No Creator, No First Cause

Root Verses 破自在天等邪因 · 石女兒喻

Having refuted self-arising, other-arising, and both-together, the text turns to the fourth and final alternative — that things arise from no cause at all, or from a single, uncaused first cause such as a creator god. It then clarifies a distinction that matters for everything that follows: the difference between something merely empty of inherent existence, and something that doesn't exist even conventionally. Chinese source at left is Venerable Fazun's (法尊法師) translation; the English at right is Ru-Yi's own translation of that Chinese.

Closing the Fourth Corner

The last of the four ways something might arise is not to arise from a cause at all — or, the theistic version of the same idea, to be produced by a single first cause (自在天/Īśvara) that itself needs no cause. The text's response to bare causelessness is practical rather than abstract: if results simply appeared or failed to appear regardless of what anyone did, farming, medicine, and every other deliberate effort toward a specific outcome would make no sense — nobody plants rice seed hoping for mangoes, and that ordinary discrimination already assumes causes matter.

The theistic version gets a sharper reply. A creator god who is genuinely uncaused breaks the very principle — that everything arises dependent on conditions — the whole argument has been establishing; a creator who does have a cause is simply not the kind of "self-existent first cause" the position needs. Either way, positing an exception for one privileged case (a creator god exempt from needing a cause) undermines rather than explains the pattern found everywhere else.

The Barren Woman's Son

An opponent presses a natural worry at this point: if Madhyamaka keeps saying things are "not truly existent," doesn't that reduce everything — vases, people, causation itself — to the same status as the proverbial impossible object, the son of a woman who cannot bear children? Something has to distinguish a vase, which nobody denies functions as a vase, from something that is empty in the strongest, flattest sense of simply not being there at all.

The text's answer is the distinction drawn in the third and fourth verses above. A barren woman's son is empty in both truths at once — he doesn't exist ultimately, and he doesn't exist conventionally either; there's no everyday sense in which people interact with him, receive anything from him, or are harmed by him. A vase, a dream, a reflection, a mirage: these are likewise without inherent, independent existence when examined — but they are not absent from the conventional world the way the barren woman's son is. People fill vases with water, wake up disturbed by nightmares, and mistake mirages for water at a real cost of wasted effort. "Empty of inherent nature" and "doesn't exist at all" are not the same claim, and the whole force of the two-truths framework depends on keeping them apart.

Already at Peace

The lecture draws out a further implication worth sitting with: if nothing ever truly arose in the first place — not from self, other, both, or nothing — then in the deepest sense nothing needs to be extinguished either. Realizing emptiness is not manufacturing a new, peaceful state out of a previously turbulent one; it is recognizing what was already the case. The text's own formula is that all phenomena are, by their very nature, already in a kind of quiescence — which is less a claim about attainment being easy, and more a reframing of what the meditative path is actually doing: removing a mistaken overlay, not adding anything new.

A Note on the Lecture's Discussion

Asked why one should accept a continuing life after death when no one has directly seen it, the lecture doesn't reach for scripture first — it reaches for a piece of pre-Buddhist Chinese history: an official spares his father's concubine from being buried alive against the father's own delirious dying wish, and years later, in battle, an old man he doesn't recognize ties clumps of grass together to trip an enemy general's horse, saving his life — revealed afterward to be the spirit of the concubine's father, repaying the kindness. The story isn't offered as proof in any rigorous sense; it's offered to make a narrower point — that "I haven't personally witnessed it" was never, on its own, a valid argument against something's existence, in the same way that "I haven't personally witnessed it" wasn't a valid argument for a creator god a few verses earlier. The absence of evidence gets held to the same standard in both directions.