Chapter 2 | The Liberation of Experience

Nāgārjuna

Buddhism, whatever its doctrinal differences, is first and foremost a radical philosophy of experience. It begins with one individual’s transformative experience, the awakening of Siddhārtha Gautama to the thought of dependent origination—an experience that, despite being shrouded in layers of Buddhist hagiography, is not more mysterious than Immanuel Kant’s awakening to David Hume’s arguments about experience or Friedrich Nietzsche’s awakening to the thought of Eternal Recurrence. Gautama initially hesitated to codify his thought into doctrine, struggling to give it a form that would not compromise the amplitude of his experience. The earliest Buddhist texts are compilations of teachings attributed to him centuries after his enlightenment, shaped by the questions and interests of his interlocutors and acolytes. Like the Christian Gospels, these texts were collected and edited with the dual aim of consolidating the teachings and of divinizing their source.

When Buddhism first entered the philosophical conversations of the West—often presented as an amalgam of Buddhist and Hindu thought—it was branded as a philosophy of nothingness and quickly attracted the interest of those philosophers who were ready to abandon the project of metaphysics and its pursuit of salvation in first principles. In the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer, eager to reverse Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dismissal of “Indian” thought, emerged as its most prominent advocate, presenting Buddhism as a pessimistic yet principled alternative to Western philosophy and religion. Nietzsche, inspired by Schopenhauer, envisioned Buddhism as the last and sweetest fruit of global nihilism and mused whether he himself might not become the “Buddha of Europe.” Neither he nor Schopenhauer nor anyone else in the nineteenth century could fully grasp that Buddhism is not concerned with metaphysical or logical nothingness but with emptiness (śūnya) as an experience. Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā—the seminal treatise in which the systematic exploration of emptiness (śunyavāda) is for the first time on full display—became available in a reliable edition only beginning in 1903, too late for Nietzsche (and for William James) to recognize its resonance with their own ways of thinking.

As with other insights that later coalesced into religions or political doctrine, Buddhism underwent phases of sectarian conflict and doctrinal overgrowth. There are no extant writings from the time of Gautama’s awakening in the fourth century BCE, and the Buddha himself would not have spoken the languages (Sanskrit and Pali) in which his teachings were first transcribed—a remarkable parallel to the emergence of Christianity, when Jesus’s Aramaic teachings were translated into the Greek of the koiné. By the second century CE, doctrinal divisions among Buddhist schools threatened to obscure the experiential core of the Buddha’s teachings. It was in this context that Nāgārjuna and the philosophy of the Middle Way emerged.

His “Radical (mūla) Verses (kārikā) of the Middle-Most Way (madhyamaka)” (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, MMK) comprises twenty-seven chapters of concise, densely argued two-line verses. Written in Sanskrit, the text often engages with opponents’ views through unmarked citation, making it challenging to discern when Nāgārjuna is speaking in his own voice. He argues logically, exposing infinite regress and contradictions in his adversaries’ assumptions. Nowhere, not even in the dedicatory “prostration” before the Buddha, is there an exhortation to belief, or a reference to preternatural causes. A striking characteristic is his focus on dismantling assumptions rather than offering counterproposals of his own. When evaluating an opponent’s proposition, he systematically examines every logical possibility—that it is so, that it is not so, that it is both so and not so, that it neither is so nor not so—and rejects them all, without offering a “truer” alternative. As we will see, Nāgārjuna regards the practice of making truth-apt statements as fatally flawed both from a logical and from a soteriological perspective.

The work begins with a dedication to the Buddha that makes use of the extreme density allowed by Sanskrit grammar; it invokes and characterizes what Nāgārjuna identifies as the Buddha’s foundational insight, the axiom of “dependent arising” (pratītyasamutpāda). It states that every phenomenon, event, or situation exists only in dependence on something else. If everything has dependently arisen, then there are no substances that exist independently from others, no essences in which the actuality of an object would be grounded, no absolute beginnings, no first causes, no final ends, no identities, no subjects, no objects. Emptiness emerges as the absence of inherent determinations. Dependent arising and emptiness are two sides of the same thought.

The first chapter extrapolates the profound implications of this universal contingency: it transforms the notion of independent, causal origination—central to Greek first philosophy, Christian metaphysics, and certain Buddhist traditions—into the analysis of the infinite web of interdependent causes in which any event is embedded. There is no terminus to this network, no singular “efficient” cause initiating a series of events or creating another phenomenon anew. There is no efficient or creative cause outside imbuing the world with purpose: no Creator at the world’s beginning, no Judge at its end.

This does not imply that reality is incoherent, or that it is simply a mirage. Borrowing from Western logical distinctions, we might say that Nāgārjuna converts the search for sufficient causes—causes through which something comes into existence—into the investigation of necessary causes—causes without which something cannot exist. For instance, is a sprout’s emergence as a sunflower caused by the sun, or by water, or by the soil, or perhaps by the gardener? Or does it not rather emerge from a network of all of these, and infinitely more, causes, and isn’t the sprout itself the product of such causes? Differently framed: it is not the case that the novel Creation Lake was brought into existence by Rachel Kushner, but that without Rachel Kushner, and a whole host of other reasons, Creation Lake would not have come into existence. This is a decisive switch in perspective—it lowers the metaphysical stakes and makes the conditions of existence accessible to experience.

Through a tightly woven series of arguments, Nāgārjuna dismantles claims to first causes and independent existence. To assert such independence would entail attributing to entities a substantiality (svabhāva) that endures beyond their individuation in a particular intersection of conditions. Arguing for the identity and substantiality of objects or subjects over time requires, as we know from ancient Greek astronomers and from Aristotle, the antecedent distinction between the identity observed and the background (the path) against which it appears. Nāgārjuna counters that this distinction between identity and its other opens a relation of dependence and thus defeats its premise, the claim to firstness and substantial independence. The prediction of a path implies the priority of order before the things to be ordered. Every chapter of the MMK makes a version of this argument before finally turning it against its own premises.

The first chapter of the MMK is concerned with invalidating four pretenses of first causes, which led some interpreters to speculate that Nāgārjuna was in actual dialogue with Aristotelian metaphysics. The second chapter shifts its focus to motion, the very problem that compelled Aristotle to vault his physics with metaphysical speculation. In twenty-five stanzas, Nāgārjuna critiques the notion that motion can be distinguished in time and space from the moving body. What would ground such a distinction? What differentiates a path traversed (or yet to be traversed) by a body from any other segment of space? How could one conceive of motion that is not the motion of a particular moving body? How can we determine when motion begins, and when it ends? These questions, familiar to us from Zeno’s paradoxes, from empiricist critiques, and from Henri Bergson’s philosophy of motion, assume a distinctive trajectory in Nāgārjuna’s treatise.

Nāgārjuna does not deny the reality of motion or argue that motion is always continuous. Instead, he contends that treating motion as existing independently of a moving body attributes to it an essence (svabhāva) persisting beyond its particular instantiation. Upon logical examination, this supposed essence reveals itself as dependent after all—motion cannot be conceived apart from a moving body, just as identifying a moving body depends on recognition, on internal or externalized memory. (“Is this the same celestial body we chronicled last year?”) The same objection applies to other topics Nāgārjuna’s opponents bring up: desire depends on its objects, perceptions on what is perceived, the self on its parts, fire on fuel, and so forth. Motion stands at the beginning of Nāgārjuna’s treatise because it is, as Aristotle also argued, the most abstract form of change. If motion is regarded as codependently arising—as arising in dependence on the moving body just as much as the moving body depends on it—then it becomes an explicable occurrence. It is no longer an essence but a name for the momentary interdependence of body, space, and time. It is true that as this essence-less, empty phenomenon motion cannot be predicted with certainty; in the flux of conditions, it is always novel. Nāgārjuna is free to take the risk of proposing such an unpredictable and changeable world because he does not have to commit to a meaningful, predictable cosmos, or to a creator god whom it would embody.

Emptiness, as Nāgārjuna explicates it, has nothing in common with the nothingness and the nihilism Nietzsche suspected as lurking at the heart of Buddhism. Rather, it is the constant philosophical task to empty out, to void and avoid concepts, habits, institutions, and practices of their pretensions to essential validity. In their effort to explain change and uphold the idea of identity and order, the essentialists clutter the world with concepts and static entities, turning every phenomenon, every event into a first repetition and stifling the potential for true novelty. “All is possible when emptiness is possible. Nothing is possible when emptiness is impossible” (MMK 24, 14).

A less abstract example of Nāgārjuna’s voiding of essences is his discussion of the Four Noble Truths, also in chapter 24. Surely, his imaginary opponent objects, you cannot deny that the Four Noble Truths that the Buddha himself proclaimed are essential to his message. To recall, these four truths are: there is suffering (dukkha), there is arising (of suffering through craving), there is cessation (of craving), there is a path (to the liberation from suffering). If these turn out not to be hard and fast truths, the rest of the doctrinal edifice of Buddhism itself is annihilated, including the “three jewels”—the infallible figure of the Buddha, his doctrine (dharma), and the community of adherents (sangha). Buddhism itself would turn out to be empty.

Yet that is exactly what Nāgārjuna argues. He shows that if the first truth, that suffering exists, were a pronouncement about the essence of the world (in the manner of Protestant ethics, say), it would condemn human existence to irredeemable misery, rendering all hopes for liberation—expressed in the third and fourth truths—misguided or futile. However, empirical suffering, analyzed from up close, really is disappointment with the transitory, conditioned nature of life. Suffering is not the valley of tears from which we need to escape and from which the monastic community needs to shield us, nor is it our helplessness in the face of tragic fate. It is the name we give to the insight that everything we encounter in our experience is “unstable” (du-stha, badly standing), shifting, unreliable. What we experience, therefore, is of the same nature as we who claim to experience it—constantly changing, without firm identity, mortal, without any ground. Suffering in the popular sense of deprivation and pain arises only if we deny this emptiness of experience and grasp at essences and identities. As the experience of emptiness, suffering is morally neutral: just as we habitually complain about the transitoriness of all things, we could also learn to enjoy it as providing us with the spectacle of arising and disappearing that makes life exciting and beautiful. Nietzsche makes exactly this claim.

The craving for permanence in a world of dependent origination is the reason for suffering, not the cruelty of fate, as the Greeks thought, or original sin. By not embracing the fullness of our experience, we are the co-originators of our suffering—this is, after all, what the second truth confirms, which is as dependent on the first as the first is on the second. The third and fourth truths—that craving can be understood and thereby stilled, and that there is a nonmystical path to such stilling—are equally dependent on each other, and on all the others. There is, in sum, no truth so noble that it could refer to an independent essence. Rather than setting out a revealed doctrine, the Four Noble Truths destabilize and empty each other—but therein, in their emptiness, lies their transformative potential.

Nāgārjuna emphasizes again and again that suffering is not a passive stance toward an unjust world but the active experience of emptiness. As disquieting as the experience of constant change and transformation may be—especially if there is no framework to secure and predict outcomes—it alone harbors the possibility of radical novelty, of another experience. Nāgārjuna was well aware that this perspective is anything but reassuring: “By a misperception of emptiness a person of little intelligence is destroyed / Like a snake seized incorrectly, or like a spell incorrectly cast. // This is why the Buddha initially hesitated to teach this dharma / fearing that it would be impossible for the slow-witted to penetrate this dharma” (MMK 24, 11 and 12).

The strategy Nāgārjuna deploys throughout the MMK consists in emptying propositions and phenomena of their essence and showing that assuming atomic kernels of meaning and being would lead to contradictions or to the doubling of explanations (e.g., explaining motion through “motion”). He argues that the analysis of the contingent and fleeting conditions that intersect in a given event will give us a better view on our reality than conceptual speculation. Emptiness is not the Nothing of the Eleatic philosophers, not a counterproposal to traditional metaphysics and its claim to essences; it is, rather, an activity and an experience—the activity of first deconstructing and then a-voiding proposed essences, and the experience of living without the solidity of ultimate reasons.

As we can see, Nāgārjuna’s project aligns intriguingly with that of Kant’s, as both propose the elimination of metaphysical claims that are not anchored in experience. However, where Nāgārjuna is willing to abandon the entire project of metaphysics and concentrate on empirical guidance, Kant, the defender of Newtonian a priori mechanics, clings to the idea of subjective identity as the bridge linking thought and its objects. For Nāgārjuna, as for most thinkers in the Buddhist tradition, the markers of human identity—such as perception, conceptual thinking, consciousness, and memory—exhaust themselves in their function; they co-arise with (are codependent on) their objects and would dissolve with them were it not for the desire, the thirst (tanha) for permanence that is at the core of suffering. Nāgārjuna’s arguments against the notion of an enduring self carry—like Nietzsche’s and James’s—a concrete liberatory impetus: historical Buddhism sought to free the individual from the ineluctable strictures of the Indian caste system and its deterministic claims of natal identity and endless cycles of rebirth.

The disavowal of a self, even if it is as insubstantial a proposition as “the I think,” leads to a consequence that Kant sought to avoid at all costs: that thoughts and experiences are not really “mine.” In Kant’s world, deeply concerned with establishing rules that separate normalcy from deviation, the idea of being visited by thoughts, dreams, or visions was a sign of possible madness; in Buddhist practice, letting thoughts come to one, attending to them, labeling them, becoming aware of their rising and falling away are, to the contrary, goals pursued with extreme effort. Later in life, Kant pondered whether being surprised by one’s thought might indicate artistic genius. For us, it is a first indication that in Buddhism there is an opening for aesthetic practice, even if it is the aesthetics of experience.

Whenever it looks as though Nāgārjuna intervenes in traditional Western philosophical debates—as when he, like Hume, decomposes the self into “bundles” (skandha) of attachment, or when he, like Kant, reminds us that there are questions that human reason can never answer—we must remember that he pursued a different agenda, one in which the guidance of experience is the main path to liberation.

Among these differences there is, first, the insistence that emptiness—in contrast to logical negation, which can be theorized and integrated into a dialectical system—must engulf any theory that articulates it. If emptiness is the consequence of dependent origination, then a theory that argues against the assumption of independent essences is dependent on this assumption—and therefore itself empty. There cannot be an absolute emptiness persisting beyond the discovery of emptiness in the various topics in the MMK. Nāgārjuna, insisting on the centrality of the Buddha’s awakening to dependent origination, concludes—to the dismay of Buddhist clerics—that the Buddha’s teaching itself must be empty. “Blissful is the quieting of all grasping, of all conceptual proliferation / Never, and nowhere, has any doctrine (dharma) been taught by the Buddha” (MMK 25, 24).

Second, the notion of emptiness as experience dramatically impacts the amplitude of human existence. Like other thinkers in the Mahāyāna tradition, Nāgārjuna distinguishes between two truths, the truth of convention and the ultimate truth. This was partly a pedagogical device to bring laypeople into the community of followers without burdening them with the full doctrinal weight of Buddhist philosophy. More profoundly, however, it is a recognition that the world of essences may be empty but still has efficacious reality. It may be ultimately true that we are not possessed of an essential identity that stays with us for all our lives, but the conventional ways in which we organize our communities, define our laws, and interact with each other rely on identity and individual responsibility. The Western notion of ideology tries to capture the same insight, though it still clings to the notion that there is a ground against which ideology reveals itself as “false” consciousness.

The axiom of emptiness, by contrast, in criticizing and invalidating the essences propagated by the world of conventions, invalidates its own status as “ultimate” truth: it is itself codependent on its object of criticism—convention—and therefore empty. The truth of the world of conventions—in the language of Buddhism, samsara—is simply that it is, against its own declarations and knowledge, the result of conventions, and therefore empty. The world of ultimate truths, nirvana, cannot be an alternate world in which all the distortions of the conventional world are rectified, for this would essentialize this alternate world and make it subject to the same criticism as that levied against the conventional world. The only way to conceive of the relation between the two truths is to say that the ultimate truth is the conventional world experienced as conventional. Nirvana (the ultimate truth) is not paradise or heaven—it is this world in which we live but experienced as the world of convention. “Whatever is the limit of nirvāna, that is the limit of samsāra / between the two, not the slightest difference can be found” (MMK 25, 20).

Experience, in the fullest sense it acquires in the Madhyamaka worldview, thus entails maintaining a parallax view on the world. It means questioning those experiences that have sedimented into conventional knowledge, judgments, and habits; it means giving space to the novelty of unforeseen intersections and networks of conditions; it means attending to one’s own experiences as ever provisional and changing. But it also means accepting, seeing the reality of conventional institutions and interactions and taking seriously their dynamics and consequences. The Middle Way Nāgārjuna envisages is not a path on which we seek out the comfortable middle, the compromise between two worldviews, but the constant undoing of one by the other: of the conventional world by realizing that its essences are fictions, of the ultimate world by realizing that it depends on the conventional world for its truth. Emptiness, after all, is always emptiness of something.

To sustain this parallax view might seem too difficult or too onerous a task, especially for us laypeople engaged in the complexities of daily life. Yet in more limited contexts, we already practice this balance. One example is the experience of raising young children. Their world is full of fantastic essences that we as parents must take seriously while gently steering them toward emptying their world of monsters, imaginary friends, hostile elements, and desperate attachments to objects. It will not do to insist on the emptiness of their worlds when they are not yet able to make such distinctions themselves, and when they see us—as they invariably will—accepting conventions and essences in our own world.

The example that is important for the present context is our experience of fiction. The relationship between conventional and ultimate truth mirrors the ways readers engage with prose fiction in Western cultures since the end of the eighteenth century. Before that time, elaborate devices of concealment—such as the invention of a fictitious editor—signaled a text’s fictional status while preserving its meaningfulness. Since then, however, through a complex network of codependent developments—which are the subjects of later chapters—we have come to accept modern novels as works of fiction that we appreciate by simultaneously suspending and acknowledging their fictionality.

When reading a novel (or watching a film or TV series), we do not typically focus on the mechanisms by which it constructs its semblance of reality. Instead, we accept the story that is being told (or shown) as a coherent account of relations between events and characters even as we remain aware of, enjoy even, its dependence on the multiple conditions that brought it before our eyes and ears. We accept, in Nāgārjuna’s terms, the characters and events in a novel as essences while being fully aware that they are empty. Reading novels allows us to experience that conventional truth is not falsehood masquerading as truth, but truth in the form of convention. It is for this reason that reading novels relates to living our lives.

If it seems preposterous to claim that the experience of modern novels is linked to Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way, in the following I will marshal the help of his modern avatars, Nietzsche and James, to make exactly this point.