The Three Assumptions and the Fourth

The phrase "beyond cause and effect" is one of the most misunderstood in the Dzogchen vocabulary. Read quickly, it sounds like an exception: a realm where causes do not operate, or a ground that produces appearances without being produced itself. A Madhyamaka reader will reasonably ask whether this is simply a smuggled substrate, a producer granted one final exemption from having to justify itself.

This chapter argues that the phrase is not an exception to dependent arising. It names what dependent arising looks like once the habit of reifying has been seen through. The route runs through three assumptions that analysis dismantles, a fourth that survives them, and a mode of seeing that does not divide.

The book frames the problem with a scheme of its own, not one that Madhyamaka presents (see the Note on Method). On this framing, most inquiry into causation rests on three assumptions, usually unstated. The first holds that appearance requires an intrinsic essence, something a thing has from its own side. The second holds that functioning requires an intrinsic causal power, a capacity the cause carries into the effect. The third holds that the coherent alignment of conditions requires a deeper ontological foundation beneath it.

Analysis meets each in turn. Take a chariot. Its wheels, axle and pole are examined, and the chariot is not found in any of them. Take the power of a cause. Look for it in the cause and it dissolves into a designation that depends on the effect it is said to produce. Take the foundation. Look for the ground beneath the conditions and it becomes one more whole to be divided, and its parts are designated too.

Two claims must be held together, and both are stated here before anything is explained.

First, analysis leaves no deeper foundation from which appearance is produced. No essence, no intrinsic power, and no substrate beneath the conditions can be found to do the producing. Every candidate is tested, and each is either found to be another designated whole or is not found at all.

Second, appearances do arise. They appear when certain factors are present and aligned: a wheel, an axle and a pole brought together by a maker's labour; a flame with fuel, air and a wick; an eye, a form and attention meeting. The analysis does not take this away. The chariot is not found in its parts, and it is not found apart from them.

Read side by side, the two points seem to cancel each other. The first seems to deny that anything produces appearance, and the second seems to say that conditions do. Before concluding that one must give way, consider a flame, the book's own illustration rather than an example from the MMK. Fuel, air and heat are brought together, and the flame appears. Remove one and it goes out. The conditions are necessary, and the burning is not separate from their meeting.

But the reader will press at once: does the fuel produce the flame, or does the flame arise from nothing? If the fuel produces it, something must pass from fuel into flame, and the flame has a separate origin. That reading affirms a producer. If nothing produces it, the flame seems to appear from nothing, a groundless event standing alone. That reading denies the conditions and turns the appearance into a self-starting thing. The two answers look like a dilemma: either a producer, or no reason at all.

The dilemma is the conflict, and both of its horns make the same assumption. They take "cause" to name an item that either stands outside the burning and produces it, or is absent. The first point removes the item. The second keeps the conditions. Put together, the question "is there a producer?" searches for something the designation "fuel producing flame" does not contain. The burning is not a product handed from fuel to flame, and it is not a flame with no reason. It is the alignment, designated as cause when traced in sequence, and designated as a single burning when seen undivided. The question of origin loses its object at the point where the conditions are complete.

Holding the two together forces a choice about what "cause" can mean. Three senses are in play. The first is the intrinsic producer: a cause that exists on its own and delivers an effect from outside itself. MMK 1.1 rejects arising from self, from other, from both, or without cause, and the first claim excludes this sense completely. The second is conditional alignment: one factor among others that, when assembled, lets a result appear. The second claim affirms it. It is valid as a conventional description, and it does real work, telling us which factors to bring together if we want a fire and which to remove if we want it to stop. The third is the designated relatum: "cause" is the element attention picks out when it sequences a process. The web of dependence is real as a web, but its relata are drawn by designation, and the presenting basis is itself one of them, with no web drawn over it.

The two claims do not conflict once the senses are separated. A cause is a designated relatum within a web, and it is nothing over and above its designation. This is why MMK 24.18 can say that dependent origination, being a dependent designation, is itself emptiness, and is the middle way. The designation is not a thin cover over a real producer. It is the whole status of the cause.

So the two points were never rival answers to one question. They are two statements about one appearing. One says nothing outside the alignment produces it. The other says the alignment is what appears. Described in sequence, this is cause and effect. Seen undivided, with no before and no after, there is no sequence and no owner.

The fourth assumption survives these three. It is the most difficult to catch, because it no longer asks what produces appearances. It asks why they spring forth at all, as though the alignment of conditions were still an incomplete answer, still owed some further and final justification. On this book's reading, which is the author's interpretive step and not a classical claim, this is the last spell. It does not search for essence, or power, or substrate. It searches for permission to stop searching. It mistakes a spontaneous ground for the thing that finally grants that permission.

The "why" question has force only while a producer seems to stand behind appearing, a prior ground for which the question can ask a reason. Seen through, there is no such ground. The question is not answered. It has no object, and so it stops applying. This is the sense in which the answer to "why do they spring forth?" is "no why and because." The phrase does not contradict dependent arising. It marks the point where the question of cause no longer has a referent.