Nagarjuna’s theory of Causality: Implications Sacred and Profane*

 

Jay L. Garfield

School of Philosophy

University of Tasmania

and

Department of Philosophy

Smith College

 

Forthcoming in Philosophy East and West

 

 

 

1.    Introduction

Nagarjuna properly emphasises that one understands the fundamental nature of reality (or lack thereof, depending on one’s perspective) if, and only if, one understands the nature of dependent origination.

 

Whoever sees dependent arising

Also sees suffering

And its arising

And its cessation as well as the path. (XXIV:40)

 

And he devotes two important chapters of MÒlamadhyamakak›rik› to the analysis of causality, per se, and of dependent arising more generally.  The analysis developed in these chapters permeates the rest of the treatise.  I have largely said my piece about how these chapters are to be read and about their role in Nagarjuna’s larger philosophical enterprise (Garfield 1990, 1994, 1995).  I will review that account only briefly here as a preliminary to some applications.  

I think that Nagarjuna is not only right about the fundamental importance of causality, and dependence more generally, to our understanding of reality and of human life but also that his own account of these matters is generally correct.  Given these two premises, it follows that our conduct of natural science as well as the pursuit of our moral life should be informed by Nagarjuna’s account of these matters.  Here I will develop some of those implications.  I caution, however, that my development, at least in the case of ethics is—though, as I will argue absolutely orthodox Madhyamaka—heterodox within at least one major living tradition in which Madhymaka is preserved and practiced—that of the dGelugspa school of Tibetan Buddhism.  As a consequence, we will have reason to question both certain substantive claims made within that tradition about the necessary conditions of the cultivation of bodhicitta and the doxographic strategy of the tradition.

My claims about the philosophy of science may be less controversial, but will nonetheless offend some.  And that (on both counts) is as it should be.  For the philosophy of science has been steadily maturing into a more Buddhist framework over the past few decades (even if most Western philosophers of science would not recognise that characterisation).  But there are residues of pre-Buddhist modernism in practice, and even those who opt for a more enlightened approach to these matters do not always see the big picture. 

I will first sketch Nagarjuna’s view.  The account will be straightforward, following my earlier discussions, and, I will not defend my reading any further here.  I will then turn to the implications of that view for the philosophy of science, arguing that Nagarjuna’s account of interdependence shows how we can clearly understand the nature of scientific explanation, the relationship between distinct levels of theoretical analysis in sciences (with particular attention to cognitive science) and how we can sidestep difficulties in understanding the relations between apparently competing ontologies induced by levels of description or explanation supervening on one another.  

Finally, I will examine rGyal tshab’s exposition of Dharmakırti’s account in the pramanasiddhi chapter of Pramanavartikka of the necessity of a belief in rebirth for the cultivation of bodhicitta.  This account is accepted in the dGe lugs tradition both as an accurate representation of Dharmakırti’s views and as authoritative regarding bodhicitta and the mah›karun› which is its necessary condition.  But, I will argue, Dharmakırti, rGyal tshab and their followers are, in virtue of accepting this argument, neglecting Nagarjuna’s’s account of dependent arising and in consequence are implicated in what might be seen from a proper prasangika-madhyamaka point of view as the very subtlest form of self-grasping.  We can use Nagarjuna’s account to extirpate this final self-grasping, thus freeing the morally central notion of bodhicitta from unnecessary and perhaps implausible metaphysical and cosmological baggage.  This also suggests some caution regarding a doxography which takes as axiomatic the consistency of Dharmakırti’s pram›nav›da and Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka.  We will conclude with a few observations on common lessons emerging from these applications of Nagarjuna’s insights in two such radically different domains. 

 

2.   The Emptiness of Causality

Nagarjuna is often erroneously understood as a nihilist with respect to causality and dependent arising.  On this misreading he is taken to argue that in fact there are no relationships of mutual dependence among phenomena, and even that no phenomena in fact exist.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Nagarjuna assiduously defends the co-relativity of emptiness and dependent arising, and insists that to say that all phenomena are empty just is to say that they are dependently arisen.

 

Whatever is dependently co-arisen

That is explained to be emptiness,

That, being a dependent designation,

Is itself the middle way.

 

Something that is not dependently arisen,

Such a thing does not exist.

Therefore a nonempty thing

Does not exist.  (XXIV:18-19)

 

Since nobody—particularly nobody who would offer a nihilistic reading of Nagarjuna with respect to the conventional world and pratitya-samutp›da—would seriously claim that Nagarjuna denies the emptiness of all phenomena, nobody who reads MÒlamadhyamakak›rik› through to the end could seriously defend the nihilistic reading.

Since one of the principal phenomena Nagarjuna analyses as empty is causation, it is not surprising that some read the first chapter of MÒlamadhyamakak›rik› as an attack on the reality of causation.  After all, in the very first verse he asserts

Neither from itself nor from another,

Nor from both,

Nor without a cause,

Does anything whatever, anywhere arise. (I:1)

But again, given a correct middle path reading Nagarjuna’s program, we can see immediately that such a reading must be erroneous. Nagarjuna’s strategy throughout MÒlamadhyamakak›rik› is to argue that phenomena we normally take to be inherently existent, to have convention-independent natures and to exist as they do precisely because of their natures are in fact empty of inherent existence, exist only conventionally and exist precisely because of their emptiness and interdependence.  To quote a favourite Tibetan prasangika-madhyamaka saw: We do not say that because things are empty they do not exist; we say that because things exist they are empty.  The converse, of course, is equally assertible.

Now, as I have argued before, in the case of causation, in chapter 1 of MÒlamadhyamakak›rik›, Nagarjuna proceeds by distinguishing hetu (rGyu) from pratyaya (kyen).  He uses the former term to denote the cause of the metaphysicians—an event capable of bringing another about in virtue of a power that is part of its nature.  The latter denotes an event or phenomenon whose occurrence or existence is correlated with that of another—a condition.

These give rise to those,

So these are called conditions.  (I:5a,b)

“When this arises, so does that.  When this ceases, so does that.”  Of course Nagarjuna identifies four kinds of conditions, in rough harmony with standard Buddhist taxonomies of causality (for more detail see Garfield 1995). Nagarjuna argues that the midpoint between reification of causation—the adoption of a realistic view with respect to causal powers—and nihilism—the view of a random and inexplicable universe of independent events—is the acceptance of the reality of conditions, and a regularist account of explanation.  On such a view, what counts as explanans and as explanandum depends on explanatory interests and upon conventions for individuation and classification.  Hume is often read (properly in my view) in roughly this way.  Such a view is hence far from a nihilism.  This is instead a moderate, sensible approach to explanation and to understanding. 

Nagarjuna’s reasons for rejecting causal powers anticipate the arguments of Hume and of Wittgenstein: Causal powers are never observed; causal powers, if sufficient for explanation can never inhere in isolated events or things, which always require cooperating conditions; causal powers cannot be explanatory on pain of regress (what would explain the arising of the powers, or their giving rise to effects?); positing causal powers imposes implausible uniformity on the explanatory landscape.  These arguments are by now familiar, if still controversial, and this analysis of the first chapter MÒlamadhyamakak›rik› is by now familiar, if still controversial.  I have defended these positions elsewhere, and merely recall them here in order to use them as a platform for extension.

Nagarjuna’s conventionalist regularism, when joined with his eclectic view about dimensions of explanation represented in the account of the four kinds of conditions (efficient, supporting, immediately preceding and dominant), gives rise to a reasonably straightforward analysis of explanatory and predictive language: We explain a phenomenon when we identify it as of a kind; when we connect occurrences of things of that kind with the occurrence of other related phenomena; when we connect the macroscopic and easily observable with the microscopic and harder-to-observe; when we place it within a network of events, purposes and connections that form patterns enabling rational action, prediction and cognitive access to the world.

The serious causal realist (really a reificationist in Nagarjuna’s sense can be expected to press against Nagarjuna the obvious question for any such regularist:[1]  What explains these regularities, if not genuine causal powers inhering in genuine causes?  After all, anyone who is even as realistic as Nagarjuna, and as committed to the enterprise of explanation as Nagarjuna must be committed to explaining why the explains appealed to in any explanation in fact explain, and in the end, why the world is regular at all.  Appeal to causes and their powers would do this; anything less leaves the entire structure mysterious.[2]

Nagarjuna’s reply in Chapter VII of MÒlamadhyamakak›rik› is straightforward: Each regularity, each pattern, each connection posited in any explanation must indeed be explicable.  That is the content of pratitya-samutp›da.  But each is explained by still further regularities, patterns, connexions.  Deeper understanding consists in the increasingly richer embedding of interdependence into larger, more articulated patterns of interdependence.  And there simply is no explanation of why the entire universe is interdependent.  There is no such well-defined totality to explain.

The arisen, the nonarisen, and that which is arising

Do not arise in any way at all.

Thus they should be understood

Just like the gone, the not-gone and the going.  (VII:14)

 

If another arising gives rise to this one,

There would be an infinite regress.  (VII:19ab)

 

That is the problem of the limits leading to the unanswerable questions.  Explanatory questions are always local.  Attempting transcendental explanations of the possibility of explanation is not only fruitless, it is meaningless: What could explain why explanation itself is possible?  Certainly not powers.  What would explain them or more deeply their explanatory potential, if not the patterns into which they are embedded?

We have then, in MÒlamadhyamakak›rik› articulated principally in chapters I and VII, but supported in a myriad of ways throughout the text—an account of explanation and causation that, like Hume’s, grounds ontology in the conventions that underlie our explanatory interests and the sortals we choose under which to collect entities, and not in a self-evident or self-presenting partition of nature into things, properties and relations.  This is, of course, an ancient view, developed and defended long before the rise of modern science.  For all of that, it provides a natural and compelling guide to the landscape of the world as captured by the scientific image.  Let us now turn to the important implications of this way of seeing things for contemporary science. 

 

3.   A Madhyamaka View of Scientific Explanation and Ontology

If we survey the world as it is understood in contemporary science, and contemporary science as it develops in order to understand the world, we are immediately struck by the fact that whichever way we come at the enterprise—whether from the standpoint of theory or from that of the object(s) of theory—multiple levels of explanation or of ontology present themselves.  Economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, ecology, cell biology, physiology, chemistry, fluid dynamics, macrophysics, quantum theory each proceed and indeed progress.  Each develops a proprietary vocabulary, methodology, explanatory strategy and ontology.  We have become accustomed—or at least we had better become accustomed—not only to the peaceful coexistence of departments of each of these disciplines in our science faculties, but also to the peaceful coexistence of the phenomena they posit at their various levels of description and explanation: Not only do departments of economics and of theoretical physics both exist, but exchange rates and neutrinos both exist as well. 

This multiplicity of kinds of theories and of things sets much of the agenda for contemporary philosophy of science and metaphysics.  For as soon as a categorial multiplicity is countenanced, there is an imperative either to reduce or to systematise it.  Is the multiplicity real, or only apparent? Is one level fundamental?   Are the relations between the levels uniform? Ordered? What determines a level? And so on.

Ontology and methodology become even more vexed when a single phenomenon appears to be explicable on multiple, prima facie orthogonal axes of explanation:  Is a movement of my arm to be explained by appeal to muscle contractions, neuromuscular synaptic events, and a neurophysiological story; is it to be explained by reference to my beliefs and desires; by reference to the cultural practices of my fellows; or by reference to the need to greet a friend?  If one level is to be privileged, which one and why?  But if multiple levels, how can such mutually independent, individually complete accounts of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the same object be equally acceptable?

Now, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science knows, debates about these issues quickly become baroque.  But we can cut through the Gordian knot if we slice at the right angle, and here is where Nagarjuna’sanalysis helps us:  For all of these questions and puzzles can be sorted into two closely related, but nonetheless distinct classes: the ontological and the methodological.  The first ask to which entities and properties we ought to commit ourselves.  The second ask how we should understand the relationship between theories and explanations pitched at distinct levels of analysis.

A Madhyamaka answer to questions of the first kind is a straightforward catholic realism:  Accept the deficits of economics, the kinship relations of anthropology, the classes of sociology, the beliefs of psychology, the molecules of chemistry, the niches of ecology and the quarks of physics.  Nagarjuna’s version of the Quinean dictum is that to be is the be the value of a bound variable is simply, “to exist is to exist conventionally, dependently.”  The relevant conventions here are those of scientific theory, and the relevant dependencies are given by the laws discovered by science.  From this perspective there is motivation neither to disparage the “high” level phenomena of the social or biological sciences in favour of an ontological primacy accorded to the “low” level phenomena of the physical science (see Churchland 1978) nor to disparage the “unobservables” of the latter in favour of the manifest entities of the latter (van Fraassen 1980). 

For our purposes, it is important to see that this ontological generosity emerges precisely from Nagarjuna’s analysis of causality and explanation.  It is best to come at this through a via negativa, or as I should say in the present context, a prasanga: The urge to privilege one level over another always emerges in science and in the philosophy of science from a view about where genuine causation is to be found: We might, following Churchland (1978), argue that because genuine causation is physical causation, in virtue of real causal power inhering in subatomic particles only the physical is really real, and all phenomena described at higher levels are real only to the extent that they are reducible to the physical.  Or, following Van Fraassen (op. cit.), we might reject the unobservable because real causal laws connect observables.[3]  In either case, we justify an ontological distinction based upon a claim about where causal powers are to be located, and this because the only genuine explanations, explananda, and explanans are those adverting to, deriving from, and possessing, respectively, causal powers.  But once we free ourselves from the thrall of this image of explanation and its ground, the motivation for these distinctions crumbles.  Then we can pay attention to pratitya-samutp›da—to interdependence, and its multiple, multidimensional, inter- and intra-level character, and let a thousand entities bloom, requiring of that it genuinely toil and spin, accomplishing some real explanatory work.[4]

Maintaining our focus on this notion of “explanatory work,” as the bulwark against ontological profligacy we can return to dispose quickly of the second class of puzzles noted above—those regarding not levels of ontology but levels of theory.  Where competing explanations are offered, or where competing science vie as candidates to explain particular phenomena, which—other things being equal—should claim our theoretical allegiance?  Of course if we seriously believed in the cement of the universe, the answer to this question would be easy: the theory or the science founded in that very cement.  The rest would then properly be regarded as pretenders or “what to do until the real science comes alone.”  But if all that explanation tracks is regularity and the increasingly rich embedding of regularity as Nagarjunawould have it, the answer to the query is equally simple: If other things are really equal, take ‘em all.  Again, this does not mean that we should accept just any conjecture or explanation, together with the ontology it implicates.  All of the standard desiderata of good theories apply—economy, elegance, predictive power, confirmation, coherence with other theories, etc…  The point is rather that these desiderata are all that matter.  And that is because beyond pratitya-samutp›da there are no occult causal powers lurking as the unique and genuine targets of our theoretical activity.

These issues are particularly sharp in cognitive science, where naturalistic, intentional explanations vie with eliminative and cognitive neuroscience, nonlinear dynamic theory, computational models, etc…  Now many of these debates are straightforwardly empirical debates about how best to understand a particular cognitive phenomenon, and about whether a particular theory is, on its own terms, successful.  Neither Nagarjunanor any other philosopher of science has anything to contribute to these debates.  This is as it should be.  These are all issues to be settled in the laboratory.

But some (e.g. Churchland op. cit., Fodor op. cit. among many others) would resolve these debates on a priori  grounds, arguing that because, eg naturalistically individuated states can’t have causal powers, they can’t explain anything, aren’t real psychological states, and so psychology must be individualistic; or that causation in the mind is ultimately a neural phenomenon and so that no phenomena other than those described in the language of neuroscience are psychologically real, and hence that only neuropsychology is possible.  Others (Burge 1979) argue that since all psychological phenomena are intentional, and since it is under intentional descriptions that they are causally active, psychological phenomena can only be individuated and explained naturalistically.  To all of these, Nagarjuna’s analysis of pratitya-samutp›da should lead us to answer, using a Sanskrit technical term from pram›na theory, “fiddlesticks.”

As many philosophers of cognitive science (Garfield 1988, Hardcastle 199x, von Eckardt 199x) have persuasively argued, many empirical domains comprise phenomena whose explanation must proceed simultaneously at distinct levels of description, using theories and vocabularies that are, while mutually consistent, methodologically orthogonal to one another.  Such theories may be mutually irreducible, and their vocabularies often comprise terms indefinable in terms of theories at distinct levels.  The only relations between such theories might be those of global supervenience.  None of this, however, requires anything but robust realism regarding each level, and regarding the entities posited by each theory.  Only a dogmatic ideology regarding the unity of science could lead one to any different conclusion.[5] Nagarjunawould smile.

4. Bodhicitta and Rebirth: A Heterodox Madhyamaka View

 So much for the profane.  Now we will turn our gaze back to Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology proper.  We will find that even in that domain the full import of Nagarjuna’s views has not always been appreciated.  I will argue in fact that a claim about the preconditions for  the cultivation of bodhicitta—the most ethically and soteriologically significant motivational state in Mah›y›na Buddhist ethics—that is taken as well-established in the dGe lugs pa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, is in fact inconsistent with Nagarjuna’s account of dependent arising, involves a subtle form of self-grasping, and so, by the lights of the tradition itself, should be rejected.  That claim is this:  That the cultivation of bodhicitta—the altruistic aspiration for buddhahood for the sake of the liberation of all sentient beings from samsara—requires the belief in rebirth. 

There is a hermeneutic fallacy in Western philosophy I call “Farabi’s fallacy” after its most spectacular exponent.  It goes roughly like this: X was a really smart philosopher.  Y was a really smart philosopher.  Two such smart guys were undoubtedly both right.  So, even though it might look like their views aren’t consistent, they must be, and the task of a successful philosophical hermeneutics is to weld them together.  Farabi tried it for Plato and Aristotle.  Aquinas, inspired by that noble failure, tried it for God and Aristotle.  In the Tibetan tradition the gold medal for Farabi’s fallacy undoubtedly goes to the founder of the dGe lugs school, rJe Tsong Khapa, who at some point said, “Nagarjuna—what a smart guy! Dharmakırti—what a smart guy!  So, despite the fact that sunyav›da and pram›nav›da might look like two v›das diverging in a yellow wood, they must be consistent.”  Tsong Khapa (unlike Frost) devoted much of the rest of his philosophical life to the task of demonstrating and working out the consequences of their consistency, trying to take both roads simultaneously.  Now, I have enormous admiration for Tsong Khapa as a philosopher, and he is arguably the titan of the Tibetan philosophical tradition.  But in this respect I find his influence less than salutary. 

The locus classicus  for the dGe lugs argument for the conclusion that belief in rebirth is a necessary condition of the cultivation of bodhicitta is Tsong Khapa’s student rGyal tshab’s commentary on the pram›nasiddhi chapter of Dharmakırti’s Pram›nav›rtikka.  On reading this chapter one might well wonder why immediately after a discussion of bodhicitta Dharmakırti sets out to prove the existence of past and future lives. rGyal tshab’s commentary on this passage explains this juxtaposition by setting up a materialist argument against the establishment of rebirth and argues that such a view is inconsistent with the cultivation of bodhicitta.  The argument is interesting from our point of view not only because it is spectacularly bad, but also because its error consists precisely in its failure to appreciate the import of Nagarjuna’s account of causality and its implications for the selflessness of the person.  As a consequence we shall see Dharmakırti and rGyal tshab caught up in what I think of as the subtlest form of self-grasping a Buddhist could imagine, but a self-grasping nonetheless.

 

[252.2] When the one endowed with great compassion became a sage, that required precursors: First, having developed a compassionate desire to free beings from all their sufferings, it was necessary for him to familiarise himself with a method for thoroughly pacify the suffering in order become a teacher.

With respect to great compassion: It is neither arisen causelessly nor from irrelevant causes.  It arises from previous familiarity of things of the same kind.  Great compassion itself is what establishes one on the beginning of the practice of the Mahayana path.

[252.11]”It isn’t accomplished through familiarity with various kinds of compassion, and it doesn’t come from prior births,  That is because since the conceptual mind depends on the body, if the body is destroyed, the mind will be destroyed as well,  For example, just as light comes from a lamp, it [mind]is the effect of a body, just as the ability to get drunk from beer is a characteristic of the body; just as a picture depends on the wall; through its very nature, it [mind] depends on it[body].”

[252.18] With respect to the conceptual mind: This body is neither its cause nor its supporting condition, and therefore the mind does not depend on it.  This is because since that that[the body] is the basis [of the mind] can be refuted through reasoning, it will be rejected.  Moreover, from giving reasons for the non-existence of past and future lives [253] it would follow that familiarity with the arising of the various compassions would not be appropriate,  Since this is not the case, through refutational reasoning this will be rejected.  Therefore, since through good reasoning past and future lives are established, it follows from this—and on the fruit to be discussed below—that it is clearly established that one can obtain a favourable rebirth in a future life.  Having proven this, and thus having established the Four Noble Truths, in that way on proves the excellent consequences of abandonment, of causes and effects, upon which beings of the three capacities should meditate in common.  Thus [the practitioner] adorned with constantly increasing boundless compassion, through having achieved a complete realisation of the Four Noble Truths establishes the way to achieving omniscience. 

[253.17] With past and future lives having been well established

And with their absence having been refuted

               Self is refuted and on that basis evil is abandoned.

 

The argument in outline runs like this:  Great compassion (mah›karun›--the highest level of compassion achieved by the bodhisattva, characterised as compassion regarding sentient beings as empty of inherent existence) is essential to the enlightenment of a bodhisattva.  It is also hard to achieve, requiring many rebirths in which one accumulates its causes, and in which one becomes familiar with compassion and with the view that underlies it.  Now, bodhicitta is the altruistic aspiration to gain enlightenment for the sake of other sentient beings, and a fortiori the aspiration to achieve this level of compassion,  But that is only possible given many rebirths,  So one cannot coherently develop this aspiration if one does not believe in the requisite rebirths.  So even to develop bodhicitta one must believe in rebirth.  This is the argument on which I want to focus, and note that it is independent of the preceding argument specifically for the existence of rebirth.

Think about the bodhisattva resolution in any of its standard formulations: I will attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings; or Santideva’s more poetic:

For as long as space remains;

For as long as transmigrators remain;

So long will I myself remain, and thereby

I will relieve all transmigrators’ suffering.[10:55]

 

But who, or what, is this ‘I’?  And what is its role in the expression of bodhicitta, particularly in the context of a Buddhist doctrine of anatman?  Now of course it is not intended to be a substantial self of the kind that all madhyamikas reject.  And we don’t want simply to dismiss these formulae as confused or nonsensical as a nihilist about the self might.  But just noting that it is the Madhyamaka’s familiar conventionally real but ultimately nonexistent “mere I” will also be too facile.  For the argument we have just surveyed for the connection between belief in rebirth and the cultivation of bodhicitta hinges directly on the need to posit this ‘I’ in past present and future lives as the basis of the causal continuum linking the extraordinarily many causes of buddhahood and the effect.  It is hence doing real metaphysical work, well above and beyond what any “mere,” nominally posited ‘I’ could ever do: It is functioning as the basis for a real causal relation.  If it were not needed for this, there would be no bar to a far simpler account of the aspiration for the liberation of all sentient beings (the one I will shortly defend) according to which the relevant aspiration is just that someone will attain Buddhahood, and that lots of people will have to do lots of stuff to make that possible.  Those causes will co-operate over time to enable the requisite enlightenment, and the practitioner resolves to contribute to that accumulation of causes.  The fact that this option is not even considered by Dharmakırti or rGyal tshab suggests that another view of the relevant causal process is at work.  Let us explore this in more detail. 

rGyal tshab, following Dharmakırti, takes himself to be responding directly to a materialist opponent who denies the reality of rebirth, arguing that

“It isn’t accomplished through familiarity with various kinds of compassion, and it doesn’t come from prior births.  That is because since the conceptual mind depends on the body, if the body is destroyed, the mind will be destroyed as well.  For example, just as light comes from a lamp, it [mind] is the effect of a body, just as the ability to get drunk from beer is a characteristic of the body; just as a picture depends on the wall; through its very nature, it [mind] depends on it[body].

rGyal tshab argues that there must be rebirth precisely because “[compassion] arises from previous familiarity of things of the same kind” and that “from giving reasons for the non-existence of past and future lives it would follow that familiarity with the arising of the various compassions would not be appropriate.”  On the other had, if, and only if, there is rebirth, he asserts that “adorned with constantly increasing boundless compassion, through having achieved a complete realisation of the Four Noble Truths [the practitioner] establishes the way to achieving omniscience…” That is, it is only personal rebirth—here defined explicitly in terms of a single mental continuum independent of the body—that for rGyal tshab (and Dharmakırti) and the subsequent dGe lugs pa tradition makes buddhahood possible, and so only belief in this possibility could ground bodhicitta—the resolution to achieve buddhahood for the sake of sentient beings.

Note that this implicates two specific theses: one regarding causality and one regarding the content of compassion.  Both, I will argue, are misguided from a Madhyamaka perspective.  The first, especially, is inconsistent with Nagarjuna’s own account of causality.  The second is implicated by it and is inconsistent with the doctrine of anatman.

A central claim in rGyal tshab’s argument is that without rebirth there cannot be any causal connection between the accumulating causes of bodhicitta and mahakaruna (accumulation of merit and wisdom and familiarisation with compassion and its objects) and the crucial effect.  That is why rGyal tshab can say that “from giving reasons for the non-existence of past and future lives it would follow that familiarity with the arising of the various compassions would not be appropriate.”  And that is why he can say that the fact that there are past and future lives enables “the excellent consequences of abandonment, of causes and effects, [and]…constantly increasing boundless compassion, through having achieved a complete realisation of the Four Noble Truths establish[ing] the way to achieving omniscience.”

But why should rebirth be necessary to mediate this causal link?  We [where “we” includes both Dharmakırti and rGyal tshab] are quite familiar with causal chains in which important causes are present in one group of entities and the effect in others (a tinderbox and flint give rise to a fire that burns in a candle and is used to light a lamp; a teacher’s words together with the text in a book give rise to understanding in the mind of a student, etc).  And this last provides a plausible alternative model for the accumulation of causes of mah›karun›, bodhicitta and omniscience: The acts, insights, writings and discoveries of one individual make possible deeper insights, more profound realisations and more informative writings on the part of another.  Knowledge and compassion deepen over the generations, and after a time, some individual attains buddhahood as a consequence of the accumulation of causes by others.  Call this the transpersonal model of attainment, as opposed to the intrapersonal model embraced by the dGe lugs pa tradition, following Dharmakırti and rGyal tshab.

The questions we must ask then, are these: (1) Why does rGyal tshab embrace the intrapersonal rather than the transpersonal model?  (2) Is his doing so consistent with Nagarjuna’s account of causation?  I think that the answer to the first is obvious, and this is confirmed by the oral tradition:[6]  Only an interpersonal continuum could mediate the connexions between the relevant causes and effects.  Remove this premise and the argument loses all plausibility.  After all, given that it is reasonable to believe that buddhahood is difficult to achieve, one could argue convincingly that bodhicitta requires a belief in the past and the future, but not in one’s own past and future lives, unless one thought that the relevant causal chain could only be intrapersonal.  But why would rGyal tshab believe that? Well the only reason I can come up with is that he thinks that causation requires a substantial basis—something in which the causal powers inhere.  That basis, for rGyal tshab, would be the mental continuum or subtle consciousness that continues across rebirths. 

And that implausible view leads us to the next question:  Is that consistent with Nagarjuna’s account of causation, which rGyal tshab and the dGe lugs tradition also endorse?  No, of course not.  For N›g›rjuna, insisting on the emptiness of causation, insists precisely on the absence of the need for any causal powers or for any substantial basis for causal chains.  Causation is re-described in his Madhyamaka analysis as a matter of explanatorily useful regularities, and the notion of explanatory utility is further unpacked in terms of the embedding of regularities in further regularities.  None of this requires the genidentity of the objects participating in cause and effect.  Nor should it, as countless counterexamples show.  Here the C›rvaka opponent seems to get things just right:  “It isn’t accomplished through familiarity with various kinds of compassion, and it doesn’t come from prior births.  That is because since the conceptual mind depends on the body, if the body is destroyed, the mind will be destroyed as well.”  Or at least it could be like that. 

Moreover, returning to the second thesis central to rGyal tshab’s account—that concerning the content of compassion—it would be more in harmony with the Mahayana understanding of an›tman (also defended forcefully by Nagarjuna in MÒlamadhyamakak›rik›) to see it like that.  This brings us back to the status of the ‘I’ in verses like Santideva’s, and the real content of bodhicitta and the mahakaruna it comprises.  The aim and the motivation of bodhicitta is the alleviation of the suffering of all sentient beings.  That is beyond question.  It also comprises the view that only a buddha could accomplish that task, given its stupendous difficulty.  Moreover, bodhicitta is more than a mere wish that a buddha arise and that thereby sentient beings be released from suffering,  It is an altruistic aspiration to bring that about.  And the notion of “bringing about,” is, of course, ineliminably causal.  One can see then how if one thought about causality in terms of substantial supporting bases of causal chains one would then be led to believe that the only way one could bring about the arising of a buddha for the sake of other sentient beings is to set about becoming one oneself, and the only way one could rationally adopt that objective would be to believe in past and future lives and the rest follows. 

But once we have shed the reified view of causality Nagarjuna so forcefully criticises, this argument crumbles.  And once we accept something like the transmission of knowledge as an analogy for a transpersonal causal chain linking epistemic and moral causes with their soteriological effects we can see that the ‘I’ as a future tense subject in the Bodhisattva resolution is gratuitous.  I must develop an altruistic resolve to do something; that something—if we accept more Buddhist soteriological theory about the necessity of a buddha’s capabilities for the task at hand—might be to bring about enlightenment (or at least to contribute to bringing it about); but that enlightenment need not be mine.  And if it need not, there is no entailment at all between bodhicitta properly understood and rebirth. 

Nor should there be.  For now we can see that to confuse an altruistic impersonal aspiration for enlightenment for the sake of sentient beings with an aspiration for one’s own enlightenment—to confuse a conviction that there is a future for the sake of which one should work with the view that it is one’s own future—is a serious, though subtle form of ›tmanv›da or even ›tmangr›ha.  The reason is this: the ‘I’ that is posited here is posited not merely as a conventionally designated continuum, but as a substratum for a causal process,  My dGe lugs proponent at this point—accusing me of nihilism about the self—will protest that the ‘I’ so posited is a mere ‘I’(‘nga’ tsam) as opposed to a substantial self.  But simply to say that this is what’s going on doesn’t make it so.  Here’s the difference:  A mere ‘I’ doesn’t do any metaphysical work—it serves as a conventionally posited imputation with no convention-independent identity conditions, and no explanatory value.  Candrakırti (1989, 1994) as well as N›g›rjuna, and later Tsong Khapa (1984, 1988) make this point with great force.  But the ‘I’ posited here—the “I myself” (bdag ni) of Santideva; the one that is reborn for rGyal tshab—has work to do.  It explains causation, something which Nagarjuna is neither in need of explanation nor capable of being explained.  To posit such a substantial substrate and then to stake the meaning of one’s moral life on its continuation through time is to fall back from a view of emptiness into a barely disguised substantialism about the self.  Only by opting for a more impersonal bodhicitta, a more impersonally bodhisattva resolution can the Mahayana remain consistently Madhyamaka.

I have heard three further objections to this account from dGe lugs pa interlocutors,  Let me rehearse and respond to each quickly before turning to my conclusion. 

(1)  On your view, it doesn’t matter what I do in this life—whether I am Hitler or Mother Theresa, and this for two reasons,  (i)  If I am not going to exist in the future, I have no moral incentive to be good; after all, I will neither reap the benefits of morally good action nor suffer the consequences of morally bad actions.  (ii) Either kind of life might lead to benefits in the future, so there is no intrinsic reason to prefer a good life to a bad one.  The answer in each case in simple: To the first objection, if your only motivation for leading a good life is your own benefit in the future, your motivation is not that of a bodhisattva in the first place.  We are considering the necessary conditions of bodhicitta, after all, not of self-interest.  To the second, the reason for thinking that Mother Theresa’s life will be more likely to lead to universal moral improvement and enlightenment that Hitler’s is not intrinsic by anyone’s reckoning: it is causal (and though fallible, plausible).  We think that it is simply more likely that lives like here generate the relevant moral benefits than lives like his.  If we thought otherwise, altruism might require strange things of us.[7]

Others object that there are plenty of independent reasons to accept rebirth (Dharmakırti and rGyal tshab would agree).  Maybe so.  Maybe not.  It doesn’t matter, I say for present purposes.  My question is this: Do you need to believe in rebirth in order to generate bodhicitta?  Just as it is both true that there are nine planets and unnecessary to believe that in order to cultivate bodhicitta, it may be true that there is rebirth.  But even if it is, I have argued that it is unnecessary to believe that in order to cultivate bodhicitta.  It is only the entailment that is at issue between rGyal tshab and me at this point.[8]

Finally, some of my dGe lugs pa colleagues ask, if there is no rebirth, how does anyone get to the point of buddhahood, given its stupendous difficulty, or, indeed, to the point of generating bodhicitta, given its still impressive difficulty?  Here I give the same answer I would give to that regarding how Kant wrote the Critique, or Einstein discovered relativity:  By taking advantage of the accomplishments of those who go before.  (Note that this is also a very plausible and a very attractive way of understanding refuge in Buddhist practice.)  And that has been the burden of the foregoing argument. 

If I am right about this, the doctrine of rebirth is of considerably less importance to Buddhism–especially to Mah›y›na Buddhism than it is generally taken to be.  I take this as confirmation of my view.  That doctrine, after all, is an import from an ambient Hindu culture.  Buddhism jettisons a great deal of the central ideology of that culture, including, prominently, the ideal of ›tman; there is no reason to think that this part should survive, especially if it can be shown both to be inessential to the central moral theses definitive of the Mah›y›na and to be inconsistent with its central insights—those of an›tman and of the emptiness of causation.[9]

 

5. Conclusions

I have referred to these distinct sets of implications of Nagarjuna’s views on causation as those for the profane and those for the sacred.  But I could have easily have adopted a more traditional classification of consequences: those pertaining to the selflessness of phenomena and those pertaining to the selflessness of persons.  In each case, Nagarjuna draws our attention to the subtle and seductive reification that comes to us so naturally, and to the extent to which our thinking about causation is implicated in that reification.

It is almost impossible to resist the temptation to seek to go beyond the merely interdependent and to posit some hidden glue—some cement of the universe—that holds not only the external world but the self in place, and that ensures the regular transition from link to link.  “Surely,” we think, driven by our deepest cognitive instincts, “even if everything we encounter is merely interdependent, that interdependence itself must have some substantial basis.”  But that commitment, when seen from the opposite side of the Madhyamaka dialectic, becomes the more insidious “surely, even if everything we encounter is empty, that emptiness must be truly existent.”  And once we commit that fallacy, we are set on the royal road to nihilism about the world in which we lead our lives, and to untenable realism about the transcendent.  It then becomes impossible to make any sense at all of empirical reality or of its emptiness.  So, tempting as the glue view is, it merely traps us in an inescapable web of metaphysical illusion. 

Nagarjuna’s analysis is powerful not only because it dissolves the hidden glue we instinctively posit to give coherence to our world, but also because it demonstrates the pernicious consequences of positing that glue.  While a theory about causation—even a pre-reflective theory—might seem to be but a recherché corner of metaphysics and the philosophy of science, it in fact infects and determines our view of everything else—from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of mind to cosmology to ethics.  Getting clear about causality is indeed a prerequisite to getting clear about everything else,  it is true that a world without inner and outer glue disintegrates.  Nothing holds the self together; nothing holds causes to their effects.  Raw interdependence is all we encounter, and there is no hope of an explanation to end all explanations.  That is the manifestation in the philosophy of science and in the existential understanding of the nature of self of the abyss of emptiness into which Dßgen much later commands us to leap.  But that leap is a leap into emptiness, and not into nihilism:  Just as Dßgen reassures us that in facing interdependence in this way the self and all things are affirmed, we have seen that in facing the emptiness of interdependence while the inefficacious occult cement of the universe vanishes, the empirical world and the possibility of meaningful life therein are affirmed, its mere interdependence providing all the coherence one could coherently desire. 

 

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