The walker and the walked
The objection from ordinary lifeAnd why it is the strongest one there is
Chapter 2 is where most readers first lose patience with the Middle Treatise, and it is worth saying at the outset that the impatience is reasonable. Somebody is walking to the market. Nāgārjuna is about to spend the longest argument in the book explaining that the going cannot be found — and no reader has ever finished it and then been unable to walk anywhere.
So begin with the objection, which the treatise puts first and puts well.
"The world's own eyes see that there is activity in the three times: what has gone, what has not yet gone, and the going now. Because there is activity, one should know that things exist."
This is not a naive objection. It is the appeal to the most obvious evidence available: things happen. Change is the one thing nobody can seriously doubt, and change is activity, and activity requires something that acts. If motion is real, then at minimum motion is a real something — and the eight negations have already failed.
Notice that the objector has chosen his ground well. Nāgārjuna could have been given an easy target — a creator god, an eternal atom. Instead he is handed walking.
Three times, and no going in any of themThe answering verse
"In what has gone there is no going,
in what has not gone there is no going,
and apart from the gone and the not-yet-gone,
in the going now there is no going either."
已去無有去， 未去亦無去，
離已去未去， 去時亦無去。
The objector offered three times; the verse takes all three. And the first two go quickly:
"In what has gone there is no going, because it has gone already. To have an act of going that stands apart from the going will not do. In what has not gone there is no going either, since the act of going is not there yet. And "the going now" means half gone and half not yet gone, since it is not separable from the gone and the not-yet-gone."
The road behind you is not being walked; the walking there is finished. The road ahead is not being walked; the walking has not started. Both obvious, both uncontroversial.
So everything rests on the third — the going now, the present moment of motion, which is where any sensible person would have located the motion in the first place. And the commentary's move against it is the one to watch: the going now is half gone and half not yet gone. It is not a third thing alongside the other two. It is made of them. Decompose it and you get a portion already walked and a portion not yet walked, and neither of those has any going in it.
The objector holds his groundAnd gets the treatise's sharpest reply
The objector is not finished, and his counter is good: forget the decomposition, just look. Wherever there is movement, there is going, and that place is neither the gone nor the not-yet-gone.
"Where there is movement there is going,
and in that there is the going now;
it is neither the gone nor the not-yet-gone,
and so the going now goes."
動處則有去， 此中有去時，
非已去未去， 是故去時去。
Note again that this verse is the opponent's, in the treatise's own text. The Middle Treatise is not a monologue; it is a transcript, and the opponent gets real lines.
The reply is the argument this chapter is famous for.
"If the going now has going in it,
then there are two goings:
the one that makes it a going-now,
and the going that the going-now does."
若去時有去， 則有二種去：
一謂為去時， 二謂去時去。
This needs unpacking, because it is doing something subtler than it looks.
Call the present moment of motion "the going-now." What makes it a going-now rather than just a now? Going. So there is already one going involved in the thing being what it is. Now the objector says that in this going-now, going happens. That is a second going — the one that occurs in the first.
"If one holds that the going now has going in it, there is a fault, namely that there are two goings: first, the going on account of which there is a going-now at all; second, the going that is inside the going-now."
And the alternative is no better. Try to separate the going-now from the going, so that the going-now is a container and the going is its contents — and the commentary has that covered too: if there were a going-now apart from the act of going, then going would sit inside the going-now the way a fruit sits inside a bowl.
A bowl is a bowl whether or not there is fruit in it. But a going-now is not a going-now unless there is going. The two are not container and contents; they are not separable at all. And things that are not separable cannot be related as one having the other in it.
The chapter runs on like this for ninety exchanges, doing the same thing to the goer: if the goer goes, there are two goings again, one making him a goer and one that he does; if the non-goer goes, then someone who is not going is going. Every attempt to locate motion in a thing produces either a duplication or a contradiction.
What this is actually an argument aboutNot motion — language, and what it makes you believe
It is worth being blunt about what this chapter is and is not doing, because the difference decides whether the whole treatise looks like sophistry.
Nāgārjuna is not arguing that nothing moves. He is arguing that the grammar of our sentences about motion contains a picture, and that the picture cannot be made coherent. The picture is: there is a goer, and there is a going, and the goer does the going. Three items, each with its own nature, combined.
Every argument in the chapter attacks that combination and nothing else. If the goer already has going in him, the going is redundant. If he does not, he is a non-goer, and non-goers do not go. If the going is a thing the going-now contains, they are separable, which they are not. The picture fails in every configuration.
And what remains after it fails is exactly what there was before anyone started: someone walking to the market. What does not remain is the conviction that there is a findable item, motion, with its own nature, which the walking consists in — and, behind that, the conviction that there is a findable item, the walker, who has it.
That second one is the actual target, and it is why this chapter comes second in the book rather than in some appendix on physics. Chapter 9 will ask whether there is a self prior to seeing and hearing; Chapter 8 will ask whether there is an agent prior to acting. Motion is the practice case, chosen because it is where nobody has anything invested. By the time the same argument arrives at the self, the reader has already agreed to the method.
- The opponent is given the strongest ground — ordinary observed motion, not a metaphysical thesis.
- The past and future road have no going in them, which nobody disputes.
- The present moment of motion is not a third thing — it is half gone and half not yet gone.
- Locating going in the going-now duplicates it: one going makes it a going-now, another happens in it.
- Separating them fails too. A bowl is a bowl without fruit; a going-now is nothing without going.
- The target is the goer, not the going. Motion is the practice case for the chapters on the self.
One practiceWalking, and looking for the walker
This chapter has an obvious practice attached to it, and the tradition has used it for a long time: walk, slowly, and look for what the chapter says cannot be found.
Attend first to the three times. The part of the step completed. The part not yet begun. And the part happening. Try to hold the third one steady and look at it. Notice how quickly it decomposes into a finished portion and an unstarted one — this is the commentary's half gone and half not yet gone, available to direct observation.
Then, without stopping, ask the chapter's real question: is there a walker doing this? Not "am I walking" — look for the one who is. Look in the legs, in the intention, in the watching.
Do not expect the walking to stop or to feel strange; if it does, slow down less. The result the exercise aims at is not an experience but a noticing: that the walking proceeds perfectly well without you having located anyone doing it, and that you only ever find the walker by turning away from the walking to think about it.
Check yourselfFive questions
You walked here. Which part of that required there to be someone who walks?
The chapter's wager is: none of it. The walking is unaffected by the analysis, and that is not a consolation prize — it is the whole finding. What cannot survive the analysis was never doing any of the walking in the first place.
Session 4 · Fire and fuel
The same argument, turned on the thing the reader does have something invested in. If the self and the aggregates are one, the self is many and impermanent; if they are different, the self has no contact with experience at all. Nāgārjuna works it through the image of a fire and the wood it burns.