Nāgārjuna · Kumārajīva · 十二門論

Twelve Ways In, and Each Opens on the Next.

The Twelve Gate Treatise is the short companion to Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā — the same method, the same conclusions, compressed into a single fascicle and organized as twelve successive doors. "Gate," Sengrui writes in his preface, "is the name for what opens a way through without obstruction." Causes fail, so conditions are pressed; conditions fail, so the marks of a conditioned thing are pressed; and by the eleventh and twelfth gates the pressing has reached time itself and arising itself. This page is the entrance for reading it part by part.

Browse 8 parts → Translation notes →

How to read this collection

The treatise is short — one fascicle, twenty-four verses of its own with Nāgārjuna's question-and-answer prose beneath them — but its twelve gates are wildly uneven in length. Gate Two alone runs to a fifth of the whole; Gate Nine is a single paragraph. We have split the text into eight parts by the shape of the argument rather than by counting gates, so that each page carries one sustained line of reasoning. Gate Two is the one place we divide a gate in two, and we divide it at the seam its own title announces: whether the fruit exists in the cause, or does not.

Because Nāgārjuna supplies his own commentary beneath each verse, no second voice is needed here, and none has been brought in. Where the treatise quotes the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by name — twice — we use the same English already standing on this site's pages for those verses.

What each part page includes

The Chinese source text beside our English translation.
Reading notes on what each argument is actually claiming, and against whom.
Cross-links to the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā wherever the two treatises share a verse or an argument.

8 of 8 parts — complete

12 gates, plus Sengrui's preface and outline

24 verses, each with Nāgārjuna's own prose

Read by Part

The treatise's own argument, gate by gate: from the first question about what a condition can give, through the marks of a conditioned thing and the two truths, to the last two gates on time and on arising itself.

Start here

The Preface and the First Gate

Sengrui's preface, written at Chang'an while the translation was fresh; the treatise's own outline of its twelve gates; and Gate One, on why the Mahāyāna's deep meaning is emptiness and why nothing arisen from conditions has a nature of its own.

The turning point

The Two Truths

In Gate Eight an opponent charges that emptiness abolishes the Four Noble Truths and the Three Jewels. The answer — the two truths, and the identification of emptiness with dependent arising — turns the objection completely around.

Most accessible

The Refutation of Īśvara

Gate Ten asks who makes suffering, and answers with the naked ascetic Kāśyapa's four questions, the Buddha's four silences, and fourteen arguments against a sovereign creator god.

Part 1 · 序・品目・觀因緣門 The Preface, the Twelve Gates, and the Gate of Conditions Sengrui's preface, the outline of all twelve gates, and Gate One: what the Mahāyāna is, and why what arises from conditions has no nature of its own. Complete. Part 2 · 觀有果無果門（上） Is the Fruit Already in the Cause? The doctrine that an effect pre-exists in its cause, dismantled — with the eight reasons a real thing goes unseen, and why a pot in clay fits none of them. Complete. Part 3 · 觀有果無果門（下）・觀緣門 Nor Is It Absent, and the Four Conditions The opposite doctrine refuted, the appeal to sesame and sand answered, and the four conditions of Abhidharma searched for the fruit they do not hold. Complete. Part 4 · 觀相門 The Three Marks, and the Lamp Arising, abiding, and ceasing put to the question; the seven co-arising dharmas; the lamp that lights itself; and whether marklessness can be nirvāṇa's mark. Complete. Part 5 · 觀有相無相門・觀一異門・觀有無門 Mark and Marked, One and Different, Existent and Non-existent A mark with nothing to mark, a relation that is neither sameness nor difference, and a thing that arises together with its own impermanence. Complete. Part 6 · 觀性門・觀因果門 No Nature, the Two Truths, and Cause and Fruit The treatise's doctrinal center: the charge that emptiness destroys Buddhism, and the two truths that answer it — and turn it around. Complete. Part 7 · 觀作者門 Who Makes Suffering? Suffering unmade by itself, by another, by both, or by nothing; the Buddha's four silences; and fourteen arguments against Īśvara, the sovereign creator. Complete. Part 8 · 觀三時門・觀生門 The Three Times, and Arising Itself A cause that can be neither earlier, nor later, nor simultaneous; and arising sought in the arisen, the unarisen, and the arising-now. Complete.

Translation Notes

The Chinese source is Kumārajīva's translation, made at Chang'an around 409 CE — the same workshop and nearly the same years that produced this site's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Terminology is matched to that translation throughout, so that a reader moving between the two treatises meets the same English for the same Chinese. See also this site's note on translation method.

自性 — a nature of its ownSvabhāva. What is unmade and does not depend on another — which is why nothing produced by conditions can have one. Matches the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā pages.

有為・無為 — conditioned, unconditionedThe treatise's recurring closing cadence: the conditioned is empty, so the unconditioned is empty, and how much more the self.

相・可相 — mark and what is markedThe pair examined in Gates Four through Six. A mark is what one points to in order to recognize a thing.

四緣 — the four conditionsCausal, antecedent, object, and dominant — given in the same order and with the same definitions as in the root treatise's opening chapter.

世諦・第一義諦 — conventional and ultimate truthNamed in Gate Eight, the treatise's doctrinal center. Not two worlds, but two ways of speaking truly, each needed to reach the other.

自在天 — Īśvara, the Sovereign LordThe creator god refuted in Gate Ten. His name means "the one in his own power" — the same word the treatise uses when it says conditions are not in their own power.

On authorship

The treatise comes down to us as Nāgārjuna's, and that is how the Chinese tradition has always read it: with the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Āryadeva's Śataka, it is one of the three treatises on which the Sanlun school was founded. Modern scholarship has raised a genuine question about this. The text survives only in Chinese — no Sanskrit or Tibetan witness exists — and much of its material is drawn openly from the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and the Śūnyatāsaptati, which has led some scholars to read it as a later compilation from Nāgārjuna's school rather than his own composition. We keep the traditional attribution, because it is the frame in which the treatise has been read and taught for sixteen centuries, and we note the question rather than settle it.

The Sanskrit title sometimes given, Dvādaśamukha-śāstra, is a modern back-formation from the Chinese rather than an attested original, which is why this collection is titled in English rather than in Sanskrit.