Who Makes Suffering?
Gate Ten is the treatise's longest single argument and its most accessible. It begins from an old scriptural scene — the naked ascetic Kāśyapa putting four questions to the Buddha about the origin of suffering, and receiving four silences — and asks what those silences meant. Nāgārjuna's answer is that suffering is empty. An opponent protests that the Buddha said no such thing, and the reply opens out into a sustained fourteen-argument demolition of Īśvara, the sovereign creator god: he cannot have made a world unlike himself, cannot have needed austerities to do it, cannot have stood anywhere to do it, and cannot account for the fact that some beings love him and some do not.
A Note on This Gate's Title and Text
The outline at the head of the treatise calls this gate 觀作門, "examining the act." The heading over the gate itself reads 觀作者門, "examining the agent," and that is what we follow. Both fit the content, which is as much about who could be doing the making as about the making itself.
Readers should also know that the received text carries the question-and-answer markers imperfectly through this gate. Two of them have dropped out: the reply that begins "He spoke as he did to suit the beings he could liberate" carries no 答曰, and the line "So this scripture merely refutes four wrong views" carries no 問曰, though the sense and the answering 答曰 that follows make both unambiguous. We have supplied the two missing markers in brackets and flagged them in place rather than smoothing them into the text.
1. Four Ways Suffering Might Be Made
The verse's first two lines are the same in Chinese as the opening verse of the twelfth chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and we have kept the same English for them. The first two options are dispatched briefly, with a principle already established in Gate Six: nothing performs its characteristic operation upon itself.
復次，一切法空。何以故？自作、他作、共作、無因作，不可得故。如說：
Furthermore, all things are empty. Why? Because being made by itself, made by another, made by both, and made without a cause are none of them to be got. As it is said:
自作及他作， 共作無因作，
如是不可得， 是則無有苦。
Made by itself, or made by another,
made by both, or made without a cause —
none of these is to be got,
and so there is no suffering.
苦自作，不然。何以故？若自作即自作其體，不得以是事即作是事，如識不能自識，指不能自觸，是故不得言自作。
他作亦不然，他何能作苦？
問曰：「眾緣名為他，眾緣作苦故名為他作，云何言不從他作？」
That suffering is made by itself will not do. Why? If it made itself, it would be making its own substance; and one and the same thing cannot be both the doing and the thing done — as consciousness cannot cognize itself, and a finger cannot touch itself. So one cannot say it is made by itself.
Made by another will not do either. What other could make suffering?
Question: The gathering of conditions is what is meant by "another"; the conditions make suffering, and so it is called made by another. How then can you say it is not made by another?
2. Conditions Are Not "Another," and Are Not Sovereign
The objection is a fair one and the reply is careful. What arises from conditions is of the conditions' own nature, and no one calls the clay "another" than the pot. Then comes a verse quoted by name from the root treatise, and the word it turns on — 自在, "in one's own power," "sovereign" — is the very word that will name the creator god a few lines later.
答曰：「若眾緣名為他者，苦則是眾緣作；是苦從眾緣生，則是眾緣性；若即是眾緣性，云何名為他？如泥瓶，泥不名為他；又如金釧，金不名為他；苦亦如是，從眾緣生故，眾緣不得名為他。
「復次，是眾緣亦不自性有，故不得自在，是故不得言從眾緣生果。如《中論》中說：
Answer: If the gathering of conditions is what you call "another," then suffering is made by the conditions; and this suffering, arising from the conditions, is of the nature of those conditions. And if it just is of the nature of those conditions, how are they to be called "another"? As with a clay pot, the clay is not called another; and as with a gold bracelet, the gold is not called another. Suffering is the same: since it arises from the conditions, the conditions cannot be called another.
Furthermore, these conditions do not exist by any nature of their own, and so are not in their own power; and therefore one cannot say that the fruit arises from the conditions. As the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā says:
「『果從眾緣生， 是緣不自在；
若緣不自在， 云何緣生果？』
The fruit arises from a gathering of conditions,
and those conditions are not in their own power;
and if the conditions are not in their own power,
how should conditions produce a fruit?
「如是，苦不得從他作。自作他作亦不然，有二過故。若說自作苦、他作苦，則有自作、他作過，是故共作苦亦不然。若苦無因生，亦不然，有無量過故。
Thus suffering cannot be made by another. Made by both self and other will not do either, since it carries the faults of both. If one says suffering is made by itself and made by another, it incurs the fault of self-making and the fault of other-making alike — and so suffering made by both will not do. And that suffering arises without any cause will not do either, since that carries faults beyond counting.
The quoted verse is worth comparing with its counterpart in the root treatise, where the corresponding line reads 是緣無自性 — those conditions have no nature of their own. Here the wording is 是緣不自在: those conditions are not in their own power. The two are close in sense, since what has no nature of its own has no independent power either, but the choice of word is doing something. 自在 is precisely the term that in a moment will name Īśvara, 自在天, the god whose whole title means "the one who is in his own power." The verse has already answered him before he is introduced: nothing in the chain of conditions is sovereign, and a chain of the non-sovereign does not acquire a sovereign at the top of it.
The clay pot and the gold bracelet are the other thing to carry away. We do not ordinarily say that the gold is "another" than the bracelet — the bracelet is what the gold is doing at the moment. Conditions stand to what they condition in the same way, which is why "made by another" fails not because the conditions do nothing, but because they are not other enough to be an outside maker.
3. The Naked Ascetic Kāśyapa, and Four Silences
The scriptural episode is well known from the early canon: an ascetic puts the four possibilities to the Buddha one by one, and the Buddha declines each in turn without offering a fifth. Nāgārjuna reads the silence as itself a teaching, and the opponent immediately objects that reading anything into a silence is reading too much.
如經說：『裸形迦葉問佛：「苦自作耶？」佛默然不答。「世尊！若苦不自作者，是他作耶？」佛亦不答。「世尊！若爾者，苦自作他作耶？」佛亦不答。「世尊！若爾者，苦無因無緣作耶？」佛亦不答。』如是四問，佛皆不答者，當知苦則是空。」
問曰：「佛說是經，不說苦是空。」
As a scripture says: "The naked ascetic Kāśyapa asked the Buddha, 'Is suffering made by itself?' The Buddha was silent and did not answer. 'World-Honored One, if suffering is not made by itself, then is it made by another?' Again the Buddha did not answer. 'World-Honored One, if not that, then is suffering made both by itself and by another?' Again the Buddha did not answer. 'World-Honored One, if not that, then is suffering made without cause and without condition?' Again the Buddha did not answer." Since the Buddha answered none of these four questions, one should know that suffering is empty.
Question: The Buddha spoke that scripture; he did not say that suffering is empty.
［答曰：］「隨可度眾生故作是說。是裸形迦葉謂人是苦因，有我者說：好醜皆神所作，神常清淨無有苦惱，所知所解悉皆是神，神作好醜苦樂，還受種種身。以是邪見故，問佛苦自作耶？是故佛不答。
[Answer:] He spoke as he did in order to suit the beings he could liberate. This naked ascetic Kāśyapa held that a person is the cause of suffering. Those who hold to a self say that the beautiful and the ugly alike are made by the soul; that the soul is eternally pure and free of all suffering; that everything known and understood is the soul; and that the soul makes beauty and ugliness, pain and pleasure, and then goes on to take up all manner of bodies. It was out of this wrong view that he asked the Buddha whether suffering is made by itself — and that is why the Buddha did not answer.
苦實非是我作。若我是苦因，因我生苦，我即無常。何以故？若法是因及從因生法，皆亦無常。若我無常，則罪福果報皆悉斷滅，修梵行福報是亦應空。若我是苦因，則無解脫。何以故？我若作苦，離苦無我能作苦者，以無身故。若無身而能作苦者，得解脫者亦應是苦。如是則無解脫，而實有解脫，是故苦自作，不然。他作苦亦不然，離苦何有人而作苦與他？
Suffering is in truth not made by a self. If the self were the cause of suffering, so that suffering arose in dependence on the self, then the self would be impermanent. Why? Because whatever is a cause, and whatever arises from a cause, is alike impermanent. And if the self were impermanent, then the ripening of the fruits of wrongdoing and merit would all be cut off, and the reward of practicing the holy life would be empty too. And if the self were the cause of suffering, there would be no liberation. Why? If the self makes suffering, then apart from suffering there is no self that could make it, since such a self would have no body; and if something bodiless could make suffering, then one who had attained liberation would be suffering still. In that case there would be no liberation — and in fact there is liberation. So that suffering is made by itself will not do. And made by another will not do either: apart from suffering, what person is there who could make suffering and hand it to someone else?
The reading of the silences is the interesting move, and it is not arbitrary. The Buddha's refusal is famously selective in the early scriptures — he answers a great many questions and declines a specific few, and the ones he declines share a feature: they presuppose something false, so that any answer would confirm the presupposition. "Is suffering self-made?" assumes there is a self to make it. "Is it other-made?" assumes a maker standing outside. Answering either way would grant the frame. Silence refuses the frame — which is exactly what Nāgārjuna means by saying the silence teaches emptiness.
The diagnosis of Kāśyapa's own view is precise and worth noting: an eternal, pure soul that is untouched by suffering yet somehow authors it, and then puts on bodies one after another. Nāgārjuna's objection is a dilemma the position cannot survive. If the soul really causes suffering, it stands in the causal order and is therefore impermanent — and an impermanent soul cannot carry the fruits of action across lives, which was the whole reason for positing it. But if it stands outside the causal order, then it is untouched even now, and the liberated person, having no body, would be in exactly the soul's position — still authoring suffering. Either the soul cannot do the job, or liberation is not liberation.
4. Īśvara, and Why He Cannot Have Made the World
Now the gate's centerpiece. If suffering is "made by another," the natural candidate is God — Īśvara, whose name means the sovereign, the one in his own power. What follows is a sustained run of fourteen arguments, each opening with furthermore, and they cover a remarkable range: the logic of resemblance, the problem of motive, the regress of the maker's own maker, the location where creation occurred, the fact of moral responsibility, and the plain observation that not everyone loves him.
復次，若他作苦者，則為是自在天作。如此邪見問故，佛亦不答。而實不從自在天作。何以故？性相違故。如牛子還是牛。若萬物從自在天生，皆應似自在天，是其子故。
復次，若自在天作眾生者，不應以苦與子，是故不應言自在天作苦。」
問曰：「眾生從自在天生，苦樂亦從自在所生，以不識樂因，故與其苦。」
Furthermore, if suffering were made by another, that would mean it was made by Īśvara, the Sovereign Lord. It was because that question too was asked out of a wrong view that the Buddha did not answer it. And in truth suffering is not made by Īśvara. Why? Because their natures are contrary. The calf of an ox is again an ox; and if the myriad things were born from Īśvara, they ought all to resemble Īśvara, being his children.
Furthermore, if Īśvara made beings, he ought not to give suffering to his own children; and so one should not say that Īśvara makes suffering.
Question: Beings are born from Īśvara, and pain and pleasure are born from him likewise; it is because they fail to recognize the cause of pleasure that he gives them suffering.
答曰：「若眾生是自在天子者，唯應以樂遮苦，不應與苦。亦應但供養自在天則滅苦得樂，而實不爾，但自行苦樂因緣而自受報，非自在天作。
「復次，彼若自在者，不應有所須。有所須自作，不名自在；若無所須，何用變化作萬物如小兒戲？
「復次，若自在作眾生者，誰復作是自在？若自在自作，則不然，如物不能自作；若更有作者，則不名自在。
Answer: If beings are Īśvara's own children, he ought to use pleasure to ward off their suffering, and not give them suffering at all. And it ought to be enough merely to make offerings to Īśvara in order to end suffering and obtain pleasure — and in fact it is not so. Beings simply enact for themselves the causes and conditions of pain and pleasure, and then undergo the recompense themselves; it is not made by Īśvara.
Furthermore, if he is sovereign, he ought to have no needs. One who has needs, and acts to meet them, is not sovereign. And if he has no needs, what use is there in his conjuring the myriad things — like a child at play?
Furthermore, if Īśvara made beings, who then made Īśvara? If he made himself, that will not do, since nothing can make itself. And if there is some further maker, then he is not sovereign.
「復次，若自在是作者，則於作中無有障礙，念即能作。如自在經說：『自在欲作萬物，行諸苦行，即生諸腹行蟲；復行苦行，生諸飛鳥；復行苦行，生諸人天。』若行苦行，初生毒蟲、次生飛鳥、後生人天，當知眾生從業因緣生，不從苦行有。
「復次，若自在作萬物者，為住何處而作萬物？是住處為是自在作？為是他作？若自在作者，為住何處作？若住餘處作，餘處復誰作？如是則無窮。若他作者，則有二自在。是事不然，是故世間萬物非自在所作。
「復次，若自在作者，何故苦行供養於他，欲令歡喜從求所願？若苦行求他，當知不自在。
Furthermore, if Īśvara is the maker, there should be no obstruction in his making; a thought alone should suffice. Yet as the scripture of Īśvara says: "Īśvara, wishing to make the myriad things, performed austerities, and there arose the creatures that crawl upon their bellies; performing austerities again, he brought forth the birds that fly; performing austerities again, he brought forth humans and gods." If he had to perform austerities, and produced first the venomous creatures, then the birds, and only afterward humans and gods, one should know that beings arise from the causes and conditions of their own action, and not from anyone's austerities.
Furthermore, if Īśvara made the myriad things, in what place did he stand to make them? Was that place made by Īśvara, or by another? If he made it, in what place was he standing to make it? And if he stood in some further place, who then made that place? So it runs on without end. And if another made it, then there are two sovereigns. This will not do — and so the myriad things of the world are not made by Īśvara.
Furthermore, if Īśvara is the maker, why does he perform austerities and make offerings to another, hoping to please him and beg the fulfillment of his wishes? If he performs austerities to petition another, one should know he is not sovereign.
「復次，若自在作萬物，初作便定，不應有變，馬則常馬，人則常人；而今隨業有變，當知非自在所作。
「復次，若自在所作者，即無罪福、善惡、好醜，皆從自在作故；而實有罪福，是故非自在所作。
「復次，若眾生從自在生者，皆應敬愛，如子愛父；而實不爾，有憎、有愛，是故當知非自在所作。
「復次、若自在作者，何故不盡作樂人、盡作苦人，而有苦者、樂者？當知從憎、愛生，故不自在；不自在故，非自在所作。
Furthermore, if Īśvara made the myriad things, then once made at the outset they would be settled and ought not to change: a horse would be always a horse, a person always a person. Yet in fact there is change in accordance with action — so one should know they are not made by Īśvara.
Furthermore, if they were made by Īśvara, then there would be no wrongdoing and no merit, no good and no evil, no beauty and no ugliness — since all alike would come from Īśvara's making. And in fact there is wrongdoing and there is merit — so they are not made by Īśvara.
Furthermore, if beings were born from Īśvara, all should revere and love him as a child loves its father. And in fact it is not so: some hate and some love. So one should know they are not made by Īśvara.
Furthermore, if Īśvara is the maker, why did he not make everyone happy, or everyone miserable, instead of there being some who suffer and some who are at ease? One should know that this comes from his own hating and loving — and so he is not sovereign; and not being sovereign, he is not the maker.
「復次，若自在作者，眾生皆不應有所作；而眾生方便各有所作，是故當知非自在所作。
「復次，若自在作者，善惡苦樂事不作而自來，如是壞世間法。持戒修梵行，皆無所益。而實不爾，是故當知非自在所作。
「復次，若福業因緣故於眾生中大，餘眾生行福業者亦復應大，何以貴自在？若無因緣而自在者，一切眾生亦應自在；而實不爾，當知非自在所作。若自在從他而得，則他復從他，如是則無窮，無窮則無因。
「如是等種種因緣，當知萬物非自在生，亦無有自在。如是邪見問他作，故佛亦不答。
「共作亦不然，有二過故。眾因緣和合生，故不從無因生，佛亦不答。」
Furthermore, if Īśvara is the maker, beings ought to do nothing at all; yet beings each contrive and accomplish things by their own effort — so one should know they are not made by Īśvara.
Furthermore, if Īśvara is the maker, then good and evil, pain and pleasure would arrive of themselves without being done, and this would ruin the way of the world. Keeping the precepts and practicing the holy life would be of no benefit whatever. And in fact it is not so — so one should know they are not made by Īśvara.
Furthermore, if it is by the causes and conditions of meritorious deeds that he is great among beings, then other beings who perform meritorious deeds ought to be great in the same way — so why honor Īśvara above them? And if he is sovereign with no cause or condition at all, then all beings ought to be sovereign likewise. In fact it is not so, so one should know they are not made by Īśvara. And if his sovereignty were obtained from another, that other would in turn have it from another, and so on without end; and what runs on without end is without a cause.
By all these various reasons one should know that the myriad things are not born from Īśvara, and that there is no Īśvara at all. Because the question about being made by another was asked out of just such a wrong view, the Buddha did not answer that one either.
Made by both will not do either, since it carries both faults. And since things arise from a gathering of causes and conditions, they do not arise without a cause — and the Buddha did not answer that either.
The fourteen arguments are not a heap; they fall into groups. Several turn on resemblance and consistency: children resemble parents, so a world of ants and misery is poor evidence of a maker like Īśvara; and a maker's products should stay as made, whereas everything here changes according to what beings do. Several turn on sovereignty defeating itself: a being with needs is not sovereign, a being who petitions another is not sovereign, a being who required austerities and produced worms before gods was working under constraint, and a being who had to be made by something else was never sovereign to begin with. One is a clean regress — where did he stand to make the world, and who made the standing-place. And several are moral: if everything comes from Īśvara, then nothing is anyone's doing, precepts are pointless, and the categories of wrongdoing and merit have nothing left to attach to.
Two are sharper than the rest and worth pausing on. The first is the observation that some beings love him and some hate him — which is offered not as impiety but as evidence: universal parentage should produce universal filial feeling, and it plainly does not. The second is the argument from unequal fortune, which is the problem of evil in its Indian form. If Īśvara is the maker, why the mixture? Not everyone is happy and not everyone is wretched; and any explanation of the mixture must appeal to something in Īśvara that discriminates — his favor and his displeasure. But a being moved by favor and displeasure is a being moved, and what is moved is not in its own power. The argument does not merely say the mixture is unjust. It says that whatever explains it costs Īśvara the sovereignty that was his defining attribute.
The passage on austerities is quoted from a scripture of the Īśvara tradition itself, which is worth registering: Nāgārjuna is not attacking a caricature but citing the opposing school's own account of creation, and pointing out that a creator who must strain, and who gets it progressively less wrong with practice, is not creating so much as working.
5. Refuting Four Wrong Views Just Is Teaching Emptiness
The opponent makes one last attempt to hold the line, and it is a reasonable one: the sūtra refutes four errors, which is not the same as asserting emptiness. The reply is the whole treatise in four sentences.
［問曰：］「是故此經但破四種邪見，不說苦為空。」
答曰：「佛雖如是說，從眾因緣生苦；破四種邪見，即是說空。說苦從眾因緣生，即是說空義。何以故？若從眾因緣生，則無自性，無自性即是空。如苦空，當知有為、無為及眾生一切皆空。」
[Question:] So this scripture merely refutes four wrong views; it does not say that suffering is empty.
Answer: Although the Buddha spoke as he did — that suffering arises from a gathering of causes and conditions — to refute those four wrong views just is to teach emptiness. To say that suffering arises from a gathering of causes and conditions is precisely to state the meaning of emptiness. Why? Because what arises from a gathering of causes and conditions has no nature of its own; and to have no nature of one's own is just what emptiness is. As suffering is empty, so one should know that the conditioned, the unconditioned, and beings — all alike — are empty.
The closing answer restates the identification made in Gate Eight, and placing it here, at the end of the longest and most concrete gate, is a deliberate piece of construction. The reader has just watched fourteen arguments dismantle a creator god, and might reasonably take the lesson to be that Buddhism has a better theory of where suffering comes from than the theists do. The final paragraph refuses that reading. Dependent arising is not a rival account of the maker; it is the observation that there is no maker to give an account of, because a thing produced by conditions has nothing of its own to have been made. To refute those four wrong views just is to teach emptiness — the negative work and the positive doctrine are one act, not two.
And note the last words once more: the conditioned, the unconditioned, and beings. The gate that began with an ascetic asking why he suffers ends by emptying the sufferer as well — not to dismiss the suffering, but because a suffering with no owner is a suffering that can end.
Part Seven Complete
This closes Gate Ten: suffering shown to be unmade by itself, since nothing acts upon itself; unmade by another, since conditions are not "other" than what they condition, and are not sovereign in any case; and unmade by both or by nothing. The naked ascetic's four questions and the Buddha's four silences, read as a refusal of the frame rather than an absence of answer; and Īśvara, the sovereign creator, dismantled by fourteen arguments that leave neither his power, nor his motive, nor his goodness, nor his existence standing. Part Eight completes the treatise with Gates Eleven and Twelve, where the pressing at last reaches time itself, and then arising itself.
Continue to Part 8 — The Three Times, and Arising Itself →