The Three Times, and Arising Itself

The first two horns turn on the relational character of causing, which the treatise has been leaning on since Gate Three. Nothing is a cause on its own; a cause is always a cause of something. So at the moment before the effect exists, there is nothing for the cause to be the cause of — the relation has only one end. And after the effect exists, it exists already, and a cause arriving then has nothing left to do. Causation seems to require the two terms to be present together for the relation to hold, and to be present apart for one to produce the other.

Which is exactly what the ox's horns close off. Simultaneity looked like the way out — the two terms present together, so the relation can hold — and the image shows why it is not. Two things that come up at the same moment are simply two things. Neither has any priority over the other, and priority is what "cause" was supposed to name. That the horns are a matched pair on a single head makes the point sharper still: intimate association, perfect correlation, and no causation whatever.

This is the third time the treatise has faced the same charge — it appeared in Gate Two, and it is the objection Nāgārjuna answers at length in his separate work the Vigrahavyāvartanī, "The Dispeller of Disputes." Its persistence is a mark of its strength: if arguments dissolve everything they touch, they ought to dissolve themselves.

The reply has two parts, and the second is the one that matters. First, the tu quoque cuts both ways — the opponent's own refuting is subject to whatever he says about Nāgārjuna's. But second and decisively: for a refutation to be undone by discovering that refutation is empty, one would have to have been claiming that refutation is a real, self-natured thing. Nāgārjuna claims nothing of the kind. When the opponent proves that refuting is empty, he has not caught Nāgārjuna in a contradiction; he has stated Nāgārjuna's conclusion for him. Since what I am asserting is emptiness, this establishes exactly what I said. An argument that has no thesis about self-natured entities cannot be refuted by showing that some entity lacks a self-nature.

The teacher-and-disciple example is the best thing the opponent produces in this gate, and it is worth appreciating before it is answered. It is a genuine case of a later thing making an earlier one what it is: no one is a teacher until somebody has been taught, so the disciple's existence reaches backward and confers a status the teacher did not previously hold. Retroactive constitution is a real phenomenon.

And the reply concedes the phenomenon while denying that it rescues causation. If there is not yet a disciple, who is the teacher? The relation is real, but it is a relation of mutual constitution, and mutual constitution is precisely not one thing producing another. The two terms come into being together as a pair, each defining the other — which puts the case with the ox's horns rather than with the potter. The example proves that the pair is inseparable. It does not locate any making.

The lamp and its light get the same treatment as sesame and sand in Gate Three: to offer their simultaneity as evidence of simultaneous causation is to assume what was being asked about. If the two arise at once, neither has priority, and there is nothing in the case beyond the fact that they occur together — which is what needed explaining.

Pause over the third definition, because the whole gate turns on it: begun to come up but not yet complete. That is the honest description of what people mean by "in the process of arising," and it contains the difficulty in plain sight. Not yet complete means not yet there. The moment that was supposed to be where arising actually happens has been defined, by anyone who defines it carefully, as a moment when the thing has not arrived.

The three closing analogies — done, burned, realized — are chosen to run from the trivial to the deepest. What is burned is not burned again; what is realized is not realized again. The last is quietly the point of the whole treatise: awakening, once reached, is not reached a second time. Completion is completion, and the operation that completes has nothing left to grip.

The second paragraph is compressed even by this treatise's standards, and the Chinese is difficult; we have rendered it as the surrounding argument requires. Its charge is that the opponent, cornered, has quietly split his own term — allowing one kind of arising that follows a prior arising and another kind that does not — so that what he stated as a definite position has become indefinite. It is the same complaint made in Gate Two against the pot that is subtle before and coarse after: an escape purchased by letting a key term mean two things.

The three consequences form a deliberate sequence: something desirable that does not happen, something dreadful that does not happen, and something impossible that could never happen. Unsurpassed awakening does not simply break out in every ordinary person; the afflictions of an arhat who has passed beyond falling back do not come flooding back; and hares do not sprout horns. Each is unarisen, and if bare unarisenness were enough for arising, all three would be equally on the table. The absurdity is graded so that the reader cannot escape it by objecting to any one case.

The other argument is quieter and more interesting — that a doing apart from doing and a going apart from going would ruin the way the world speaks. Nāgārjuna is not proposing that ordinary usage settles metaphysics. He is pointing out that his opponent has to appeal to ordinary usage himself, since the entire debate is conducted in the language of things arising, being made, and coming to be. A position that renders that language incoherent has sawn through the branch on which it was standing to speak.

The first reply is the important one, and it is a model of how Madhyamaka answers an appeal to conditions. The opponent's objection is entirely reasonable: of course unarisenness alone does not produce anything; arising happens when the right conditions assemble. Nāgārjuna does not dispute a word of this. He simply asks what happens within the assembled conditions — and points back to Gate Two. Once everything is in place, is the fruit already there, or not there, or both? The three-way question does not go away because the conditions are complete; it is now asked at the site where the arising is supposed to occur, and gets the same three answers.

Then arising-now is dismantled from four sides. It divides into an arisen part and an unarisen part, and neither arises. It has no existence apart from arising, so it cannot be the place where arising is explained. Saying it arises requires two arisings where only one is available. And it has nowhere to be — a moment of arising presupposes arising, so there is no prior ground on which arising could be underway.

The treatise ends without a peroration, without a dedication of merit, and without any of the closing apparatus a reader might expect. The last line simply restates the conclusion and stops: all things are unarisen — for they are, in the end, empty and still. Those final four characters, 畢竟空寂, are the only place in the whole work where the tone shifts from argument to something else. 寂 is stillness, quiet, the word used for the peace of nirvāṇa. After twelve gates of relentless pressing, the last word is not a victory but a settling.

It is worth taking the measure of what has been done. The treatise did not argue that nothing exists. It argued, twelve times over from twelve directions, that when you go looking for the machinery — the causal power inside the cause, the fruit waiting inside its conditions, the mark that certifies a thing as conditioned, the moment in which arising occurs, the agent behind suffering — there is nothing there to find. Pots are still made, sesame still yields oil, and beings still suffer and are still liberated. What has been removed is not the world but a layer we had added to it: the assumption that behind each of these there stands a real, self-standing thing doing the work.

And Gate Eight is the reason this is not a loss. If things had natures of their own, nothing could change, suffering could never cease, and the path would lead nowhere. It is emptiness that leaves room for arising, for alteration, for the ending of what we would like to end. The stillness at the last line is not the stillness of a world brought to a halt. It is the quiet of a grip finally opening.