Nāgārjuna's Śūnyatā as an Epistemological Ground for Dependent Origination — Epoche C2
Introduction: the verse that sets four terms equal The eighteenth verse of the twenty-fourth chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) — the root verses on the middle way, composed by Nāgārjuna in perhaps the late second century CE and the founding text of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy — asserts an identity between four things the tradition had until then kept apart. Jay Garfield renders it: 'Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way.' The four terms are dependent arising ( pratītyasamutpāda ), the doctrine that whatever occurs occurs in dependence on conditions; emptiness ( śūnyatā ), the absence in anything whatever of an intrinsic nature of its own; dependent designation ( upādāya prajñapti ), a term whose application is fixed only relative to something else, as 'long' is fixed only relative to something short; and the middle way ( madhyamā pratipad ), the Buddha's course between the extreme of taking things to endure with fixed natures and the extreme of taking them to be nothing at all. To run the four together is to say that being dependently arisen, being empty and being a merely relative designation are one condition under three names, and that recognising it is the middle way. That identification looks self-destroying, and the appearance is not a modern misreading imported from outside the tradition: Nāgārjuna states the objection himself, in the opponent's voice, in the first six verses of the same chapter, before answering it in the remaining thirty-four. This essay reconstructs that answer. Its thesis is the one the title announces — that emptiness functions as an epistemological ground for dependent arising — but the word 'ground' has to be earned, because on Nāgārjuna's own principles nothing can be a foundation in the ordinary sense of a self-standing base from which the rest is derived. What the text actually argues is that emptiness is the condition under which the practices we call knowing are possible at all, and that the argument for this is a reductio conducted entirely on the opponent's premises rather than a doctrine asserted on Nāgārjuna's own account. The nihilist objection, and who presses it Because the charge of nihilism organises everything that follows, it is worth having in its strongest and earliest form rather than as a vague modern suspicion. The opponent of MMK 24.1–6 is a Buddhist scholastic, and his complaint is that emptiness destroys Buddhism. If everything is empty, he says, there is no arising and no ceasing; then the four noble truths do not obtain — no suffering to be known, no origin to be abandoned, no cessation to be realised, no path to be cultivated. Without those there are no attainments and no attainers, hence no community of practitioners, no teaching and no Buddha; and emptiness wrecks not only the religion but ordinary life, since right and wrong, cause and effect, and every worldly convention collapse together. Nāgārjuna's first response at 24.7 is not a rebuttal but a diagnosis: the opponent has not understood the purpose of emptiness, emptiness itself, or its meaning, and is therefore injured by his own misconstrual. At 24.11 the point is sharper — emptiness wrongly grasped ruins the dull-witted, as a snake seized in the wrong place ruins the man who seizes it. The concession matters. Nāgārjuna is not claiming the nihilist reading is unavailable; he is claiming it is a misgrasping of a doctrine that can indeed be misgrasped. The reading has modern defenders, and it is fairer to name one than to gesture at a diffuse Western consensus. David Burton, in Emptiness Appraised (1999), argues that Nāgārjuna is committed to nihilism whatever his intentions: if to lack intrinsic nature is to lack any nature, and if entities just are their natures, then the denial of intrinsic nature entails the denial of entities, and the protestation that conventional reality has been preserved is unavailing. This is a serious position, and it fixes where the argument must be won — on what svabhāva , intrinsic nature, is taken to mean. One historical observation is worth registering first, because it shows that the tradition treated the nihilist reading as a structural hazard rather than an outsider's mistake. Jizang (吉藏, 549–623), who systematised the Chinese Sanlun or 'Three Treatises' tradition — named for the three Madhyamaka works Kumārajīva translated at the beginning of the fifth century, among them the MMK — built his account of the two truths as a graded ladder rather than a pair. In his Erdi yi (二諦義, 'The Meaning of the Two Truths'), what counts as ultimate at one level is demoted to the merely conventional at the next, so that the sequence terminates in no standing description at all. The device exists to prevent emptiness from hardening into a further thesis about how things are, and a tradition that needed it plainly understood that emptiness invites exactly the reading Burton presses. What svabhāva means, and where this essay's earlier citation was wrong The whole dispute turns on a definition, and the text supplies it. Here a correction is due. An earlier version of this essay attributed to MMK 15.2 the universal claim that all phenomena are empty of svabhāva . The attribution is wrong, and worth correcting openly, because 15.2 does something more important than assert the conclusion: it supplies the premise from which the conclusion follows. The universal statement belongs to MMK 24.19, which says that since there is no phenomenon whatever that is not dependently arisen, there is no phenomenon whatever that is not empty. What 15.1 and 15.2 give is a definition and an immediate consequence. Verse 15.1 states that the arising of svabhāva from causes and conditions is incoherent, since anything so arisen would be kṛtaka — made, produced, brought about. Verse 15.2 then asks how there could be a made intrinsic nature at all, and answers by unpa