city of gandharvas: the towers and walls that seem to stand in the clouds, or shimmer over the desert, and are not found when you walk towards them.

Each image has two sides. In a dream, a house is built, stands and burns down. These events are vivid, they follow their own logic, and they move the dreamer to joy and fear. Yet none of them is found anywhere on waking. A magician's elephant walks across the stage and the audience gasps; it is seen, and it is not an elephant. The images keep the appearing and let go of the something that was supposed to be behind it.

So the verse does not say that nothing happens. It says that what happens, happens the way a dream happens: fully, vividly, with effects, and without anything that arises, lasts or ends from its own side.

What is left standing

A cup is still made in a pottery, used for years and dropped on a kitchen floor. We can still say when it was made and when it broke, and we are right. Doctors still date the onset of an illness, and engineers still measure how long a bridge will last. The chapter does not touch any of this.

What it removes is the idea that arising, abiding and ceasing are real forces or stages that a thing passes through on its own: a moment at which being switches on, a stretch in which it holds steady, a moment at which it switches off. Look for any of these and you find more change, with no edge where a thing crosses from nothing into being or back. The three marks work as designations within before and after. They do not report something standing there to be born, to last and to die.

This also answers a worry. If nothing truly arises or ceases, is the world frozen? No. A frozen world would need things that truly abide, and abiding was not found either. The world as it appears, changing, workable and dream-like, is exactly what is left.

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)': arising, abiding and ceasing examined together (MMK 7), why appearances are not ultimately 'ongoing', the question 'does this moment arise or cease?', and the closing images of verse 7.34.
• Chapter 8, States of Awareness, Deep Sleep, and Death, the section 'Dreaming': the dream as the tradition's image for conditioned things, citing verse 7.34; vivid and coherent, yet not anything from its own side.
• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article): change without a changer, and the eight extremes turned over.

Talks on YouTube:

• Core Logic 4: Infinite Regress, on this chapter.
• Nāgārjuna's MMK: 5 Core Deconstruction Logics.

Words to know

• Conditioned (saṃskṛta): whatever comes about through causes and conditions.
• Unconditioned (asaṃskṛta): in the Abhidharma, what has no arising or ceasing, such as space and nirvāṇa.
• The three marks (trilakṣaṇa): arising (utpāda), abiding (sthiti) and ceasing (bhaṅga or nirodha), held to define the conditioned.
• Infinite regress (anavasthā): an explanation that needs another of the same kind, and that one another, with no end.
• At peace (śānta): free of own-nature; not stirred by an arising of its own.
• City of gandharvas (gandharvanagara): a mirage city in the clouds, a classic image of what appears vividly and is not found when sought.