I started this whole reading-the-history-of-philosophy thing a few years back mainly to grapple with two questions; 1) why is the world the way it is? and 2) how different could it be? These questions were not about the the way the world is out there in some natural eternal objective state, but exactly the opposite: about how various traditions have understood the world and how that understanding determined, for them and now “us”, what the world is—what constitutes reality. The idea was to recognize the contingent nature of the nearly invisible glasses we wear—the worldview we live—so as to experience, in some small way, the freedom of seeing without them. If I could see the way a worldview—supposedly about “reality”—actually came to solidify a reality out there, I could maybe melt this reality a little bit and see what other shapes it might form. I thought most of philosophy, surely the early traditions, would partake in the construction of worldviews—letting the glasses seep into our faces until they are forgotten, and not until relatively recently would any “deconstruction” work begin. I did not expect to find this deconstruction appearing in India some two millennia before it appeared in any form in the West. I did not expect to find it as the very heart of Buddhism. I did not expect to find that the recognition of the world as nothing other than our worldview was what the Buddhists were talking about when they talked about nirvana.
The heart of Buddhism I am referring to is the doctrine of the Middle Way, as it appears in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, written by the 2nd century Buddhist Nāgārjuna. Written hundreds of years after the life of the historical Buddha, Nāgārjuna is attempting to make explicit what he understands to be for the most part merely implied in the teachings of the Buddha as they are collected in the numerous early discourses that make up the Buddhist Pāli Canon. The reason the Buddha did not solely teach the Middle Way, goes the thinking of Buddhists like Nagarjuna, is that the teaching is so subtle and difficult to transmit that the Buddha chose to give other teachings that might prepare one to later receive the teaching of the Middle Way. This idea, and the difference between the main schools of Buddhism, Theravāda and Mahāyāna, I hope to return to if and when I write about some of the discourses of the Pāli Canon. But here, I will focus on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and its relation, not to other Buddhist schools, but to the orthodox Vedic schools I have recently been writing about. Nāgārjuna’s project can then be seen to be revealing the fatal flaw in the systematic philosophy of these schools; their belief that any of their views might be an accurate description of some inherently existent reality separate from their descriptions.
I prostrate to Gautama
Who through compassion
Taught the true doctrine,
Which leads to the relinquishing of all views. (XXVII:30)
What is a view? Nāgārjuna gives some examples of views in the final chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, quoting various positions taken by others regarding whether or not the “self” existed in the past or will exist in the future, as well as views about the world, i.e., whether it is permanent or limited. These views are all explicitly metaphysical views—they are statements about the existence of the world and entities in it, and in what way such things exist. They purport to state what is really the case—what is ultimately true about the world. But we may wish to expand our definition of a view to include those other kinds of views which are not explicitly metaphysical, say, political views and general opinions, or even more generally, any thought directed upon anything. After all, Nāgārjuna does not seem to be making any qualification when he says to relinquish “all views”.1 But taken in this sense, it seems that the verse above—the final verse in the text—is paradoxical. If the Buddha teaches the relinquishing of all views, isn’t that teaching—against views—a view? How can the Buddha, having relinquished all views, still have a view to give? How can one accept a view that asks to relinquish all views?
One may be tempted to wriggle out of this seeming paradox by simply reading Nāgārjuna to be saying that the Buddha taught the relinquishing of all those other views—the wrong ones. That is, he finally “got it right”. Or one may understand Nāgārjuna to be saying that the Buddha’s doctrine is a particularly special view, the one that leads one to relinquish it and all other views, eventually. Indeed, the Buddha describes his doctrine like a raft that one must abandon upon reaching the other side of the river.2 However, I will attempt to demonstrate here that Nāgārjuna is making a stronger statement; that the “true doctrine” of the Middle Way—which he takes the Buddha to have taught—is actually not a view at all. For this to be the case, there will have to be something common to all views, whether explicitly metaphysical or more generally—something that they all participate in, something that undergirds them all, the very thing that makes them “a view”, that the doctrine of the Middle Way is free from, and it is just this that I understand Nāgārjuna to be demonstrating, particularly in Chapter XXIV: Examination of the Four Noble Truths.
This chapter comes near the end of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and Nāgārjuna has done a lot of work to get to this point, especially in laying out the argument for the “emptiness” of all phenomena. In order to be able to analyze Nāgārjuna’s later chapters, it is necessary that I first briefly summarize the idea of emptiness and its relation to the idea of essences.
The various orthodox Vedic schools all profess the view that there are phenomena that possess essences, which is to say that they have inherently existent natures—they exist self-dependently as that which makes them exactly what they are. The Vaiśeṣika, for example, proclaim that we can know the essences of such things like substances (e.g., the “self”), attributes (e.g., color), and actions (e.g., motion). For the Vaiśeṣika and Sāṁkhya schools, essences, depending on their specific inherent natures, are the causes and/or effects of other phenomena, thereby explaining the existence of the myriad phenomena we experience in the world.
Nāgārjuna will demonstrate that, in fact, when such things as substances, attributes, actions, and causes and effects are understood as possessing essences, all phenomena are rendered incoherent—we cannot actually account for the arising, abiding, and ceasing of any of the phenomena that we experience. Nāgārjuna will demonstrate that only when phenomena are taken to be “empty” of essence—not possessing an inherently existing nature—can they arise, abide, and cease. Phenomena are no longer self-existent, but they have a different kind of existence; they exist dependently. They exist when the conditions that cause their arising themselves arise, which in turn depend on other conditions arising, and so on. Nothing can any longer be said to exist inherently, but existence, in this other sense, is recovered by the emptiness of phenomena. The emptiness of phenomena is the “true doctrine” that Nāgārjuna asks us to receive, the one that will “[lead] to the relinquishing of all views”.
But the idea of essences runs deep, down to the very understanding of the relation between language and reality, leading Nāgārjuna’s opponents to misunderstand the doctrine of emptiness. By looking at how they misunderstand emptiness, we can uncover just what this fundamental (mis)understanding about the relation between language and reality is. It is this (mis)understanding, I will argue, that is responsible for their having “views”—it is that which all view-having participates in, that which makes “having a view” possible. Finally, I will argue how the doctrine of emptiness entails a different understanding of the relation between language and reality such that the Middle Way cannot be understood as a “view”, and therefore why Nāgārjuna does not enter a paradox with his concluding verse.
Let us then turn to the first verse of Chapter XXIV, where Nāgārjuna has imagined an opponent who thinks he has understood what Nāgārjuna has said about emptiness—that phenomena are devoid of essences—and draws the conclusion that Nāgārjuna has contradicted the Buddha, for he must deny the existence of the tenets of Buddhism, being as they are about arising and ceasing:
If all of this is empty,
Neither arising, nor ceasing,
Then for you, it follows that
The Four Noble Truths do not exist. (XXIV:1)
If everything is empty, and everything is thereby denied inherent existence, says the opponent, then nothing exists. This extreme position—that nothing exists—is only possible if one denies that a dependently arisen existence counts as a meaningful kind of existence. Why would the opponent feel this way? Let us look at how the essentialist schools understand existence, or more specifically, how they know that the things that exist, exist. As an example, we can take the doctrine of the “self”.
For the various Vedic schools, the “self” is that eternally existent entity different from our transitory physical body that is the true subject of all perception and experience. Though characterizing the self differently, the schools’ arguments for the self’s existence have a shared, intertwined, two-fold root. First, they argue, we know the self exists because its existence has been revealed to us by the scriptures. Second, we know it exists because we have cognitions involving the term “I”; most generally of the kind “I experience…”, and there must exist an entity to which this “I” refers—the experiencer who exists apart from the experience. The implication of revelation—that sentences describing the created world were given to us—is that words, and the things of the world, were both established independently of us, corresponding to each other one-to-one. This correspondence is what establishes a word’s meaning; words are names, and names are part of what constitutes a thing’s inherently existent nature—their essence. One can then say that because we use a word like “I” meaningfully when having a perception like “I am [insert name]”, there must be an entity we are perceiving (the self) to which the word corresponds—the other half of the created pair—existing out there in the world.3 Words reify phenomena; their meaningful use establishes that the phenomena which they name exist inherently.
For someone who thinks that words correspond one-to-one with an inherently existent reality4, the denial of essences by Nāgārjuna leaves the words “corresponding”, as it were, but there is no longer anything to which they correspond to. Where each essence was is now a void being pointed at. There is still a world inherently out there, but it is a world of nothingness. The underlying belief that words correspond one-to-one with an ultimate reality, independently of us, leaves us only with the two options of the imagined opponent—essences exist, or there is an inherently existent void. There is no room for a different kind of existence—dependent existence—because there is no room for the option that meaning has been established by us as a matter of convention. Thus, we may formulate their position as a semantic one; the meaning of words depends on the fact that they name real essential entities, if the entities they name don’t exist inherently, the words are meaningless. It is this that the opponent is also charging Nāgārjuna with—that Buddhism is nonsense.
It is now clear that the opponent’s misunderstanding of the idea of emptiness—where he replaces essences with essential non-existence—stems from this deeper misunderstanding about language, one that Najarguna explains as a confusion between “two truths”:
The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma
Is based on two truths:
A truth of worldly convention
And an ultimate truth.Those who do not understand
The distinction drawn between these two truths
Do not understand
The Buddha’s profound truth. (XXIV:8-9)
The opponent’s misunderstanding of the relation between language and reality means he can only understand existence as a truth in an ultimate sense. In order to make the distinction between an idea of existence as a conventional truth and as an ultimate truth, we have to come to terms with this misunderstanding—we have to stop ourselves from thinking that we are talking about an inherently existent ultimate reality when we are talking. Nāgārjuna can help us by showing us the absurdity of actually holding that position.
Take the words “fire” and “fuel”, as they are used in a statement like “the fire is burning the fuel”. It appears that we have an agent, “fire”, which acts on an object, “fuel”, and we therefore might be tempted to think that both refer to essences—that is, we can think of them as inherently existent entities in an ultimate reality. But this immediately raises problems:
So, if one thinks that
That which is burning is the fuel,
If it is just this,
how is this fuel being burned? (X:4)
If we want to think of the essence of fuel as “that which is burning”, we somehow have to explain how it burns without recourse to fire. Don’t we want to say that fire burns the fuel? On the other hand, if we don’t want to think of fuel as “that which is burning”, but still posit it as having an essence, it can never come to be burned:
If [fuel and burning] are different, and if one not yet connected isn’t connected,
The not yet burned will not be burned.
They will not cease. If they do not cease
Then it will persist with its own characteristic. (X:5)
Fire and fuel seem to be dependent on the other, but if both are inherently existent natures, neither one can ever exist first to then cause the existence of the other:
If that on which an entity depends
Is established on the basis
Of the entity depending on it,
What is established in dependence on what? (X:10)
If we commit to an understanding of “fire” and “fuel” as referring to essences, starting a fire should be impossible. In ordinary life we have no problem burning wood in the fireplace, and are not troubled by saying such things as “the fire is burning the fuel”, so what is going on? We have made the mistake of reifying our language—thinking that our words correspond with ultimately existing entities, indeed even assuming that a statement like “the fire is burning the fuel” is meaningful because this is so. But we can, obviously, have a wood-fire. How? We can pursue this in two directions; we can take the metaphysical route and ask what fire and fuel actually are ontologically such that a wood-fire happens, or we can take the semantic route and ask what our words are actually doing that makes them meaningful, since they are not corresponding to ultimately existing entities. The answer to either question will end up answering both by giving an explanation of the dependently arisen establishment of conventional truth.
If fire and fuel do not exist inherently and independently of us, they must exist because of us. We must have decided to designate them as phenomena, drawing them out from the ultimately empty world—that is, the not-designated ultimate reality. To designate them as phenomena is just to designate them nominally, with names like “fire” and “fuel”. That we have chosen to anoint these designations with conventionally true existence as opposed to some other possible designations is wholly dependent, contingent on any number of conditions we might point to, like our basic needs and functions as human beings; we don’t have enough body hair to keep us warm, we cannot digest raw food, we receive oxygen from the air and live on the surface of the planet, we have eyes that see and vocal cavities that make sounds, etc. That is, fire and fuel, as ontological and nominal entities, may have been designated so that we could cook and keep warm. We would not have done so if we were fish. The point is that each of these conditions could have been otherwise, and each depends on other innumerable conditions which could have been otherwise, so that we might have had a very different way of designating what we might hesitantly call a similar “region” of ultimate reality, or no designation “there” at all. In fact, we do have another designation—modern scientists, operating on a different set of conditions from those related to meeting our basic needs, could designate this similar “region” purely with equations of chemical reactions, with no recourse to fire or fuel in the nominal or ontological sense. Both are conventional truths. But this is not to say that we are designating differently what is ultimately the same—the ultimately real phenomenon of “burning”, say. We are designating differently what is ultimately empty, hence we must throw away even the idea of an inherent “region” of ultimate reality being designated. There are only maps, not territories.
Conventional truth is made up of the designations we have collectively decided on—which is to say that they have dependently arisen, and the ultimate truth is that these designated entities are ultimately empty. Thereby is the distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth made clear. The Middle Way is the recognition of this difference between the two, which is equivalent to saying that the conventional truth be recognized as conventional:
Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation,
Is itself the middle way. (XXIV: 18)
Contrary to the opponent who thought the existence of entities was destroyed by the Buddha’s doctrine of emptiness, it has turned out that only by being empty can anything come to exist; conventionally, by dependent arising—which is the only way to exist at all:
Something that is not dependently arisen,
Such a thing does not exist.
Therefore a nonempty thing
Does not exist. (XXIV:19)
The doctrine of emptiness also recovers meaning. Nāgārjuna has demonstrated that words arise dependently, inseparably from the phenomena they refer to. Conventionally existent phenomena, which is to say all phenomena, come into conventional existence—or dependently arise—together with their name, when they are named. Meaning is established only because both words and things are empty:
If dependent arising is denied,
Emptiness itself is rejected.
This would contradict
All of the worldly conventions. (XXIV:36)
But to say that the ultimate truth is that these conventionally designated entities—which together constitute a conventional truth—are ultimately empty, is to say that all truth is conventional. That is, the Middle Way distinguishes the conventional from the ultimate truth only to deny that there is an ultimate truth at all. What looks at first like a positive assertion about the ultimate truth—that everything is empty—is actually denying the very concept of such a kind of truth. This is because saying that “everything is empty” is not reifying that emptiness as an ultimate existent. Emptiness is itself a concept—the concept that the things we designate conventionally are themselves free of the conventional conceptualizations we bring, and to designate it as anything, like, say, the emptiness of a blank map on which you can designate your conceptualizations, would make it non-empty, thus making it self-contradicting. The doctrine of emptiness is itself empty—it’s emptiness all the way down. The Middle Way is the total lack of reification, and herein lies the solution to the seeming paradox we began with about views.
All views arise from a fundamental misunderstanding that there is something, separate from the view, that the view is about. This is to say that having a view is an act of reification. This is most clearly seen with explicitly metaphysical views; insofar as they attempt to “get it right”, they hold that there is a something, existing or non-existing in an ultimate sense, which one can correctly explicate. Reification, then, is nothing more than a confusion of the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth. It is the mistake of thinking there is a world separate from a worldview. But this is not just a danger for philosophers, for we have a strong tendency to reify in ordinary life. When we have a general opinion, e.g., “my favorite color is blue”, we are reifying colors and, more importantly, the “self” as an identity with real preferences. The distinction between explicitly metaphysical views and general views turns out not to be important because, insofar as all views reify, all views are metaphysical views.
The Middle Way, because it does not reify, is not a view. It is rather a “move” that removes the floor that undergirds all view-making—that misunderstanding of the relation between language and reality that causes the confusion between conventional and ultimate truth. This does not mean that the Middle Way is easy, or that one cannot mistake it for a view itself. Our tendency to reify is hard to stop. Indeed, one may identify reification as the root ignorance that causes all suffering. For one can only “grasp” at something when one has reified it as a something—when one has objectified it. But the Buddha, by engaging meaningfully with the conventional truth without reifying it, can still give teachings to others without falling into view-making—including of teaching, teacher, time, place, and self. By doing so, one is no longer in the world of saṃsāra, but the world of nirvāṇa:
The pacification of all objectification
And the pacification of illusion:
No Dharma was taught by the Buddha
At any time, in any place, to any person. (XXV:24)
But this is just what the world was all along:
Without distinction, without identity,
And free from conceptual construction. (Dedicatory Verses)
In other words, empty. The difference between living in the world of illusion and objectification and living in the world free of these conceptualizations is the difference between reifying our language and understanding those same words to be empty.
Works referenced in this post:
Jay L. Garfield. (1995). Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Oxford University Press.
The Sanskrit being translated as “view”, dṛṣṭi, from the verb root dṛś, to see, is only qualified by the word sarva, “all”.
I do not disagree with this reading. One may understand the “true doctrine” to be the discourses of the Buddha in total, which all together may get one across the river of saṃsāra where one can then abandon them with all the rest. However, I think there is a stronger reading that a Mahayana Buddhist like Nāgārjuna would make; that the “true doctrine” is the doctrine of dependent arising, which a Mahayana extrapolates to the doctrine of emptiness (and the emptiness of emptiness)—the Middle Way, which for him, cannot be understood as “a view” at all.
Without the perception, the word establishes the entity as an inherently existent non-existent, e.g. a centaur
This includes inherently existent non-existents.