For many people, fear of old age or of death is replaced by an anxiety about the implacable tread of Time. This phantasmal but ever-present antagonist becomes a stand-in for the future imponderables which have less of a grip on their imagination. They turn to philosophies of time not from speculative curiosity, but in search of relief from the oppression caused by the incessant falling of sand in the hourglass, by the dismaying speed with which the quiet lapse of hours converts into an unbelievable – yet unchallengeable – reckoning of vanished years. Often the philosophers are more than happy to respond to their demand, with bland assurances that “time, like space, has most evidently proved not to be real, but to be a contradictory appearance” (Bradley, 36). If a deconstruction of time is called for, who holds out more promise than Nâgârjuna, the most radical of the Buddhist philosophers? In its rigid structure, its unfaltering rhythm, its undeniable, ever-present insistence, time would appear to have the character of intrinsic existence (svabhâva), which Nâgârjuna systematically refutes. His doctrine that all phenomena are empty (sunya) of such existence promises to end the fret of our chafing against the chain of time.

David Loy finds in Nâgârjuna a middle path between the affirmation of permanence, which entails that “time itself is in some sense illusory and unreal,” and the affirmation of radical impermanence, which entails that “nothing escapes from the ravages of time” (Loy, 216). “Rather than accepting the reality of both permanence and change by combining them in a hierarchy, I follow Mâdhyamika in criticizing and dismissing them both by revealing their conceptual interdependence” (217). The reader who may doubt the capacity of conceptual dialectics to remove weighty, oppressive realities is not left in the lurch, for Loy goes on to give an empirical, phenomenological account of living in time beyond the dualism of permanent and impermanent. He opposes “the thought-constructed dualism between things and time” (221), which leads us to conceive the flow of time in contrast to permanent things or a permanent subject that is somehow trapped in this flow. If things and the subject are temporal through and through, there is no permanence to be guarded against the flux. “I am not in time because I am time, which therefore means that I am free from time” (220). “Time ‘flies away’ when we experience it dualistically, with the sense of a self that is outside and looking at it. Then time becomes something that I have (or don’t have), objectified and quantified into a succession of ‘now-moments’ that cannot be held but incessantly fall away… As Nâgârjuna would put it, that things (or rather ‘thingings’) are time means that there is no second, external time that they are ‘within’” (221). In the end, Loy affirms something unchanging in the midst of change: “Dôgen’s ‘eternal present of time’… is eternal because there is something that does not change: it is always now” (223). To accept one’s impermanence, then, would mean to recognize and enjoy the space of the present (not conceived as an atomistic instant) as one’s vital milieu, to remain mindful of it in all one’s activities so that they all take on the “eternity” of the “now.” I think it would be better to speak of the perpetuity rather than the eternity of the now, since the phenomenon in question is a modest, empirical one, not some theological claim, and the word “eternal” inevitably attracts the suspicion of substantialism (sasvâtavâda). It seems clear that mindfully living in the present is the practical solution that Buddhism offers to the problem of time. That Nâgârjuna comments on temporal categories will be in line with this attitude seems a good hermeneutic assumption.

To bring Nâgârjuna’s views on anything, and especially on so slippery a topic as time, into clear focus is never an easy task. Is his method of demonstrating that time is empty of inherent existence a purely dialectical, logical one, or has it a phenomenological dimension as well? Is it directed against Sarvâstavâdin claims about the reality of the three times, or is it directed against Sautrântika theories of the point-instant (ksana) as well? How developed would such theories have been in his time, and how must would they have concerned him or his circle? How far does the scope of his critique extend? Is the target merely the metaphysical speculation of these Abhidharma schools? Or are these speculations seen as expressing ever-renascent delusions of the human mind as it craves for illusory stability? Are everyday language about time and commonsense calculation about past, present and future left unchanged by the critique of metaphysical projections, or are these everyday conventions themselves under attack? Does Nâgârjuna go beyond the early Buddhist stress on impermanence (anityatâ) in order to move on to the more radical insight of universal emptiness (sunyatâ)? How does his discussion of time in Mûlamadhyamakakârikâ XIX relate to the other topics of analysis in the MMK? What, if any, is the implicit temporal component in his analyses of other topics such as causality and movement?

How to Approach Nâgârjuna

Any discussion of these questions has first to negotiate the more general issue of the nature of Nâgârjuna’s thought. David J. Kalupahana claims that Nâgârjuna was not a Mahâyâna Buddhist in the sectarian sense of the Lotus Sutra for example, and is best seen as one who defended the authentic teaching of the Buddha against metaphysical excrescences, much as Moggalîputtissa (Maudgalîputra) did against similar targets, including the sarvâstivâda views of Kâtyâtaniputra, at the second council of Pâtaliputra in the mid-third century BCE. Lindtner (1987: 21) says that even in the MMK alone “the Mahâyâna background is indisputable,” with its use of such topics as gandharvanagara (magic city) and its echoes of early Mahâyâna texts such as the Kâsyapaparivarta and Aksayamatinirdesa. But Kalupahana disputes the weight of these points (1986: 6, 25, 179), and points out that in the MMK ‘no reference whatever is made to any one of the major discourses of the Mahâyâna tradition, not even to the famous Prajnâpâramitâ-sutras’ (7). He makes much of the reference to the Kaccâyanagotta-sutta (Samutta-nikâya 2.17) in MMK 15.7 and sees much of the text as commenting on it. Peter Della Santina and Ian Charles Harris have also alerted us to the many echoes of early Buddhist tradition in Nâgârjuna’s verses. To see the MMK as developing the tetralemmas of the fourteen inexpressibles (avyâkrta) of the Vacchagotta Samyuttam and parallel texts in the Pâli Tripitaka, is not incompatible with seeing him as a Mahâyânist, if Mahâyâna is seen as a critical reaction to the svabhâva thinking that had infiltrated Abhidharma scholasticism. To say that Nâgârjuna is totally dedicated to clarifying the doctrine of dependent arising (pratîtya-samutpâda) does not exclude that his basis is the emptiness doctrine of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, for this itself, it might be argued, is nothing other than a clarification of dependent arising (see Della Santina, 1-2). Perhaps the most crucial hermeneutic tip the reader of Nâgârjuna should follow is to bear in mind the basic Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination and to watch for how Nâgârjuna undoes substantialist and annihilationist misreadings of the doctrine, which themselves would need to be precisely defined. But the next step is to place him against the background of the anti-substantialist emptiness thinking that culminates in the Perfection of Wisdom sutras. The dizzying effect of Nâgârjuna’s text is not an accident, and brings him close to the paradoxes and the sweeping proclamations of emptiness in those sutras.

The basic tenet of Nâgârjuna, that dependent origination is emptiness, is double-edged. If one places the stress on dependent co-origination, emptiness is merely a safeguard against substantialist misinterpretations of this doctrine. In contrast, those who see Nâgârjuna as consolidating a Mahâyâna ‘Copernican revolution’ within Buddhism see him as drawing out hitherto little-suspected implications of dependent origination, which is understood as consigning all objects of thought to mere conventionality (samvrti-satya) while revealing emptiness as their ultimate truth (paramârtha-satya). Those who see him as giving logical form to the vision of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras take him to be tackling the bases of the everyday world itself. Following the commentary of Candrakîrti in particular, this interpretation is likely to stress the ineffability of Nagarjuna’s insight, reached by a transcendence of logical and linguistic convention in a leap of yogic intuition, a leap that can be perfectly accomplished only by a Buddha. Ultimate truth, in this reading, is separated by a gulf from conventional truth, and the delusive nature of the latter is emphasized. Surely when Nâgârjuna attacks the real existence of such entities as time or the self, he does not leave our everyday functional usage of self-language and time-language entirely unscathed. If the realization that the referents of our everyday speech have no inherent existence but only a provisional, conventional status has something to do with nirvâna, then it must signify a profound conversion in our attitudes. It cannot mean that everything goes on just as before, except that we have dumped some superfluous metaphysics.

Many have discerned absolutistic and apophatic tendencies in Candrakîrti. These seem to be tamed in the Tibetan Gelugpa version of Prasangika-Madhyamaka, whose modern Western representatives stress Nâgârjuna’s respect for everyday conventional truth and tend to reduce his critique to a linguistic therapy somewhat reminiscent of Wittgenstein, as we see especially in Garfield’s widely-used translation and commentary. The most authoritative Gelugpa figure, Tsong Khapa, saw insight into emptiness not as a mystic intuition bypassing the discursive, but as a fruit of vipasyanâ, which is a lucid, integral grasp of the texture of the real, made possible by the prior attainment of samatha or calm abiding; it is in these terms that he defines the last two of the six perfections (pâramitâ),concentration and wisdom (samâdhi and prajnâ). Vipasyanâ is “an analytical wisdom defined as a wisdom of thorough discrimination of phenomena conjoined with special pliancy induced by the power of analysis” (Napper, 20). Even if we take the MMK as based on the Perfection of Wisdom sutras and as presenting the Mahâyâna vision of emptiness in all its radicality, we can see it not as catapulting us into a nirvanic cloud of unknowing, but as guiding us to progressively to deeper meditative insight. Some readings in this vein are too protective of conventional regularities; but in a curious turn-about others stress that conventions are all there are, with the risk of reducing the MMK to a postmodern deconstructive dance of scepticism, wherein the ultimate truth would be that there is no ultimate truth.

Tsong Khapa seems to lose the shock value of the original doctrine of emptiness. “There is not the spontaneity found in other Mâdhyamika interpretations that focus on the transcendent quality of realization of emptiness, the sense of simply shifting perspective and turning away from mundane descriptions”; his stress on “a verbal distinction between existence and inherent existence which cannot be realized in everyday experience” can obscure the fact that “Mâdhyamika is attacking and refuting our very sense of existence” and not “something merely intellectual” (Napper, 147). Yet there are texts in which Tsong Khapa speaks directly from the standpoint of ultimate truth, without his usual cautions, to declare the non-existence of phenomena (see Lopez 1994). Return to Nâgârjuna from the vast jungle of later debate, we are liable to say, “here he is talking from the ultimate, paramârthic perspective, and there he is talking from the conventional perspective,” but this recourse to two-truths theory, usually to save the conventional existence of something that Nâgârjuna roundly declares not to exist – time, for example – seem to me prone to produce an arbitrary or abusive hermeneutics. Recourse to that distinction should surely be kept to the strict minimum; as should the practice of saying “here the opponent speaks” when the text gives no clear indication that this is so.

The meaning of emptiness (sûnyatâ) does not lend itself to being directly and securely grasped, once and for all. Nâgârjuna does offer, in his irksomely cryptic verses, logical demonstrations that dependently arisen entities are lacking in own-being (svabhâva). A concrete phenomenological account of what this means is scarcely favoured by the abstract cast of his arguments and his reliance on a set of argumentative tactics that are not immediately convincing to the modern reader (or even to many of his ancient readers). The contemporary reader needs an experiential foothold, some recognition of emptiness as inscribed in the texture of real life. And of all human experiences, none speaks to us so constantly and so intimately of emptiness as the experience of time. The experience of living in time, and the frustrating exercise of thinking about time, provide an apprenticeship in emptiness. If Nâgârjuna can bring that experience to a new pitch of lucid insight, conversely, the experience can help us make sense of Nâgârjuna’s abstruse discourse.

The Emptiness of Time (MMK 19)

Buddhist meditation and analysis take as their focus the data of temporal experience and seek to deepen the awareness of impermanence (anityatâ) by attending to each moment as it arises and passes away. Where other religions and philosophies anchor themselves in some stable transcendent being, Buddhism seeks only a lucid grasp of our existence here and now in its painful instability. That such lucidity can be therapeutic, even salvific, seems a desperate claim. We may begin to discover its plausibility as we attempt to see how the Madhyamaka analysis of impermanence leads to a gracious and liberating encounter with emptiness. The Madhyamaka argument builds on the association of impermanence and emptiness in early Buddhism: “All samskâra (dispositions; compositions) are impermanent and everything impermanent ends in pain (duhkha). Every duhkha is without self and what is without self is empty (sûnyam)” (Udâna Vagga XI 5.8). What is, is impermanent, non-self, empty, and we create false problems when we project onto it duration, self-identity, substance. Nâgârjuna’s inflection of this teaching can be defended as bringing out its inevitable ontological implications: “What is of deceptive nature is but a delusion, said the Buddha, so all samskâra, being of deceptive nature, are delusion. But if what is of deceptive nature is delusion, with regard to what is it delusion? What the Buddha spoke there lights up emptiness” (MMK 13.1-2; after Bugault). The world is composed (samskrta) of the stuff of dispositions (samskâra); the two words in their amphibology capture the flimsy fabric of the dependently arisen, its emptiness (see Kapani I 174-5).

Juggling with paradoxes involving the three dimensions of time, as MMK 19 does, was not a novelty in Buddhism. The purging of time-ideas by dialectical reasoning, and the use of time to undermine substantialist beliefs, can be found in the Kathâvatthu more than three centuries before Nagârjuna’s time:

Does that which has been future become present? If you assent, you must admit that that which was future is the same as that which is now present. You admit this? Then you must admit that anything which having been [future], is [present], will in turn, having been [future], become once more [present]. You admit this? Then you must also admit that that which, not having been [future], is not [present], will not in turn have been [future] only to become [present] again. (Kathâvatthu I 6; Aung/Rhys Davids, 89)

Does the past exist? “Yes,” you reply. Then, is the existent the past? You reply “the existent may be past, and may be not-past.” But herein you make out that the past may be the past and may be the not-past. Your position is wrong, and you are refuted. (ibid., 94)

The reader may often detect a whiff of sophistry in these arguments, as in Nâgârjuna’s, but to convict the ancient texts of this vice is no easy matter, since clear understanding of the steps of the argument, awareness of tacit presuppositions or logical rules, without which its force is missed, and insight into the wider concrete context of the debate, are likely to be only very scantily available to the modern scholar. The ascription of real existence to past and future dharmas seems to have been so well refuted in these older debates that there was little need for Nâgârjuna to argue against it again. It is subtler forms of Sarvâstavâdin thought that he tackles.

Does he argue from the insubstantiality of time to the insubstantiality of things, or vice versa? Earlier sections of the MMK have tackled many things, such as the visual faculty, the skandhas, act and agent, fire and fuel, svabhâva, bondage and release, the fruit of action, the self. Time is invoked not in order to reinforce these arguments, but as a subtler target, consisting in an orientation among different poles, and comparable to other abstract triads such as “upper, lower, middle.”. The six verses of this chapter have a “meta-” character, aiming at structures of reflection to whose reality we cling even as we subscribe to the deconstruction of more obvious claimants to inherent existence. (However, Candrakîrti’s commentary on MMK 19 sees the reality of time as an argument for the reality of things, on the part of the opponents, and the refutation of the reality of time as primarily an argument against the reality of things.) Bugault’s comment on MMK 4.8-9 is illuminating on this strategy of smoking out substantialism as it retreats from one lair to another:

Provisionally defeated on the first skandha, the opponent invokes the substantial reality of the second to found the first, then of the third to found the second, etc., up to the fifth and last. Having no sixth and no further space to retreat to, he finds himself pushed back against emptiness, the very fate from which he fled…. This is not an anavashtâ, an infinite regress, for there are only five skandha. It is a regressus in finitum. There is a parallel to this regressive and limited structure in the linking of the first twenty-five chapters of the Prasannapadâ, as presented by Candrakîrti… The opponent retreats until chapter 25 on nirvâna, which has the same role in the economy of the Prasannapadâ as sunyatâ has at the end of MMK 4. (Bugault 2002: 82)

The discussion of time in MMK 19 is disappointing for those who would have liked a biting existential reflection on impermanence. Instead we have a logical critique of our everyday language about time. The argument can be summarized as follows:

As for time, it too is a concept devoid of independent reality. The notion of time exists relative to phenomena. Disassociated from phenomena, time is impossible. Phenomena do not exist ultimately. Therefore, time too is unreal. Moreover, time itself is not a unitary concept but is divided into three components – past, present and future. Past, present and future time again are devoid of independent reality inasmuch as they exist only relative to each other. Hence, time too is a construction of imagination which is devoid of objective reality. It does not exist ultimately. (Della Santina, 45)

However, the upshot of this critique may be more radical than is sometimes thought, depending on what view is being attacked here, and how far-reaching the attack is. Would the opponents merely claim an abstract logical inevitability of the three temporal dimensions, perhaps going on to defend svabhâva and reject emptiness on the basis that “since time exists, its basis in the reality of things must exist also”? Or would the Sarvâstavâdin opponents have been more concerned with a concrete temporality, time as the generation and extinction of dharmas, and not particularly anxious to defend the reality of past, present and future as abstract categories? If the opponents appeal to a concrete sense of duration, Nâgârjuna seems rather to shift the discourse to a more abstract level, in order to lay bare the logical quandaries invited by the very structure of temporal discourse.

MMK 19.1-3 reads: pratyutpanno ’nâgatas ca yady atîtam apeksya hi/pratyutpanno ’nâgatas ca kâle’tîte bhavisyatah//pratyutpanno ’nâgatas ca na stas tatra punar yadi/pratyutpanno ’nâgatas ca syâtâm katham apeksya tam//anapeksya punah siddhir nâtîtam vidyate tayoh/pratyutpanno ’nâgatas ca tasmât kâlo na vidyate//. (text as in de Jong 1977)

These are not particularly difficult verses, but a review of some translations shows how variously they may be understood. (I ignore the strophic breaking up of the lines in de Jong, Streng, Garfield, and Driessens.)

Streng translates:

If “the present” and “future” exist presupposing “the past,” “the present” and “future” will exist in “the past.”

If “the present” and “future” did not exist there [in “the past”], how could “the present” and “future” exist presupposing that “past”?

Without presupposing “the past” the two things [“the present” and “future”] cannot be proved to exist. Therefore neither present nor future time exist. (Streng 1967: 205)

The use of quote marks here is inconsistent, for they are dropped in the references to present and future time in 3b yet kept for the reference to past time in 1b. Streng’s idea, presumably, is that our way of talking about the three temporal dimensions reveals their mutual implication, and so a solid present or future time (without quote marks) does not exist. The inference from 3a, stating that “present” and “future” cannot be proved to exist, to 3b, stating that present and future time do not exist, is flimsy. Moreover, the translation questionably presents Nâgârjuna as a linguistic philosopher, querying the presuppositions of everyday speech. But Nâgârjuna’s analyses work on basic Buddhist concepts and are more logical than linguistic. In each case he establishes dependent origination against incorrect svabhâvic interpretations, that is, he expounds dependent origination as emptiness. Generalizing, he declares at 24.28, “We state that whatever is dependent arising, that is emptiness” (tr. Kalupahana). Both expressions belong to the register of prajnapti, designation, depending on the consideration of dependently arising phenomena, and are thus not absolutes – either substantialist or annihilationist – hence “that itself is the middle path” (24.28b); see Kalupahana 1986: 340). The conventionality of designations is logically and ontologically grounded via the analysis of phenomena as dependently arisen and empty. Thus to begin by treating all concepts as linguistic conventions, putting them in quote marks, is to undermine the very basis of the argument.

Sprung translates:

If what is arising here and now and what is not yet realized are dependent on what is past, what is arising here and now and what is not yet realized will be in past time. If, on the other hand, arising here and now and being not yet realized are not based in the past how could arising here and now and being not yet realized be related to the past? The reality of these two cannot be established independently of the past; the time phases arising here and now and being not yet realized are, therefore, not real. (Sprung 1979: 187-188)

Translating the text as quoted in the Prasannapadâ, Sprung echoes Candrakîrti’s emphasis on the concrete phenomenological sense of the words for the three temporal dimensions. But this projects a richness into the text that distracts from its pallid logic. Sprung introduces a causal glue between the dimensions when he translates stas tatra as “based in the past.” In reality, 19.2 adds no extra bond between the dimensions to what is found in 19.1. The more implausible idea that future and present are actually in the past is what is required for the argument, in any case, which otherwise becomes tautologous, since “based in” and “dependent on” are much the same thing.

Kalupahana translates:

If the present and the future exist contingent upon the past, then the present and the future would be in the past time.Again, if the present and the future were not to exist therein [i.e., in the past], how could the present and the future be contingent upon that? Moreover, non-contingent upon the past, their [i.e. of the present and future] establishment is not evident. Therefore, neither a present nor a future time is evident. (Kalupahana 1986: 276)

Kalupahana uses a heavy “exist” and “would be” instead of “will be” in 19.1. Perhaps he wants to underline that the target is the Sarvâstivâdin stress on real existence. He comments: “Analysing time as a separate entity, the metaphysicians assumed that if there were to be any mutual relationship between the present and the future on the one hand and the past on the other, then, since they are distinct entities, the present and the future will have to be inherent in the past. In other words, the past produces the present and future from within itself” (276). The verse is thus made to resume the Madhyamaka view of erratic Sarvâstivâdin reasoning, rather than an argument directly stated by Nâgârjuna himself. Kalupahana does not see Nâgârjuna as drawing an absurd consequence from the opponents’ position, but as resuming the opponents’ speculation; given their strong “identity version of causation (svatopatti)” (276) they are happy to say that each of the temporal dimensions exists in the others.

Oetke translates:

If present and future existed depending on the past, (then) present and future would be in the past time. If present and future would however not be there [in the past], how would present and future be depending on that? But not depending on the past the two [present and future] are not established, therefore the present and future time do not exist. (Oetke 1990: 106)

Oetke, too, has an emphatic “exist” in 19.1a. Though “were not there” (subjunctive) would be more felicitous as English than “would not be there” in 19.2, the translation brings out well the connection between 19.1 and 19.2.

The premise that present and future depend on past leads immediately to the strange consequence of the coexistence of the three times. For Kalupahana this is the result of the svabhâvic presuppositions of the opponents whose position is being presented. For Oetke, it is due a tacit principle of Nâgârjuna himself to the effect that things that are conditions for each other must exist simultaneously. “It seems hardly conceivable that Nâgârjuna should have clung both to the thesis of the dependence between the time epochs and to the assumption concerning the entailment between dependence and coexistence without special reasons” (Oetke 1990: 95). Bronkhorst (1997) thinks Oetke’s tacit premise is unnecessary, given a general Indian belief in a direct correspondence between signifier and signified, sabda and artha, which would entail that the sentence, “Devadatta sat in a chair” implies the co-existence of Devadatta, sitting, and chair in the situation referred to by the sentence. Oetke objects that this is too weak, and that what would be needed at the very least is a version of the correspondence principle entailing that the items to which the terms of sentence refer “must exist simultaneously in the same manner as the terms referring to them occur simultaneously in one and the same sentence” (Oetke 2004: 94). In any case, Oetke argues that such a naïve correspondence would be incompatible with Nagarjuna’s ontology.

Oetke argues that the tacit premise also underlies the argument, expounded in MMK 1 and 20, that causality is impossible, since if cause and effect coexist the cause is unnecessary since the effect already exists, whereas if they do not coexist the cause cannot produce the effect since it already exists (Oetke 1990: 103). But this argument can stand on its own, it seems to me, without any tacit presupposition. Bugault says that “it is a principle, for the Madhyamika, that two simultaneous things have no bond of causality between them” (Bugault 2002: 154), which complements Oetke’s principle of the simultaneity of what are linked conditionally; father is not the cause of son, or son of father, but both spring up simultaneously as mutually presupposed conditions. However, what Bugault calls a principle is established by a clear argument, which is persuasive enough for the immediate cause of things though it might seem absurd if extended to their remote cause (making it necessary that one’s remote ancestor still be alive since he is one’s cause); in reality, if immediate causality is reduced to conditionality, so is remote causality. But would the simultaneity of what are linked conditionally not still entail the implausible continued existence of the remote ancestor? Clearly the simultaneity in question cannot be strictly temporal, and indeed Oetke’s tacit presupposition can be restated without any reference to temporal simultaneity. The meaning is that logically a great-great-grandchild presupposes a great-great-grandparent, who is posited as such only in relation to the great-great-grandchild; the one cannot exist as such without the other. Indeed, this is not a tacit presupposition at all but one exhibited openly in the text. The logical simultaneity, or rather inseparability, of past, present, and future is treated as equivalent to the logical simultaneity of above, middle, and below in 19.4. One could rewrite 19.1 for those categories as follows: “If above and middle are contingent on below, above and middle will exist down below,” with the conclusion, based on 19.3, that “neither above nor middle are real.” The relation of causality works only if cause and effect coexist temporally, which leads to an absurdity; the relation of conditionality works only if the conditions are mutually inseparable, that is, coexist logically, which leads to undermining of the independent being of the relata, since each has existence only in function of the others. The fact that one cannot have a cause without an effect and vice versa leads to a breakdown of the causal relation. The fact that one cannot have a conditional relatum without its counterpart (father without son, above without below) does not lead to a breakdown of conditionality but to a demonstration from conditionality of the lack of svabhâva of conditionally related things. This neat differentiation of causality and conditionality is threatened by such a text as 1.6b: “Of an existing thing, what could be the condition? And if it exists already, of what use is a condition?” (tr. after Bugault), but here the hetu-pratyaya or causal condition is in question, which is not the kind of condition involved in talk of temporal relations. In general Nâgârjuna accepts conditionality only when it is voided of causality..

The logic of conditionality leads to absurd consequences: the future cannot be without the past, nor the above without the below, so where one is the other must be. I am not sure if anything in Bronkhorst and Oetke’s discussion clears away the suspicion that we are dealing with some kind of sophism here. This logic deconstructs even our everyday temporal language, pointing up a potentially disturbing ontological riddle in our talk of past and future. If they exist no longer, or not yet, how can we link them to present reality? How can there be an intelligible connection between what truly exists and what has no real existence? The Madhyamaka answer would be that the present reality does not truly exist either. It might be objected to the whole argument that a demonstration of logical inseparability of three dimensions breaks down a highly platonistic claim to the substantial existence of these dimensions, but does not have any bearing on any extra-logical reality.

Driessens translates (from the Tibetan):

If present and future depended on the past, present and future would exist in the past. If present and future existed in the past, how would present and future depend on it? Without depending on the past, both will not exist. In consequence, the present and the future do not exist. (after Driessens 1995: 176-177)

Striking here is the divergent translation of 19.2: “if present and future existed in the past” instead of “did not exist” as in the other versions. I do not know the textual basis of this, but it would yield a more interesting argument, for otherwise 19.2 seems merely to repeat the sense of 19.1.

Garfield translates (from the Tibetan):

If the present and the future depend on the past, then the present and the future would have existed in the past. If the present and the future did not exist there, how could the present and the future be dependent upon it? If they are not dependent upon the past, neither of the two would be established. Therefore neither the present nor the future would exist. (Garfield 1995: 50)

As the translation of 19.3 suggests, Garfield sees the text at upholding the reality of time, not as “an entity existing independently of temporal phenomena” but as “a set of relations among them” (254). This is surely a rather flattening interpretation of the text, and is not helped by the sweeping statement that its arguments are “closely akin to those of Zeno, Sextus and McTaggart” (ibid.). Garfield treats the relation between the three temporal dimensions as a causal one: “If they [present and future] depend upon it [past] in any sense that could plausibly guarantee their inherent existence, they must somehow emerge from it as a basis” (254). I am uneasy with softening impact of the phrase “in any sense that could guarantee their inherent existence” – a qualification not found explicitly in the text but stressed by Garfield at every possible opportunity. The idea of present and future emerging from past is not in the text either. The mutual reference of the three times is noted as a logical necessity, one that would still pose problems even when the idea of time is purged of the metaphysical reifications that Garfield thinks are the target of the critique. Garfield remarks that if present and future did not exist in the past “we would then either have the situation in which the ostensibly dependent exists, but in the absence of that on which it depends, or in which the necessary condition exists, but without that of which it is the condition” (255). The svabhâvic thinker imagines that “there must be a real relation between the cause and the effect in which the effect is contained potentially in the cause and this would unfortunately entail the past existence of the present and the future” (255). But Garfield does not advert to the residual difficulty posed by the mutual dependence of the temporal dimensions even when no such real causal relation is imagined.

Garfield sees 19.3a as proposing that past, present and future simply exist without causal interconnectedness. Then “there would be no sense in which they would be determinately ordered and in which they would be part of the same time” (255-256). But 19.3b does not give that argument, contenting itself with observing that without reference to the past, the other dimensions cannot be established. “Time is by definition an ordering of events in which moments stand in determinate relations to one another, in virtue of which the location of any moment depends on the location of all of the others” (256). While avoiding causal substantialism, Garfield here strongly affirms the reality of time as a set of relations. I doubt if Nâgârjuna would accept the definition of time as a determinate ordering of events or location of moments. It would seem to give an objective stability to moments and their location. If time is a matter of unfailing regularities, ever-reliable coordinates, then it is not animitta (SS 7) but securely definable and locatable. To see the MMK as upholding a Humean world of secure explanatory regularities or a Wittgensteinian one of trustworthy ordinary language is to domesticate and scholasticize Nâgârjuna, making him a linguistic therapist who frees us from substantializations and reifications, but only to let us install ourselves more serenely in the conventional dependently co-arising world. It seems to me that in Buddhism this samsaric world is always painful, radically unsatisfactory, and that Nâgârjuna is not just curing us of false theories about it, but is revealing it as radically self-contradictory even in its everyday pragmatic or conventional texture. To say that time is an ultimately impossible concept explodes the unity and identifiability of any system of temporal coordinates. We can no longer securely refer to past, future and present, for our very machinery of reference is riddled with contradiction.

MMK 2.1 tells us that since neither past nor future movement are moving, and present movement cannot be conceived apart from these, movement cannot be conceived at all. Thus even our basic experience of movement is self-contradictory. Garfield sets up what again looks like a straw man, the idea “that motion is an entity, or a property with an existence independent of that of moving things” (124). “Nâgârjuna does presuppose, in developing the view that conventionally things do arise dependent on conditions, that there is motion, or change. For if there were not, there would be no arising” (ib.). Crucial here is the weight attached to the qualifier “conventionally,” a word that has connotations of delusion, contradiction, occultation, frustration, which are diluted in Garfield's reading. Nâgârjuna is pointing out not only the perils of reifying dependent origination (126), but the inherently contradictory texture of the dependently originated world.

I agree with Garfield that Nâgârjuna accepts conditions as describing “the kind of association he endorses as an analysis of dependent arising” (104), while rejecting causes as a substantialist delusion. For those who see Nâgârjuna as treating causes and conditions in the same way, “the distinction between the four conditions provides a platform for an exhaustive refutation of production with no positive account of interdependence implicated” (ibid.). But even when conditions are recognized, that which arises from them enjoys only provisional existence, and the relata that they link have only a mutually dependent existence. To insist on the stable regularity of conditions as Garfield does seems rather inconsistent with this. It bolsters the conventional at the expense of ultimate emptiness.

Svabhâvic causes and substances have no existence, but conditions and other survivors of Nâgârjuna’s critique are accorded only a conventional, not an ultimate existence. They are products of vikalpa (conceptuality) and prapañca (fabrication, elaboration). (For a sense of the rich connotations of vikalpa, see Tola/Dragonetti, 24-9.) Nâgârjuna's arguments are not merely about language, the dissolution of linguistic delusions; “they are, without a shade of doubt, about the phenomenal world, which they try to prove to be self-contradictory” (Bronkhorst 1999:19); “everyday reality does not exist” (21).

Bugault translates:

If the present and the future depend on the past, this implies that they exist already in the past. If, on the contrary, the present and the future are absent therefrom, how could they depend on the past?However, one cannot found their existence rationally independently of the past. In consequence, present and future do not have [intrinsic] existence. (after Bugault 2002: 243)

Bugault adds the notation “intrinsic” (propre) to the denial of existence, perhaps drawing on two-truths theory to suggest that the three dimensions exist conventionally but not ultimately. Or perhaps he is noting some nuance of difference between bhavisyatah in 1a (future indicative dual of the verb “to be”) and vidyate in 3a and b. Edgerton (488) defines vidyate as “is found, occurs, exists, is” and notes that in practice it is used as a passive auxiliary with past participles. It may perhaps carry less assertive, existential force than then verb “to be,” which does not entail that its negation has more existential force. Na vidyate should probably not be translated as “does not exist at all,” but by some milder expression such as “there is not, does not occur, is not evident, is not real.” Bugault’s insertion of the word propre may reflect this lesser force of the denial.

MMK 19.4 reads:

etenaivâvasistau dvau kramena parivartakau/uttamâdhamamadhyâdîn ekatâdîms ca laksayet//

“By this same (method) one should consider the remaining two changes in regard to (their) order, as well as the (attributes of being) the highest, the lowest and the middle (or: the latest, the earliest and the middle (?)) etc. and the oneness/sameness etc.” (Oetke 1990: 106). “By the same method, the other two divisions – past and future, upper, lower, middle, etc., unity, etc., should be understood” (Garfield 1995: 50).

The subversive feature of temporal language is the co-existence of terms that contradict one another. The same contradiction can be found in all correlative terms. In his commentary Candrakîrti writes out 19.1-3 in two other versions, showing how the argument applies equally well if for “past” we substitute “present” or “future,” mutatis mutandis. Such triads as “highest, middle and lowest” and such dyadic oppositions such as “unity, multiplicity” are to be treated in the same way. Candrakîrti adds some examples that are perhaps inapposite, as being too concrete, such as “the realms of desire, of form, of the formless” (Sprung 1979: 189). The extension to all correlative terms undermines the solidity of every reference. “Without one (eka) there are not many (aneka). Without many (aneka) one (eka) is not possible. Therefore things that arise dependently (pratîtyasamutpanna) are indeterminable (animitta)” (SS 7 [Lindtner 1987: 37]). Wherever we seek to grasp a solid landmark we find it to be a flimsy signifier not pinning down a signified but referring to another signifier in a self-undermining way.

MMK 19.5 reads:

nâsthito grhyate kâlah sthitah kâlo na vidyate/yo grhyetâgrhîtas ca kâlah prajnapyate katham//.

Translations: “A variable time cannot be grasped and there is no unvarying time that could be grasped. How can one speak of a time that is not grasped?” (after de Jong). “A non-static time is not observed. A static time is not evident. Even if the unobserved time were to be observed, how can it be made known?” (Kalupahana). “A nonstatic time is not grasped. Nothing one would grasp as stationary time exists. If time is not grasped, how is it known” (Garfield). “A mobile time does not let itself be grasped. As for an immobile time susceptible of being grasped, no trace of such is to be found. How, then, speak of a time that is not grasped?” (after Bugault).

The flux of time can be comprehended, we imagine, by being measured. “One may object that time is real because it is measurable (parimânavattva). The thought here is that what is not, cannot in fact be measurable as the horns of a donkey cannot be.” The answer: “there is no such thing as invariable, unchanging time which could be understood in terms of periods such as moments and minutes. Hence variable (asthita) time cannot be understood; that is to say, it cannot be understood in its variableness” (Candrakîrti; Sprung 1979: 190). Faced with the impossibility of mastering the flux, the Sarvâstavâdin tried to conceive of a “static moment (sthiti-ksana)” (Kalupahana 1986: 278). “Sensation, being instantaneous, is a static state, for the instant is static (eka ksana sthiti), in the sense that it springs up only to disappear immediately and does not move or continue into the next instant” (Silburn 1955: 290). No doubt a barrage of arguments, both logical and phenomenological, could have been brought against both ideas, but here is it assumed that both the idea of measuring the flux and that of arresting the moment are transparently absurd. Such desperate resorts reveal the incomprehensibility of time, which is due to its unreality.

This verse seems to undermine the stability Garfield attributed to time as a set of relations among phenomena. But Garfield believes that the target is a hypostatized super-time. In his comment on 19.1 he mentions a difficulty specific to the topic of time: “if the present and the future depend upon the past, they must succeed or be simultaneous with it. But they must succeed or be simultaneous with it in time. That requires a super-time in which the parts of time are related, and so on, ad infinitum” (255). If there is any point of attachment for such argumentation in the text it is here at 19.5. Garfield comments on this verse: To say that time changes is “to posit a super-time in which that change occurs,” while to say that it is static “suggests that past, present, and future coexist”; hence “there is no coherent conception of time as an entity” (Garfield, 256). Note that 19.4 does not refer back to the coexistence theme of 19.1-3. As to the super-time idea, it seems to distract from the more proximate targets Nâgârjuna has in view.

Candrakîrti indeed gives as one of two possible interpretations of “static time”a kind of super-time, a permanent hypostatized time that would contain and control temporal events: “It might be urged that what is called time is in its invariable essence imperishable but manifests (abhivyajyate) itself in time periods such as moments”; he replies: “time cannot be conceived of as something distinct from periods of time such as moments or minutes” (Sprung 1979: 190; de Jong 1949: 41). In the background lies the Vedic hypostasization of Time as a power, as suggested by a stanza both Candrikîrti and MPPS quote: “Time transmutes the elements; time sustains being; times cares for the sleeping; time is insurmountable” (ib.). The source is the Kâlasûtra of the Kâlavâdin, an Âjîvika group who were partisans of absolute time, a cosmic fire that cooked all beings (Silburn 1955: 5, 127). This text is also quoted in the Mahâ-prajnâpâramitâ-sâstra (MPPS) as it argues against a hypostatized immutable time, which either creates all beings or at least is immutable, has a real existence, is a subtle dharma, invisible and unknowable, and manifest in its effects such as flowers, fruits etc. (Taishô 1509.65b8-20 [Lamotte, 76]). A similar vision of time is found in the Atharva Veda, which states that “time manifests all beings” (XIX 53.2; Silburn 1955: 138). Candrakîrti unconvincingly sees as the target of MMK 20.1 this hypostatized time, supposed to be proved by the reality of the processes observed in time, such as “the development and contraction of the universe” (May 1980: 232; see de Jong 1949: 43).This image may lurk behind the delusion refuted in MMK 19, the notion that beings really come to be and pass away in time and that their reality is vouched for by the reality of time (though the mythic image would survive only in the most attenuated form in the Buddhist predecessors who are his immediate targets). But Garfield may mean by the super-time only what Loy means when he sees Nâgârjuna as refuting a “second, external time” that things are “within” (Loy 1988: 221). This idea, too, is hard to find in MMK 19.5, but it might a point of attachment in 19.6a, whose logic underlies a statement of Âryadeva: “That [time] in which activity and inactivity are perceived in a thing depends upon something else and, consequently, is also an effect” (CS 9.7).

MMK 19.6 reads:. bhâvam pratîtya kâlas cet kâlo bhâvâd rte kutah/na ca kas cana bhâvo ’sti kutah kâlo bhavisyati//.

Translations: “If it is assumed that time exists depending upon an existent, how can there be time without an existent? No existent whatsoever is found to exist. Where can time be?” (Kalupahana). “If time depends on an entity, then without an entity how could time exist? There is no existent entity. So how can time exist?” (Garfield). “If the course of things (time) exists presupposing things, how will it be able to exist without them? Now, nothing exists in itself. How then will time be able to exist?” (after Bugault).

Garfield finds this verse to be “double-edged”: “its positive reading contains Nâgârjuna’s positive account of the nature of time. Nâgârjuna points out that with no entities to be temporally related, there is no time. That is, the only mode of existence that time has is as a set of relations among empirical phenomena. Apart from those phenomena and those relations, there is no time. (This insight is foundational for Dôgen's later analysis of Uji, or being-time.) But that means that, given the lack of inherent existence of phenomena, there can be no inherent existence of time. Time is thus merely a dependent set of relations, not an entity in its own right” (257). I am not at all sure that Nâgârjuna is concerned with a phenomenological inseparability of being and time. This would not be a novel idea. “The Sarvâstavâdin are partisans of momentariness; they do not admit an objective time, real in itself... Time does not differ in nature from the constructive energies [better: conditioned formations] (samskâra); time is the samskâra; the samskâra are time” (Silburn 1955: 255). Here already we have a kind of “being-time,” though not in the rich Zen sense. Nâgârjuna does not need to argue against a bifurcation of concrete being and time as empty form. Rather he argues from the admitted co-implication of time and being that neither, because of their mutual dependency, can have inherent existence; or at least that since no being has inherent existence, time, which depends on beings, cannot have inherent existence either (MMK 19.6). Mutual establishing affects not only the three dimensions of past, present, future, but also the relation between time and temporal things, which again are mutually dependent on each other for their existence. If there is no time apart from being, and no being apart from time, we are pushed beyond both to an awareness of empty reality that is neither time nor being. “Being-time” was glimpsed by the Sarvâstavâdin, but Nâgârjuna pursues its logical implications to the point where emptiness emerges as the truth of this co-dependence of time and being.

The argument of MMK 19 is resumed in the following words: “The three times (kâlatraya) do not exist (substantially) since they are unfixed (asthita), mutually established (parasparasiddha), and since they change [and] since they are not self-established [and finally] since there is no being (bhâva). They are merely discriminations (vikalpamâtra)” (SS 29, tr. Lindtner). (Again I query the need to insert the qualifying expression “substantially.”) What would it mean, phenomenologically, to say that past, present, and future are merely vikalpa? Does it mean that they are merely the product of our acts of attending, springing up only when for some reason we need to think of them? Do we see the world in temporal terms only because of our needs? If past and future are mirages of regret and hope, the present, too, can be seen as the product of our attention to it. If past and future have no real existence, neither has the present, defined as it is in correlation to the other two. Talk of the present is also a convention, a concept of utilitarian character but ultimately unstable, useful for handling the constant movement of this samsaric world. No more than time itself does the “moment” have its own inherent essence. It is a concept we project onto the flow of things. No more than time itself does the “moment” exist separately from the provisional phenomena it serves to map and correlate. Indeed one might argue that past and future are more useful measuring devices than the moment, and in that sense enjoy a more secure provisional existence, whereas the speed with which the moment disappears shows up the emptiness of provisional existence more dramatically. Nâgârjuna does not descend to such phenomenological inquiries, for his argumentation is rigidly concentrated on a single purpose: to disprove the real existence of all the chief candidates for real existence.

If we give the abstract terms past, present and future concrete reference to the arising, having arisen, or not yet having arisen of dharmas, as MMK 19 does not do, the argument becomes more upsetting to our trust in temporal orientations and distinctions. The “I” that arises at this moment is no longer the “I” that arose a moment ago, but is the product of a whole new constellation of conditions. If I cling to the identity of past “I” and present “I,” then I am trying to make past and present coincide, which ruins the identity of both. But if I rush to the other extreme and deny any continuity whatever, claiming that the past and present events are separate, unrelated dharmas, that just pop into existence like sky-blossoms appearing from nowhere (a position I that can be either a stubborn “eternalist” strategy upholding the reality of the successive instantaneous selves or a “nihilist” abandonment to irrationality), then I run into a basic law of temporal discourse, to the effect that the reality of any one dimension presupposes the reality of the others. Each relies on the others for its foundation, a radically unstable state of affairs. The uneasy logic of time-language leads to the conclusion is that time can only enjoy its flimsy provisional functioning at all only because it is basically not real.

Ksana-thinking

Impermanence itself, just as much as dependent arising or emptiness, is a counter-intuitive truth, constantly forgotten, not something one simply registers once and for all. More counter-intuitive than impermanence, and more controversial, is the radical thesis of momentariness (ksanikatva) developed over the centuries in Buddhist scholasticism. Ksana-thinking seeks to grasp the ontological necessity that all conditioned things must perish, and indeed perish as soon as they come to be, so that everything is changing all the time, and nothing abides even for an instant. The historical and systematic connections between early Buddhist reflection on impermanence and the elaboration of ksana-argumentation are complex (Halbfass, 236). The ksana atomism is associated with the Sautrântika milieu, the latest of the early Buddhist sects, which emerged in opposition to their parent sect, the Sarvâstivâdin, about 150 BCE (Bareau 1955: 34, 155). However, other sects, including the Sarvâstivâdin themselves, upheld absolute momentariness. None of their writings are extant. I do not know if earlier Sarvâstivâdin ripostes to them reveal them to have been concerned with the ksana. The usual accounts of their ksana thinking draw on late works such as those of Vasubandhu (400-480) and Yasomitra (c. 6th cent. CE).

‘Substantial time (sthulah kâlah, in Kathâ-vatthu – mahâkâla) was likewise denied, but subtle time, i.e. the moment, the point-instant of efficiency, was not only asserted, it was made…the fulcrum on which the whole edifice of reality was made to rest’ (Stcherbatsky I 85). The ksana did not escape perception: ‘That sensation is a momentary flash is proved by introspection, But a momentary sensation is but the reflex of a momentary thing (Stcherbatsky I 87, referring to Vâcaspati’s Nyâya-kanikâ).

In traditional Indian thought “the ordering of acts comes first and duration is only a consequence of this” so that “there is no duration as such, but successive discontinuous acts whose succession is more or less well regulated” (Silburn 1955: 1). Buddhism opposes the constructed time that derives from an activity of elaboration to the moment, which is independent of such activity. Against the ancient idea that “immortality is found in the prolongation of a well-constructed duration” (3), Buddhism aims to put an end to duration in putting an end to the action that gives rise to it. In Sautrântika, time is based on instants, and composed by a fiction of continuity. Ultimate reality is purely momentary, and is known in direct perception; temporal continuity is a merely conceptual construction: “Sensation cannot produce the impression of changing nor that of lasting. Sensation is pure primitivity whereas the sense of duration, if it exists, is not primitive; we do not have the sensation of the past and the future, since sensation is exempt from memory” (290).

The doctrine of momentariness was refined when it became necessary to defend it against Brahmanic orthodoxy (Mimaki, 1). The positions attacked and defended ware generally Sautrântika ones, and the logic of Dignâga (480-540) and Dharmakîrti (600-660) was the chief defensive weapon. The two chief arguments for momentariness in this tradition of debate were an argument from impermanence (vinasitvânumâna), which found mature formulation in Vasubandhu, and an argument from the very nature of being (sattvânumâna), which was introduced by Dharmakîrti and became the principal argument (see Frauwallner, Steinkellner). Being was defined as causal efficacity (arthakriyâ) and it was argued that only what is immediately present has such efficacity. In the later stages of this tradition, logic overrides intuition in establishing the truth of momentariness and appeal to direct experience plays a diminished role. Thus when Ratnakîrti (1000-1050) refutes an argument for permanence based on recognition, his inferential proof of the momentariness of things annuls the recognition of the pot I perceive today as the one I perceived yesterday. If it is objected that recognition is a perception (pratyaksa) and thus a more trustworthy instrument of knowledge than inferential proof, the reply is that the two instruments of knowledge (pramâna) have the same validity; perception can annul inference only when the supposed inference is invalid; and conversely a valid inference can annul a fallacious perception (Mimaki, 16-17). ]

A question one might ask about ksana thinking is whether it really deepened the Buddhist awareness of impermanence or tended rather to distract from it. Buddhists seek to live in the present moment, in attentive mindfulness (sati). Present action, the object of mindfulness, is not mapped in relation to a past to be carried through consistently or a future to be built. Thinking of past and future would bring about the distracting imperfections listed in the Upakkilesa Sutta (Majjhima Nikâya no. 128, 16-27): doubt, inattention, sloth and torpor, fear, elation, inertia, excess of energy, deficiency of energy, longing, perception of diversity, excessive meditation. Each of these is a falling away from full consciousness of each moment of time (see Silburn 1955: 218). A monastic ordering of time permits attention to each moment as an end in itself, in detachment from utilitarian calculation. This is not hedonistic clinging to the moment or despairing abandonment to the moment (two sides of the same coin). Mindfulness controls the flux of samsaric life so as to reorient it to nirvanic detachment and simplicity.

“Let go of the past, let go of the future, let go of what is between” (muñca pure munca pacchato majjhe muñca; Dhammapada 348). This verse warns against clinging to the present as well as against clinging to past or future. When ksana theorists lay a heavy stress on the sole reality of the present instant, too confident in having isolated at last a secure or ultimate point of reference, they risk veering to the extreme positions of eternalism (sâsvatânta) or annihilationism (ucchedânta). The Sarvâstavâdin are suspected of eternalist tendencies, in that, though committed to universal momentariness, they sought to give all moments some kind of permanent identity apart from their fleeting actuality when present. One might suspect that the Sautrântika, in corroding the reality of things to the point-instant, courted the risk of annihilationism.

The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, as inflected by Zen, has become in the West a popular gospel of living the present moment to the full. This may be a formula for hedonistic spontaneity or it may be a grimmer, more Stoical creed: “The moment is all you've got, all you are”. Celebration of the present can be an unavowed nihilism. If there is nothing behind and nothing before, our life is reduced to a narrow perch on a tightrope. This concern with the impermanent present moment may owe less to Buddhist tradition than to an age-old Western quest for permanence. Our cultural programming leads us to invest in the moment, erected into a pure self-sufficient reality, a bare particular of totally pristine sensation, perhaps of enlightened ecstasy, all the longings for certitude and stability that have been left frustrated by the collapse of Platonism. It is logical that Nietzsche's diagnosis of the “death of God” should issue in a cult of the moment and even its impossible eternalization in the notion of an “eternal return”.;

Momentariness in Nagarjuna

If the doctrine of momentariness tended to harden into a scholastic atomism, we may expect there to have been a reaction to it from within Buddhism itself. “To take the momentary mode of existence of phenomena, their destruction at each moment, as what truly constitutes their impermanence made perfect sense. Much more problematic is the situation once the practitioner operates in the doctrinal framework of the Mahâyâna tradition, and hence does not accept the existence of discrete momentary conditioned entities that have, despite their temporal and spatial minuteness, an innate own-being (svabhâva)” (Rospatt 2004:82). This incompatibility between ksana-atomism and emptiness seems to underlie Nâgârjuna’s refutations of Sautrântika positions. No more than time itself does the moment have its own inherent essence. It is a concept we project onto the flow of things. No more than time itself does the moment exist separately from the provisional phenomena it serves to map and correlate. Indeed one might argue that past and future are more useful measuring devices than the moment, and in that sense enjoy a more secure provisional existence, whereas the speed with which the moment disappears shows up the emptiness of provisional existence more dramatically. Nâgârjuna does not descend to such phenomenological inquiries, for his argumentation is rigidly concentrated on a single purpose: to disprove the real existence of all the chief candidates for real existence.

But it must be noted that the word ksana never occurs in the MMK. “He refutes the arising and perishing of things, the three samskrtalaksanas, persisting and non-persisting time, and even uses the idea of impermanence in one of more verses, but he does not go after momentariness per se... He may have been aware of the theory of momentariness, or of a theory developing in this direction, but it may still have been a controversial or possibly even esoteric theory in his circles” (Anne MacDonald, personal communication). Full-fledged ksana theorizing begins only after Nâgârjuna, and some suggest that he may have prompted its formation as a way of saving reality from his criticism (Vetter 1997: 169). The word ksana may have been used elsewhere by Nâgârjuna, if Lindtner’s translation from the Tibetan is followed: “Since one moment of mind (buddhiksana) cannot within [the very same] moment (ksana) grasp a form (rûpa) born as explained, how could it understand a past (atîta) and a future (anâgata) form (rûpa)” (SS 49; Lindtner 1987: 57).

MMK 20.6 is typical of a form of argument that recurs often:

hetum phasalya dattvâ ca yadi hetur nirudhyate//hetoh niruddhe jâtam tat phalam âhetukam bhavet

Kalupahana translates: “If the cause were to cease without passing on the causal status to the effect, then the effect that is born when the cause has ceased would be without a cause.” Bugault is more perspicuous: “If the cause were destroyed without having given that which is cause for the fruit, that fruit, since the cause is destroyed, would be born without cause.” Kalupahana, as he often does, invokes ksana-thinking here: “With the dominance of the linear view of causation as well as the theory of momentary destruction (ksana-bhanga) of phenomena, the question was raised as to how the cause in the present moment could give rise to the effect in the succeeding moment. The answer was that the effect comes to be without a pause or gap (samantara nirvarttamat). The effect is both given (datta), in the sense of being put forward (prayacchati) by the cause, and at the same time not given (na punah dattam) because it is not identical (tad eva) with the cause” (Kalupahana, 282, referring to Akb p. 99). Often it is hard to see if something as concrete as the momentary destruction of phenomena is under attack or whether the argument is confined to a more abstract, dialectical plane, simply showing the impossibility of attributing self-nature to movement, without specifying a precise theory.

In MMK 21, at the last stage of his examination of relative realities, just before going on to ultimates such as the Tathâgata (22), the Fourfold Truth (24) and nirvâna (25), Nagarjuna shows the mutual incompatibility between an existence (sambhavo) that entails dissolution (vibhavo) and a dissolution that immediately entails existence, in addition to the fact that both are self-contradictory. This refutation of the arising and perishing of things seems to have in view “the phenomenon of momentary impermanence” (Garfield, 267). At least that would be the most graphic example of a sambhavo that immediately entails vibhavo. In this discussion, too, he remains a rigorous critic of language, eschewing a phenomenological approach for an exposure of the contradictions even in what seem the most innocent svabhavic assumptions. Candrakîrti takes MMK 21, as he took MMK 20, to be directed against those who think that time has a real existence. They claim that it is thanks to the existence of time that things are produced and perish, and the Madhyamaka reply that this might be so if things were really produced and destroyed, but they are not (de Jong 1949: 57). This reference to time seems an irrelevant carry-over from MMK 19, nor is the existence of time further discussed in Candrakîrti's remarks on MMK 20-21. He does not refer MMK 21 to the concept of the ksana.

A good reason to connect MMK 21 with ksana theory is that otherwise its arguments do not hold up very well. Oetke finds an equivocal amphiboly between temporal and non-temporal senses of the termes in MMK 21.4: “How should there be production without destruction? For impermanence is never not found in the things.” He thinks that Nâgârjuna's argument limps, and is propped up only by a variant of the “tacit premise”: production and destruction can be “together with” each other, in a non-temporal logical sense, only if they coexist temporally (Oetke 1990: 104). But if the non-temporal reading is ruled out altogether and we take it that in 4b “the temporal quantifier is used in its primary and literal sense so that the sentence may be taken to say that everything possesses always the property of impermanence” (94), then, it seems to me, Nâgârjuna’s arguments make perfect sense. Their “tacit premise” is simply the view that dharmas have only momentary existence, so that they perish as soon as they are produced. The passage “from having always the property of impermanence to the actual destruction at every time of a thing’s existence” indeed “involves more than mere paraphrasing” (ib.). But if the context is ksana thinking (not necessarily in a very developed form), the immediate entailment of momentariness by impermanence has already been established and can be presupposed. The location of the chapter suggests that Nâgârjuna is tackling a last outpost of svabhavic thought rather than returning to generalities. In pointing out the inherent contradictoriness of momentary production-destruction he forbids us to repose in the idea of the moment, though it comes so close to the insight into emptiness. Rather we must accept the emptiness of the categories of production and destruction, as the doctrine of instantaneous production-destruction comes close to confessing. The breakdown of these categories voids the moment of its last shred of real existence.

There is, however, a text in which Nagarjuna explicitly tackles ksana-thinking in its Sautrântika form. In Ratnavâli I 66-74) he defends momentariness against Vaisesika, and then goes on to refute an inherently existing ksana. The authenticity of this text has been questioned, rather inconclusively (Vetter 1992); it is drawn on by Christina Scherrer-Schaub in her quest for Nâgârjuna’s historical context (in her courses at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes), and Nâgârjuna's authorship is convincingly established on grounds of logical syntax, metre and scriptural allusions in a recent study (Walser 2005). The text confirms in any case that “if [the Madhyamaka] turn to the issue of momentariness at all, then they usually do so only in order to combat it insofar as it is taken to affirm the existence of momentary entities” (Rospatt 1995:7). Here is the text:

How are things non-momentary

If they are always changing?

If they do not change, then how

In fact can they be altered? 66

Do they become momentary through

Partial or complete disintegration?

Because an inequality is not apprehended,

This momentariness cannot be admitted. 67

When a thing ceases to exist through momentariness,

How can anything be old?

When a thing is non-momentary due to constancy

How can anything be old? 68

Since a moment ends it must have

A beginning and a middle,

This triple nature of a moment means

That the world never abides for an instant. 69

Also the beginning, middle and end

Are to be analysed like a moment; .

Therefore, beginning, middle and end

Are not [produced] from self or other. 70

Due to having many parts ‘one’ does not exist,

There is not anything which is without parts,

Further without ‘one’ ‘many’ does not exist

And without existence there is not non-existence. 71 (tr. Hopkins)

The ksana appears as the last desperate refuge of a clinging to svabhâva. Some of the other texts ascribed to Nâgârjuna by Lindtner refer to the ksana in similar ways.

According to Silburn, the Sautrântika argued that only the present ksana has substantive existence (dravyasat) whereas past and future exist only by designation (prajñaptisat). Silburn refers to Abhidharma-kosa V 27 (La Vallée Poussin 1980 IV 58); but note that Bareau, writing in the same year as Silburn’s thesis (of 1948) was published, says he has never found attributed to the Sautrântika “the idea that things are not substances (dravya) but simple denominations (prajnapti)”; the notion that the Sautrântika were predecessors of the Mahâyâna is a mistaken interpretation of their commonsense rejection of some outlandish Sarvâstivâdin claims (Bareau 1955: 302). Rejecting the substantive reality of past and future, they said: “If you do not accept that the elements no longer exist after having existed, it will not be possible for the three epochs to be established.” To which the Sarvâstavâdin replied: “We have never claimed that the past and the future exist in the manner of the present... The three epochs, though constant in their true nature, are nonetheless diversified as regards activity, for there are an infinite number of ways of being” (Silburn 1955: 268-9). The Sautrântika rejected this: something either really exists or is merely fictive, there is no middle ground. Likewise, “either the thing that endures [duration] is a fiction and the instants are real, or the latter are fictive and the former real” (ibid. 333). Madhyamaka, it seems, would be happy to admit that both duration and the instant are fictive, and that the present is as much a prapañca as the past and the future. Interestingly, the Sarvâstavâdin had formulated the objection that if past and future are not real the present, too, is mere prapañca: “If the past and future are not real, the present does not exist either, for the present is designated (prajñâpyate) in consideration of (apeksya) the past and the future” (Silburn 1955: 273, referencing Vibhâsâ p. 393, as translated in Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques V 10-11). “If the future exists only as a designation, admit then that the present, too, exists as a designation and not as a thing” (Silburn 1955: 264, referencing ibid. 47-8).

Momentariness as the Gate of Emptiness in the Mahâprajnâpâramitâ-upadesa

To pit Nâgârjuna against momentariness is an unsatisfactory exercise, for reasons we have seen. But I shall now take a wide step to another text in the vast reaches of the Madhyamaka tradition, namely the MPPS, extant only in Chinese, which is a commentary on the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra in 8000 Lines. It may still be true that the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures provide the horizon for a full understanding of Nâgârjuna’s thought. The commentator surely found a close link between the sutra and Nâgârjuna, since in the course of the work he quotes most of the MMK. Consultation of this work cannot confirm the connection we attempted to discern between MMK 21 and ksana thinking, but it does provide a rich context in which a critique of momentariness would develop along lines comparable to Nâgârjuna’s critique of other concepts. The text is an interesting chapter in the Wirkungsgeschichte of the MMK, particularly as giving a sense of the spiritual upshot of Nâgârjuna’s analyses. Alexander Rospatt suggested at the 2002 Straniak Stiftung symposium that “the link between impermanence and emptiness follows from spiritual practice, particularly if anityatâ is radicalized in terms of momentariness... It seems almost inevitable that in a Mahâyâna setting this undermining of substantial existence was taken even further, and that the point to which existence had become reduced was finally also erased’. He cites a Burmese Vipassanâ teacher's testimony that “the experience of momentariness may give way to a meditative state where phenomena cease to exist entirely as separate entities with an own-being”, a state in which the objects observed so far “are no longer there and seem to have ceased to exist” (Rospatt 2002: 15-16).

The author of MPPS, a master of Abhidharma lore, firmly associates impermanence with momentariness, paraphrasing “all samskâra are impermanent” as follows: “all conditioned dharma, being born and perishing from instant to instant, are impermanent” (222a.29 [Lamotte, 1370]). Is there a logical progression from the doctrine of instantaneity to the realization of emptiness? Or is the ksana theory a svabhâvic cul-de-sac to be refuted on the path through impermanence to emptiness? According to Rospatt there is a prima facie contradiction between impermanence and emptiness, insofar as the doctrine of emptiness “is clearly at odds with the Buddha's teaching on anityatâ inasmuch as this teaching implies that there are real phenomena which are subject to origination and destruction.” The contradiction was resolved ingeniously: “To be a-nitya (im-permanent) was interpreted to mean nityam a-sat (‘permanently, i.e. forever, non-existing’). This denial of existence does not refer directly to the characterized entity as such, but to its supposed own-being or essence (svabhâva). Thus the Buddha's teaching that all entities are anitya comes to affirm the Mahâyâna teaching that all entities are devoid of substantial existence” (Rospatt 2002:15-16).

The MPPS sees impermanence, understood as momentariness, as taking us across the threshold of insight into emptiness:

Question: Mahâyâna teaches that dharma do not arise and do not perish, and have but one characteristic (laksana), namely the absence of characteristics. Why is it said here that “all samskâra are impermanent” and that this is a seal of the doctrine? How do these teachings not contradict one another?

Answer: To consider impermanence is to consider emptiness. If one considers instantaneous and impermanent matter (rûpa), one knows it as empty. Past matter, being already destroyed, is invisible, hence without the characteristic of matter. Future matter, not yet being born, is without activity, without function, and invisible, hence without the characteristic of matter. Present matter, too, is without duration, invisible, and indiscernable, hence without the characteristic of matter. The absence of the characteristic of matter is emptiness; emptiness is non-birth and non-destruction. Non-birth and non-destruction are in reality one and the same thing as birth and destruction... Present matter has no duration... Every dharma found retrospectively to have the characteristic of destruction must have it from its birth, but this is not known because of its subtlety... As the characteristics of birth and destruction always attend the samskâra, there is no duration. If there were duration, there would be neither birth nor destruction. Hence present matter has no duration and, in duration, there is neither birth nor destruction, for duration reduced to a unique instant characterises the samskâra. (222b27-c6.8-10, 13-16 [Lamotte, 1376-7])

Here the refutation of birth and destruction is derived from examination of the instant. In the instant, matter (or any other phenomenon examined) has no duration; if it did it would be free of birth and destruction; thus birth and destruction coincide in the instant and this makes them equivalent to no birth or destruction. On the basis of momentariness, as the immediate conjunction of birth and destruction, matter is shown to be empty of all characteristics, including birth and destruction. Here birth and destruction prove their own emptiness by their momentariness. In MMK 21 they are not given a chance to prove anything, for the legitimacy of the very terms is undercut from the start. The argument there was that it is impossible for there to be production with destruction or production without destruction; since production and destruction are impossible concepts, entities have no real existence, for entities cannot exist apart from production and destruction (21.8). Their emptiness is thus not traced to the rapidity of their production-destruction but to the impossibility of thinking in this way at all. Unlike MPPS, MMK 21 seems to bypass ksana-thinking completely.

Yet MPPS denies the reality of birth and destruction as much as of duration. It has invoked impermanence and momentariness, but only as a provisional rhetoric. In reality impermanence does not exist:

Question: What is the complete notion of anityatâ?

Answer: To see the conditioned entities arising and perishing in every moment as dust blown by the wind, as water flowing from a fountain, as flames falling away one after another. All conditioned entities are devoid of solidity, devoid of energy: they can neither be grasped nor be clung to. As illusions they deceive fools. Through this anityatâ one obtains entry into the gate of sûnyatâ. Since in emptiness no dharma exists, neither does impermanence exist. Why is this? Birth, duration, and destruction do not coexist in one and the same instant... They are mutually opposed by their characters and nature... Because they do not exist, neither does impermanence. (229b14-22 [Lamotte, 1436]; see also 171a24-b15 [Lamotte II 920-3]; 287c; 290c).

The Buddha spoke of impermanence only to destroy eternalism, among other reasons, and not because he took impermanence to be real. The doctrine of impermanence is of a remedial not an ultimate nature, and is only the first door to emptiness (228b22-8 [Lamotte, 1436-7]; 193b1-6 [Lamotte, 1083-4]; see Ramanan, 177). Nâgârjuna has a similar attitude to impermanence. Just as letting go of past and future entails letting go of present, so, by a similar logic, to let go of permanence requires that one let go of impermanence as well. Buddhism begins by asserting impermanence against permanence, the present against past and future, but at a higher level it deconstructs the dualism and fixation implicit in such oppositions. “[In a relative sense] everything is impermanent, but [in the absolute sense] nothing is permanent or impermanent” (SS 58 [Lindtner 1987: 61]). But it is not necessary to invoke the two truths here; if all is impermanent, there is no permanence to oppose to it, so the permanent/impermanent distinction breaks down. Note that there is an echo here of the Prajnâpâramitâ sûtras, which deny the applicability of a set of paired categories to any dharma (beginning with form, rûpa). The first pair listed is impermanent and permanent:

If he does not course in the idea that “form is not permanent or impermanent,” “not ease or ill,” etc. then he courses in perfect wisdom. And why? That form does not exist in such a way that impermanent or permanent, ease or ill, self or not-self, attractive or repulsive (can be predicated) of it. (Conze 1979: 302; see also 306, 314)

“The notion of impermanence is pure when it grasps impermanence correctly, impure when it begins to study impermanence” (229c17-18 [ Lamotte, 1438]). Here we see a thrust against scholastic analysis of impermanence, such as the ksana-theorists practised. The enlightened bodhisattva does not bother with any form of examination, such as examination of impermanence, pain, emptiness, non-self, birth and destruction, existence, non-existence, neither existence nor non-existence. He rejects all such vain chatter (prapanca) (205a20-3 [Lamotte, 1202]). In the MMK, too, analysis of the impermanent realities, valuable as it is, does not take us all the way to the ultimate “quiescence of fabrications” (MMK dedication verse and 25.24). For this one has to allow the conventional status of the analysis itself to come to light, so that it, too, is seen as fabrication.An instance of this is the surpassing of temporal analysis in the insight that time does not exist at all. Ramanan claims that in MPPS, “the denial of time as a substance is not a total denial of time but is a revelation of time as a derived notion” (Ramanan, 197). “If there were absolutely no past and future, if there were only the present lasting for a moment, then even the Buddha could not have striven in the path and achieved the immeasurable merits... So it must be known that the past and future are there indeed” (254c.14-18 [Lamotte, 1691]). That sounds rather like Garfield’s reading of MMK 19. But Ramanan fails to notice that this is a Sarvâstivâdin statement! The Mahâyâna position (255a23-b15 [Lamotte, 1694-5]) contradicts it: time does not exist. The Buddha’s analysis of the three times and his unobstructed penetration of their nature is not yet insight into emptiness; this dharma-analysis is surpassed by the preaching of unlimited emptiness: as the triple time does not exist, nothing whatever exists. This is presented as a teaching of the Prajnâpâramitâ sûtras.

Undoubtedly there is a more absolutistic feel to the discourse on time in the MPSS and in Candrakîrti than is apparent in the MMK. Yet what these later developments suggest at least is that Nâgârjuna lends himself to be used not only to shatter metaphysical reifications, or the dogmatism of ksana thinking, but equally the rigidity of our trust in normal temporal categories. Time, like everything that arises in dependent co-origination, is proved to be unreal and empty, and this is a step to the supreme liberating vision wherein the dependent (pratîtya) and relative (upâdâya) world of becoming, is shown, as non-dependent and non-relative, to be nirvâna (MMK 25.9). This idea should not be invoked blithely. “The eventual equation of the phenomenal world with emptiness, of samsâra with nirvâna, and of the conventional and the ultimate” (Garfield 1995: 101) is very, very eventual, so that only a Buddha can perceive it correctly. Asserted too early, too sweepingly, it can short-circuit the path to liberation. To say that emptiness is “merely a characteristic of conventional reality” (ibid. 91) could imply that Madhyamaka thought is merely a wise conventionalism, and that if one just gets the conventions right one is already in touch with emptiness, already enjoying nirvâna. I have tried to suggest that Madhyamaka arguments that allow time and the ksana to deconstruct themselves are aiming not at a demystified vision of temporal conventions, but at a vision of emptiness in which time is not seen at all, or seen at most as a useful mirage for guiding the suffering sentient beings who are still entangled in delusive temporal categories.

References

Primary sources

Dhammapada; Ed./tr. Radhakrishnan 1974.

Kathâvatthu; Tr. S.Z. Aung and C.A.F. Rhys Davies, Points of Controversy. London, 1969.

MMK = Mûlamadhyamakakârikâ.Ed. Inada, 1970; de Jong. 1977. Tr. de Jong 1949; Streng, 1969; Sprung, 1979; Kalupahana 1986; Driessens, 1995; Garfield 1995; Bugault 2002.

MPPS = Mahâprajnâpâramitâsâstra. Tr. Lamotte, 1970ff.Ratnavâli; Tr. Hopkins 1975.

Secondary sources

Bareau, André 1955. Les sectes bouddhiques du petit véhicule. Paris.

Bradley, Francis Herbert 1978. Appearance and Reality. Oxford.

Bronkhorst, Johannes 1997. “Nâgârjuna's Logic.” In: Kieffer-Puelz and Hartmann, pp. 29-38.

----. 1999 “Nâgârjuna and apoha.” In: S. Katsura, ed. Dharmakîrti's Thought and its Impact on In\dian and Tibetan Philosophy. Vienna, pp. 17-23.

Bugault, Guy 2002. Nâgârjuna: Stances du milieu par excellence. Paris.

Driessens, Georges 1979. Nagarjuna: Traité du Milieu. Paris.

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Conze, Edward, tr.1979. The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom. Delhi.

de Jong, J. W.(tr. 1949. Cinq chapitres de la Prasannapadâ. Paris,

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Hopkins, Jeffrey1975. The Precious Garland. London

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Kalupahana, David J. 1986. Nâgârjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way. Albany, NY.

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Lopez, Donald S.1994. “dGe ’dun Chos ’phel’s Position on Vigrahavyâvartinî 29.” In: T. Skorupski and U. Pagel (eds), The Buddhist Forum. Volume III. London.

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May, Jacques1980. “Âryadeva et Candrakîrti sur la Permanence.” In: Indianisme et Bouddhisme (Mélanges Lamotte). Louvain-la-neuve, pp. 215-32.

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-----. 2004. “On ‘Nâgârjuna’s Logic.’” In : H.W. Bodewitz and Minoru Hara (eds), Gedenkschrift J.W. de Jong. Tokyo, pp. 83-98.

O’Leary, Joseph S. 2002. “Beyond the Cult of the Moment: Nâgârjuna on Time.” Reader for the Staniak Stiftung symposium, Zeit: Anfang und Ende, Weingarten.

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Ramanan, K. Venkata 1978. Nâgârjuna's Philosophy as Presented in the Mahâ-prajnâpâramitâ-sâstra. Delhi.

Schweidler, Walter (ed.)2004. Zeit: Anfang und Ende. Sankt Augustin.

Rospatt, Alexander1995. The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness. Stuttgart.2002. “Erlebte Zeit: Die Betrachtung der Vergänglichkeit in der spirituellen Praxis der fruhen . Yogâcâra Schule.” Reader for the Straniak Stiftung symposium, Zeit: Anfang und Ende, Weingarten.2004. “Impermanence and Time: The Contemplation of Impermanence (anityatâ) in the Yogâcâra Tradition of Maitreya and Asanga.” In: Schweidler, pp. 69-85.

Silburn, Lilian1955. Instant et cause: Le discontinu dans la pensée philosophique de l'Inde. Paris.

Sprung, Mervyn1979. Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way: The Essential Chapters from the Prasannapadâ of Candrakîrti. London.

Steinkellner, Ernst1968. “Die Entwicklung des ksanivatvânumâna bei Dharmakîrti.” In: G. Oberhammer, ed. Beiträge zur Geistesgeschichte Indiens. Vienna, pp. 361-77.

Streng, Frederick J.1969. Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning. Nashville and New York.

Tola, Fernando and Dragonetti, Carmen2001. The Yogas Sutras of Patanjali. Delhi.

Vetter, Tilmann. “On the Authenticity of the Ratnâvâli.” Asiatische Studien 46:492-506. -----. 1997. Review of Rospatt 1995. Indo-Iranian Journal 40:166-70.

Walser, Joseph 2005. Nâgârjuna in Context: Mahâyâna Buddhism and Early Indian Culture. Columbia University Press.

My thanks to Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz, Anne MacDonald and Alexander Rospatt for their valuable criticisms, and to Fernando Tola and Carmen Dragonetti who generously shared with me the treasures of their library in Buenos Aires in August 2002.

From:

Karin Preisendanz, ed. Expanding and Merging Horizons: Contributions to South Asian and Cross-Cultural Studies in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007, pp. 525-49.

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April 13, 2009

From Impermanence to Emptiness: Madhyamaka and Momentariness

How to Approach Nâgârjuna

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