Was Nagarjuna a Well Poisoner?

In today’s New York Times, Alexander George writes in the periodic philosophy column, The Stone, about well poisoners. The essay was specifically directed at the current occupant of the White House, and questioned whether his continued denigration of scientific facts as “lies” and his accusations that the mainstream media promotes “fake news” will end up poisoning the public discourse so that people finally are unable to discuss serious issues based on facts. He cites the case of the Dutch art forger van Meegeren who successfully forged paintings by Vermeer. Van Meegeren was able to do so by managing to convince a prominent Vermeer collector, whose collection was used as the yardstick against which to compare questionable works, that a forgery was an authentic Vermeer. While today it’s completely obvious that van Meegeren’s work looks nothing like Vermeer’s, that move allowed him to pass off his forgeries as authentic. 

George states that this move in philosophy is called “poisoning the well”, and that behind every philosophical skeptic is a well poisoner. He cites the case of Descartes, who, in his work Meditations on First Philosophy completely deconstructs your everyday experience to show that none of your beliefs about the everyday world can be trusted. Descartes does this by raising arguments about the trustworthiness of your senses, and raises the possibility that you are dreaming. According to George, Descartes pulls himself out of his tailspin to his satisfaction, but not to many philosophers’. This kind of move is called “well poisoning” because, like an enemy army trying to cut off the water supply to a village, it is more efficient to poison the well (convince you that you cannot trust what you experience) than to turn off the water at the individual houses (argue each case individually).

Though I’ve never read Meditations on First Philosophy, George’s descriptions of how Descartes argued sounded an awful lot like Nagarjuna’s arguments in the Karikas. So the question arose for me: was Nagarjuna a well poisoner, like Descartes?

Overall, I think not, but with respect to metaphysics, most certainly. What Nagarjuna does is poison the well for those who try to argue philosophically about ultimate reality and metaphysics. He firmly establishes that reality is empty of any ultimate and self-existing objects, and only consists of ephemeral cause and effect events, which he says are “like a dream”. Not that they are a dream, he just uses dreaming as a metaphor. Nagarjuna’s tactics are rather the opposite of a well poisoner, to argue each individual case. Precisely because he wants to completely deconstruct the notion of an ultimate reality with self-existing objects, he cannot base his arguments on any assumed, overarching philosophical framework or view. Even emptiness isn’t such a framework, Nagarjuna says that people who believe emptiness is a view are “incurable”. So we can only talk about reality from a conventional, cause and effect standpoint, not from an ultimate standpoint. Curiously enough, that’s the conclusion I came to (before I even knew a whole lot about Nagarjuna’s thinking) in my practice memoir, Silicon Valley Monk. That’s why I subtitled it: From Metaphysics to Reality on the Buddhist Path.

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Conventional Reality and Ultimate Reality

This post is another in a series of posts on Nagarjuna and emptiness that I've been spinning out of a study I've been doing on Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika since August (you can read other posts in the series here, here, and here). What I would like to talk about here is the "Two Truths" doctrine. Zen teachers talk occasionally about it and I have the impression that Tibetan teachers talk about it somewhat more. The idea behind the Two Truths is that reality consists of a collection of truths that are conventional in the sense of being about cause and effect in everyday life, and then ultimate truth which is about the way reality really is when you penetrate conventional reality through meditation coupled with philosophical analysis.

What the the ancient Indian philosophers who came up with the doctrine had in mind when they spoke of conventional truths were things like "if I plant this seed, a mango tree will grow and after a period of time will bear fruit". This is a clear instance of causality, namely seed -> tree -> fruit (at some point). Today, I think we could include such statements as "the intense gravitational field at the event horizon of a black hole causes the emission of virtual quantum particles when the quantum vacuum breaks down, generates a particle pair, and one particle is swallowed by the black hole while the other is emitted", a process sometimes called "Hawking radiation" because it causes black holes, previously thought not to radiate (which is why they were called "black"), to emit energy. While such statements have little or nothing to do with everyday life like mango seeds and trees (in India at least, we don't see many mango trees in Silicon Valley), they do represent a clear instance of cause and effect, and my impression is that conventional truths are basically about cause and effect.

What then is an ultimate truth? The Vedic philosophers who preceded the Buddha and continued via Brahmanism into Nagarjuna's time thought that an ultimate truth was something that would be true forever, that it was essentially immortal. And that objects that were ultimately real (hence part of ultimate reality) would have an existence from their own side, and not be dependent on causes and conditions to exist. The Vedic philosophers posited the existence of an ultimate self. The Abhidharmykas who followed the Buddha rejected the existence of an ultimate self, but posited that experience was composed of objects, called dharmas, that had ultimate existence, and that experience could be broken down into these objects, but no further. In addition, they believed that causality operated upon these objects, since they were the fundamental atoms of experience.

Nagarjuna, on the other hand, argued in the Karikas that the only statement you can make about ultimate reality is that all things are empty of any ultimate existence. His argument was based on a simple observation: if an object has ultimate existence, it can never change. Not only that, it can never interact with anything else. So the dharmas that Abhidharmykas posited couldn't possibly be subject to cause and effect and therefore either didn't exist or were subject to cause and effect and actually are part of conventional reality. Every time you try to pin down ultimate reality, you come back to emptiness: that reality is completely empty of any abiding characteristic and you cannot designate anything as ultimately real. When looking for ultimate reality, logic becomes slippery and it becomes impossible to make any statement at all about it. Chandrikirti, one of Nagarjuna's interpreters, complained about this, and many śūnyavādins (early Mayahanists who accepted emptiness as the nature of reality) were profoundly uncomfortable with the situation. 

So how does this look from 2000 years into the future?  Modern science has a different view of cause and effect than the ancient Indian philosophers. In Nagarjuna's time, cause and effect were a matter of one object somehow causing the appearance of or becoming another object. In the Karikas, Nagarjuna effectively demolishes the proposition that cause and effect can operate on ultimately real objects, establishing that the nature of reality is empty of any inherently existing objects. The modern view is that cause and effect is more a matter of events. For example, in his groundbreaking work Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Judah Pearl develops a calculus of causality grounded in Bayesian graphical network theory. The structure of the causal models he describes are all based on a graph of events with a probability on the arc between one event, the cause, and another, the effect, giving the probability that a particular cause will result in a particular effect. The probabilities are calculated using Bayes Theorem with data from observations of previous cause-effect transitions, or estimates based on models and later refined with data. Events are the stuff of experience, like the ancient dharmas, but, unlike the Abhidarmykas notion, they arise and pass away like the light of flickering fireflies on a summer night, or like the passing content of your Facebook feed, completely empty of any inherent existence. 



Image source:  angelsinnature.files.wordpress.com