Nagarjuna and John Calvin

John Calvin by the Renaissance painter Hans Holbein

After reading through Khenpo Rimpoche’s commentary on Nagarjuna last summer and writing a commentary on the commentary, I decided to engage with Nagarjuna somewhat more directly. Nagarjuna was a Buddhist monk who lived in India in the second or third centuries AD but surprisingly little else is known about his life. He wrote a body of work in Sanskirt, some of which is still available and others of which is only available in Chinese or Tibetan translation. Nagarjuna's work is second only to the Buddha’s in the development of Buddhist philosophy. He is known as the “Philosopher of Emptiness”, since he established emptiness as the foundational principle of the Mahayana. 

His primary work is the Mula-madhyamak-karikas (also known as the Karikas), or, in English, The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way. This work consists of 27 verses (actually, in English, short chapters) that are structured as a kind of dialog with opponents. In the text, an opponent brings up an objection to emptiness as the fundamental nature of reality and Nagarjuna counters with arguments. The chapters are difficult to read, kind of like a differential topology text, and after struggling with them for a while, I finally paged to the end of the book and read through an essay by Richard Jones, the Karikas translator.

One particular chapter stands out as the key to the entire work: Chapter 2. Chapter 2 is about Motion. I read through the chapter six or seven times and still didn’t quite get it. He seemed to be saying something akin to the Greek philosopher Zeno (about which more later) but then it didn’t quite seem to be the exactly same thing. I asked my Mahamudra teacher about the chapter but he said that when he was studying with Khenpo Rimpoche, Khenpo never taught anything about Chapter 2, and I don't recall it having been discussed in Khenpo's commentary either. Actually, that is not surprising because the chapter is not concerned with traditional religious topics, like suffering and rebirth, topics which would interest a Tibetan lama but is more something physicists would care about. 

The argument in the chapter on Motion illustrates Nagarjuna’s basic argument on emptiness and goes something like this. Suppose the world consisted of self-existent entities. A self-existent entity is one which has no cause, exists for all time, never changes, and cannot possibly have any influence on any other entity nor be influenced itself by any such entity. Given that, it would be impossible for a self-existent entity to move, because that would involve it changing in some fashion (now it is at place <x,y,z> and then it moves to place <x’,y’,z’>). Since in practice, we see movement all the time, self-existent entities cannot possibly exist. The rest of the Karikas go on to develop this argument in various forms against other objections to emptiness. 

Nagarajuna’s philosophy is that reality is empty of any self-existing entity. Any entities that we see are ephemeral, arising due to causes and conditions and disappearing when the causes and conditions for their disappearance arise. They do in some fashion represent whatever the underlying reality is, but the tendency to view reality as a collection of self-existent entities is the fundamental delusion, the root ignorance, that causes suffering. The process by which the mind generates suffering is dependent arising, the tendency to grasp onto objects or reject them (attraction or aversion) because we are attracted to or repelled by their attributes. But emptiness is not a view or thing, it is just simply the underlying condition of reality, just as space is the underlying condition of the universe. Enlightened individuals view reality as free of such self-existing entities, as more a collection of processes, causes and conditions arising and passing away. 

Zeno, the Greek philosopher, faced exactly the same dilemma when contemplating movement. How is it possible for a self-existing entity to move? His conclusion was exactly the opposite of Nagarjuna’s, that self-existing entities did exist but that movement is an illusion. Nagarjuna's position never gained much traction in Western philosophy whereas Zeno's position became the basis of all Western religions. The Judeo-Christo-Islamic position, for example, is that God is a self-existing entity. The Buddhist position is that the gods are as ephemeral as other creatures in samsara. The king of the gods (Brahma in the Indian religious tradition) who believes he is eternal suffers from a misperception because when he came into existence, there were no other gods or other entities and he had no memory of not existing.

The Christian notion of the soul is another example of a self-existing entity. Because the soul lives on for eternity, it can't possibly change. If it did change, it would be something else. Traditional Catholic doctrine teaches that redemption is possible by doing good works, participating in the sacraments of confession and communion, and other ways (receiving indulgences from the pope, etc.). But how could these acts ever affect something that is eternal, in fact, how could sin or redemption ever occur? Because a person is ephemeral and changing, there can't possibly be any interaction between the soul and the physical person.

Possibly this dilemma was what led John Calvin to his doctrine of predestination. Calvin's predestination (technically double predestination because it applies both to the saved and the damned) holds that God decided at the beginning of time whose soul would be saved and whose would be damned and nothing you can do in your life can have any effect on your soul's fate. Your soul remains untouched by anything your physical body does, as must necessarily be the case for a self-existent entity such as a soul. The contrast between Nagarjuna and Calvin couldn't be more striking. In Nagarjuna's philosophy, reality is fluid and changing, free of hindrance if we can change our perception to see the fluidity. In Calvin's, reality was fixed at the time of Creation and is completely impossible to change, like a computer program written by God when He booted up Creation and burned into an SSD.

Image source: wikipedia.com