Who acts, and who answers for it?

What you will work out

Explain the problem the Abhidharma schools faced in connecting an action with a result that comes much later, and the two answers chapter 17 reports.
Reconstruct Nāgārjuna’s argument that an action with intrinsic nature could never be done, and explain what the image of a magically created being is meant to show.
Explain how a person understood as a convention can still answer for past actions, and assess the charge that Madhyamaka is a form of nihilism.
Say what question the “graded teaching” of 18.6 and 18.8 raises about whether one account of the self can be more accurate than another.

An apology thirty years late

Imagine a man apologizing to an old friend for something cruel he said thirty years ago. The body that spoke the words has changed, the mood that produced them is long gone, and he can barely remember saying them. Yet the apology makes sense only if the man apologizing is, in some way that matters, the man who spoke.

The last lesson argued that the self is neither the aggregates nor something apart from them, and that it is conceived in dependence on them. This lesson asks what that means for action. If there is no lasting self, who did the deed, and who answers for it now?

What connects a deed to its result?

For the Buddhists Nāgārjuna addressed, the question had a sharper form, because of the teaching of karma, from the Sanskrit word for “action”. According to that teaching, intentional actions bring results to the one who acts, both in this life and in later ones.[1] Chapter 17 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā begins by setting it out. Self-control, thoughtfulness toward others and friendliness are “the seeds of fruit both hereafter and here” (17.1), and “action” means a volition together with the speech or bodily movement a volition brings about (17.2–3). As with rebirth in the last lesson, the study explains this teaching because the arguments rely on it; they do not establish it.

The difficulty is one of timing. The result of an action often comes long after the action is over, perhaps in another life. And many Abhidharma thinkers held that whatever is real lasts only a moment. So how can an action that has vanished produce anything?

If the action endures to the time of maturation, then it would be permanent. If it is destroyed, then being destroyed, what fruit will it produce?

The translators explain the dilemma. If the action lasts until its result appears, there is no reason it should ever cease, and something eternal could not produce anything. If it ceases at once, it seems unable to cause a result that comes later.

Chapter 17 reports two answers from the schools. The first, later associated with the Sautrāntika school, compares action to a seed (17.7–10). A mango seed is long gone before the mango appears, yet it started the series of sprout, sapling and tree that ends in the fruit. In the same way, the translators explain, an action can start a series of momentary traces in the mind, each causing the next, until one of them ripens as the result. An objector replies that the analogy fails: a mango seed yields only mangoes, while one action can bear quite different fruits (17.12). The second answer, which the translators identify as the Personalists’ view, uses a different image: “The unperishing is like the pledge pen, the action is like the debt” (17.14). When you sign a pledge to repay a loan, the translators explain, the signing is soon over, but the written record of the debt remains until the debt is repaid. On this view an action leaves behind a special element, “the unperishing”, which likewise remains until the result arises. A third answer, from the Vaibhāṣika school, was that a past action still exists in some sense, since every element exists in all three times; the chapter does not take it up.

An action that could never be done

At verse 21 Nāgārjuna enters the discussion. All these theories assume that action and result are real things joined by a real connection. He replies:[1]

Why is an action not arisen? Because it is without intrinsic nature. And since it is unarisen, it does not perish.

The opponent has a verse of the Buddha’s on his side, which the commentators Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti cite: actions “do not perish even after billions of cosmic epochs”. Surely something that does not perish must be real. Nāgārjuna turns the saying around. An action does not perish because, ultimately, it never arose, and what never occurred cannot cease. On the translators’ explanation of this reply, the Buddha’s saying is a manner of speaking, not a description of the ultimate truth about action.

The next verse gives the argument:

If the action were something with intrinsic nature, then it would doubtless be eternal. And the action would be undone, for the eternal is not something that is done.

A thing with intrinsic nature cannot change its nature, as chapter 15 argued. But doing something is a change: the action passes from not yet done to done. So an action with intrinsic nature could never be done at all. The following verses draw the consequence. We would reap results of actions we had not done: on Candrakīrti’s reading of 17.23, as the translators report it, someone who had lived a faultless, restrained life might still reap the fruit of a life without restraint. And:

Without doubt this would contradict all worldly conduct. And it would not be correct to distinguish between those who have done the meritorious and those who have done wrong.

The translators explain with an example: farming and weaving would make no sense, since a crop would be as likely to come from not sowing as from sowing. Notice what the argument uses as its test: ordinary practice. Intrinsic nature, far from securing the connection between a deed and its result, would cut it.

Agent and enjoyer

The opponent tries once more, again citing the Buddha, who spoke of a person “enclosed in ignorance and bound by thirst” who both acts and reaps:

[Objection:] The person who is enclosed in ignorance and bound by thirst, that person is the enjoyer; but that one is neither someone other than the agent nor someone identical with the agent.

If there is someone who acts and someone who enjoys the fruit, the opponent reasons, action must be real. Nāgārjuna replies that an action arises neither dependently nor independently in the ultimate sense, so “therefore the agent also does not exist” (17.29), and without action and agent there is no fruit and no one to enjoy it (17.30). The translators explain how to hear the Buddha’s words: saying that agent and enjoyer are neither the same nor different was not a way of describing a real agent with an odd relation to a real enjoyer. It was a way of saying that, “strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the agent (or the enjoyer, either).” Strictly speaking here means ultimately.

Magic that works inside the magic

How can there be no agent, strictly speaking, and yet actions with consequences? The chapter ends with an image:

Just as the Teacher by his supernatural power fabricates a magical being that in turn fabricates yet another magical being,

so with regard to the agent, which has the form of a magical being, and the action that is done by it, it is like the case where a second magical being is fabricated by a magical being.

Defilements, actions, and bodies, agents, and fruits, are similar to the city of the gandharvas; they are like a mirage, a dream.

The “city of the gandharvas”, Westerhoff explains, was a popular Indian example of an unreal appearance: a city seen in the sky that is not really there.[3] The translators describe the picture behind the first two verses: a buddha makes an audience see a magician, who then produces further illusions. The second illusion really is produced, within the performance, by something that is itself an illusion.

Westerhoff draws out what the image does and does not say. It is not the familiar contrast between appearance and a solid reality behind it. Things that lack intrinsic nature are brought about by other things that lack it: it is, in his phrase, “insubstantial entities all the way down.” The image does not say that nothing is produced. It says that what is produced, and what produces it, lack natures of their own. In his earlier book he adds an illustration of his own. While we are dreaming and do not know it, we sensibly leave a building by the stairs rather than the window; as long as we are inside an illusion, he argues, we have to act in accordance with its laws.[2]

A charge of nihilism

Critics saw danger here at once. Westerhoff reports that both Buddhist and non-Buddhist opponents accused Madhyamaka of nihilism, and he quotes in English a passage from the Buddhist philosopher Asaṅga’s Bodhisattvabhūmi.[3] Asaṅga describes readers who say “All this is in reality just a designation” while denying any given thing on which the designation rests. Without such a basis, he argues, even the designation cannot exist: “In this manner both reality and designation are rejected. Because of the rejection of designation and reality they are to be known as the most extreme kind of nihilist.”

The Mādhyamikas, Westerhoff says, were often confronted with a moral form of the charge. If they reject the existence of all things, they must reject the karmic results of actions too, and then one main reason for ordinary people to behave well seems to be gone.

The reply depends on a distinction the study has used from the start. Existing without intrinsic nature is not the same as not existing. Flowers in the sky and the sons of barren women do not exist; chariots and pots exist without intrinsic nature and still carry wood or water. Westerhoff offers a comparison that recalls the coin in lesson 1’s exercise: a monetary economy needs nothing intrinsically valuable behind its currency, since it runs on the beliefs and expectations of the people who use it. On this reply, lacking intrinsic nature does not mean lacking the power to do anything. Things without natures of their own can still act on one another, Westerhoff concludes, and so actions still have results, and rebirth, the Buddhist path and liberation keep their place in the Madhyamaka view.

The person as a convention

That reply tells us that conventional persons can act and be affected. It does not yet say why the convention of a continuing person should hold. Westerhoff takes up this question, noting that the view of the self as a connected series of events is shared by all the main Buddhist schools, and that it faces two problems.[2]

The first concerns boundaries. One person decides to make a sound and makes it; another hears it and later remembers it. All these events are causally connected. Where does the series that is one person end and the series that is the other begin, if we may not already assume what a person is? The second concerns care for the future. Westerhoff’s example is buying an umbrella today so as not to get wet tomorrow. If a person is only a fiction built on momentary events, who is there to care about tomorrow?

Westerhoff sketches replies drawn from the philosopher Mark Siderits. For boundaries, we can group events into the set with the most continuous causal connections: a speaker’s voice is far more steadily connected over time to the speaker’s own ear than to a listener’s. For concern, the idea is that “the concept of a person as a trans-temporal, non-momentary entity is a convention accepted because of its consequences.” We could have adopted others, such as treating each moment as a separate being. The convention of a lasting person earns its place: under it we are much less likely to trade a small pleasure now for a great pain later, and the prospect of later pain can deter. Westerhoff notes an assumption this makes, that pain can be understood without bringing persons back in, and he presents the whole account as a sketch.

He is also candid that Nāgārjuna’s writings on Madhyamaka say little directly about ethics; the basis they offer for such answers is, in his words, “at best implicit”. What this section describes is a modern reconstruction built on Nāgārjuna’s arguments, not a theory stated in the verses.

A graded teaching

Chapter 18 suggests how Nāgārjuna understood the Buddha’s different statements about the self.[1]

“The self” is conveyed and “nonself” is taught by buddhas; it is taught as well that neither self nor nonself is the case.

The translators explain the traditional account. The Buddha sometimes spoke as if there were a self, for hearers who thought their good and bad deeds died with them; the idea of a self that is reborn helped them take the results of their actions seriously. Others he taught nonself. The verse suggests that nonself too was taught for its effect on the hearer and is not the final account of reality, and it adds a third teaching, neither self nor nonself. The translators suggest that even this third teaching may be one of the grades rather than the ultimate truth. A later verse applies the same idea to everything:

All is real, or all is unreal, all is both real and unreal, all is neither unreal nor real; this is the graded teaching of the Buddha.

Is this a ladder that climbs toward the most accurate account? The translators doubt whether a Mādhyamika can say so. An accurate account of how things ultimately are would have to describe their intrinsic natures, and there are none to describe. Perhaps, they suggest, the grades rise not in accuracy but in usefulness for the goal the teaching serves. If that is right, it fits the account of persons above: the convention of a lasting person may be the right one to use without describing anything that exists on its own.

Try a promise across the years

Imagine that Dagny, years ago, promised her younger brother that she would help pay for his studies when the time came. Now it has come, and she says: “The person who made that promise was a different bundle of processes. The promise isn’t mine.”

Explain the mistaken step in Dagny’s reply, using chapter 17 and the account of the person as a convention. Then say what your answer leaves unsettled. Writing an answer is optional.

A full explanatory answer

Dagny’s mistake is to move from “not the same self” to “a different person”, as if lacking an identical self meant being strictly someone else.

That second claim is one of the two options Nāgārjuna rejects. If the present person were wholly distinct from the earlier one, then, as 27.10–11 argues, the results of what one did would be reaped by another, and action would be cut off from its results. Chapter 17 treats that severing as absurd: it “would contradict all worldly conduct” (17.24). Promising is part of worldly conduct. A promise works only because the one who makes it and the one who later keeps or breaks it count as the same person.

Lacking intrinsic nature does not remove the conventional person. Ultimately, the Dagny who promised and the Dagny who speaks now are neither identical nor distinct. Conventionally, they are one person, and that person made the promise and now owes its keeping. Dagny cannot use the ultimate level to cancel a conventional obligation, because the ultimate level does not deliver the verdict “different person” either.

Nor is the convention arbitrary. On the account Westerhoff reports from Siderits, the convention of a lasting person is accepted because of its consequences, and one of them is that promising is possible at all. A convention on which every promise lapsed with the next moment would leave no promises to make.

The answer leaves something open. It shows that Dagny cannot disown the promise simply because she has changed. It does not settle how far responsibility extends: whether a promise made in very different circumstances, or by someone very young, binds in the same way.

End of the second stage

This stage began with the photograph and asked what the “I” in “That’s me” could be. Chapter 18 argued that the self can be neither the aggregates nor something apart from them. Chapter 10 turned the Personalists’ own image against them: fire and fuel depend on each other in a way that neither identity nor difference describes. Chapter 27 applied the same reasoning across lives and then refused the easy conclusion: it is not established that the self does not exist. Chapter 17 argued that an action with intrinsic nature could never be done, and offered the image of a magical being who creates another.

The premises an opponent could question have been named along the way: Nyāya philosophers can hold that qualities need a real bearer; the account of persons as conventions faces the problems of boundaries and care for the future; and, as Westerhoff notes, Nāgārjuna’s writings on Madhyamaka say little directly about ethics.

As in the first stage, each conclusion has an ultimate and a conventional side. Ultimately, there is no self, no agent and no action with a nature of its own. Conventionally, people remember, promise, act and answer for what they did, and the convention of a lasting person is not an arbitrary one. One question remains open. If the convention is justified by its consequences, and nothing beneath it has a nature of its own, what gives it its hold on us? Can a convention bind if nothing grounds it?

Remember, too, what kind of evidence we have read: verses read through the translators’ commentary and the classical commentators they report, a modern philosopher’s reconstruction, which in places builds on another’s, and a hostile critic, Asaṅga, known here only through that philosopher’s English.

You can stop here. When you return, the next lesson, “What is left of the two truths?”, asks about the distinction the first five lessons have relied on. If even the elements lack intrinsic nature, what remains of the difference between conventional and ultimate truth?

Sources and limits

[1] Nāgārjuna, Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, translated with commentary by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Wisdom Publications, 2013), for chapter 17, verses of chapter 18 and the translators’ commentary.

Chapter 17: all thirty-three verses with commentary, pp. 171–191. The verses quoted are 17.1 (p. 172), 17.6 (p. 176), 17.14 (p. 180), 17.21 (p. 185), 17.22 (p. 185), 17.24 (p. 186), 17.28 (p. 189), 17.29 (p. 190) and 17.31–33 (p. 191); 17.2–3 are on pp. 172–173.
The translators’ commentary: on 17.6, the Vaibhāṣika answer and the schools behind the two answers, pp. 176–177; on the seed and the objection of 17.12, pp. 178–180; on the pledge, pp. 180–181; on 17.21, with the Buddha’s saying, p. 185; on 17.22–24, with Candrakīrti’s readings and farming and weaving, pp. 186–187; on 17.28–29, pp. 189–190; on 17.31–33, p. 191.
Chapter 18: 18.6 (p. 198) and 18.8 (p. 200), with the commentary on pp. 199–202.
Chapter 27: 27.10–11 with commentary, pp. 323–324.

Words in square brackets are the translators’. The Buddha’s sayings and the classical commentators are reported only as the translators report them; no Abhidharma text was read. Karma and rebirth are explained as the setting of the arguments, not endorsed.

[2] Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), for his reading of chapter 17 and his account of persons as conventions. These sections and their endnotes were read in full.

The dream and acting within an illusion: §7.4, pp. 163–164.
The two problems for a reductionist view of persons, and replies after Siderits: §10.2, pp. 208–212, with the umbrella on p. 211 and the quotation about convention on p. 212.
Nāgārjuna’s sparse ethical remarks; his reading of 17.23–24: §10.3, pp. 212–216, with the reading on p. 214 and “at best implicit” on p. 215. Westerhoff reads 17.23–24 somewhat differently from the translators, as the worry that without a substantial self the results of a deed could fall on someone who did not do it. Both readings treat the severing of action from result as absurd, which is all the lesson needs, so it follows the translators.

Westerhoff presents the replies of §10.2 as a brief sketch based on Mark Siderits’s Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy (2003), which was not read.

[3] Jan Westerhoff, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 2, section 4b, “Illusionism in Nāgārjuna’s thought”, for the reading of 17.31–33, the gloss on the city of the gandharvas (in a footnote), the charge of nihilism, Asaṅga’s passage as Westerhoff gives it in English and the reply, including the comparison with a monetary economy. The section and its footnotes were read in full. 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. Asaṅga’s Bodhisattvabhūmi was not read directly.

The apology and Dagny’s promise are original teaching examples. The pledge and the magically created being are the verses’ own images; the mango seed and farming and weaving come from the translators’ commentary; the umbrella, the dream and the monetary economy are Westerhoff’s.