I needed some space to air my views and reading of Nagarjuna's text, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā [The Root Wisdom of the Middle Way]. So I thought blogging about would be a good idea, like a friend of mine who has a whole blog dedicated to Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
I wanted to start with the first verse in the text that can be called emblematic of the book and establishes Nagarjuna's views on causality:
Neither from itself nor from another,
nor from both,
nor without a cause
Does anything whatever anywhere arise. [Garfield's translation]
Let me start by presenting Garfield's commentary on what the first proposition in the verse above seeks to negate, the view of “self-generation” (or self-causation) as held by the Samkhya philosophers. Garfield states that, “A proponent of this view would argue that for a cause to be genuinely the cause of an effect, that effect must exist potentially in the cause,” and, further, that “...a thing's prior potential existence is what gives rise to its later actual existence” (pp 106-6).
Murti has this to say on the same issue: “The Sāṁkhya advocates identity between the two (satkaryavada), and thus holds the theory of self-becoming: things are produced out of themselves (svata utpannā bhāvāḥ).1 Candrakirti mentions this first in general manner as: “When other schools reflect on arising they think of it either as spontaneous, or as from another, or from both, or at random,” and later, naming the Samkhyas: “Bhavaviveka should not, therefore, require Buddhapalita to establish his own argument against the Samkhya claim that the effect pre-existed in the cause and is therefore self-generated.”2
As we saw from Garfield's commentary, the view of self-causation is basically one of the in potentio nature of an effect inherent in the cause.
Let us first examine the arguments against this statement. Murti is blunt: “The Samkhya thesis that things are produced out of themselves is wrong; for there is no point in self-production, reduplication. The Samkhya too does not admit that the thing which is already present (fully manifest like a pitcher) produces itself...The Samkhya might parry the argument by saying that it does not deny all difference; the manifestation (abhivyakti) is certainly new; but this does not amount to a difference in substance, but only in form or states of the same substance. Does not this difference militate against the identity of the underlying substratum? [italics mine]” (p 133).
Candrakirti refers to his own work for the repudiation of the view of self-origination: “What that reason is [origination from self is not possible] can be ascertained from the Madhyamakavatara: 'Therefore, if something, of whatever kind, has arisen there can be no point at all in a subsequent birth of this birth: it would be nonsense,' and further quoting Buddhapalita: 'Whether we take the example of the clay and the pot or the threads and the cloth, he has shown clearly and with good reasons, that the Samkhya position, according to which the effect [pot and cloth] preexists in the cause [clay and threads] does not make sense, namely because, if they really preexist, there is no sense in their arising a second time'” (p 36, 38).
If we take a look at the commentary by Jamgon Mipham on Candrakirti's Madhyamakavatara, we get this: “According to the Samkhya view, cause and effect are identical in nature. The effect, clearly manifest in the result phase, is said to be present, though latent, in the cause phase...”3
Before we go any further, let us quickly look at what the Samkhya has to say about its theory of self-causation, as presented in a paper by Gerald Larson: 4
The so-called theory of causation in classical Samkhya is set forth in Samkhyakarika 9 as follows:
asadakarandd upddanagrahanatsarvasambhavabhavdt/
saktasya sakyakaranat kdranabhavdc ca satkdryam//
K. C. Bhattacharya in his Studies in Philosophy neatly paraphrases the sense of the verse as follows: "...the effect is immediately known as what was implicit in the cause, as what has now the cause for its matter or material, as the only determination of the cause, as what the cause alone can become and
as partaking of the nature of the cause. The cause in fact is manifest in the effect as its very self, the effect immediately showing it. The effect reveals the cause as having become it, as still becoming it and so far as it is itself manifest, as including the manifest effect within it...Another favorite simile of the Samkhya tradition is that of milk and curds-that is, the effect is only a modification or rearrangement or transformation (parinama) of that which is already potentially and creatively present in the cause "
Further on, Larson concludes that: “The Samkhya assertion, then, that the 'effect exists (before the operation of cause)' (satkarya) appears to be related to a peculiar context of "noumenal" manifestation, which is quite different from the phenomenal level of manifestation.”5
According to Larson's interpretation, the simplistic view of the Samkhya's causation theory is inaccurate if applied to the phenomenal world. Also, his quotation of the milk and curds example points to the fact that the Samkhya philosophers were not not talking of identity of form but an “essential” continuation of the identity. Could the Samkhya philosophers have missed the fact that curds are not a mere transformation of milk, like a change in state of water, but a result of something else, some other conditions (bacteria)? Be that as it may, it seems unlikely to me that the assertion of the existence of an in potentio effect inside of the cause (the seedness of say, a flowering plant which finally blossoms into the plant?) was meant to represent identical things. Who would maintain that a full banyan tree exists within the seed, the oak within the acorn? It seems natural to me that the reference would be to the oakness that exists within the acorn or as modern science would say, the acorn contains the genetic blueprint for the oak. Going further down that path, the modern essence of animate things is the DNA within cells which gets passed on from cause to effect.
This is what the commentary on MV has: “The Samkhyas think, however, that the (observable) differences, and the destruction of the seed by the sprout [when grass seeds turn into a meadow, for instance], are simply modulations taking place within a simple entity.” This seems to be a fair reading of the Samkhya view. But, a little further, we have this: “It may be urged that the seed phase is abandoned and another phase is assumed, with the result that the seed becomes the shoot...The answer to this is that if the preceding entity of the seed is eliminated and something different from it – namely, the condition of the shoot – eventuates, how can be the seed said to become the shoot? For the two terms are related to each other as destroyer and destroyed.”6
It would seem obvious to anyone that any thing would not be produced by “another” thing identical with it, for what would be the point, unless you are a copier machine? But we do know that biologically cells duplicate and divide (mitosis). So even if we ignore the fact that modern science gives s a different idea of causation – think Newton's laws involving action and reaction also in the macro-world, we should not have to bring any repudiation of the Samkhyas for the first negation of Nagarjuna to stand on its own.
I think one way of looking at this, which seems to be the point that Mipham seems to driving, is that a thing itself, in identity terms cannot inhere/exist in a cause. So let us take the example of a pot. Does the pot “arise” out of clay? Well, according to the Samkhya theory, the pot exists as potential in the clay. So, does a pot “property” or essence exist within the clay? Does the clay, then, have more than one essence, that of a pot and also of being clay? Or is the essence of the pot that of the clay, in which case there is no pot thingy...in essence...just clay, re-figured and mentally imputed as a “pot” by human convention. To say that the independent essence of the pot, the “potness” of it, exists as such inside of the clay, yet non-manifested means the clay has certainly the essence of a pot residing in or pervading it. Similarly, if the sprout is a sprout of strong, upstanding, independent nature, with a distinct identity of “sproutness,” then to say that the “sproutness” existed in the cause, the seed, would be to ascribe more than one essence to the seed – or, if there can be only one essence to a thing, then to state that that the seed has an essence of that of the sprout, and hence, no essence of its own, as a seed!
I think it might have to do with the aphoristic nature of Nagarjuna's verses that the first negation in the first karika sounds counter-intuitive if not a little wrong headed. What that first par of the first line of the first karika (Neither from itself ...) should read is something like this: “Neither from a cause identical with itself nor from another.” But this isn't straight and direct, either. What it should be is probably, “No cause can produce an effect identical with itself in essence,” however ungainly that might sound. So, I think the problem is with the usage of the word itself, which I think is some clever shorthand that Nagarjuna employed to encapsulate the impossibility in the most cogent and conclusive way possible – note, Nagarjuna views the causality from the effect into the cause [“from itself”] and not the other way around.
The no-causation from anything other than the thing produced, the “effect,” is repudiated because that would deny any connection whatsoever between cause and effect. This, according to Candrakirti quoting Buddhapalita is “...because it would follow that anything would be possible from anything.”7
1The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 1960, T.R.V Murti. p. 133
2Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way, The Essential Chapters from the Prasannapada [PP]of Candrakirti, 1979, tr. By Mervyn Sprung, pp 36-7.
3Introduction to the Middle Way, Chandrakirti's Madhyamavatara [MV] with a commentary by Jamgon Mipham, 1st ed., pp 182-3.
4 The Notion of Satkarya in Samkhya: Toward a Philosophical Reconstruction, Gerald J. Larson, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 25, No. 1, The Problems of Causation: East and West. (Jan.,1975), p. 31
5Ibid p. 35
6MV p. 186
7PP p. 42
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