Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why Did Nāgārjuna Start with Causation?

Thesis / main argument

This 1994 Philosophy East and West article (pp. 219–250) is, before it is anything else, a piece of explicit hermeneutic instruction — a “how to read the MMK” — which makes it directly pertinent to this wiki’s own project. Garfield asks why Nāgārjuna opens a twenty-seven-chapter treatise on emptiness (སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་) with a chapter on causation, and rejects the standard answer (that causation is merely “a fundamental doctrine of Buddhism”, which he attributes by name to Kalupahana 1986) in favour of a systematic one: the doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness (śūnyatāśūnyatā) — made explicit only at MMK 24:18 — is already present “in embryo” in the opening analysis of conditions, and is the architectural key to the whole text.

The reading-procedure has three moves, and they constitute the article’s distinctive contribution over and above its (now familiar, via garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995) doctrinal content:

1. Read Chapter 1 through Chapter 24. The emptiness of dependent arising argued in Ch 1 is the emptiness of emptiness drawn out in Ch 24 (since emptiness just is dependent arising, the emptiness of dependent arising is the emptiness of emptiness). “The entire central doctrine developed in the climactic twenty-fourth chapter is present in embryo in the first. And this is why Nāgārjuna began with causation.”
2. Hold the emptiness of emptiness in mind throughout. The same negation read with or without the emptiness of emptiness yields opposite tones: “it is one thing to argue for the emptiness of some phenomenon simpliciter and quite another to argue for that emptiness with the emptiness of emptiness in mind.” Read the first way, the chapters look “unrelentingly nihilistic”; read the second, they take on “a remarkably positive tone.”
3. The structure is retrospective. “The rhetorical structure of the text only makes this clear in retrospect, when enough of the philosophical apparatus is on the table.” The opening chapter must be re-read in light of Ch 24.

This is the earliest datable, freestanding statement of the interpretive architecture that the wiki otherwise grounds on the 1995 book (garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995): the two-truths-as-greatest-contribution, the emptiness of emptiness as the device that “saves [Madhyamaka] from metaphysical extravagance”, the twin-distortion anti-nihilism (24:16), and the regularist reading of causation (Ch 1) all appear here, a year before the book. The frame is the deflation of causal power: Nāgārjuna distinguishes cause (hetu, an event with an essential power kriyā to produce its effect) from condition (pratyaya, an explanatorily useful regularity with no occult power), rejects the former and keeps the latter, and the resulting “emptiness of causation” is the emptiness of emptiness once one sees that to demonstrate a thing’s emptiness is to demonstrate that it is dependently arisen.

Key claims

The hermeneutic — “why start with causation”

• Against Kalupahana on the opening chapter. Where Kalupahana 1986 explains the placement of Ch 1 by appeal to causation as “a fundamental doctrine of Buddhism”, Garfield argues Nāgārjuna “begins with causation for deeper, more systematic reasons” (p. 221): the emptiness of dependent arising is the premise from which the emptiness of emptiness, and hence the identity of the two truths, follows. A clean head-to-head on the same textual question — and the framework-reader claims the more coherent answer (Kalupahana, kalupahana-vs-buddhapalita-and-vv).
• The order of exposition. Garfield’s own essay enacts the method: read Ch 1 philosophically; jump to Ch 24 for the emptiness of emptiness and the two truths; return to Ch 1 to show the doctrine was anticipated there; then re-read a sample later chapter (Ch 2, motion) to show what the re-reading buys.
• Ch 1 contains the conclusion of Ch 24. “The central thesis of chapter 1… is that there is no inherently existent causal nexus. The link between conditions and the phenomena dependent upon them is empty. To be empty is, however, to be dependent. Emptiness itself is therefore… dependent arising. Hence the emptiness of dependent arising is the emptiness of emptiness.” (pp. 233–234)

Causation deflated (MMK Ch 1)

• hetu vs pratyaya. Hetu (cause) carries a power (kriyā) to produce its effect as part of its essence (svabhāva, intrinsic nature, རང་བཞིན་); pratyaya (condition) is an event that can be appealed to in explanation “without any metaphysical commitment to any occult connection between explanandum and explanans” (p. 222). Ch 1 argues against causes and for the four kinds of condition (efficient, percept-object, immediate, dominant), which Nāgārjuna positively affirms at 1:2 and never retracts (notes 3 on the textual case).
• The regularity reading. “It is the regularities that count. Flickings give rise to illuminations. So they are conditions of them… Adding active forces or potentials adds nothing of explanatory utility” (p. 223). Explanation is the embedding of regularities in further regularities, never bottoming out in a power; “Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that” (p. 226). Explicitly read as anticipating Hume and Wittgenstein (Tractatus 6.371–2, quoted in the companion garfield-causality-2001).
• The emptiness of causation as a via media. Between the reificationist extreme (grounding explanation in real causal powers) and the nihilist extreme (no powers, therefore no dependent origination at all) lies the acceptance of conditions-as-regularities, “taking conventions as the foundation of ontology, hence rejecting the very enterprise of a philosophical search for the ontological foundations of convention” (p. 226 — the line he footnotes to Garfield 1990, garfield-causality-2001). The earliest statement of the method-not-system reading the wiki grounds on FWMW.

The emptiness of emptiness (MMK Ch 24)

• The fourfold identity at 24:18. Emptiness = dependent arising = dependent designation (prajñaptir upādāya, བརྟེན་ནས་གདགས་པ་) = the middle way; and, exploiting “the nice ambiguity in the reference of ‘that’ (de ni)”, the very relation among them is itself a dependent designation and hence empty (pp. 228–229, and note 8 on the emptiness of that relation as the seat of Nāgārjuna’s positionlessness).
• The table demonstration. Analyse a table to its emptiness; then analyse that emptiness and “we find nothing at all but the table’s lack of inherent existence. The emptiness is dependent upon the table… Hence emptiness itself is empty” (p. 231). This is “the deepest and most radical step in the Madhyamaka dialectic”, and the step that “saves it from falling into metaphysical extravagance.”
• The twin-distortion thesis (24:16). “Nihilism about one kind of entity is typically paired with reification of another” (p. 228): to reify emptiness as a hyper-real void behind appearances is, in the same move, to deny the reality of the phenomenal world; both extremes share the premise to exist = to exist inherently. The deep identity of the two truths follows once emptiness is seen to be empty.
• The deep identity of the two truths. “Emptiness is not other than dependent-arising, and hence… emptiness is empty” (p. 233); the conventional existence and ultimate non-existence of a thing “are the same thing.” The two truths are not two ontological layers but two characterisations of one dependently-arisen world.

The method demonstrated — Chapter 2 (motion) as the worked example

• Read in isolation, Ch 2 looks nihilistic. Nāgārjuna’s refutation of motion-as-an-entity, taken alone, “can appear unrelentingly nihilistic” — a static universe behind an illusion of change, with emptiness indistinguishable from non-existence (pp. 235–236). This is exactly the reading the framework is needed to block.
• Read with the emptiness of emptiness, motion is recovered. Because emptiness is itself empty, “the conclusion that motion is empty is then simply the conclusion that it is merely conventional and dependent” — motion is real as a relation between a body’s positions at distinct times, dependent on conventions of individuation. “In understanding its emptiness in this way, we bring motion, change, and movable and changeable entities back from the brink of extinction” (p. 237). A non-nihilistic, non-dualistic, constructive reading — but “only accessible in the chapters analyzing particular phenomena if we already find it in chapter 1.”

Antimetaphysical pragmatism (the closing register)

• Demystification, not mysticism. The “real central thrust of Madhyamaka is the demystification of [the] apparently mystical conclusion” that nothing exists; “the entire phenomenal world, persons and all, are recovered within that emptiness” (p. 237). The principal move in the demystification is “the attack on a reified view of causality.”
• The soteriological note (note 9, pp. 248–249). Reification is “the root of grasping and craving, and hence of all suffering”; but if in uprooting it one “falls into the abyss of nihilism, nothing is achieved”, and if one “relinquishes the reification of phenomena but reifies emptiness, that issues in a new grasping and craving — the grasping of emptiness and the craving for nirvana.” Only the simultaneous realisation of the emptiness and conventional reality of phenomena, and of the emptiness of emptiness, uproots suffering. The 1994 statement of the failure-mode the wiki tracks at grasping-emptiness-is-itself-a-form-of-nihilism.
• Nominalism defuses the regress (note 10, pp. 249–250). The apparent paradox — if “conventional” cancels itself on iteration, things turn out non-conventional and so non-empty — is dissolved because “conventional” functions ontologically (a mode of subsistence, “without an independent nature”), not as a logical negation-operator. Madhyamaka’s “strongly nominalistic character” — refusing to make even emptiness and conventionality real properties — is “exactly where Nāgārjuna parts company with all forms of realism.”

Methodology

Comparative-philosophical reconstruction in the analytic register, but here applied as textual hermeneutics: the article is structured as a reading-experiment on the MMK’s own architecture (Ch 1 → Ch 24 → back to Ch 1 → Ch 2). Garfield reads from the Tibetan (an appendix translates Chs 1, 2, and 24 “from the Tibetan text”), thanks Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe, Lobzang Norbu Shastri and Jay Garfield’s colleagues at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies (Sarnath), and frames his reading as one that “harmonizes with Candrakīrti’s” and is “most consonant with Nāgārjuna’s philosophical school” (i.e. Prāsaṅgika). His Western interlocutors (Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein) are comparative aids, not the primary frame. The result is framework-internal in method (Prāsaṅgika, two truths, emptiness of emptiness) with a Western register — the same placement the scholar page settles for the mature Garfield.

Notable quotes

• “it is one thing to argue for the emptiness of some phenomenon simpliciter and quite another to argue for that emptiness with the emptiness of emptiness in mind” (p. 234 — the reading-instruction in one line).
• “nihilism about one kind of entity is typically paired with reification of another” (p. 228 — the twin-distortion thesis).
• “this is why Nāgārjuna began with causation” (pp. 233–234 — the architectural conclusion).

Connections

• Same author (sits beside): garfield-fundamental-wisdom-1995 (the 1995 book systematises this article’s architecture verse-by-verse), garfield-causality-2001 (the 2001 application-paper extends the regularist reading of Ch 1/VII and footnotes the same 1990 piece). His “Epoche and Śūnyatā” (1990, Philosophy East and West 40:285–307) — the cross-cultural-skepticism essay this article cites at p. 226 and note 5 — is not yet added (parked).
• Corroborates: nihilism-charge-refuted (twin-distortion; the motion demonstration as modern evidence the framework is needed to survive the negation), madhyamaka-is-method-not-standalone-system (the earliest “conventions as foundation of ontology / rejecting the search for ontological foundations of convention” statement), grasping-emptiness-is-itself-a-form-of-nihilism (note 9: reifying emptiness is “a new grasping and craving”).
• Engages / critiques: Kalupahana (by name, on why the MMK opens with causation); Candrakīrti (the reading “harmonizes with” his emptiness of emptiness and grounds the Prāsaṅgika via-media formulation).