The Preface, the Twelve Gates, and the Gate of Conditions
This page carries Ru-Yi's translation of the opening of the Twelve Gate Treatise (十二門論): Sengrui's preface, written in Chang'an while Kumārajīva's translation was still fresh; the treatise's own outline, which names each of the twelve gates and says in a single line what each one is for; and Gate One itself, where Nāgārjuna states why he is writing at all — the Mahāyāna's deep meaning is emptiness, and emptiness is entered through twelve gates — before turning the first key: whatever arises from a gathering of conditions can have no nature of its own, and that alone empties the conditioned, the unconditioned, and the self together.
Translation Method
The Chinese source is Kumārajīva's translation, made at Chang'an around 409 CE — the same workshop, and very nearly the same years, that produced this site's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. The two treatises are built the same way: Nāgārjuna's own verses, with Nāgārjuna's own question-and-answer prose beneath them. Because the author is his own commentator, no second voice needs to be brought in, and none has been. Where this treatise quotes the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā outright — and it does so twice, by name — we have used the same English already standing on this site's pages for those verses, so that a reader moving between the two treatises meets the same words.
Classical text is set in the left-hand column below, our English in the right. Reading notes follow each passage. See also this site's note on translation method.
The treatise comes down to us as Nāgārjuna's, and that is how the Chinese tradition has always read it: together with the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Āryadeva's Śataka, it is one of the three treatises on which the Sanlun school was founded, and Chinese commentators from Jizang onward treat it as Nāgārjuna's own compressed restatement of the longer work. Modern scholarship has raised a real 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 here, because it is the frame in which the treatise has actually been read and taught for sixteen centuries, and we note the question rather than settle it.
1. Sengrui's Preface
Sengrui (僧叡, c. 352–436) was among the closest of Kumārajīva's Chinese collaborators, and his prefaces are some of the earliest attempts in Chinese to say what Madhyamaka is for. This one is written in the high literary register of its moment, thick with Zhuangzi and the Analects — the fish-trap one forgets after catching the fish, the butcher's blade that finds the gap, the great awakening within the dream. That vocabulary is not decoration. Sengrui is reaching for the nearest Chinese words for something Chinese had no words for yet, and the strain shows honestly.
十二門論者，蓋是實相之折中，道場之要軌也。十二門者，總眾枝之大數也；門者，開通無滯之稱也；論之者，欲以窮其源、盡其理也。
The Twelve Gate Treatise is the arbiter of what is really so, the essential track of the seat of awakening. "Twelve gates" is the grand sum that gathers in all the branches. "Gate" is the name for what opens a way through without obstruction. And to treat of them is to wish to plumb their source to the bottom and to run their principle out to its end.
若一理之不盡，則眾異紛然，有或趣之乖；一源之不窮，則眾塗扶疏，有殊致之迹。殊致之不夷、乖趣之不泯，大士之憂也。是以龍樹菩薩，開出者之由路，作十二門以正之。
If a single principle is left unexhausted, the manifold differences swarm in confusion, and there appear the divergences of a misled direction. If a single source is left unplumbed, the many roads branch and spread, and there appear the tracks of destinations that do not meet. That destinations which do not meet are never leveled, that misled directions are never extinguished — this is the great being's grief. And so Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva opened up the road by which one may get out, composing the twelve gates in order to set the matter right.
正之以十二，則有無兼暢，事無不盡。事盡於有無，則忘功於造化。理極於虛位，則喪我於二際。然則喪我在乎落筌，筌忘存乎遺寄。筌我兼忘，始可以幾乎實矣！
Set right by twelve, existence and non-existence are both made to run clear, and no matter is left unexhausted. When matters are exhausted in existence and non-existence, one forgets to credit any achievement to creation and transformation. When principle reaches its limit at the empty station, one loses the self at both boundaries. Yet losing the self lies in letting the fish-trap fall away, and forgetting the trap lies in giving up what one leans on. When trap and self are forgotten together — only then may one come near to what is real.
幾乎實矣，則虛實兩冥、得失無際。冥而無際，則能忘造次於兩玄、泯顛沛於一致，整歸駕於道場、畢趣心於佛地。恢恢焉，真可謂運虛刃於無間、奏希聲於宇內，濟溺喪於玄津、出有無於域外者矣。
Come near to what is real, and the empty and the real go dark together, gain and loss have no border between them. Dark, and without border, one can then forget one's haste amid the two mysteries and let one's stumbling dissolve into a single accord; one can straighten the homeward carriage toward the seat of awakening and bring the mind's whole course to rest in the ground of buddhahood. Vast, how vast! Truly this may be called running an edgeless blade through what has no gap, sounding the rarest of notes within the cosmos, ferrying the drowned and the lost across the dark crossing, and carrying existence and non-existence clean outside all bounds.
遇哉後之學者，夷路既坦、幽塗既開，真得振和鸞於北冥、馳白牛以南迴，悟大覺於夢境、即百化以安歸。夫如是者慧，復知曜靈之方盛、玄陸之未希也哉。
What good fortune for those who study later! The level road already smoothed, the shadowed path already opened, they may truly shake the carriage-bells over the Northern Deep and drive the white ox on the southward turn, waken to the great awakening inside the dream, and, amid the hundred transformations, come home at ease. One wise in this way — need he still be told that the blazing sun is only now at its height, and that the dark mainland is not yet a rarity?
叡以鄙倍之淺識，猶敢用誠虛關、希懷宗極，庶日用之有宜、冀歲計之能殖。況才之美者乎！不勝敬仰之至。敢以鈍辭[打-丁+豆]思序而申之，并目品義題之於首，豈其能益也？庶以此心開疾進之路耳。
I, Ruì, coarse and shallow in understanding as I am, have still dared to bring sincerity to the empty barrier and to set my hopes on the ultimate ancestor, trusting that daily use may find what suits it and that the year's reckoning may show some growth. How much more, then, for one of real talent! My reverence is more than I can carry. I have ventured, with dull words and thoughts shaken loose, to preface the work and set it forth, and further to list the sense of each chapter and inscribe it at the head. What could this possibly add? I hope only that the intention behind it may open a road of swift advance.
Almost every striking image here is borrowed, and knowing the source makes the preface far less opaque. The fish-trap is Zhuangzi's: having caught the fish, you forget the trap — and Sengrui's addition is that you must also forget the one who was doing the catching. "Haste" and "stumbling" are lifted straight from the Analects, where the noble person never departs from humaneness even in haste, even in stumbling. The edgeless blade running through what has no gap is Zhuangzi's cook, whose knife never dulls because it goes where there is space. The rarest of notes is Laozi's "the great sound has the faintest voice." The Northern Deep is where Zhuangzi's great fish becomes a bird; the white ox is the great cart of the Lotus Sūtra; the great awakening within the dream is again Zhuangzi. Sengrui is doing something quite deliberate with all of it: reaching for the only Chinese vocabulary that existed for a wordless ultimate, while flagging by his very last images that the destination is Buddhist and not Daoist.
The closing sentence of the main preface is textually rough, and readers of the Chinese should know it. The phrase 玄陸之未希 has no settled reading, and 夫如是者慧 breaks the parallel prose so awkwardly that some editors suspect a lost or displaced character. We have translated it as a rhetorical question in the sense the surrounding lines support — that one who has understood this needs no further reassurance that the light is rising — and we flag it rather than smooth it over.
2. The Outline of the Twelve Gates
The outline is Sengrui's own contribution, added at the head as he says at the close of his preface: each gate named, with a single parenthetical line on what that gate presses and why the pressing opens a way through. Read straight down, it is the shortest possible summary of the entire treatise — and a useful map to keep beside the eight parts that follow.
觀因緣門第一（萬法所因似各有性，推而會之實自無性，通達無滯故謂之門）
觀有果無果門第二（重推無性之法，為先有而生？為先無而生？有無無生，以之為門）
觀緣門第三（上推因，此推緣，四緣廣略皆無有果，故以為門）
觀相門第四（上三門推因緣無生，此推三相，三相既無，以之為門）
觀有相無相門第五（此推三相之實，為有相而相？為無相而相？有無無相，故以為門）
觀一異門第六（即推有相無相，為在一法？為在異法？不一不異，以之為門）
觀有無門第七（上推三相非相，此明四相亦非，生住為有變異？為無？同處不有，異處亦無，故以為門）
觀性門第八（既知有無，又推其性，變易無常從緣而有，則非性也，故以為門）
觀因果門第九（無性之法既無因果，變異處推求則無得理，故以為門）
觀作門第十（無因無果則為無作，四處既無，以之為門）
觀三時門第十一（既推無作必盡其因，故尋三時無作而以為門）
觀生門第十二（作為有造，生為有起，時中既無，誰為生者？即以為門）
One small discrepancy is worth naming before it puzzles anyone. The outline calls the tenth gate 觀作門, "examining the act," while the heading over the tenth gate in the body of the treatise reads 觀作者門, "examining the agent." Both readings are defensible from the content — the gate refutes self-made, other-made, both-made, and uncaused suffering, which is as much about who acts as about the acting — and we follow the body's own heading when we reach it, in Part 7.
Notice also the shape the outline reveals. The gates are not twelve independent arguments laid side by side; each takes up what the one before it has just destroyed and presses one level further in. Causes fail, so conditions are pressed; conditions fail, so the marks of a conditioned thing are pressed; the marks fail, so what a mark could even attach to is pressed; and by the eleventh and twelfth gates the pressing has reached time itself and arising itself. Sengrui's word for this, over and over, is 推 — to push, to press, to drive a thing back until it gives way. The treatise is a single sustained push, not a dozen separate ones.
3. Why Explain the Mahāyāna at All
Gate One opens not with an argument but with a reason for writing. Nāgārjuna answers an objector twice — once on what possible use such an explanation could serve, and once on the sheer impossibility of the task — and both answers are strikingly modest. He writes for people of the later age, who are thin in merit and dull in faculties and who read the scriptures without getting through them. And to the charge that the Mahāyāna is too vast to explain, his whole reply is: that is why I said briefly.
說曰：今當略解摩訶衍義。
問曰：「解摩訶衍者，有何義利？」
答曰：「摩訶衍者，是十方三世諸佛甚深法藏，為大功德利根者說。末世眾生薄福鈍根，雖尋經文不能通達。我愍此等欲令開悟，又欲光闡如來無上大法，是故略解摩訶衍義。」
Statement: I shall now briefly explain the meaning of the Mahāyāna.
Question: What good is there in explaining the Mahāyāna?
Answer: The Mahāyāna is the profound treasury of Dharma belonging to all the buddhas of the ten directions and the three times, spoken for those of great merit and sharp faculties. Beings of the final age are thin in merit and dull in faculties; though they search the words of the scriptures, they cannot get through them. Out of pity for such people, wishing to open their understanding — and wishing also to set the Tathāgata's unsurpassed great Dharma blazing where it can be seen — I therefore briefly explain the meaning of the Mahāyāna.
問曰：「摩訶衍無量無邊不可稱數，直是佛語尚不可盡，況復解釋演散其義？」
答曰：「以是義故，我初言略解。」
Question: The Mahāyāna is measureless, boundless, past all reckoning. Even the Buddha's own words on it could not be exhausted — how much less could anyone explain it and spread its meaning out?
Answer: It is for precisely that reason that I said, at the outset, briefly.
問曰：「何故名為摩訶衍？」
答曰：「摩訶衍者，於二乘為上，故名大乘；諸佛最大，是乘能至，故名為大；諸佛大人乘是乘故，故名為大；又能滅除眾生大苦、與大利益事，故名為大；又觀世音、得大勢、文殊師利、彌勒菩薩等，是諸大士之所乘故，故名為大；又以此乘能盡一切諸法邊底，故名為大；又如《般若經》中佛自說摩訶衍義無量無邊，以是因緣，故名為大。」
Question: Why is it called the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle?
Answer: The Mahāyāna stands above the two vehicles, and so is called the Great Vehicle. The buddhas are the greatest of all, and this is the vehicle that can reach them — and so it is called great. The buddhas, who are great persons, ride in this vehicle — and so it is called great. It can put an end to beings' great suffering and confer great benefit upon them — and so it is called great. Avalokiteśvara, Mahāsthāmaprāpta, Mañjuśrī, Maitreya and the rest — this is the vehicle those great beings ride in — and so it is called great. By this vehicle one can reach the very floor and furthest edge of all things whatsoever — and so it is called great. And as the Buddha himself says in the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures, the meaning of the Mahāyāna is measureless and boundless — for this reason too it is called great.
大分深義，所謂空也。若能通達是義，即通達大乘，具足六波羅蜜，無所障礙，是故我今但解釋空。解釋空者，當以十二門入於空義。
Its profound meaning, in the main, is what is called emptiness. If one can get through to this meaning, one has got through to the Great Vehicle entire, is fully possessed of the six perfections, and is obstructed by nothing at all. Therefore what I shall explain here is nothing but emptiness — and to explain emptiness, one should enter the meaning of emptiness by way of twelve gates.
The seven senses of "great" are worth slowing over, because they are not seven synonyms. Three of them are comparative or social — it surpasses the two vehicles, the buddhas ride it, the great bodhisattvas ride it. Two are about what it does — it ends great suffering, it confers great benefit. One is scriptural — the Prajñāpāramitā says so. But one is unlike all the others: by this vehicle one can reach the very floor and furthest edge of all things whatsoever. That is not a claim about status or about effect. It is a claim about scope, and it is the one that licenses everything that follows. A treatise that will spend twelve gates dismantling causation, marks, time, and arising itself needs to have established first that nothing is out of range.
Then comes the hinge of the whole work, stated in a single unemphatic sentence: the Mahāyāna's deep meaning is emptiness, and therefore emptiness is all this treatise will explain. Everything from here to the last line of Gate Twelve is the working out of that one substitution.
4. The Root Verse, and the Two Kinds of Conditions
The first gate's verse is the treatise's foundation stone, and it is a conditional with a sting in it: if the thing has no nature of its own, in what sense is there a thing there at all? Nāgārjuna then does something the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā rarely bothers to do — he grounds the abstraction in workshops. Pots, cloth, houses, butter, sprouts: five ordinary manufactures, each one obviously the product of a gathering, none of them containing anything that was not gathered.
初是因緣門，所謂：
The first is the gate of causes and conditions, which runs:
眾緣所生法， 是即無自性；
若無自性者， 云何有是法？
A thing arisen from a gathering of conditions
has, just by that, no nature of its own;
and if it has no nature of its own,
how is there any such thing at all?
眾緣所生法有二種：一者內，二者外。眾緣亦有二種：一者內，二者外。外因緣者，如泥團、輪繩、陶師等和合，故有瓶生；又如縷繩、機杼、織師等和合，故有疊生；又如治地、築基梁、椽、泥、草、人功等和合，故有舍生；又如酪器、鑽搖、人功等和合，故有酥生；又如種子、地、水、火、風、虛空、時節、人功等和合，故有芽生；當知外緣等法皆亦如是。
Things arisen from a gathering of conditions are of two kinds: inner and outer. And the gatherings of conditions are likewise of two kinds: inner and outer. As for outer causes and conditions — a lump of clay, the wheel, the cord, the potter and the rest come together, and so a pot arises. Thread and cord, loom and shuttle, the weaver and the rest come together, and so cloth arises. The leveling of ground, the laying of foundations, beams, rafters, mud, thatch, human labor and the rest come together, and so a house arises. The curd-vessel, the churning-stick and its turning, human labor and the rest come together, and so butter arises. A seed, earth, water, fire, wind, space, the season, human labor and the rest come together, and so a sprout arises. Know that everything arising from outer conditions is of just this kind.
內因緣者，所謂無明、行、識、名色、六入、觸、受、愛、取、有、生、老死，各各先因而後生。
如是內外諸法皆從眾緣生，從眾緣生故，即非是無性耶！
As for inner causes and conditions, they are these: ignorance, formations, consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense-fields, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, and old age and death — each one having its cause first and arising afterward.
Thus all things, inner and outer alike, arise from a gathering of conditions. And arising from a gathering of conditions — are they then not without any nature of their own?
The five workshop examples are chosen with some care. A pot, cloth, and a house are assembled from parts; butter is churned out of what was already curd; a sprout emerges from a seed. These are not the same kind of production, and an opponent could reasonably say so. The treatise lets that pass here, because the point being made holds across all five: in no case is there a sixth thing, over and above the gathering, that the gathering produced. It will come back to the distinction between these cases at length in Gate Two, where the question of whether butter was already there in the curd becomes the central battleground.
Note too the pairing of outer and inner. The five manufactures are matched against the twelve links of dependent arising, and the match is exact and deliberate: whatever is true of a pot on a wheel is true of a life in saṃsāra. Nāgārjuna is not offering a physical analogy for a spiritual truth. He is claiming that the two cases are one case.
5. Not by Its Own Nature, Not by Another's
An obvious rescue lies ready to hand: grant that a thing has no nature of its own, and let it borrow one from what produced it. Nāgārjuna closes this in two moves. If a thing exists by another's nature, the absurdity is immediate — an ox would exist by the nature of a horse. And if it exists merely in dependence on another, without borrowing that other's nature, then the rushes and the mat are either one thing, in which case they are not two, or genuinely two, in which case the dependence claim collapses.
若法自性無，他性亦無，自他亦無。何以故？因他性故無自性。若謂以他性故有者，則牛以馬性有，馬以牛性有，梨以柰性有，柰以梨性有，餘皆應爾，而實不然。
If a thing has no nature of its own, it has no other-nature either, and no nature of both together. Why? Because it is precisely by being made to depend on another's nature that it has no nature of its own. And if you say a thing exists by another's nature, then an ox would exist by the nature of a horse and a horse by the nature of an ox; a pear would exist by the nature of an apple and an apple by the nature of a pear; and it would go so with everything else. But in fact it does not.
若謂不以他性故有，但因他故有者，是亦不然。何以故？若以蒲故有席者，則蒲、席一體，不名為他；若謂蒲於席為他者，不得言以蒲故有席。又蒲亦無自性。何以故？蒲亦從眾緣出，故無自性。無自性故，不得言以蒲性故有席，是故席不應以蒲為體。餘瓶、酥等外因緣生法，皆亦如是不可得。
Suppose you say instead that a thing exists not by another's nature but merely in dependence on another. This too is wrong. Why? If a mat exists because of rushes, then rushes and mat are a single substance, and the rushes cannot be called "another" at all. And if you say the rushes really are other than the mat, then you cannot say the mat exists because of the rushes. Besides, the rushes themselves have no nature of their own. Why? Because the rushes too come forth from a gathering of conditions, and so have no nature of their own. Having none, one cannot say the mat exists by the nature of the rushes — and therefore the mat cannot take rushes as its substance. All other things arisen from outer causes and conditions — pots, butter, and the rest — are in just this way not to be got.
The rushes-and-mat dilemma is the sharpest thing in the first gate, and its force is easy to miss because it looks like word-play. It is not. The claim under attack is that a mat depends on rushes for its being — which requires the rushes to be genuinely other than the mat, or "depend on" means nothing, and simultaneously requires them to be genuinely continuous with the mat, or the mat is not made of anything. Ordinary speech runs both requirements together without noticing. Press them apart and only two options remain, and each destroys the other.
Then the second blow, which is the one that generalizes: even if the rescue had worked, the rushes have no nature of their own either. Borrowing being from something that has none to lend gets you nowhere. This is the move that turns a local puzzle about mats into a claim about everything, and the same structure will reappear in Gate Eight, where the opponent tries the borrowing move one last time and gets the same answer at the level of nature itself.
6. The Twelve Links, in One Mind or in Many
Nāgārjuna turns to the inner conditions and applies the same pressure, this time with a verse quoted from the Śūnyatāsaptati, the "Seventy Verses on Emptiness." The dilemma is temporal. If the twelve links are all present within a single moment of mind, cause and effect become simultaneous, which is not what a cause is. If they are spread across many moments, then each earlier link has ceased before the later one arrives — and what has ceased is nothing, and nothing cannot cause.
內因緣生法，皆亦如是不可得，如《七十論》中說：
Things arisen from inner causes and conditions are in just the same way not to be got. As the Seventy Verses says:
緣法實無生； 若謂為有生，
為在一心中； 為在多心中？
Conditioned things in truth have no arising;
and if you say there is arising —
is it within a single moment of mind,
or within many moments of mind?
是十二因緣法實自無生。若謂有生，為一心中有？為眾心中有？若一心中有者，因果即一時共生。又因果一時有，是事不然。何以故？凡物先因後果故。若眾心中有者，十二因緣法則各各別異，先分共心滅已，後分誰為因緣？滅法無所有，何得為因？十二因緣法若先有者，應若一心、若多心，二俱不然。
These twelve links of dependent arising in truth have no arising of their own. If you say there is arising, is it present within a single moment of mind, or within many moments of mind? If within a single moment, then cause and fruit would come into being together at one and the same time — and that cause and fruit should exist at one time is not so. Why? Because in every case whatever, the cause is first and the fruit after. And if within many moments of mind, then the twelve links are each separate and distinct from one another; and once the earlier members have ceased along with the moment of mind they shared, what is left to serve as cause and condition for the later ones? What has ceased is nothing at all — how could it act as a cause? So if the twelve links existed beforehand, it would have to be either in a single moment of mind or in many; and neither holds.
The Śūnyatāsaptati, cited here simply as the "Seventy Verses," is one of Nāgārjuna's own shorter works, surviving in full only in Tibetan. Its appearance here is one of the reasons some modern scholars have questioned this treatise's authorship — a writer quoting himself by title is not impossible, but it is more usual in a compiler. Readers can weigh that as they like; the argument stands on its own either way.
And the argument is a good one, because it is aimed at something Buddhist rather than at an outside school. The twelve links are Buddhism's own crown jewel of causal analysis, the model of how suffering is produced without any producer. Nāgārjuna's dilemma does not deny that the links describe experience accurately. It denies that the links can be cashed out as twelve real items handing being to one another — because the handover has to happen either all at once, which is not causation, or across a gap, and across a gap the giver is already gone. The chain works as description. It fails as machinery.
7. The Conditioned, the Self, and Even Nirvāṇa
The gate closes by cashing in. If conditions are empty, then whatever arises from conditions is empty, and all conditioned things are empty. The self was only ever spoken of in dependence on conditioned things — aggregates, sense-fields, elements — so it goes with them, as fire goes when fuel is gone. And then the last and least expected step: nirvāṇa too. Nirvāṇa was defined as the ceasing of the aggregates; but if the aggregates were empty from the start, what ceased?
是故眾緣皆空。緣空故，從緣生法亦空，是故當知一切有為法皆空。
有為法尚空，何況我耶？因五陰、十二入、十八界有為法故說有我，如因可然故說有然；若陰、入、界空，更無有法可說為我，如無可然不可說然。如經說：「佛告諸比丘：『因我故有我所，若無我則無我所。』」
Therefore every gathering of conditions is empty. The conditions being empty, what arises from conditions is empty too — and so one should know that all conditioned things are empty.
If conditioned things are empty, how much more a self! It is in dependence on conditioned things — the five aggregates, the twelve sense-fields, the eighteen elements — that one speaks of a self at all, just as it is in dependence on fuel that one speaks of fire. If the aggregates, the sense-fields, and the elements are empty, there is no remaining thing that could be called a self — just as, where there is nothing to burn, one cannot speak of fire. As a scripture says: "The Buddha told the monks: 'It is because of a self that there is what belongs to a self; if there were no self, there would be nothing belonging to a self.'"
如是有為法空故，當知無為涅槃法亦空。何以故？此五陰滅更不生餘五陰，是名涅槃。五陰本來自空，何所滅故說名涅槃？又我亦復空，誰得涅槃？
復次，無生法名涅槃，若生法成者，無生法亦應成；生法不成，先已說因緣，後當復說，是故生法不成。因生法故名無生，若生法不成，無生法云何成？
是故有為、無為及我皆空。
Since conditioned things are empty in this way, one should know that the unconditioned — nirvāṇa — is empty as well. Why? Because it is this: these five aggregates cease, and no further five aggregates arise; that is what is called nirvāṇa. But the five aggregates are of themselves empty from the very beginning — so what is it that ceases, that one should give it the name nirvāṇa? And the self, too, is empty — so who is it that attains nirvāṇa?
Furthermore, what does not arise is what is called nirvāṇa. If arising were established, then non-arising would be established along with it. But arising is not established — the reasons have been given above and will be given again below — and so arising does not stand. It is in dependence on arising that one speaks of non-arising; and if arising does not stand, how should non-arising stand?
Therefore the conditioned, the unconditioned, and the self are all empty.
The final move of Gate One is the one that unsettles readers, and it should. Emptying the conditioned world is one thing; emptying nirvāṇa is another, and it can look like the treatise sawing off the branch it is sitting on. But look at how the argument actually runs. Nirvāṇa has been defined — by the Abhidharma tradition Nāgārjuna is addressing — as the cessation of the aggregates and as the unarisen. Both definitions are relational: they say what nirvāṇa is by reference to something else. Empty the aggregates, and "their cessation" has nothing to be the cessation of. Empty arising, and "the unarisen" has nothing to be the negation of. Nirvāṇa is not being denied. What is being denied is that it can be a further real item standing over against saṃsāra, since the only content the definition gave it was borrowed from the very things now shown to be empty.
This is the same reasoning the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā will run at length in its chapter on nirvāṇa, and it explains the treatise's characteristic closing cadence, which returns at the end of nearly every gate from here on: the conditioned is empty; therefore the unconditioned is empty; and if both are empty, how much more the self. Once the reader has seen it built here, it can be stated in a single breath thereafter — which is exactly what the following gates do.
Part One Complete
This closes Part One of Ru-Yi's translation: Sengrui's preface and his outline of the twelve gates, and Gate One entire — why the Mahāyāna is called great, why its deep meaning is emptiness, why nothing arisen from a gathering of conditions can hold a nature of its own, and why that single point already empties the conditioned world, the self that was spoken of in dependence on it, and nirvāṇa along with them. Part Two takes up the longest of the twelve gates, and the oldest quarrel in Indian philosophy about causation: whether the fruit is already there, waiting, inside its cause.
Continue to Part 2 — Is the Fruit Already in the Cause? →