Short Comment on Nagarjuna's "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way"

Well, strictly speaking, since I don't read or speak Tibetan, this is a comment on Khenpo Tsueltrim  Gyamtso's very fine commentary on Nagarjuna 's text, The Sun of Wisdom,  published by Shambhala in 2003. But to continue...

The whole point of Nagarjuna's text seems to be to negate the view that anything substantially exists or substantially doesn't exists, that is, the view that something exists "for real" or that nothing exists "for real". Khenpo Rimpoche claims there are three views corresponding to the three Turnings of the Wheel:

1. The view that there are substantially existent entities, like suffering, cause and effect, etc.
2. The view that there are no substantially existent entities,
3. The view that it is impossible to say from our experience whether there is or is not a substantially existing reality and that true reality transcends both existence and nonexistence.

The second stage corresponds to the Heart Sutra, the third to the Prasangika Madhymaka school. 

From reading Khenpo Rimpoche's commentary, it seems that Nagarajuna means the third view to be a cognitive strategy, that is a way of approaching the world that has specific benefits, rather than an ontological view, or a statement about what reality "really" is. He mentions that the Buddha used the first view as a way to encourage people to practice, the second view to discourage strong practitioners from becoming attached to the views of suffering and samsara as real, and the third view to discourage practitioners from becoming attached to emptiness as real. Becoming attached to suffering and samsara as real can lead practitioners to religious dogmatism. Becoming attached to them as unreal can lead to the "emptiness disease", where practitioners say "well, if it's all just empty, then it doesn't matter if I do X" where X is some word or act of a questionable ethical nature. In another text which I can't find a reference to at the moment, Nagarjuna likens being attached to emptiness as real to grabbing a snake by the tail: it will flip around and bite you. The Prasangika Madhymaka view espoused by Nagarjuna seems motivated by the Buddha's underlying teaching to "hold no fixed views". Several times, in the suttas, the Buddha states that this is an important cognitive strategy.

The text consists of 27 Chapters, plus opening and closing Homage. Each chapter refutes the reality and unreality of some important aspect of practice, like cause and effect, that one of the schools of  Buddhism at the time held to be substantially existent, then refutes the unreality of that, and asserts that since you can't logically prove either the reality or unreality of that thing, you need to assert its emptiness. Khenpo Rimpoche then says that "Y is like Y in a dream" where Y is whatever the chapter is refuting. Or, maybe another way of looking at it "Y is like Y in a computer simulation". In a computer simulation, Y has no reality outside of the computer simulation and therefore cannot possibly be substantially existent.

What I find puzzling, though, is the basic logical argument for proving that Y isn't substantially exisitent. Take, for example, cause and effect. It goes something like this:

• Effects can't arise from themselves because if they did, then there would be no arising, just the effect because the arising would never end,
• Effects don't arise from a cause different from themselves, because if they did, they would be able to arise from anything at all and not a specific cause,
• Effects don't arise from both a cause different than themselves and themselves because of the logical fallacy in the first two positions,
• Effects don't arise from nothing at all because then they would either always arise or never arise due to the effect being unrelated to the cause

This argument follows the basic underlying four valued Indian logic of "it can't be this, or that or both or neither".

The problem is, I've just spent a couple of years studying statistical causality off and on between other aspects of my day job and the second point, that effects don't  arise from a cause different than themselves, is patently flawed. It's possible to take a bunch of data, analyze it, and draw out a specific cause. When the effect is diabetes and the cause is obesity, then there are very specific and consequent results from altering the cause. There is a clear health benefit in reduced diabetes from reducing obesity. Sometimes in a statistical causality study there are confounding factors that are known and can change the results, often times reversing them from what the actual effect may be, but there are ways of controlling for confounding factors if you know they are there.

Now, I'd venture that statistical causality didn't exist in the 2nd century AD, approximately the time Nagarjuna lived, so one can hardly blame him. He used the best argument he knew given the general state of knowledge of the time. But I think there is an even more powerful argument for emptiness, and it lies in the nature of statistical causality itself.

The problem is it is impossible to predict, with 100% accuracy, anything. Any event, outcome, measurement, etc. is always subject to the potential for multiple possible results. Consider for example something as simple as throwing a ball up in the air. Physics 101 teaches that Newton's laws of motion apply, and that the ball reaches a height determined by its initial velocity, minus the reduction in velocity due to the pull of gravity. If you refine it a bit more, you can add air resistance, which of course varies depending on what altitude you are at. But there's more. What happens if it's a windy day? The ball won't go straight up in the air, it will curve, and the actual trajectory won't be predictable because it will depend on the wind speed and direction. And yet more. While it's not highly probable, what happens if there's an earthquake (something to consider if you live in California)? The surface of the earth will jerk around and the ball may hit the ground during the crest or trough of one of the seismic waves.

Khenpo Rimpoche sort of mentions this in the runup to the discussion of the four points of the argument above, in that a particular effect isn't the result of a single cause but the result of multiple causes. But not only that, which of these causes happens to occur around a particular instance of the effect is probabilistc, not deterministic. If there were some substantial reality, then effects would be completely predictable from their causes. That emptiness, itself, isn't real just follows from the observation that there is no underlying substrate to this kind of probabilistic structure of experienced reality.

For me, the lesson for everyday practice seems to be this. When you generalize from your experience and abstract that into some fixed set of rules, the actual experience gets left behind and becomes just a set of theoretical abstractions that, in the end, may or may not be matched the next time that set of conditions occurs. So keeping a more fluid view seems a cognitive strategy that is more likely to accommodate whatever the world happens to dish up at any particular moment.




Image courtesy of http://gadensamtenling.org/