Mahāyāna Buddhist Philosophy-Class Notes
by Darryl Sterk

EAS 468 L. Priestley

Carr Hall 405 Tues., Thu. 3-4

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

All of the conditions either separately or together. That should mean either that the result exists a) in each of the conditions or b) in all of the conditions combined. If a), then you should get many copies of the result, and if b) then each of the conditions should produce a discrete part of the result. What we want to claim is that the entire result is produced by the various conditions. Then Nagarjuna goes on to wonder how the result can be produced in its conditions when it wasn’t there in the conditions to begin with. The result is obviously not there in the conditions (there’s a transformation in between cause and result), so, argues Nagarjuna, it should just as easily come from non-conditions, which is absurd.

Candrakirti’s example is the cloth and threads: The cloth exists neither in the individual threads nor in the threads taken together. The cloth comes from thread which do not contain cloth, so cloth should also come from straw or stones, an absurdity. The absurdity, I think, is the Madhyamaka way of indicating a certain problem with causality.

Moving on with Nagarjuna: The result is made of its conditions, but the conditions are not made of themselves. How can that result, which is from things not made of themselves, be made of its conditions? Priestley follows Candrakirti: because of the 13^th and 14^th verses, Candrakirti takes this whole section as being about the kind of causal relationship illustrated by cloth and thread.

Linguistic note: the suffix maya can “made of” but can also mean made from. For example, cow dung is go-maya, “made by a cow”. This doesn’t mean that the dung is made of cow in the same way that cloth is made out of cotton string. So, Candrakirti is interpreting the verses in a certain way, assuming that maya means “made of”, where maya indicates any causal relationship and not just the kind of relationship between the string and the cloth.

One odd thing about using cloth and threads as an example: no Buddhist considered cloth and threads to be real. Candrakirti’s preaching to the converted (perhaps his assuming there are non-Buddhists among his readership. If we were talking about one real existent dharma coming from other similarly-natured dharmas, then these arguments have some force in the context in which Candrakirti was writing. For us, the cloth and threads argument is very easy to appreciate, as our tradition is very concerned with part/whole relationships, especially working toward the parts that are simple (atomic, indivisible). The implication of “conditions are not made of themselves” is that the conditions are composite and divisible. Today, we're inclined to think that you do get to subatomic particles that are basic (the quarks, a word that I think comes to us from Finnagens Wake). Nagarjuna would argue that any particles no matter how subatomic are all composite, divisible, and thus conceptual entities.

Eisel: The Buddha spoke of the relation between desire and perception. Obviously desire is not made of perception, but arises when perception is present. Did anyone seriously suggest that desire and perception were divisible or argue for their indivisibility? To what extent is this metaphor of the cloth and strings relevant.

If it weren’t for Candrakirti, Priestley wouldn’t be raising the matter. The metaphor is intruiging. Perhaps Candrakirti was speaking to non-Buddhists, for whom wholes were thought to have some kind of reality.

Eisel: Is the same metaphor used in the early Tibetan commentary?

Priestley: His recollection is that it isn’t. As long as you don’t use an illustration and just talk of “dependency”, then you cover all kinds of causal relationships without committing yourself to the specific kind of causal relationship illustrated by cloth and string. It would be interesting to see what Bhavya says. Bhavya’s commentary was the first to use lots of examples, a trend Candrakirti follows. For us, the cloth and string illustration fits so neatly and misleadingly into our preconceptions about what constitutes reality: what you get when you analyze down to the indivisibles. Again, we should not assume that Nagarjuna recognized a basic irreducible level of reality, for a pain aim of his whole project is to do away with the idea that the dharmas exist. How far were Buddhists interested in arriving at this irreducible level of reality generally? It’s hard to tell. Certainly Vasubandhu talks in those terms; he speaks in exactly those terms when he deals with the unreality of the person—he’s deriving a fair bit of what he does from previous Abidharma texts. And hard-core Abidharmists were out to find a hard core of real reality, or, rather, a real foundation on which our everyday experience is based. Up to a certain point, you also get this kind of thought in the Theravada. But were the dharmas thought of as the ultimate constituents of reality at the time? Stcherbatsky thought so, and so did Warder, though with less confidence. Why with less confidence? Because some of the choices made for what counted as ultimate constituents seem arbitrary. The Abidharma started out with a quest to find out which things mentioned in the Buddha’s discourse are the same under different names. Originally, these things were the tools the Buddha favored because of the power they had to reduce suffering. Later on there is a move towards arriving at an exhaustive list of what there is, beyond which all you have is conceptual, everyday reality. The Buddha would most likely not have approved of this trend. The Abidharma enterprise was much more scientific than the Buddha’s strictly soteriological enterprise. So, can we say that originally the Buddha was not concerned so much with the ultimate constituents of reality as with those constituents that tend to cause suffering? Can we say that there was a trend in certain branches of Buddhism where the goal became to analyze down to the level of the individuals? It was this kind of trend, at any rate, that Nagarjuna was attacking.

The result is made of the conditions but the conditions are not made of themselves and so must be made of other conditions, and so on until infinity, until we find something that doesn't need a cause.

On infinite regress in Indian thought. They were just as uncomfortable with it as our philosophical tradition. Nagarjuna can't see the justification of saying something is self-caused or uncaused, just in order to avoid infinite regress. If uncaused, how can it exist, for nothing exists without a cause. If caused, then you have not reached the bedrock of existence you are searching for, the bedrock that supports the existence of things. The seemingly unavoidable infinite regress for Nagarjuna shows up the failure of the position that leads to it. A position makes no sense if it leads to infinity. We obscure the force of this argument if we think infinity is some point we can reach, whence all is derived. We do tend to say things like “back to infinity” as if infinity is reachable. Infinity is simply in-finite.

Does a circular dependency escape the problem (cause and effect depending on each other)? Neither circular nor linear dependency make sense to Nagarjuna (this has come up in previous lectures).

Whenever we find dependency relations, this set of problems applies. We’ve been talking about efficient and material causation, but consider what Aristotle would have called final causation. Material causation distinguished from final (purposeful) causation. The same difficulty is there when we try to find an ultimate reason for the things we do, an ultimate motivation. We want to assert that something is valuable in its own right, or sometimes we may be comfortable with what leads up to it carrying the value to the thing in question, or we may become comfortable with an infinite series that produces the final value. So: we have a general structure here that emerges in a number of different situations.

No result is made either of conditions or non-conditions. If the result does not exist, where do the causes and conditions come from? This is by now familiar, because conditions exist in relation to results.

End of the first chapter! This counts as rapid progress and these arguments deserve a lot more discussion. But by now we have a sense of the structure and impact of the arguments. Don’t worry, we’ll go deeper later on.

General observations: features that strike us either consciously or unconsciously: 1) inflexibility, too much rigor, too cut and dried, too logical, too rational (what a thing for us to accuse him of!). Priestley's first impression was that this thinking was somehow crude, that the problem was that he wasn't taking the matter to an adequate level of complexity and detail. Later Priestley came to think that Nagarjuna knew what he was doing, and that increasing complexity doesn't solve any of the problems raised. This was a shock. In English literature and philosophy, it often helps to increase complexity and refinement of interpretation to reflect the richness of the material under discussion. What we find here when we increase complexity and refinement is the same problem, in smaller bits instead of in crude form. A great story. The monkey god was fighting a powerful demon. He cut the demon into a thousand pieces, which all swarmed around him like bees. This captures the feeling we may have in approaching this philosophy. 2) There’s something peculiar in the interdependence of cause and result. Without the result, the cause doesn't exist, so the result is also the cause of the cause. We ought to feel something’s fishy. After all, first the cause, then the result, first the seed then the sprout. Nagarjuna is talking as if the result/sprout depend on the cause/seed. We sense that there is a different kind of dependency here. We may call the first kind of dependence “physical” versus some other kind of dependence. We might say that the sprout needs the seed to exist, but the seed needs the sprout to be what it is, to be a “seed”. Do we not have two kinds of existence here? In English we distinguish in some contexts (philosophical) between being as being something and existence as being there, or occurring. This distinction became clear as the Greek was translated into Arabic. The Greek texts used esti for both senses, whereas what was an implicit distinction in the original had to become explicit in Arabic, in which there are two different words (as in Chinese: shi 是 (to be) and you 有 (to exist, which is commonly expressed by there is/are in English)). Latin also made this distinction, which became an issue in Medieval philosophy. Is Nagarjuna confusing these two types of existence? Priestley thinks he probably knew very well what he was doing, that he was dealing with two quite different things that are dealt with using the same word, a confusing state of affairs for all concerned.

Eisel’s “counter-argument”. Etiology and epistemology. We know the seed as a seed because it produces the sprout. We’re not talking about being qua being, and certainly for Nagarjuna there is no notion of etiology unconditioned by epistemology. The problem is here rather than existence verses being.

Priestley concurs. Yet he feels we can still talk in terms of being and existence. Existence is what happens to beings as they are transformed through physical processes. Being is “what’s there”, the particular things we can identify.

To clarify: existence and being: what distinguishes the table that is actually here from the concept of the table. The table as such (as an essence) has this kind of form and function, while the table that is actually here exists. How does this relate to Nagarjuna? In the status of the things that are supposed to exist. It is convenient for us to be able to distinguish between the identities of things (what is used to identify them (epistemological) and what makes them what they are (essential)) from their actual occurrence (existence). Nagarjuna draws our attention to the fact that it makes no sense to talk of being, unless it is the being of something, to talk about the identity of something that never occurs. These two are abstracted from a reality that isn’t reducible to either.

Eisel: the relationship between seed and sprout in either direction doesn’t imply an essence. Addendum: clearly, Nagarjuna is out to dismantle the idea of essence, not construct new ontologies. In ordinary speech, we speak of things acting on other things, of things turning into other things. If you say that a seed turns into a sprout, it seems as if there was a single event and zap! the seed became a sprout. Some strange things can happen (ontologies) when philosophers take their examples too seriously and assume the existence of things that usually are just talked about. I don’t mean to reduce Nagarjuna to Wittgenstein, whom Priestley has mentioned, for seeing the way things is not something the ordinary person is capable of and the philosopher incapable of; seeing the way things are involves seeing through finer and yet finer distinctions.

Next time is Chapter 18. Let's look a little more carefully at seed and sprout. This example at first sight relates only indirectly to what Nagarjuna seems primarily concerned with, the dharmas or bhavas. This is a model for causal relationships accepted generally by ancient Indian philosophers. Let's go over Nagarjuna’s arguments in terms of seed and sprout; rather let’s call to mind a seed transforming into a sprout. In doing so, we're following the move Nagarjuna uses at the 4^th term of the tetralemma—throwing ourselves back on our experience. Picture the germinating sprout. There isn't a sprout inside the seed, though there is a part of the seed continuous with the sprout that emerges. We can talk of seeds and sprouts and when we're doing so we know what we're talking about. But if you watch closely, you see the seed undergoing changes while still being a seed, but at a certain point the seed body splits and the sprout extends upwards and downwards. Magical! We can’t make sense of this process just in terms of “seed” and “sprout” (or “just” in terms of any set of terms, however numerous). The process of change, of course, continues after splitting. What’s the connection between this example, and the fuzzy boundary between seed and sprout that we’re working towards? Well, in physical terms, there’s no problem with causation: seeds produce sprouts, things happen in the world, and most of us believe they happen for causal reasons. What seems to be happening is that Nagarjuna seems to be talking about other kinds of dependence in terms of this metaphor and, Priestley thinks, that he knows exactly what he’s doing. Any problem with the fuzzy boundary: a fuzzy boundary isn’t a boundary at all.