No Nature, the Two Truths, and Cause and Fruit

The definition is the argument. What is not made and does not depend on another is what is called a nature — this is not Nāgārjuna's stipulation, it is what his opponents themselves mean by the word. A nature is supposed to be the thing's own, underived, and unalterable; that is why it can serve as the bedrock of an ontology. But then anything produced by conditions has, by definition, no nature, since it was made and does depend. The doctrine of emptiness is not asserting a mysterious extra fact about things. It is pointing out that "arisen from conditions" and "having a nature of its own" are contradictory descriptions, and that everything we ever meet answers to the first.

The verse's third line guards the exit. Having found that things have no nature, one might treat naturelessness as the truth about them — a hidden essence of emptiness underneath the appearances. The line closes that off before it opens: what has no nature is not there either. Emptiness is not a substance that things secretly are.

It is important not to hear this as an outsider's attack. The speaker is a Buddhist, and everything he is defending is worth defending — that suffering is real, that it has a cause that can be cut, that the path actually leads somewhere, and that there really are people further along it. His fear is one that Madhyamaka has provoked in every century since: that this looks less like a deeper Buddhism than like the end of Buddhism.

The same objection is put at greater length in the twenty-fourth chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and receives the same answer. Reading the two together is the best way to see how central this exchange was to Nāgārjuna's project — it is the one place where he stops refuting and explains himself.

Three things are being said here, and it is worth separating them.

First, the two truths are not two worlds, one real and one fake. They are two ways of speaking truly about the same thing, and the relation between them runs in both directions. The ultimate is not reachable except through the conventional, because there is no other language to reach it in — one has to say "suffering," "path," "cessation" before one can say anything about their emptiness. And equally, understanding the ultimate is what lets one hold the conventional properly, as functioning description rather than as a report on self-standing entities.

Second, the diagnosis of the objection is exact. The opponent hears "there is suffering, there is a path, there are noble ones" and takes these to be claims about things with natures of their own. That is what he thinks emptiness threatens, and he is right that emptiness denies it. What he has missed is that those statements were never operating at that level. To deny that suffering has a nature of its own is not to deny that there is suffering; it is to say what kind of truth "there is suffering" is.

Third — and this is the sentence that carries the most weight — the buddhas' teaching of dependent arising is what is called the profound ultimate; and because this dependent arising has no nature of its own, I call it empty. Emptiness and dependent arising are not two doctrines, one negative and one positive. They are the same fact stated twice. Whatever arises dependently thereby lacks a nature of its own, and whatever lacks a nature of its own is precisely what can arise dependently. This is the identification on which all of Madhyamaka turns, and everything in the next paragraph follows from it.

The reversal is exact, clause for clause, and it is worth following slowly, because it is the single most important argument in Madhyamaka. Take the opponent's demand seriously: let things have fixed natures of their own. Then the five aggregates cannot arise or cease, because a nature is by definition unmade and unalterable. No arising and ceasing means no impermanence. No impermanence means no suffering — for the whole Buddhist analysis of suffering runs through impermanence. And a fixed nature is even worse for the third truth than for the first: if suffering had a nature of its own, it could never stop, because natures do not alter. Cessation becomes impossible in principle, and a path to an impossible destination is no path.

So the objection was aimed in the wrong direction. Emptiness does not make change and liberation impossible; it is what makes them possible. Only what lacks a fixed nature can arise, alter, and come to an end. A world of things with natures of their own would be a world where nothing could ever be different from what it is — the world would forever wear one single aspect — and in such a world there would be no wrongdoing, no merit, no ripening, no growth, and above all no awakening. The person who cannot accept emptiness is the one who has destroyed the Four Noble Truths.

The last clause is quietly the boldest: if there are no Three Jewels, then conventional truth itself is ruined. Emptiness is not the enemy of ordinary reality. Fixed natures are. It is the doctrine of self-standing things that cannot account for the world we live in, and emptiness that lets it be exactly what it appears to be — arising, changing, and passing.

The decisive line is the simplest: another's nature is just that other's own nature. "Other-nature" is not a second kind of nature with different rules; it is exactly the same thing viewed from a different seat. So an argument that abolishes natures of one's own has already abolished other-natures, in the same stroke, everywhere. There is no borrowing from a neighbor who has nothing either — the same point made with rushes and a mat at the end of Gate One, here reaching its most general form.

The gate is brief because it only needs to close one exit, and the closing argument is neat. Suppose the fruit did arrive from somewhere else. Then it did not come from its conditions — and the entire gathering of clay, wheel, cord, and potter turns out to have contributed nothing whatever to the pot. That is a price no one is willing to pay, including the opponent, since the whole reason for positing causes was to explain why the pot appears when they are assembled and not otherwise.

Placed where it is, immediately after Gate Eight, the brevity reads as confidence. Having just shown that emptiness is what makes causation possible rather than what destroys it, Nāgārjuna can dispose of the last alternative in a paragraph and turn to the three gates that remain — on the agent, on time, and on arising itself.