Nagarjuna's Middle Way

Mulamadhyamakakarika

Mark Siderits, Shoryu Katsura

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781614290612
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Winner of the 2014 Khyenste Foundation Translation Prize. Nagarjuna's renowned twenty-seven-chapter Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mulamadhyamakakarika) is the foundational text of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. It is the definitive, touchstone presentation of the doctrine of emptiness. Professors Siderits and Katsura prepared this translation using the four surviving Indian commentaries in an attempt to reconstruct an interpretation of its enigmatic verses that adheres as closely as possible to that of its earliest proponents. Each verse is accompanied by concise, lively exposition by the authors conveying the explanations of the Indian commentators. The result is a translation that balances the demands for fidelity and accessibility.

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

BY NĀGĀRJUNA

Dedicatory Verse

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anirodham anutpādam anucchedam aśāśvatam |

anekārtham anānārtham anāgamam anirgamam ||

yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaṃ prapañcopaśamaṃ śivam |

deśayāmāsa saṃbuddhas taṃ vande vadatāṃ varam ||

I salute the Fully Enlightened One, the best of orators, who taught the doctrine of dependent origination, according to which there is neither cessation nor origination, neither annihilation nor the eternal, neither singularity nor plurality, neither the coming nor the going [of any dharma, for the purpose of nirvāṇa characterized by] the auspicious cessation of hypostatization.

THIS VERSE serves not only as a dedication of the work to the Buddha but also as an announcement of purpose. One often finds at the beginning of an Indian treatise a statement indicating why one should read it: how one will benefit from its contents. Nāgārjuna does not explicitly claim here that this work will help one achieve liberation from saṃsāra (it is Candrakīrti who says this is the purpose of the text), but what he does say suggests that is the intention behind his work.

The verse begins with the famous eight negations: “neither cessation nor origination” and so on. (Our English translation reverses the word order of the Sanskrit original in order to make the meaning more easily intelligible.) These negations are said to describe the content of the Buddha’s central teaching of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). The verse thus claims that when we say everything is subject to dependent origination, what this actually means is that nothing really ceases or arises, nothing is ever annihilated nor is there anything eternal, that things are neither really one nor are they many distinct things, and that nothing really ever comes here from elsewhere or goes away from here.

Some of this would come as no surprise to Nāgārjuna’s fellow Buddhists. For instance, the claim that nothing ever really moves (discussed in chapter 2) was widely accepted by Buddhist philosophers as one consequence of the impermanence of existents; the idea that dependently originated entities form a causal series was thought to explain why it appears to us that there is motion. Likewise “Neither annihilation nor the eternal” echoes the Buddha’s claim that dependent origination represents the correct middle path between the extremes of eternalism and annihilationism. This is discussed in chapters 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, and 27, though in ways that go considerably beyond what had been the orthodox understanding. But the claim that there is neither cessation nor origination (discussed in chapters 1, 7, 20, 21, and 25) would have come as a shock to many, since dependent origination was thought to involve (and explain) the origination and cessation of ultimately real entities. And while “neither one nor many” will have a familiar ring to many Buddhists (the Buddha did say that the person in one life and the reborn person in another are “neither identical nor distinct,” e.g., at S II.62, S II.76, S II.113), the standard Abhidharma account of dependent origination relies on the notion that there are many ultimately real dharmas that are mutually distinct. So when (as in chapters 6, 14, and 27) Nāgārjuna claims that what are thought of as two distinct things can ultimately be neither one nor many, this will surprise quite a few.

The purpose is not to shock, though. Instead, the commentators tell us, the point of understanding dependent origination through these eight negations is to bring about nirvāṇa by bringing an end to hypostatizing (prapañca). By hypostatization is meant the process of reification or “thing-ifying”: taking what is actually just a useful form of speech to refer to some real entity. Because the doctrine of dependent origination plays so central a role in the Buddha’s teachings, Abhidharma scholars developed a complex web of concepts designed to explicate it. The suggestion is that the eight negations are meant to remind us that conceptual proliferation can distract us from the real goal—liberation—and perhaps even serve as a barrier to the achievement of the cessation of suffering. (See 18.6, as well as chapters 24 and 27.) But these negations (as well as other allied negations) are not to be accepted because some wise person has told us so. MMK consists of philosophical arguments meant to refute such things as cessation and origination. This work would then be designed to help foster liberation by enlisting the tool of philosophical rationality in the task of putting in their proper place the sorts of conceptual distinctions developed by other Buddhist philosophers. The “proper place” of these concepts is in the toolkit carried by every skillful Buddhist teacher, to be used when appropriate given the circumstances of a particular suffering being. (See 18.5–12.)

1. An Analysis of Conditions

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THIS IS THE first of several chapters investigating the concept of causation. It is important to note at the outset that in classical Indian philosophy causation is usually understood as a relation between entities (“the seed, together with warm moist soil, is the cause of the sprout”) and not, as in modern science, between events (“the collision caused the motion of the ball”). It begins with a statement of the thesis: that existing things do not arise in any of the four logically possible ways that causation might be thought to involve. The Ābhidharmika opponent (i.e., a member of one of the Abhidharma schools) then introduces a conditions-based analysis of causation, which is a version of the second of the four possible views concerning causation. The remainder of the chapter consists of arguments against the details of this theory that entities arise in dependence on distinct conditions. In outline the chapter proceeds as follows:

1.1	Assertion: No entity arises in any of the four possible ways: (a) from itself, (b) from a distinct cause, (c) from both itself and something distinct, or (d) without cause.
1.2	General refutation of arising on possibilities a–d
1.3	Opponent: Entities arise (b) in dependence on distinct conditions of four kinds.
1.4	Refutation of relation between conditions and causal activity
1.5–6	Definition of “condition” and argument for the impossibility of anything meeting the definition
1.7–10	Refutations of each of the four conditions
1.11–14	Refutation of thesis that effect arises from conditions

na svato nāpi parato na dvābhyāṃ nāpy ahetutaḥ |

utpannā jātu vidyante bhāvāḥ kvacana kecana || 1||

1. Not from itself, not from another, not from both, nor without cause:

Never in any way is there any existing thing that has arisen.

This is the overall conclusion for which Nāgārjuna will argue in this chapter: that existents do not come into existence as the result of causes and conditions. There are four possible ways in which this might be thought to happen, and he rejects all of them. According to the first, when an effect seems to arise, it does so because it was already in some sense present in its cause; its appearance is really just the manifestation of something that already existed. The second view claims instead that cause and effect are distinct entities. The third has it that cause and effect may be said to be both identical and distinct. The fourth claims that things originate without any cause; since there are thus no causes, an originating thing could not be said to originate either from itself or from something distinct—it does not originate from anything.

We follow Ye 2011 and accordingly diverge from translations that follow the La Vallée Poussin edition, in reversing the order of t...