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Reading group: Nāgārjuna on causes and conditions, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 1, 20 and 24

Meera Kulkarni Fellow
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CausationBuddhistIndianMadhyamakaSamkhya & YogaDavid HumeNagarjuna#causal-powers#dependent-origination#emptiness#mulamadhyamakakarika
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The Nyāya–Madhyamaka debates all lead back to the opening of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, so I'd like to read three chapters of it together.

Translation. Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995), which has the verses and a commentary. Garfield's reading is influential and also contested; we can argue with it as we go.

Week 1. Chapter 1, the examination of conditions. The famous opening verse: nothing anywhere arises from itself, from another, from both, or without a cause. Each option gets its own argument. Ask which schools each horn is aimed at. "From itself" looks like the Sāṃkhya view that the effect pre-exists in its cause.

Week 2. Chapter 20, the examination of combination. Does an effect arise from the coming together of causes and conditions? Nāgārjuna argues it can't be the same as the combination, or different from it.

Week 3. Chapter 24, where he answers the charge that emptiness destroys the teaching, and says that whatever arises dependently is what he calls emptiness. This is where the negative arguments of chapter 1 turn out to be in the service of dependent origination, not against it.

Garfield suggests that Nāgārjuna rejects causal powers while accepting regular dependence, which invites comparison with Hume. Keep that in mind and test it.

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5 replies

  1. Nima Tsering Gurung

    Fellow

    Week 1. I've carried this book for twenty years and chapter 1 still feels like being walked to the edge of a cliff four times. What strikes me now is that Nāgārjuna never says nothing happens. Things depend on conditions, he just won't let anything have its own power to produce another thing. That's how my teacher in Manang put it: conditions, yes; owners of effects, no.

  2. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    Week 1, an Advaitin's note. The first horn, arising from itself, is aimed at Sāṃkhya's satkāryavāda, as Meera says. My tradition took a different route: Śaṅkara's school holds that the effect is an appearance of the cause rather than a real transformation of it. Nāgārjuna's arguments against real arising are ones Advaita can largely accept. It is the conclusion he draws, emptiness all the way down with no unchanging ground, that we reject.

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  3. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    Week 2. The dilemma in chapter 20 is cleaner than I remembered. If the effect is already in the combination of causes, it doesn't arise from it. If it isn't, then the combination produces something it doesn't contain, and why that and not anything else? This is the old Indian quarrel between Sāṃkhya, for whom the effect pre-exists in its cause, and Nyāya, for whom it is a new thing, and Nāgārjuna refuses both. Garfield's Hume comparison works best here.

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  4. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    Week 3, and a Korean angle. Wonhyo spent a lifetime reconciling Buddhist schools that seemed to contradict each other, and chapter 24 shows why he could. Nāgārjuna says emptiness and dependent origination are the same thing seen two ways. Once you see that, the long arguments in chapter 1 stop looking nihilistic. In class I've started using the chariot and chapter 24 together: things are real as dependent, not real as independent.

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  5. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    My summary for the record: Garfield's Hume comparison is illuminating for the negative arguments and misleading for the purpose. Hume ends in custom and scepticism; Nāgārjuna ends in a middle way between eternalism and nihilism, and a path.