The Root Stanzas of the Middle Way Read online

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  Buddha Shakyamuni

  Bodhisattva Manjushri

  Nagarjuna

  THE ROOT STANZAS OF THE MIDDLE WAY

  The Mulamadhyamakakarika

  Nagarjuna

  TRANSLATED FROM THE TIBETAN BY THE

  Padmakara Translation Group

  Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  4720 Walnut Street

  Boulder, Colorado 80301

  www.shambhala.com

  ©2008 by Editions Padmakara

  Previously published privately in a limited edition in France by Editions Padmakara (2008).

  Cover design: Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

  Cover art: Cover painting of Nagarjuna by Livia Liverani used courtesy of Tsadra Foundation.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Names: Nāgārjuna, active 2nd century, author. | Comitâe de traduction Padmakara, translator.

  Title: The Root Stanzas of the Middle Way: the Mulamadhyamakakārikā / Nagarjuna; Translated from the Tibetan by the Padmakara Translation Group.

  Other titles: Madhyamakakārikā. English

  Description: First Shambhala Edition. | Boulder: Shambhala, 2016. | “Previously published privately in a limited edition in France by Editions Padmakara (2008).”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015041715 | eISBN: 978-1-9220-5998-7 | ISBN 9781611803426 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH : Mādhyamika (Buddhism)—Early works to 1800. | BISAC: RELIGION / Buddhism / Sacred Writings. | PHILOSOPHY / Buddhist.

  Classification: LCC BQ 2792.E5 P33 2016 | DDC 294.3/85—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041715

  The Padmakara Translation Group gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Tsadra Foundation in sponsoring the translation and preparation of this book.

  Contents

  Translators’ Preface

  The Root Stanzas of the Middle Way

  Homage

  1. An Examination of Conditions

  2. An Examination of Motion

  3. An Examination of the Sense Powers

  4. An Examination of the Aggregates

  5. An Examination of the Elements

  6. An Examination of Desire and the Desirous

  7. An Examination of Arising, Abiding, and Decay

  8. An Examination of Agent and Action

  9. An Examination of the Foregoing Entity

  10. An Examination of Fire and Fuel

  11. An Examination of Earlier and Later Limits

  12. An Examination of Self-Production and Other-Production

  13. An Examination of Compounded Things

  14. An Examination of Contact

  15. An Examination of Intrinsic Being

  16. An Examination of Bondage and Release from Bondage

  17. An Examination of Action

  18. An Examination of the Self and Phenomena

  19. An Examination of Time

  20. An Examination of the Confluence of Causes and Conditions

  21. An Examination of Arising and Destruction

  22. An Examination of the Tathagata

  23. An Examination of Mistakes

  24. An Examination of the Truths of the Aryas

  25. An Examination of Nirvana

  26. An Examination of the Twelve Links of Existence

  27. An Examination of Views

  Concluding Homage

  Colophon

  The Tibetan Text

  Notes

  Bibliography

  E-mail Sign-Up

  Translators’ Preface

  Of Nagarjuna’s life, we know almost nothing. He is said to have been born into a Brahmin family in the south of India around the beginning of the second century CE. He became a monk and a teacher of high renown and exerted a profound and pervasive influence on the evolution of the Buddhist tradition in India and beyond. Much of his life seems to have been spent at Sriparvata in the southern province of Andhra Pradesh, at a monastery built for him by king Gotamiputra, for whom he composed the Suhrllekha, his celebrated Letter to a Friend.

  Nagarjuna is intimately associated with the Prajnaparamita sutras, the teachings on the Perfection of Wisdom, the earliest-known examples of which seem to have appeared in written form around the first century BC, thus coinciding with the emergence of Mahayana, the Buddhism of the Great Vehicle.

  It is recorded in the Pali Canon that the Buddha foretold the disappearance of some of his most profound teachings. They would be misunderstood and neglected, and would fall into oblivion. “In this way,” he said, “those discourses spoken by the Tathāgata that are deep, deep in meaning, supramundane, dealing with emptiness, will disappear.”1 There is no knowing whether on that occasion he was referring to the Perfection of Wisdom, but it is certain that the earliest exponents of the Mahayana believed that, with the Prajnaparamita scriptures, they were recovering a profound and long-lost doctrine. Nagarjuna seems to have been deeply implicated in this rediscovery. Questions of historicity aside, the story that he brought back seven volumes of the Prajnaparamita sutras from the subterranean realm of the nagas, where they had been preserved, conveys a clear message. In the eyes of Nagarjuna’s contemporaries and of later generations, the appearance of the Prajnaparamita sutras marked a new beginning in the history of Buddhism, and yet the teachings they contained were not innovations. And in their interpretation and propagation, Nagarjuna played a crucial role.

  Tibetan scholarship has organized Nagarjuna’s literary output into three collections. The first of these, the so-called Yukti-corpus (Tib. rigs tshogs) contains six scholastic texts expounding the Madhyamaka view and related topics: the Mulamadhyamakakarika (The Root Stanzas on the Middle Way), the Yuktishashtika (The Sixty Stanzas on Reasoning), the Shunyata-saptati (The Seventy Stanzas on Emptiness), the Vigrahavyavartani (Answers to Objections), the Vaidalya-sutra (The Finely Woven Sutra), and the Ratnavali (The Jeweled Necklace) or the no longer extant Vyavaharasiddhi (The Proof of Conventionalities).2 The second collection is the Stava-corpus (Tib. bstod tshogs) comprising prayers and hymns, while the third is the Parikatha-corpus (Tib. gtam tshogs), which contains letters and other discourses.

  It is impossible here to give anything approaching an adequate description or analysis of the Mulamadhyamakakarika. Yet as a brief indicator of its importance, we may say that, together with Nagarjuna’s other philosophical writings, it was the first-known attempt to distill the voluminous contents of the Prajnaparamita scriptures into a systematic scholastic form. As such it lies at the origin of the Madhyamaka school, which flourished in India from the second century CE until the disappearance of Buddhism from the subcontinent in the twelfth: a thousand years during which the tradition was upheld by a series of outstanding teachers and commentators—of whom Aryadeva, Buddhapalita, Bhavaviveka, Chandrakirti, Shantideva, Shantarakshita, Kamalashila, and Atisha were only the most notable. Shantarakshita and Kamalashila introduced the Madhyamaka teachings to Tibet, where they have formed an essential cornerstone of Buddhist study and practice until the present day.

  The Mulamadhyamakakarika is an extremely demanding text. It is filled with subtle reasoning on abstruse themes. Without the help of the commentarial tradition as well as a keen and tenacious commitment on the part of the student, it is practically incomprehensible. As one tries to negotiate the labyrinthine arguments, however, it may be u
seful to bear the following four points in mind. The first is that, however tortuous and rarefied the karikas may seem, it is worth remembering that Madhyamaka is not a mystical doctrine concerned with strange and otherworldly revelations. Neither is it a philosophical explanation of Reality, if by that is meant some remote transcendental absolute. The purpose of Madhyamaka is simply to elucidate the nature of phenomena: the things and situations that make up the world of our experience.

  The second point is that Madhyamaka is not a species of philosophical nihilism. Although phenomena are said to be empty, their functional effectiveness on the experiential level is not at all called into question. Phenomena appear and they do affect us regardless of the theories that we may entertain about them. The view of Madhyamaka, on the other hand, is that within phenomena, two truths, the relative and ultimate, fuse together and are united. Relatively, things appear through the force of causes and conditions. Yet, in the very moment of their appearance, they are empty of intrinsic being: the seemingly solid, discrete, independent “thingness” that, owing to our long-ingrained tendency to perceive them thus, appears to us so vividly.

  The third point is that—like all Buddhist teachings—Madhyamaka has one essential goal: the liberation of beings. Its aim is to correct our mistaken apprehension of phenomena and to dissolve our long-ingrained belief that they exist in the way that they appear. For things and situations seem intrinsically desirable or intrinsically repulsive, and it is through our “clinging” to them as real that we indulge in deluded actions marked by craving or aversion. We thus contrive our existence, for good or ill, and wander helplessly from one unsatisfactory state to another—indeed from one life to another—in the condition we call samsara. On the other hand, it is by understanding the true nature of phenomena that we can free ourselves from the tyrannical hold that they have on us.

  The union of appearance and emptiness occurring in phenomena is, to use Nagarjuna’s term, the madhyama-pratipad, the middle way. In the earlier Buddhist tradition, this expression had been used in an ethical sense to refer to the spirit of disciplined moderation, between sensual indulgence and excessive austerity, that is the mark of a pure and holy life. In this context, however, “middle way” means that the truth of phenomena is to be found in none of the four “ontological extremes”: existence, nonexistence, both existence and nonexistence, and neither existence nor nonexistence. Briefly, to say that the true status of phenomena lies in none of these four alternatives is the same as saying that it is inconceivable and indescribable. It lies beyond the reach of thought and word. But if language and, by extension, reasoning are in themselves unable to deliver the actual truth, they nevertheless have a crucial, if indirect, role to play. As Chandrakirti said, when we drink, we need a cup to bring the water to our lips. But we do not drink the cup; we drink the water. Although words and logic are unable to capture the nature of phenomena, they may nevertheless carry us to the threshold of the truth by exposing the incoherence of our mistaken ideas. Therefore, the fourth point to bear in mind is that in the karikas, Nagarjuna does not attempt the impossible; he does not describe the nature of phenomena. He expresses no thesis of his own and does not supply us with yet another theory about the universe. Instead, in order to encourage, and perhaps trigger, a more profound insight, he systematically destroys any idea contrived by human intelligence to account for phenomena—any theory that serves to confirm our mistaken apprehension that they truly exist.

  The structure of the Mulamadhyamakakarika is interesting and significant. The sequence of chapters, which at first sight looks like a haphazard collection of unrelated topics, in fact reveals an essential feature of Madhyamaka dialectical procedure. The first two chapters belong together in that they both discuss the problem of change: the causal process (change occurring within the very constitution of things) and motion (change occurring in things in relation to their outer environment). Thus the karikas open, in the traditional manner, with an examination of causation and lay waste to the conventional understanding of cause and effect:3 the naive view that real things emerge from the coming together of equally real conditions. This sets the tone for the entire work, which turns around the fundamental axiom that dependent origination is the equivalent of emptiness: the absence of intrinsic being in things as they appear. If phenomena are a tissue of interdependent relations, they cannot be the clear-cut, isolated, really existing entities that they seem to be.

  The second chapter shows that the conventional assumptions about movement are simplistic and contradictory. Its special importance, however, lies in the fact that, in its examination of the location and attribution of motion, it lays out the kind of argument that will be used repeatedly in the sequel for the discussion of other categories. For example, the question whether a body in movement is itself a moving thing or a motionless object to which motion has been added—specious and sophistical as the arguments may at first seem—is not trivial, for it concerns the fundamental problem of the relation between putatively real things and their properties. It is a question that reappears in various guises as the text unfolds.

  Each of the remaining chapters is devoted to the refutation of a new category, the choice of which is apparently prompted by a possible objection raised in support of the abhidharmika category that has just been refuted.4 For example, having withstood the first salvos of Nagarjuna’s dialectical ordnance, an opponent could protest, whatever logic may say, the reality of movement is proved by the simple fact that we experience it with our senses. In reply, instead of contradicting this proposition, Nagarjuna simply demolishes the evidence that had been adduced in its defense: the sense powers are themselves shown to be unreal. And so on. The Mulamadhyamakakarika therefore plots a meandering course as Nagarjuna relentlessly obliterates the successive positions of his hapless victim: the advocate of real existence. He thus demolishes a whole series of categories—whether characteristically Buddhist or else the common property of Indian philosophy—beginning with the most basic and coming by gradual degrees to the most sacrosanct notions of Buddhist doctrine: the Tathagata, the four noble truths, nirvana, and so on. All are shown to be empty of real existence. And in reply to the objection that the doctrine of emptiness, so understood, is the destruction of the Dharma itself, Nagarjuna replies that, on the contrary, it is only by virtue of emptiness that the Dharma is intelligible and that the pursuit of the spiritual path and the gaining of its fruit are possible.

  This translation of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika was prepared, at the request of Taklung Tsetrul Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, as an offering to mark the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to France in August 2008 and as a support for some of the teachings scheduled for that occasion.

  The Mulamadhyamakakarika is one of the relatively few works of Indian Buddhism that has survived in the original Sanskrit. Our translation, however, has been made from the Tibetan version of the eighth-century translator Chokro Lui Gyaltsen as revised and amended by Patsap Nyima Drak. Since, like all traditional Buddhist root texts, Nagarjuna’s karikas presuppose the accompaniment of a commentary, we have followed the one composed by Jamgön Mipham Rinpoche (1846–1912), thus appealing to a living tradition that stretches back unbroken to the Tibetan translators and through their Sanskrit mentors to Nagarjuna himself. We have followed Mipham’s interpretation on all occasions but have consulted the translations already made by Western scholars and that have been listed in the bibliography. We gratefully acknowledge the help they have given us. In addition, the brief commentary The Sun of Wisdom, by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, proved particularly helpful. For the understanding of several passages in the karikas we had recourse to the Prasannapada of Chandrakirti himself. We gratefully took advantage of the lucid explanations provided in Mervyn Sprung’s translation of that difficult text.

  This translation was prepared by Helena Blankleder and Wulstan Fletcher of the Padmakara Translation Group. We are indebted to Khenchen Pema Sherab and Khenpo Shedrub Gyaltsen for their precious assist
ance.

  THE ROOT STANZAS OF THE MIDDLE WAY CALLED SUPREME WISDOM

  Prajna nama mulamadhyamakakarika dBu ma rtsa ba’i tshig le’ur byas pa shes rab ces bya ba

  Homage to the Three Jewels!

  Homage to noble Manjushri, ever youthful!

  Homage to the noble master Nagarjuna!

  To him who taught that things arise dependently,

  Not ceasing, not arising,

  Not annihilated nor yet permanent,

  Not coming, not departing,

  Not different, not the same:

  The stilling of all thought, and perfect peace:

  To him, the best of teachers, perfect Buddha,

  I bow down.

  1

  An Examination of Conditions

  Not from itself and not from something else,

  Not from both and not without a cause,

  Does any thing whatever,

  Anywhere, at any time, arise.

  2

  There are four conditions:

  The “causal” and the “object,”

  The “immediately preceding” and the “dominant.”

  There is no fifth condition.

  3

  The intrinsic being of phenomena

  Lies not in these conditions or in any others.

  When the thing itself has no existence,

  The “other” [its conditions] also lacks existence.

  4

  There is no activity that has conditions

  And without conditions, there is no activity.

  That which lacks activity is no condition;

  Neither do conditions have activity.

  5

  Things arise dependently on these,

  Which therefore are declared to be conditions.

  But inasmuch as things do not arise,