What would it mean to exist on one’s own?

What you will work out

Explain what the Buddhist thinkers Nāgārjuna addresses meant by intrinsic nature, and why they held that some things must have it.
Distinguish an essential feature from independent existence, and dependence for existence from dependence for a description.
Reconstruct the argument of chapter 15 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and explain why denying intrinsic nature is presented as a middle path rather than a claim that nothing exists.
Assess the objection that a property produced by causes, such as a fire’s heat, could still belong to its bearer as its own.

The eldest sister and the flame

Imagine a woman who is the eldest of three sisters. Nothing in her body or character makes her the eldest. She holds that position only because her sisters were born after her; had they never been born, she would be the same person, but the eldest of no one.

Now think of the heat of a flame. The heat does not seem to be borrowed from anything outside the flame, and a flame that gave off no heat would hardly be a flame at all. Being the eldest is plainly a matter of relations. Being hot looks like something a flame has all by itself.

Most of what we care about is clearly of the first kind. A house is a house because of its walls and roof and the way they are joined; a price is a price because people will pay it. But it is natural to suppose that the relations must stop somewhere. If everything owed what it is to something else, what would the whole arrangement rest on? Surely some things are what they are on their own.

Nāgārjuna, the Buddhist philosopher whose Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way) this study reads, argues that nothing is. To see what he denies, and what he leaves standing, we first need the view he argued against. Careful thinkers held it for serious reasons.

A theory worth taking seriously

Nāgārjuna wrote for fellow Buddhists. As his translators Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura explain, his audience shared the presuppositions of Abhidharma, the part of the Buddhist tradition that worked out the metaphysical details behind the Buddha’s teachings of not-self, impermanence and suffering.[1] Its schools disagreed about many of those details, but they agreed on a framework.

A statement, on this framework, can be true in two ways. It is conventionally true if acting on it reliably succeeds: this chariot will carry you to town. It is ultimately true if it matches the way reality is without relying on any “conceptual fiction”, and a chariot is such a fiction. When parts are assembled in the right way, the translators write, “we only believe there is a chariot in addition to the parts because of facts about our interests and our cognitive limitations”. Talk about chariots can be conventionally true; it cannot be ultimately true or false.

What is ultimately real are the dharmas, the simple elements left when analysis has taken every composite thing apart. The schools listed them differently; the translators’ examples include indivisible particles of matter, particular occurrences of color and shape, pain sensations and individual moments of consciousness. (A dharma in this sense is written lowercase; “the Dharma” is the Buddha’s teaching.) Every fact about people, forests and chariots was supposed to be explicable, in the end, by facts about dharmas.

Each dharma has intrinsic nature, svabhāva: in the translators’ words, “a property that is intrinsic to its bearer—that is, the fact that the property characterizes that entity is independent of facts about anything else.” A chariot’s shape is not like that. It is borrowed from the shapes and arrangement of the parts, so it is an extrinsic nature, parabhāva.

This is not a straw man. It answers a real question: if persons and chariots are constructed, what are they constructed from? Jan Westerhoff, whose reconstruction of Nāgārjuna this study uses as one interpreter’s guide, puts the underlying thought clearly: a chain of explanations might go on without end, but a chain of dependence has to rest on something that does not itself depend.[2] Abhidharma thinkers also had a test for finding that foundation. A chariot vanishes when you take it apart or analyze it; whatever keeps its nature under analysis is ultimately real. Nor did Nāgārjuna dismiss the whole enterprise. Westerhoff notes that in the Ratnāvalī, a work of advice to a king, Nāgārjuna recommends close study of a list of faults that most plausibly comes from an Abhidharma text.[3]

One further point matters for what follows. Most dharmas were held to arise from causes and conditions, and the Abhidharma thinkers saw no conflict between a dharma’s being caused and its having a nature of its own. Nāgārjuna does, and much of this study turns on why.

According to the translators, Nāgārjuna accepts the Abhidharma account of what a dharma would be. What he denies is that there are any: if anything were ultimately real, it would have intrinsic nature, but nothing can.[1] Keep this in mind whenever his conclusions seem extreme. When he argues that there is no going, no cause or no self, he denies that any of these is ultimately real in this demanding sense. Whether each still functions conventionally, as the chariot still carries its passengers, is a separate question, and this study asks it every time. What becomes of the distinction itself, once even the dharmas are gone, is the subject of lesson 6.

Two things “intrinsic nature” can mean

The flame seemed to have its heat all by itself. Westerhoff, drawing on the classical commentator Candrakīrti, distinguishes two things that could mean.[2]

The first he calls essence-svabhāva: a feature a thing cannot lose without ceasing to be that kind of thing. Candrakīrti, in Westerhoff’s translation, observes that “in common usage, heat is called the svabhāva of fire, because it is invariable in it”, whereas the heat of hot water is not, since water can cool and still be water. Nothing in that ordinary way of speaking requires the fire to be independent of anything, and Candrakīrti accepts it as a conventional usage.

The second he calls substance-svabhāva: existing “unconstructed and independent of anything else”. This is the sense Nāgārjuna argues against, and the difference is large. Everything might have some essential features, as a triangle must have three sides, and yet everything might still depend on something else. Denying the second sense leaves the first untouched.

The distinction bears on a charge Westerhoff reports from the scholar Richard Hayes: that Nāgārjuna slides between a sense of svabhāva as identity and a sense as independence, so that his arguments are invalid.[2] Whether he slides is worth watching for in each argument. This study reads his target as independent existence.

Two ways of depending

If intrinsic nature means independence, we need to know what kind of dependence it excludes. Westerhoff separates two.[2]

A thing depends for its existence on something if it could not exist without it; Westerhoff calls this existential dependence. A sprout depends in this way on its seed, soil and water, and a book on its pages. A thing depends for a description on something if it could exist without it but could not then be described in a particular way. This is the eldest sister’s case, and Westerhoff calls it notional dependence. He shows that Nāgārjuna’s own examples mix the two. In one of Nāgārjuna’s verses, in Westerhoff’s translation, a father and son “cannot exist one without the other”; yet the son depends on the father for his existence, while the father depends on the son only for being called a father.

Later Tibetan commentators, Westerhoff reports, distinguished three kinds of dependence: on a thing’s causes, on its parts and on the concepts and names through which it is picked out. They held that the subtlest understanding of emptiness takes all three into account. In that demanding sense, a thing with intrinsic nature would depend on none of them.

A nature that is made

Chapter 15 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā examines intrinsic nature directly and opens with a compact argument.[1]

It is not correct to say that intrinsic nature (svabhāva) is produced by means of causes and conditions. An intrinsic nature that was produced by causes and conditions would be a product.

But how could there ever be an intrinsic nature that is a product? For intrinsic nature is not adventitious, nor is it dependent on something else.

A reference such as 15.2 means chapter 15, verse 2. The second line of 15.2 gives the definition: intrinsic nature is not added from outside and does not depend on anything else. Whatever is produced by causes depends on them. An intrinsic nature that was produced would therefore be both dependent and independent.

The translators explain the example Candrakīrti uses. We do not count the heat of hot water as its intrinsic nature, or the red of a piece of quartz, which is normally white, because each comes from causes separate from the water or the quartz: a fire nearby, iron in the rock. Candrakīrti then applies the same reasoning to fire itself. A fire needs fuel, air and friction to arise, so its heat too is a product of causes and conditions, and cannot be its intrinsic nature. The translators observe that this appears to be the only argument in which Nāgārjuna explicitly tries to show that an intrinsic nature cannot be caused, so a good deal rests on it.[1]

Neither existent nor nonexistent

The chapter then takes a step that sounds alarming. If nothing has an intrinsic nature, nothing can have an extrinsic nature either, since a borrowed nature must be borrowed from something that owns one (15.3). And without a nature of either kind there can ultimately be no “existent” in the opponent’s strong sense (15.4).

Does that mean that nothing exists? The translators answer directly: “It is tempting to take the conclusion of verse 4 to mean that nothing whatsoever exists, that all is nonexistent. But Nāgārjuna denies this.” Verse 5 gives his reason:

If the existent is unestablished, then the nonexistent (abhāva) too is not established. For people proclaim the nonexistent to be the alteration of the existent.

Nonexistence, as people ordinarily speak of it, is what becomes of something that existed. The translators compare rudeness: an action can be impolite only where politeness is possible. In the same way, for it to be ultimately true that everything is nonexistent, there would have to be at least the possibility of ultimately real existents, and that requires the intrinsic nature the chapter has just rejected.

A path between two extremes

Nāgārjuna then claims the authority of the Buddha, who in a discourse the translators call “The Instructing of Katyāyana” described his teaching as a middle path.

In “The Instructing of Katyāyana” both “it exists” and “it does not exist” are denied by the Blessed One, who clearly perceives the existent and the nonexistent.

The Abhidharma thinkers read that discourse as concerning persons: there is no permanent self, but the person is not annihilated either, since a causal series of aggregates, the physical and mental constituents of a life, continues and is conveniently called a person. Nāgārjuna accepts this reading but finds a wider one beneath it. The middle path lies between holding that there are ultimately existing things and holding that ultimately nothing exists.[1]

The last verses explain why both extremes fail. Whatever had an intrinsic nature could never lose it, since nothing outside it could take it away, and so it could never cease (15.8–9). Hence:

“It exists” is an eternalist view; “It does not exist” is an annihilationist idea. Therefore the wise one should not have recourse to either existence or nonexistence.

To say that things ultimately exist, with intrinsic natures, makes them eternal and unchanging. To say that, lacking intrinsic nature, they are utterly unreal is annihilation (15.11).

The middle here is not a compromise halfway between the two. Candrakīrti quotes a sūtra in which the wise person, avoiding both extremes, “likewise does not take a stand in the middle”. The translators take this to mean that the middle path rejects the underlying assumption that generates both extremes. On the reading followed here, that assumption is that to be real is to have an intrinsic nature. Give it up, and “it exists” and “it does not exist” no longer exhaust the options.

So the conclusion has two levels. Ultimately, nothing has an intrinsic nature, and nothing exists or fails to exist in the opponent’s strong sense. Conventionally, the flame still warms the room and the eldest sister is still the eldest. Those facts depend on conditions, and the argument has not touched them.

Must a nature be separate from its bearer?

The translators raise a doubt about the argument of 15.2. It works for hot water and red quartz, whose heat and color come from causes separate from the causes of the water or quartz existing at all. Fire is different. Whenever a fire comes into existence, heat comes with it; the cause of the heat just is the cause of the fire. So why should heat’s being caused make it any less the fire’s own?[1]

They suggest a reply on Nāgārjuna’s behalf. For the fire to have heat as its own, fire and heat must be distinguishable: there must be a bearer that receives the heat from its causes and makes it its own. The Abhidharma definition of a dharma, as “that which bears its intrinsic nature”, points this way. But if bearer and nature are distinct, the nature was acquired, and it is not intrinsic after all. The consistent alternative would be to identify each dharma with its nature, so that the fire is its heat. Some Abhidharma thinkers did hold that view, though the translators think it may not have been widely held until well after Nāgārjuna.

The reply is suggestive, not decisive. It leaves a question the rest of the study will return to: must an intrinsic nature be distinguishable from the thing that has it? If not, 15.1–2 has not yet shown that nothing has one.

Try the distinctions

Here are four short claims:

“A triangle has three sides.”
“She is the eldest.”
“This coin would be worth something even if no one ever traded anything.”
“There is a heat that owes nothing to anything.”

For each, decide whether it ascribes an essential feature, a dependence for a description or independent existence. Then say which kind Nāgārjuna’s argument in chapter 15 targets, and what sorting the claims does and does not show. Writing an answer is optional.

A full explanatory answer

Only the third and fourth claims assert independent existence, so only they state what chapter 15 attacks.

The triangle has an essential feature: something without three sides would not be a triangle. That fits Westerhoff’s essence-svabhāva, which Candrakīrti accepts as a conventional way of speaking. It says nothing about whether triangles, or the drawings and minds in which they appear, depend on anything else, so Nāgārjuna has no quarrel with it.

The eldest sister depends on her sisters for a description. She would exist without them, but she would not be the eldest. No one claims that being the eldest is intrinsic, so this claim is not a target. It is a clear example of the kind of dependence intrinsic nature would have to exclude.

The coin claim needs a careful reading. Taken as stated, it gives the coin a value that owes nothing to any practice of exchange: value the coin has by itself. That is a claim of independent existence for a property, and so of intrinsic nature in the target sense. If the speaker meant only that the metal would still be useful to someone for something, the claim has quietly brought back relations to people’s needs and uses, and no longer claims independence.

The fourth claim is the plainest case. A heat that owes nothing to anything is exactly an intrinsic nature in Nāgārjuna’s target sense, and 15.1–2 is aimed at it. If the heat was produced, it owes its existence to causes; if it was not, the opponent must explain how it belongs to a fire that was.

Sorting the claims shows what is at stake. It does not show that the target is empty. That depends on arguments such as 15.1–2, and on whether the translators’ doubt about fire can be answered.

Carry this forward

The Abhidharma thinkers held that dharmas arise from causes and still have natures of their own, and chapter 15 argues that the combination cannot hold. The strongest test is the relation of dependence itself: when one thing produces another, what does the producing? The next lesson, “What makes a condition a cause?”, follows the argument of the work’s first chapter.

Sources and limits

[1] Nāgārjuna, Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, translated with commentary by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Wisdom Publications, 2013), for the Abhidharma framework, the verses of chapter 15 and the translators’ commentary on them.

The Abhidharma presuppositions and Nāgārjuna’s position: introduction, pp. 4–7, with the chariot quotation on p. 4, the definition of intrinsic nature on pp. 5–6 and Nāgārjuna’s rejection of dharmas on p. 7.
The test of analysis: chapter 15’s introduction, p. 153.
Chapter 15: all eleven verses with commentary, pp. 153–162: 15.1–2 on pp. 154–156, the remark that this appears to be Nāgārjuna’s only explicit argument of its kind on p. 156, the translators’ objection and reply on pp. 156–157, 15.3–5 on pp. 157–159, 15.6–7 with the sūtra quotation on pp. 159–160 and 15.8–11 on pp. 160–162.

The translation is from the Sanskrit, guided by the four classical Indian commentaries; the translators say their commentary seldom goes beyond what at least one of those states. Words in square brackets are theirs, supplied from the commentaries. Their running commentary is a separate voice from the verses, and the lesson says when a point is theirs. Candrakīrti’s commentary and the Abhidharma texts they cite were not read directly; the lesson reports them only as the translators do. Page numbers are to the print edition, as marked in the ebook. No Sanskrit was consulted.

[2] Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), for the senses of svabhāva and the kinds of dependence.

Essence-svabhāva: §2.1.1, pp. 21–23, with Candrakīrti’s remark on fire’s heat, in Westerhoff’s translation, on p. 22.
Substance-svabhāva, the two kinds of dependence and the father–son verse: §2.1.2, pp. 23–29, with the verse on pp. 27–28 and the later Tibetan distinction of three kinds of dependence on p. 27.
Candrakīrti’s acceptance of essence-talk; the need for a well-founded chain of dependence: pp. 29–31.
Richard Hayes’s charge of equivocation: p. 24, note 23, citing Hayes, “Nāgārjuna’s Appeal”, Journal of Indian Philosophy 22 (1994).

These sections and their endnotes were read in full. Westerhoff describes his method as combining consistency with the commentarial tradition with reconstructing each argument “in the philosophically most successful way” (chapter 1); the lesson treats the result as one interpretation. Hayes’s article and the other works Westerhoff cites were not read.

[3] Jan Westerhoff, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 2, section 4a, “Nāgārjuna and the criticism of the Abhidharma project”, for Nāgārjuna’s recommendation of Abhidharma material in the Ratnāvalī. The copy consulted is the publisher’s corrected proof, whose page numbers have not been checked against the published edition, so the section title is given instead of pages. The Ratnāvalī was not read directly.

The three sisters, the flame and the four claims in the exercise are original teaching examples.