Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), “Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”, is the masterpiece of Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd century CE) and the founding text of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy. In about 450 tightly argued verses in 27 chapters, it examines one fundamental concept after another — causation, motion, perception, the self, time, karma, the Buddha, the Four Noble Truths, nirvāṇa — and shows that each, if understood as having intrinsic existence (svabhāva), leads to contradiction. Its conclusion is that all things are empty (śūnya) of intrinsic existence because they arise in dependence on other things; and that this emptiness is itself the middle way between the extremes of existence and non-existence. One of the most compressed and demanding texts in the history of philosophy, it has generated commentaries in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan for eighteen centuries.

The argument

The dedication

The text opens with a dedicatory verse to the Buddha, who taught dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) as “without cessation, without arising, without annihilation, without permanence, without coming, without going, without distinction, without identity, and peaceful — the stilling of conceptual elaboration (prapañca)”. The eight negations announce the work’s method.

Causation

The first chapter’s first verse: “Neither from itself, nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause, does anything whatever, anywhere, arise.” If a thing arose from itself, it would have to exist before it arose; if from another, then, since everything is “other”, anything could arise from anything; from both combines the two faults; without a cause is absurd. Understood as relations between self-existent things, causation is impossible. Nāgārjuna then examines the four kinds of condition taught by the Abhidharma and finds none of them intrinsically real.

Motion

The second chapter examines going: “What has been gone over is not being gone over; what has not been gone over is not being gone over; apart from what has and has not been gone over, there is no being gone over” (2.1). Nor can the goer be identical with or different from the going. Motion, analysed as the act of a self-existent goer over a self-existent path, dissolves. The arguments resemble Zeno’s paradoxes, but their point is different: not that motion is unreal, but that it is not intrinsically real.

The self

Chapter 18 examines the self: “If the self were the aggregates, it would arise and perish; if it were different from the aggregates, it would not have their characteristics” (18.1). Neither identical with nor different from the aggregates, the self has no intrinsic existence. “When views of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ are extinguished, grasping ceases, and with it, rebirth” (18.4). The Buddhas have taught that there is a self, that there is no self, and that there is neither — according to what their hearers needed (18.6).

Emptiness and the Four Noble Truths

Chapter 24 answers the objection that emptiness destroys the Buddhist path: if everything is empty, there is no arising or ceasing, so no Four Noble Truths, no fruits of practice, no Saṅgha, no Dharma, no Buddha. Nāgārjuna replies that the objector has misunderstood emptiness. The Buddha taught by two truths — conventional and ultimate — and “without relying on the conventional, the ultimate is not taught” (24.10). Emptiness misunderstood “destroys the slow-witted, like a snake wrongly grasped or a spell wrongly cast” (24.11). It is precisely intrinsic existence that would make the path impossible: “For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible; for whom emptiness is not possible, nothing is possible” (24.14). And then the central verse: “Whatever is dependently arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way” (24.18).

Nirvāṇa

Chapter 25 examines nirvāṇa, and concludes that it is neither existent, nor non-existent, nor both, nor neither: “There is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa; there is not the slightest difference between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra” (25.19). “The pacification of all objectification and the pacification of elaboration is peace. No dharma was taught by the Buddha at any time, in any place, to any person” (25.24).

Views

The last chapter examines the metaphysical views the Buddha refused to answer, and closes with homage to the Buddha “who, out of compassion, taught the true doctrine for the abandonment of all views” (27.30).

Significance

The MMK founded one of the two great Mahāyāna schools and became the root text of philosophy in Tibetan monastic education. Its arguments have been read as scepticism, as mysticism, as a critique of metaphysics, and as a positive metaphysics of relations; contemporary analytic philosophers continue to debate them.

In conversation

The one verse to know: “Whatever is dependently arisen, that is emptiness; that is the middle way” (24.18). And its boldest: there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa.