How the school describes itself
Two gates, and only twoJizang sets out the school's whole programme
Seven sessions with Nāgārjuna and his commentator. This one steps forward about four centuries, to the school that grew up around the three treatises in China — the 三論宗, the Three Treatise school — and to its greatest systematiser, Jizang (549–623), writing at imperial command for a newly reunified empire that wanted to know what its Buddhism should teach.
The text is the Sanlun Xuanyi, The Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises, and its opening paragraph is the whole programme.
"To set out the overall drift of the doctrine in general, this treatise opens into two gates: the first is a general preface covering the overall tendency of the whole; the second is a detailed exposition of each individual topic. The first gate itself has two parts: the first is refuting the false; the second is revealing the true."
破邪顯正 — refuting the false, revealing the true. Two moves, and they are the entire method.
There is a detail here that is easy to miss and tells you something about the school. The "detailed exposition of each individual topic" promised in that same sentence never arrives as a separate section. What stands under that heading is simply the enormous elaboration of refuting-the-false-and-revealing-the-true that fills the rest of the book. The map drawn in the first paragraph turns out to be the whole territory.
And the two moves are not two. This is the school's most distinctive claim and the reason this course is called what it is: revealing the true is not a separate operation performed after the refuting. There is no positive doctrine waiting behind the demolition to be unveiled once the rubble is cleared. When every false position has been stilled, that stillness is the true. Nothing further is produced.
If that sounds evasive, the rest of this session is the school answering exactly that charge — at length, and under pressure.
The chain that runs from confusion to sufferingWhat the method rests on
An objector puts the obvious question: if you reject everyone — inside the tradition and out, Great Vehicle and Small alike — what is left for you to stand on?
"If the three treatises rebuke both inside and outside, and reject both great and small alike, then on what does this treatise's own guiding doctrine actually rely?"
"If the mind still harbors inside and outside, and the feelings still lodge in great and small, then one has already fallen into one-sided error and lost the correct principle. Having lost the correct principle, correct contemplation does not arise. If correct contemplation does not arise, then annihilationism and eternalism are not extinguished. If annihilationism and eternalism are not extinguished, then the wheel of suffering turns on forever."
"It is only when inside and outside are both left in stillness, and great and small are both quiesced together, that this is properly named the correct principle. Awakening to this correct principle, one gives rise to correct contemplation; once correct contemplation arises, conceptual proliferation is thereby extinguished; once conceptual proliferation is extinguished, the wheel of suffering is thereby broken."
以內外並冥大小俱寂。始名正理。悟斯正理則發生正觀。正觀若生則戲論斯滅。戲論斯滅則苦輪便壞。
That is a chain of dependent causation, and it is deliberately built like the twelve links — except that philosophical error stands where craving usually stands.
Read in reverse, it is the whole justification for a method that looks purely destructive. The stilling of positions is not intellectual sport and not scepticism for its own sake. It is the first link in a chain that ends in the breaking of the wheel of suffering — and it is the link that the school's entire apparatus is designed to reach.
Notice too where the argument places prapañca, the conceptual elaboration Session 1 met in the homage verse. It sits between correct contemplation and the wheel of suffering. The Buddha was praised, in the treatise's opening lines, for quieting it. Eight sessions later, that quieting has been shown to be the mechanism by which suffering ends.
"Then you are a nihilist"The objection pressed three times, and refused three times
The charge that has shadowed the school since Nāgārjuna now comes in its most persistent form, and Jizang's method of handling it is worth watching, because the objector will not accept the first answer, or the second.
"If inside and outside are both done away with, and great and small are both rejected, this surely amounts to the view of annihilation — how, then, can it be called the correct doctrine?"
"Precisely because inside and outside are both stilled together, annihilationism and eternalism are thereby quiesced as well. With both extremes now abandoned, how could this fail to be the correct doctrine?"
The objector immediately sees the gap and drives at it: to be without annihilation and without eternalism is itself a position — it is non-existence — so you have landed on one of the two extremes after all.
"To have annihilation and to have eternalism is precisely what is called "existence"; to be without annihilation and without eternalism is thereby designated "non-existence." But since this position is itself simply non-existence, how could it possibly escape annihilationism after all?"
"Precisely because annihilationism and eternalism are quiesced together, existence and non-existence, and every such pair, are thereby left behind as well. One ought not, on top of this, turn around and claim that the position has simply been dyed over into non-existence instead."
The objector tries once more, one level up — and his persistence is the reason this passage is valuable, because it is exactly the objection a good modern reader makes.
"Though this answer offers a way through, it still does not escape the difficulty. To have both "there is existence" and "there is non-existence" is what is called existence; to have neither "there is existence" nor "there is non-existence" — this, from the outset, is simply the greater non-existence. But since the position has thereby fallen into non-existence, how does it escape annihilationism after all?"
"The teaching of non-existence was, from the start, set up specifically to counter the sickness of existence. Once the sickness of existence has dissolved, the medicine of emptiness is likewise set aside — from which it may be known that the sagely path has never, at any point, actually been either existence or non-existence. What, then, is there left to be caught on?"
有病若消，空藥亦廢 — once the sickness of existence has dissolved, the medicine of emptiness is likewise set aside.
This is the answer to every version of the objection at once, and it works by refusing the question's framing. The objector keeps asking what is your position?, and keeps being told that the appearance of a position is an artefact of the treatment. You do not ask what a course of medicine is asserting. The school's claim is that emptiness is that kind of thing throughout.
And notice where this leaves the course. Session 1 opened with the commentary explaining that the Middle Treatise was written for people who had seized on emptiness and given rise to craving and clinging — who had turned the medicine into a disease. Eight sessions later, the school's mature self-description makes the same point in its own vocabulary, and closes the circle.
Where to go from hereThe rest of the library, and the other side of the argument
The course has read one treatise closely and one commentary at the end. The school is called the Three Treatise school for a reason, and the other two are here in full.
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, complete
Nāgārjuna's verses with Piṅgala's commentary, in Kumārajīva's 409 CE Chinese and Ru-Yi's English, chapter by chapter. This course quoted seven chapters; there are twenty more.
Read the treatise →The Twelve Gate Treatise (十二門論) is Nāgārjuna's own compressed restatement in twelve arguments — the fastest way into the method for anyone who found twenty-seven chapters long. The Hundred Treatise (百論) is by Āryadeva, Nāgārjuna's student, and is aimed outward at the non-Buddhist schools rather than inward. And Jizang's Sanlun Xuanyi, quoted in this session, is complete in fourteen parts.
And then the argument on the other side. The Yogācāra elective accepts most of what this course has argued and refuses one step: that the dependent process itself is empty. Something is happening, that school says, and the happening has to be real, or there is nothing for the analysis to be about. Reading the two electives together is the closest this Academy comes to putting the two great Mahāyāna schools in one room.
- Two gates, and the second is not a separate operation. Stilling every false position is the revealing; nothing further is produced.
- The method is justified by a causal chain that runs from holding a position to the turning of the wheel of suffering.
- Elaboration sits between contemplation and suffering — which is why quieting it was what the Buddha was praised for in Session 1.
- The nihilism charge is pressed three times and refused three times, each time by refusing the framing rather than by taking a side.
- Emptiness is a dose, not a doctrine. When the sickness of existence goes, the medicine is set aside too.
One practiceThe last one
Eight sessions of a method this corrosive leave a residue, and the residue is usually a new fluency: a set of moves you can now perform on anyone's position, including your own. Jizang's line about the medicine is the treatment for that.
Then read it back and mark every place where an argument from this course has been used to avoid committing to something. Not to refute a bad idea — to avoid saying what you think.
Then rewrite those sentences without the move.
The school's own test is in the chain from Part 2: does the stilling of positions run through to less suffering, or has it stopped at fluency? If what you produce is a document with nothing in it, the medicine has become the sickness, and the chapter on the snake was written for you.
Check yourselfFive questions
If emptiness is a medicine, what were you sick with — and are you still?
Eight sessions have not answered that, and could not. What they have done is supply a diagnosis precise enough to be checked, and a warning, delivered twice — once by Piṅgala at the start and once by Jizang at the end — that the medicine is the most commonly mistaken thing in the tradition. You will know which way you are holding it by what it does to your ordinary life, and by nothing else.
Eight sessions, twenty-seven chapters
From the eight negations through arising, motion, the self, karma, the great objection and nirvāṇa, to the school's own account of its method. The third Layer 4 elective, The Diamond Sūtra, All Thirty-Two, reads the Perfection of Wisdom literature that both of these schools take as their scriptural ground.