Interlude: Same Words, Different Worlds

Before the argument proper begins in Chapter 2, one obstacle has to be faced directly, because it decides whether the argument can be heard at all. Nāgārjuna's key terms—dependent arising, condition, cause, time, space, motion, existence, the conventional, emptiness, nirvāṇa—are ordinary words, or have become ordinary in translation. Every reader brings meanings to them. Those meanings were formed by the very habit Chapter 1 has described, and so the reader quietly hears a substantialist sentence where Nāgārjuna wrote a Madhyamaka one.

This is not a matter of vocabulary that a glossary could settle. It is a matter of the picture that stands behind each word. When a substantialist mind hears 'dependent arising', it sees things tied together; when it hears 'time', it sees a river; when it hears 'conventional', it hears 'only agreed upon'. The words are the same, but the worlds in which they are understood are different. The same text can then be read for a lifetime, admired and even taught, while what it says is never heard, because every sentence has been translated back into the habit it was written to dissolve.

This interlude takes the terms one at a time. For each, it sets the picture the habit supplies beside the way Nāgārjuna uses the word, and offers a way to check the difference in one's own experience. The aim is not definitions, which would only be new labels for old pictures, but a change in how the words are heard.

Dependent Arising

The substantialist hears interconnection. Everything is connected to everything else: the tree to the soil, the soil to the rain, the rain to the sea, all held together in a vast web. Popular presentations borrow, and usually flatten, the image, from the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and the Huayan school, of Indra's net, an infinite net with a jewel at every knot, each reflecting all the others. The picture is moving and partly apt, and it is genuinely an advance on the image of isolated objects. But listen to its grammar. There are jewels, and they are connected. The things come first, and the connections are laid between them. Each jewel, however much it reflects, is still a jewel in its own right.

Nāgārjuna's dependent arising does not describe how existing things are linked. It describes how anything is identified at all: only in dependence on what it is not—its parts, its causes, its contrasts and the designation under which it is picked out. A thing is not first there and then dependent. It is identified as this thing only in the dependence; and the dependence is not there first either, for relation and relata are designated together. Apart from them nothing is found that could be tied to anything. That is why Nāgārjuna can say that whatever is dependently arisen is emptiness, and that emptiness is itself a dependent designation (MMK 24.18). Interconnection could never be equated with emptiness; interconnected things would each still have a nature of their own. Dependent arising can be equated with emptiness precisely because there is no nature to connect.

The difference shows in what the doctrine is for. For the substantialist, dependent arising is a fact about the world, a cosmic web to be admired. For Nāgārjuna it is an instrument: it demonstrates emptiness, and when it has done so it is not left standing as a new account of what reality is made of. Try this. Pick out the cup on the table, and ask what it would be if it were connected to nothing. The substantialist answer is: still a cup, only alone. Nāgārjuna's answer is: nothing that could be called a cup, or anything else—because 'cup' was never a jewel waiting to be strung.

Conditions and Causes

The substantialist hears production. A cause is a thing with power, which acts on another thing and brings about a third. The seed, with its inner potency, pushes up the sprout; the match, with its heat, makes the fire. Conditions are helpers that assist the cause: soil, water, warmth. In each case the cause is there first, complete in itself, and the effect comes out of it, as a chick comes out of an egg.

After the homage, Nāgārjuna begins the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by asking where such production could occur. Nothing arises from itself, from another, from both or without a cause (MMK 1.1). He takes up the Abhidharma's list of four kinds of condition—the causal, the object, the immediately preceding and the dominant (MMK 1.2)—and then asks what a condition is. If conditions were conditions by their own nature, they would be conditions whether or not anything arose from them. But a seed is called a condition only because a sprout arises in dependence on it. 'These are conditions, because in dependence on them that arises': so it is said. 'But for as long as that has not arisen, why are these not non-conditions?' (MMK 1.5). Condition and effect are designated in relation to each other; neither is a condition or an effect on its own.

The same analysis is applied to fire and fuel. If fire were the same as its fuel, agent and action would be one; if fire were different from fuel, it could exist without fuel (MMK 10.1). Fire is identified as fire only as burning this fuel, and fuel as fuel only as being burned. Neither is the producer of the other. The early formula of dependent arising already had this shape: when this is, that is; from the arising of this, that arises (Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.21). It states what holds together, reliably and usefully. It does not name a power hidden inside the cause, reaching across to the effect.

None of this denies that matches light fires and that farmers can rely on seeds. Conventionally the regularities hold, and Chapter 14 shows why their reliability needs no essence. What is denied is the picture of the cause as a self-standing thing that contains its effect or pushes it out. Watch a match being struck. The flame does not leave the match head; there is no fire waiting inside it. Match, striking, oxygen, flame and the one who calls it 'lighting a match' are identified together, designated together; even 'one event' is a designation, not a whole waiting to be cut into cause and effect.

Time

Of all the terms, time is perhaps the one most deeply held in substantialist form. The habit pictures time as a river flowing on its own, independent of anything that happens: a single, universal 'now' sweeping across the whole universe at once. Things exist in time as fish swim in a river. Remove all the fish and the river, we feel, would still flow.

Buddhists have not been exempt. The Sarvāstivāda school held that the basic elements of experience exist in all three times, past, present and future, and only their activity changes; some Abhidharma theories of momentariness (kṣaṇavāda) pictured time as a string of discrete moments, each easily imagined as a tiny self-standing unit of duration. In both cases time, or its smallest pieces, was given a nature of its own.

Nāgārjuna's examination is brief. Present and future are established only in relation to the past, and the past only in relation to them; none of the three is found by itself (MMK 19.1–4). A time that does not stay cannot be grasped, and a time that stays does not exist; how, then, could an ungrasped time be designated (MMK 19.5)? Then the conclusion: if time depends on things, how could there be time without things? And no entity whatsoever is found—none, that is, existing from its own side—so how could time (MMK 19.6)? Time is not a container in which phenomena occur. It is designated together with phenomena, as the 'when' of their changing, and it cannot be found apart from them.

Nor is time found apart from the framework in which it is measured and spoken of. The day is the turning of the earth in relation to the sun; the year is its orbit; the hour is a division agreed for convenience. Even the most precise time human beings have defined is defined through a phenomenon: since 1967 the second has been fixed as 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation emitted in a particular transition of the caesium-133 atom. Physics has gone further still. Einstein showed in 1905 that whether two distant events happen at the same time depends on the frame of reference from which they are described; there is no universal 'now' across the universe. The clocks on GPS satellites run faster than clocks on the ground by about thirty-eight millionths of a second each day, because their height in the earth's gravity speeds them up more than their speed slows them down, and the system has to correct for it or fail within hours. Relativity, at least, has no place for a river that flows by itself, the same for everyone everywhere—a finding compatible with this analysis, though physics alone does not settle the philosophical question.

Lived time shows the same intimacy. An hour in a dentist's chair and an hour with an old friend are the same on the clock and nothing alike in experience. The past exists as memory, record and consequence, designated now; the future exists as plan, fear and expectation, designated now—and 'now' is itself designated only in relation to past and future. Dōgen's being-time (uji) refuses the river from the inside: time is not something that flows past things, but the being of each thing in its own position, and, read in Madhyamaka terms, each position is designated, not found (Chapter 5).

A test. Sit for a minute without looking at a clock, and ask where time is. There is the sound of traffic, a breath, a thought about lunch, an ache in the back. There is change, and the sense of before and after. But look for the river itself, the time in which all this is happening, and it is not there to be found. What appears is change, vivid and functional; yet sought, change too is not found apart from what changes and the framework that calls it change. Time and change are designated together.

Space

The habit pictures space as the great container: an empty room, infinite in every direction, which would remain if everything in it were taken away. Here too Buddhists were not exempt. The Sarvāstivāda counted space (ākāśa) among the unconditioned elements, existing by its own nature and dependent on nothing.

Nāgārjuna gives space a chapter of its own (MMK 5). Space is defined by its characteristic of non-obstruction, the room it gives. But no space is found prior to that characteristic, since a space without any characteristic would be nothing at all; and the characteristic has nowhere to occur without the space it characterizes. Characteristic and characterized are designated together. In the same spirit, the room space gives is room for something: space is identified only through what occupies it and moves within it, as 'between', 'around' and 'room for'. Physics, too, has given up the fixed stage: in general relativity spacetime is dynamical, its geometry shaped by matter and energy, and space and time are divided differently in different frames. Look at the space between your hands. It is not an empty something; it is the distance between these hands, here, now, measured by your eyes.

Motion and the Mover

The habit pictures motion as a thing passing through space: a self-standing walker who carries an activity called walking from one place to another. Nāgārjuna's second chapter, on going and coming, is aimed precisely at this. The path already walked is not being walked; the path not yet walked is not being walked; and apart from these, no 'being walked' is found (MMK 2.1). Nor can walking be found apart from a walker, or a walker apart from walking: if the walker were the same as the walking, agent and action would be one; if different, there could be a walker who does not walk (MMK 2.18–20).

These verses are often read as puzzles in the style of Zeno, trying to prove that nothing moves. They do not. People go to the market and come back, and Nāgārjuna does not deny it. What the analysis removes is the picture of a self-standing mover carrying a self-standing motion across a self-standing space. Walker, walking and path are designated together; take one away and the others are not found. Walk across a room and notice: there is no walker there apart from the walking, and no walking apart from someone walking somewhere.

Existence and Non-Existence

The habit hears 'exists' and 'does not exist' as the two possible answers to any question about a thing. If emptiness says it is not there as it seems, the habit concludes that it is not there at all; if appearance says it is there, the habit concludes that it is there by its own nature. Both answers share a premise: that there is something with a definite status, waiting to be settled.

Nāgārjuna, following the Buddha's teaching to Kaccānagotta, refuses both (MMK 15.7, 15.10–11; Chapter 6). 'Exists', said of a thing standing on its own, falls into permanence; 'does not exist', said of a thing that once stood on its own, falls into annihilation. Neither applies, because nothing standing on its own is found to bear either. This is not a third, vaguer status in between. It is the dropping of the premise that made the two seem exhaustive. The coldness of ice is neither inherently in the ice nor nothing at all. It is vividly felt, and found nowhere when sought.

The Conventional and the Ultimate

The habit hears 'conventional' as 'merely conventional': agreed on by a group, perhaps arbitrary, certainly second-rate. And it hears 'ultimate' as a higher realm behind the conventional one—the real reality, of which ordinary life is a shadow. On this reading the two truths become two worlds, and the spiritual task becomes leaving the lower for the higher.

Nāgārjuna's two truths are nothing of the kind. The Sanskrit vyavahāra means transaction, everyday usage: the world as lived, spoken of and acted on. Saṃvṛti adds that this same world conceals its emptiness from ordinary perception (Chapter 5). The conventional is not arbitrary; it has its own standards, and some conventions are correct and others mistaken. Nor is it second-rate: without relying on the conventional, Nāgārjuna says, the ultimate cannot be taught (MMK 24.10). And the ultimate is not another world. It is the emptiness of this one—of the cup, the ice, the person. There is one appearance, seen two ways.

Emptiness

The habit hears emptiness in one of two ways, both substantial. Either it is a void, a nothingness behind or beneath things into which they dissolve; or it is a hidden essence, a vast spacious ground from which all things arise, sometimes equated with pure awareness. The first is nihilism, the second a new substance with a quieter name.

Nāgārjuna's emptiness is neither. It is the absence of own-nature (svabhāva) in things that appear and function—always the emptiness of something, never a something on its own. It is itself empty, a dependent designation (MMK 24.18), and anyone who turns it into a view, he warns, is incurable (MMK 13.8). Emptiness does not lie behind the cup. It is the cup's not being a cup from its own side—and a cup that was a cup from its own side could never have been made, could not hold the tea and could not break when dropped.

Nirvāṇa

Finally, the habit pictures nirvāṇa as a place or state elsewhere: a final destination reached by leaving the world behind, or a permanent condition into which a self escapes. Nāgārjuna's chapter on nirvāṇa contains the most startling verse in the work: there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa (MMK 25.19–20). This does not mean that suffering is liberation. It means that nirvāṇa is not a second world. It is this world, no longer misread: the cessation not of appearances, but of the grasping at them, and of the elaborations that build them into things (MMK 25.24).

Hearing the Words Anew

The habit hears a noun and pictures a thing: a web, a pusher, a river, a room, a mover, a void, a higher world. Nāgārjuna uses the same words to point out that no such thing is found, and that what the word names is designated together with what it is contrasted with and the framework in which it is used—a framework that is itself designated, not a ground.

The table below sets out the contrasts. It can be read as a checklist: whenever one of these words appears in the chapters that follow, or in Nāgārjuna's own verses, it is worth asking which picture one is hearing it with.

Table 1. Key terms as the substantialist habit hears them, and as Nāgārjuna uses them.