I recently started reading Nagarjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. After only a few chapters it became clear that there was going to be some heavy philosophical lifting involved. In other words, the forthcoming review of the Root Verses of the Middle Way may be a while in coming forth. Meanwhile, I discovered that Leigh Brasington had written a new book on dependent origination that devoted some space to Nagarjuna's philosophy (you can download it here). Since I enjoyed Brasington's practical treatment of the jhanas, I figured his latest effort would serve as a good warm up for understanding Nagarjuna. I was not disappointed. Brasington's book is straightforward to the point of being almost conversational, so I read through the electronic version quite quickly. I plan to get a paperback copy and go through it again more thoroughly once I've finished with Nargarjuna. As a result, this review is going to be pretty summary. I just want to jot down some of the more eye-opening points that I think might be immediately useful.
The first part of the book gives some background on the importance of dependent origination in the Buddha's teachings. Indeed, Brasington produces a lot of textual evidence to the effect that dependent origination is the Buddha's teaching, full stop. That is, if you really understand dependent origination, you'll understand the four noble truths and can end dukkha (which Brasington proposes to translate "a bummer"). Brasington's biggest claim here is that the practical power of dependent origination lies in the fact that it talks only about necessary conditions, and not about causes (which would be necessary and sufficient conditions). We cannot know the full cause of every bit of suffering in the world. However, we can learn to see what conditions have to be present for dukkha to arise. If we can take away any of those necessary conditions, suffering will cease to arise. I've always wondered why people call it the doctrine of "dependent origination" rather than just saying that the Buddha taught about cause and effect. Brasington's distinction between conditionality and causality answers this question precisely, and highlights how the Buddha was not a metaphysician but a pragmatic healer. While we could endlessly debate the true cause of any event, and at the limit always discover that the true cause of anything is everything, what we want to do in practical terms is see a necessary condition of our suffering and prevent that condition from arising. As the book goes on, Brasington delves into exactly which conditions we might prevent from arising.
It is essential that you keep in mind that these links are not about causes; rather they are about necessary conditions. If you start trying to figure out how some link causes the next one, you will miss the actual teaching because that is not what is being taught. Dependent origination is about dependencies – it's right there in the name; it is not about causes. Keep the basic meaning of idappaccayatā in mind: this arises dependent on that; if that doesn't happen, this doesn't arise.
The second part of the book has an interesting historical and textual analysis of the links of conditions that form the orthodox teaching of dependent origination. It turns out that the full list of 12 links is a rather late-breaking idea within Buddhism. Other versions of this list (with fewer links) existed before, and yet others were developed later. I won't go into the details of this section, even though they're interesting, because they are in a sense beside the point for me (and to some extent for Brasington as well). I've seen the list of the 12 links numerous times before, and some of them make reasonable sense from a practical psychological perspective (eg. Contact → Vedanā → Craving → Clinging → Dukkha). But if you look at this list as a theory, you can't help but wonder why there are exactly 12 links. Are all of these really necessary? How do we know there aren't any other intermediate ones hiding in there that we haven't listed? Brasington's discussion of the history of this list makes it clear that 12 is not really a magic number. In fact, in his reading of it, there are really only 3 important links -- ignorance → craving → dukkha -- because it's really only at the ignorance or the craving links in the chain that we can do anything practical about our conditioning. Essentially, the road to the end of suffering lies either in: 1) seeing how the valence of your experience usually leads you to crave the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant (which can be combated by cultivating equanimity) or 2) removing our ignorance by realizing that there's no one there to suffer to begin with. The latter is of course the realization of not-self, or emptiness. One of Brasington's main points in examining all these different lists is to suggest that the Buddha had something more general in mind with the theory of dependent origination. It's not the specific links that matter so much as understanding the general idea that if X depends on Y, then if Y doesn't show up, neither will X. In which case, the theory of dependent origination could be shortened to read: a suffering self necessarily depends on having a self to suffer. No self, no dukkha.
The third part of the book examines the consequences of this "general theory of dependent origination", which was essentially elaborated by Nagarjuna. Since suffering depends on a self arising and a self is a type of thing, then suffering depends on things arising. That is, without a (reciprocal) distinction between subject and object, suffering would be deprived of one of its necessary conditions. So Brasington argues that the deepest understanding of dependent origination leads us towards emptiness and the non-dual. Suffering ultimately depends on the way reification carves up the world into essentially distinct parts that differ in kind, the most important example of which is the cleft between subject and object. If there were no-thing to suffer, suffering would not arise. While Brasington grounds this vision of emptiness in the arguments Nagarjuna presents, he also coins his own term for this worldview: SODAPI. Streams Of Dependently Arising Processes Interacting. This is a world where there are no objects, but only processes, no nouns, but only verbs. And while this world can unfold in a law-like manner, it's not appropriate to say that its evolution is governed by our typical idea of cause and effect because each of these would be a thing. Here at last you can see the metaphysical importance of the distinction between dependent origination and causality. There can still be necessary conditions in a world without any objects to serve as causes. And in fact, it turns out that the first chapter in the Root Verses of the Middle Way will be devoted to demolishing the idea that causality is a category that could apply to real (non-empty) entities. I told you this would come in handy in reading Nagarjuna!
Brasington sums up this idea in a way that any mystic or Deleuzian could appreciate:
Any piece of the universe that you pick up is not a separate thing. John Muir stated this brilliantly: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." It's all very much interconnected/interrelated.†. There are no separate entities anywhere in the entire universe. We concoct separate entities; we thingify our experience, because that's the only way we can manage to deal with it. But it's all just SODAPI, and all those streams are entangled enough so it's impossible to divide up the universe into separate entities and have an accurate picture of what's actually happening. I said earlier that it's all verbs, but truth be told, there is only one verb: "Unfolding." We could say "the universe is unfolding" but actually "the universe is" is superfluous; there's just Unfolding.
The footnote in that third sentence is especially interesting since it points precisely to what you might call a transcendental empiricism.
"Interconnected" would imply that everything is connected to everything else. "Interrelated" means that everything is connected to enough other things so that all the connections yield chains of connections from any one thing to all other things. Given these
definitions, "interrelated" more closely matches the way the world is constructed.
Everything is indeed connected to everything else, but not in any order. To unfold the order of connections between processes that lie beyond or before the subject-object distinction would entail a special type of empiricism.
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