I mentioned a month ago that I thought plowing through Nagarjuna's seminal Mulamadhyamakakarika was going to take a while. So I'm pleased and surprised to report that the reading sped up considerably after the first few chapters. Initially, I worried that following Nagarjuna's analysis might require dipping into some secondary literature that outlined the various issues at stake in second century Indian philosophy. The first chapter in particular seemed to be a highly technical analysis of the concept of causality that presumes the reader is familiar with the positions adopted by a number of different schools of Buddhism from that time period. Or at least, that was the impression given by the combination of Nagarjuna's terse style and the academic commentary that accompanies the verses in the translation I used. And of course, treating it as a piece of logical philosophical analysis that responds to various sectarian debates of the time would be one legitimate way to read the book. But as I read further, I began to see that this wasn't the only way to read Nagarjuna.
Gradually, I started to notice that the text was pretty repetitive from a philosophical perspective. The same strategies of argumentation led to the same types of conclusions again and again. I also started to notice that while Siderits' and Katsura's commentary was very helpful, it always tried to map the poetry directly into analytical prose, as if the form were just an external constraint. They continually cite a number of other commentators and try to triangulate just who Nagarjuna might have been arguing with and exactly what his argument was. Basically, they try to convert him into an analytic and scholastic philosopher. Meanwhile, the literal translation they provide of the verses slowly makes clear that a lot of what Nagarjuna is doing here relies on the way language can quickly frame a seemingly insoluble paradox that on closer inspection turns out to reveal basic flaws in our assumptions. In short, you can also read Nagarjuna as a sort of proto-zen poet whose goal is not to prove anything but simply to get your conceptual mind to unclench and surrender its dualistic categories. I suspect that Stephen Batchelor's translation may lend itself to this koan-ic type of reading, and I plan to revisit Nagarjuna in the future from this angle.
What I'm left with is something between these two readings. I do understand Nagarjuna as having written a logical, analytical text that attempts to make philosophical arguments. But the important thing is not the many details of the arguments, but their unvarying form -- effectively there's just one argument in the text. Whether we're talking about the self, or about agency, or arising and dissolution, or even about nirvana and the buddha himself, the point is ultimately always the same. Whatever it is we're talking about does not have an essential intrinsic nature. It does not stand alone, in itself, naturally distinct from all other things in the universe. Whatever we're talking about is not ultimately real, but is constructed, fabricated. It is just a conceptual fiction that is more or less useful ... for liberating ourselves from our conceptual fictions. In short, the only argument is that everything is empty.
One way to see Nagarjuna's concept of emptiness is as a total critique of Plato's notion of the Forms. The Forms are quasi-divine bits of pure essence. Each exists entirely in-itself, distinct from all the others and especially from every possible empirical exemplar of that Form. At the same time each Form is pure in the sense that it is nothing but itself. The Form of Beauty alone is truly beautiful. Actually beautiful things derive from it through a process of getting mixed up with other stuff. In the long history of Western philosophy, this essentialism will change shape many times. Instead of the Forms, the essential thing will be the atoms, or our ideas, or God. But each update of this essentialist philosophy will maintain the same form. Ultimate Reality is made up of something that is absolutely identical to itself and utterly distinct from everything else. The core building block of true reality will always remain simple, pure, unchanging, and essentially in-itself. And as a corollary, everything that is composite, mixed, impermanent, and tied up with other things will be cast out of the realm of essence. These things are ultimately not real at all, but just shadows on the wall, semblances, appearances, illusions that cannot properly be said to truly exist. If there are essences, there must be accidents. If there is reality, there must be mere appearance. Every essentialist philosophy (every realist philosophy?) is dualistic.
Emptiness is the antidote to essentialism. Over and over again, Nagarujuna will point out the problems that arise when we take something to exist essentially and in-itself. No matter what thing we're talking about, he will extract logical paradoxes from its hypothesized 'ultimate reality'. His goal is not to replace one set of proposed essences with another, truer or more accurate, set. His goal is to treat our addiction to essentialism itself. When properly understood, emptiness is exactly the concept for this job. Because emptiness ≠ non-existence. It's not the same thing as mere appearance or illusion. The contention is not that most things are empty, but some special class of things are nonempty. That is the old Theravadan statement of the problem -- sure, the self is empty, but the dharmas (the ayatanas, skandas, and dhatus of Abidharma orthodoxy) are underlying real elements that compose the unreal self. In the Mahayana tradition Nagarjuna argues for here, the contention is that everything, not just the self, is empty. So empty, in fact, that there aren't even things to be individually empty. So empty that even emptiness itself is empty. As Nagarjuna makes clear many times over, the concept of emptiness goes beyond the dualistic opposition between existence and non-existence, reality and appearance. An anti-essentialist philosophy must be inherently non-dual.
If an anti-essentialist philosophy is inherently non-dual, then it is also inherently paradoxical. You can see this immediately in Nagarjuna's repeated negation of the four possibilities of the tetralemma -- the Buddha neither exists, nor does not exist, nor both exists and does not exist, nor, finally, does he neither exist nor not exist. Strange as it sounds, these logical categories simply don't apply -- not to the Buddha, and not to anything else either, because there simply isn't any real thing for them to apply to. But you can also see the essential paradox of this line of thinking when we reach the question of whether things are "truly" empty. How can Nagarjuna even coherently write down his philosophy of emptiness? Isn't the very concept of emptiness yet another empty conceptual fiction? After expounding emptiness, how could you ever hope to claim this view is more accurate than any other? Nagarjuna does not treat this question head on aside from a few passages that make clear he understands the problem, and would apply the same deconstruction to his own philosophical notions that he has applied to everyone else's. At first I found this light treatment was insufficient to the gravity of the problem. But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that there simply is no way to tackle the problem head on via philosophical content. No matter how many caveats you explicitly add to your metaphysical concepts, someone can still ask whether, for example, it's "really true" that emptiness itself is empty or whether that statement too is empty, etc ... There's no escape from the paradox of taking relativism as a truth, no end to the proliferation of metas within the realm of content. However, the realm of content is not the only one available to us. We should not forget that Nagarjuna is a poet. While Siderits and Katsura mainly treat the text as a philosophical opus that was accidentally squeezed into verse form simply to accommodate the demands of tradition and pedagogy, we've already observed that their own translation suggests that this content focused reading is not the only one. Nagarjuna (just like Plato, incidentally) has real style as well. And when we reach this outermost layer of emptiness with its reflexive self-application, style becomes essential. The language Nagarjuna uses is constantly sharpened to a striking point. The paradoxes he so consistently creates keeping halting us in our tracks as we read, trying to force us to experience this philosophy for ourselves. Style is actually the only way to cope with the fractal vertigo of anti-essentialism. How could you be satisfied with the usual discursive style of philosophy when your point is that there is no real world waiting out there to be described or theorized? When you abandon this presumption of metaphysical objectivity, the medium becomes part of the message, the style becomes essential in its own right, rather than serving merely as an accidental and irrelevant casing for the content. In fact, the very distinctions between these two sides collapses.
The final idea I will take away from reading Nagarjuna is the link between emptiness and dependent origination. The most famous verse in the Mulamadhyamakakarika is 24.18.
Dependent origination we declare to be emptiness.
It [emptiness] is a dependent concept; just that is the middle path.
As we just discussed, the second line of this verse seems to be saying that emptiness itself is just another empty concept, meaning that Nagarjuna's critique of essence applies to his own favorite concept as well. But the first line introduces the idea that emptiness = dependent origination. The simplest way to understand this connection is to see that in a world without essences, everything comes into being and goes out of being, gets fabricated and falls apart. Nothing stands apart, permanent and self sufficient. Instead, everything depends on causes and conditions, and this explains why everything is empty. Siderits and Katsura point out that this basically amounts to saying that emptiness is a consequence of dependent origination. While I think that way of understanding it is useful as far as it goes, I think it misses a deeper aspect of the connection between emptiness and dependent origination. As Leigh Brasington pointed out, dependent origination is not the same thing as causality. He says that this is because dependent origination only concerns necessary conditions, and leaves entirely to the side the question of the sufficient conditions that go with those to complete our usual understanding of causality. But we can cast the same observation in a slightly different light by noticing that in Nagarjuna's world, there is no thing to serve as cause, and no thing to serve as effect, simply because there is no-thing at all. In other words, in this second understanding, we might reverse the earlier logic and claim that dependent origination is a consequence of emptiness. The doctrine of dependent origination isn't talking about causality, it is simply telling us that if one thing does not arise, then another thing which depends on its arising will likewise not arise. One example of this would be our usual understanding of the way that the arising of an effect depends on the arising of its cause, but there's nothing special about cause and effect here. It's just that if we know thing B needs thing A in order to arise, then the realized emptiness of thing A prevents thing B from showing up.
That last sentence deliberately introduced an ambiguity that I'm not sure I know how to resolve completely but that I feel lurking. Are we talking about the arising of our concepts here, or of actual things? Is this an epistemological or an ontological question? After all, if thing A just is empty, then neither it nor thing B should arise, right? Why is our realization of the emptiness important, and how can this realization alone prevent real things from arising? Or does the pairing of the two lines in the verse indicate that we're only really talking about the dependent origination of concepts here? If there aren't "really" any things in the world, then we must be inventing them. In which case we could avoid the arising of thing B simply by not fabricating thing A. I think this reading is on the right track but is still slightly missing the deepest point. In Nagarjuna's world there cannot be any real distinction between things and concepts. It seems to me that the ubiquity of emptiness is clearly pointing us to the idea of a flat ontology. We can either say that concepts are also things or that things too are concepts, but it makes no sense to choose one side of this duality as opposed to the other. Perhaps this turns the middle path mentioned in the verse into a sort of Mobius strip where all our apparent dualities can be balanced by remembering that there's actually only one side? Maybe Nagarjuna's middle way is more extreme than it sounds.
#reread
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