Cracking the walnut, p.5
Cracking the Walnut, page 5
13. If the effect comes from conditions,
those conditions do not have a self-nature.
If, then, the effect comes from conditions that do not have a self-nature,
how can it be said to come from those conditions?
若果從緣生
是緣無自性
從無自性生
何得從緣生
If the effect arises from conditions, those conditions must not have a self-nature; if they did, they would be unchanging and always remain themselves, incapable of giving rise to something else. If the effect, however, comes from something without a self-nature, then why do we say that it arises from conditions? We have to remember that the first chapter of the Verses on the Middle Way points a bayonet toward the concept of a self-nature. The idea of a self (ātman, the soul) that lies under all that changes but does not itself change had long been a part of Brahmanism, in the Vaiśeṣika and Saṃkhyā philosophies. When the Buddha was teaching, he made a revolutionary declaration: what you call a soul or a self is not there. He showed us the nature of phenomena, saying: there are only phenomena and behind those phenomena there is nothing immortal or unchanging—not even the unchanging ātman or Brahman.
The Buddha only recognized the psychesoma (nāmarūpa), the coming together of the five skandhas: body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness (body being the soma or rūpa and the next four skandhas being the psyche or nāma). Looking into this composite we see that everything is changing; nothing can endure for any length of time. We see clearly that there is nothing solid and unchanging to be equated with the self or the soul of Brahmanism. Therefore, there is no self (anātman). All that we experience is impermanent and changing, like the five skandhas. Looking deeply into the skandhas we are unable to grasp at anything eternal or constant. These teachings are very practical, and when the Buddha manifested he set this important revolution in contemporary thought into motion.
Brahmanism holds that lying underneath the anātman (what Buddhists call the five skandhas) is the ātman. According to this teaching, by meditating on the individual self (ātman) one sees that it is one with the ultimate (brahman).
The Buddha used the teachings of impermanence and nonself to point a bayonet at the notions of ātman and brahman. Both of these notions involve the idea of a separate self and an immortal soul. Well-known Hindu texts were refined to respond to Buddhist teachings. Nowhere do the teachings of the Buddha accept a separate self, a self-nature, or an own-being. Brahmanic teachings reacted to this insight by arguing strongly in favor of a separate self. The Buddha’s disciples, in turn, had to develop the Buddha’s teachings as a response.
The Buddha’s teachings powerfully influenced the historical development of Indian thought. The Buddha categorically denied the idea of ātman and brahman. His phenomenological way of looking perceived all things as impermanent and without a separate self. The upholders of Brahmanism reacted strongly to this and continued to react centuries after the Buddha had passed away. On this account the Mainstream Buddhist Schools had to develop their tenets to oppose the attack of Brahmanism.
During the lifetime of the Buddha and for hundreds of years afterward ideological and philosophical debate flourished in India. The Sarvāstivāda school developed and refined a profuse Abhidharma literature, mainly represented by the Vibhāṣā. The Vibhāṣā develops the notion of a self-nature and maintains that the three times are real, though the self is not. According to this theory, matter can be divided into small particles or atoms (aṇu) and time into instants (kṣaṇa, an extremely short period of milliseconds). The Sarvāstivādins split time and space into its most elementary particles and said that, though everything is changing, elements underlying these changes in time and space are real and made up of the self. According to the Vibhāṣā, the self is not real but the elements which make up the self do exist.
The Sarvāstivāda wanted to be faithful to the Buddha and his teachings, so they maintained that there was no self. Despite this, they claimed that the elements that give us the feeling that there is a self are real. The basic tenet of the Sarvāstivāda school is there is no self but there are elements. These elements are the aṇu of matter and the kṣaṇa of time. These elements exist but the self does not. In the theory that there is no self but there are elements, the Sarvāstivāda comes very close to a self-nature. This is not orthodox Buddhism, which is to say it is not faithful to what the Buddha taught. The Sarvāstivāda school was a branch of the conservative Sthaviravāda, but because it had to compete with Brahmanic theories it developed and refined theories of its own. Out of this need to contend with Brahmanism, the Sarvāstivāda arrived at a dangerous idea with the potential to deny the original teachings of the Buddha on no self.
Contemporary to the Sarvāstivāda school was another important Buddhist school: the Sautrāntika school. The particularity of the Sautrāntika school was that it held fast to and followed the words of the original sutras; it only based its arguments on these sutras and refused to rely on other documents and arguments, and they had no interest in composing new Abhidharma material like the Vibhāṣā. They simply adhered faithfully to the words of the sutras, as evidenced by their name, which means “relying on the sutras.” A basic tenet of this school is “the past does not exist, the future does not exist, only the present exists.” They had probably read the Bhaddekaratta Sutta (MN 131)* where the Buddha taught:
Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is
in the very here and now,
the practitioner dwells
in stability and freedom.
The Sautrāntikas had read this sutra or others like it, but did not have the insight that the three times inter-are. They maintained instead that only the present was real and that the past and the future are merely ideas. They claimed to be the school closest to the Buddha’s teachings because the Buddha himself had said: “The past is already gone, the future has not yet arrived, there is only the present.”
The Sarvāstivāda school, on the other hand, maintained that the past, present, and future were all real. The Sautrāntikas accepted the Sarvāstivāda’s notions of aṇu and kṣaṇa. They also thought that something must connect a thing to what it becomes as part of the cycle of birth and death of phenomena. As a result, the Sautrāntikas arrived at the peculiar idea that there is a self, but that this self is found neither in the skandhas nor outside of them.* This idea was later taken up by many other Buddhist schools.
Where can we find the self? Is it in the five skandhas or outside of the five skandhas? Two viewpoints are common. One is that the self is found in the skandhas, the other that it is found outside of the skandhas. The Sautrāntika viewpoint is a third viewpoint, namely that the self that is found neither inside nor outside of the skandhas. This idea, which is challenging to understand, was used to explain why there is a continuation between cause and result. They called this idea of a self pudgala. Pudgala means the person, but the Sautrāntikas used the word pudgala rather than ātman to mean the self.
The Sautrāntikas often quoted from the sutras: “Bhikkhus, there is a person whose appearance in the world is of great benefit for so many people.”* The person in this sentence is the Buddha; thanks to the Buddha appearing in the world, countless people overcame their suffering. According to the Sautrāntikas, the sutra says “there is a person,” so why would you say there isn’t a person, a self? The person is a pudgala. The Tathāgata is a person. We do not have a self, but we have a person. The Sautrāntikas looked for a self that could explain continuation in the round of birth and death. This is completely unorthodox, as far as Buddhism is concerned.
The Sarvāstivāda, Sautrāntika, and other schools did not want to betray the Buddha. They wanted to be loyal to the teachings of impermanence and no self. However, the opponents of Buddhism (who maintained the existence of ātman and brahman) attacked them with such force that they had to come to a compromise and explain continuation from one life to the next with what would later become the teachings called Pudgalavāda. When Master Xuanzang came to India in the seventh century to bring Buddhist texts back to China, the prospering Pudgalavāda tradition comprised 70,000 monks. The idea of pudgala that arose in the Sautrāntika school was very important.
The difference between Buddhism and Brahmanism was becoming blurred. In the beginning Buddhism and Brahmanism were distinct, but as time went on the boundary between the two was eroded. Today, people often confuse Buddhism with Vedānta.
This is why the first chapter of the Verses on the Middle Way aims its bayonet at the idea of self-nature. Nāgārjuna did not aim at Brahmanic philosophies but at Buddhist ones: he saw that the Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika Schools had gone too far. He wanted to be faithful to the Buddha and to correct the mistakes being made in the Mainstream Schools of the time.
The first chapter of the Verses on the Middle Way criticizes the viewpoint of a self-nature. Only when you understand that, can you understand the following text: If the effect comes from conditions, but looking into those conditions you see they are always changing and do not have a true substance, then those conditions do not have a self-nature. If, then, the effect comes from conditions that do not have a self-nature, how can it be said to come from those conditions? Nāgārjuna thus lays the irrationality of this argument bare.
14. There is no effect that arises from conditions,
nor an effect that arises from non-conditions.
Since there is no effect,
there are neither conditions nor non-conditions.
果不從緣生
不從非緣生
以果無有故
緣非緣亦無
This verse is the concluding verse of the chapter. It says that the effect does not arise from conditions nor from non-conditions and that, because the self-nature of the effect is not there, the self-nature of conditions or of non-conditions is also not there. This brings us to the concept of nonbeing. Since the effect has no characteristic of real existence, the conditions and non-conditions have no real existence either.
We have to understand this verse in light of verse 13. The effect does not arise from conditions or from non-conditions because the nature of the effect is not something real. Therefore, what are called conditions or non-conditions cannot be real either.
* The Prajñāpāramitā literature began to take shape in the south of India from the first century BCE onward for several hundred years. First was the Prajñāpāramitā in Eight Thousand Lines and then, over time, longer sutras such as the Prajñāpāramitā in Twenty Thousand Lines and the Prajñāpāramitā in One Hundred Thousand Lines were composed.
† The Chinese characters that we translate as “speculation”are 戲論, from the Sanskrit prapañca. 戲論 literally means “to enjoy theorizing.”
* It is not correct to translate the last line as “the best of all doctrines”—even though the Chinese characters could easily be understood in this way.
† We can provisionally call this the first verse. The preceding verse on the eight negations is considered the preface to the entire text of the Verses on the Middle Way, although it is included in the first chapter.
* In this verse the character 自, meaning “self” or “oneself,” is opposed to the character 他, which means “other” or “other than the self.”
† In this case the character 共, which means “together,” represents two terms: 自生 (born by themselves) and 他生 (born from others).
* In the Sanskrit version of the text, the order of the second and third verses of the Chinese translation is inverted. The Sanskrit version seems to be logically more correct, and therefore I propose that we invert these two verses to present them as they are found in the original Sanskrit text.
* The four conditions are first attested in the Vijñānakāya from the first century CE. The Jñānaprasthāna, a later Sarvāstivāda text, additionally lists six causes: kāraṇahetu, the efficient cause; sahabhūhetu, the coexistent cause; saṃprayuktahetu, the associated cause; sabhāgahetu, the homogenous cause; sarvatragahetu, the universal cause; and vipākahetu, the ripening or retribution cause. cf. Buswell, Lopez, Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Princeton University Press, 2014.
* Thich Nhat Hanh from his poem “Thuyền về bến cũ” in the collection Thơ từng ôm và mặt trời từng hạt.
* The various Abhidharma works were a development and systematization of the Buddha’s teachings by the mainstream Buddhist schools. —Eds.
† T. 1545, 1546, 1547.
** 破邪顯正 is an expression often used in Mahāyāna commentaries in Chinese. It is discussed in the Sanlun xuanyi, The Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises.
* Translated and commented on by the author in Thundering Silence, Parallax Press, 1993, 2008.
† The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing are discussed in detail in Interbeing, Parallax Press, 1987, 2020.
* Translated by the author as the Sutra on the Better Way to Live Alone in Our Appointment with Life, Parallax Press, 1990, 2010.
* 非即非離蘊我.
* AN 1.13 and EA 8.2.
2
Examination of Coming and Going
1. That which has already gone is not going;
that which has not yet gone is not going.
Besides already-gone and not-yet-gone,
the present going cannot be known.
已去無有去
未去亦無去
離已去未去
去時亦無去
In this, as in the last chapter, Nāgārjuna brings our attention to certain Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika theories on time and on self-nature.
When somebody has died we say that the person is gone, and when someone is born we say that the baby has arrived. Arriving means that from not being we become something, while going means that from being we become nothing.
When we go looking for what we call “going” we cannot find it in the past, in the future, or even in the present. In English, when someone dies we also say they have “passed away,” which means that from here they go over there.
The main thesis of this verse is that the idea of going is simply an idea in our mind. In reality there is no such thing as going.
If we look for the act of going in the past, we cannot see it. Since the act of going belongs to the past, we cannot possibly see it now. In the present we cannot see the existence of a subject that goes or a place that it has gone to.
Someone who has gone is not going somewhere, nor is someone who has not yet gone going. When we say that someone is going, or has not yet gone, this means that they are still alive! How could going or dying be found while someone is still alive? In the end, going is not found in any of the three times. The next verse is the antithesis of this proposition.
2. When the act of going is taking place,
there is going;
There is no having-gone nor not-yet-gone at the time of going,
but there is going at the time of going.
動處則有去
此中有去時
非已去未去
是故去時去
This is the higher mathematics of Nāgārjuna. This verse represents the standpoint of the interlocutor: the going actually exists. We do not see the act of going in the past, and cannot yet see it happening in the future, but in the present we do see it happening. If we now reread the previous verse, we might ask, “Why would you say there is no going?”
動處 means literally where the going is happening. In the place where the going is happening, how can you say there is no going? 去時 means literally“time of going.” The present moment of going does not refer to something that has gone or to something that is about to go. According to the interlocutor, this proves that at the present moment of going we can see the going. The interlocutor wants to prove that there actually is a going and a time of going. They recognize that the going is not found in what is already gone or in what has not yet gone, but they also stress that when the act of going is taking place, there is going. They say it is incorrect to deny the existence of going because at the time of going, there is going; this proves that there is such a thing as going. This is a way we all reason, and Nāgārjuna responds to this objection in the following verse.
3. How could the fact of going be there
during the time of going?
If there is no fact of going
how can there be a time of going?
云何於去時
而當有去法
若離於去法
去時不可得
If there is no fact of going, there is no time of going. Only if there is going can there be a time of going.
