The Un-grounding of Emptiness: Candrakīrti's Deconstructive Reading of Nāgārjuna — Epoche C2
The interpretation at issue Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā , a work of some four hundred and fifty Sanskrit verses composed in the second or third century CE, argues that nothing whatever has svabhāva — intrinsic nature, the property of being what it is in its own right, independently of causes, parts and conceptual designation. The resulting doctrine is śūnyatā , emptiness. The question at issue here is whether that doctrine, having removed intrinsic nature from everything else, functions as a ground in its own right: whether emptiness is what secures and explains the everyday reliability of things, the final fact in virtue of which conventional reality is as it is. That reading is widespread and it is not stupid; it has a verse of Nāgārjuna's own behind it, which will be set out below at its full strength before it is answered. The case against it is made here through Candrakīrti (c. 600–650 CE), whose commentary on Nāgārjuna, the Prasannapadā or "Clear Words", is built around a methodological restriction that makes the grounding reading unavailable to him. The claim is not that Candrakīrti dislikes foundations. It is that his way of arguing licenses no positive conclusion at all, so that anything he establishes cannot be a ground, because he does not establish things. One bibliographical note, since the misattribution circulates. The Prasannapadā has never been translated into English in full; Mervyn Sprung's volume of 1979 gives the essential chapters, including the first. Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura's translation of 2013 is a translation of Nāgārjuna's verses, not of Candrakīrti's commentary, though it follows Candrakīrti's readings throughout. The verse the grounding reading rests on The twenty-fourth chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an objection, and the objection is the strongest in the book. If everything is empty, says the opponent, then there is no arising and no ceasing; the four noble truths are destroyed; so are the fruits of the religious path, the community that pursues it, and the Buddha's teaching itself; and so, finally, is every ordinary worldly transaction. Emptiness, on this charge, is nihilism with a technical vocabulary. Nāgārjuna's reply is that the opponent has mistaken the purpose of emptiness, and it turns on a distinction, the two truths ( satyadvaya ). At 24.8 he says that the Buddhas' teaching rests on two: worldly conventional truth ( lokasaṃvṛtisatya ) and ultimate truth ( paramārthasatya ). At 24.10 he adds that without relying on convention the ultimate cannot be taught, and without reaching the ultimate there is no liberation. Then, at 24.14, comes the verse on which everything turns: "Everything is possible for one for whom emptiness is possible; nothing is possible for one for whom emptiness is not possible." ( Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.14) Read as it stands, that looks like an unambiguous statement of grounding. Emptiness is the condition on which the possibility of everything else depends; take it away and nothing works. And 24.18 seems to complete the picture by identifying emptiness with dependent arising ( pratītyasamutpāda ) and with dependent designation ( prajñapti upādāya ) — one thing, under three descriptions, which is also the middle way. If emptiness just is the structure of dependent arising, and dependent arising is why things function, then emptiness is why things function. The inference is natural and it is the inference this essay denies. The denial rests on reading 24.14 as the conditional it is. It says that if things had intrinsic nature nothing could happen: what is what it is in its own right cannot change, cannot arise, cannot be affected, and cannot stand in the dependence relations that constitute a functioning world. Emptiness is the absence of that obstacle, not the presence of a support. Nāgārjuna makes the same move at 24.19 in the form of a biconditional-like sweep — since no dharma is not dependently arisen, no dharma is not empty — which is a statement about coextension, not about one thing propping up another. A removed impediment is not a foundation, and 24.14 says nothing more than that the impediment is removed. Nāgārjuna's own guard rails If the grounding reading were what Nāgārjuna meant, three passages in the same text would be inexplicable, and the third is decisive. At 13.8: the Victorious Ones have declared emptiness to be the relinquishing of all views, and those who take emptiness itself as a view are called incurable. A ground is precisely a view — a positive commitment about what there ultimately is — so a doctrine that makes itself incurable when held as a view is not offering one. At 22.11 the same point is made about the vocabulary: one should not say "empty", nor "non-empty", nor both, nor neither, these being said only for the purposes of designation. And at 24.11 the warning is practical: emptiness wrongly grasped destroys the dull-witted, like a snake seized by the wrong end or a spell miscast. What could grasping emptiness wrongly consist in, if not treating it as a something? The decisive passage is elsewhere. In the Vigrahavyāvartanī , Nāgārjuna's own reply to objectors, verse 29 states: if I had any thesis ( pratijñā ), the fault you allege would be mine; I have no thesis, so I incur no fault. The objection being answered is a self-refutation charge — that "all things lack intrinsic nature" must itself either have intrinsic nature, and so be a counter-example, or lack it, and so say nothing. Nāgārjuna does not answer by exempting his own claim. He answers by denying that he has advanced one. Whatever else that manoeuvre is, it is incompatible with emptiness being a truth about what ultimately underlies the world. What prasaṅga is, and the quarrel that produced it This is where Candrakīrti's method becomes the substance rather than the style of the position, and the method has a precise history, which is worth having because the usual gloss — "Candrakīrti argues negatively" —