Nattier's Response to Fukui on the Chinese Origins of the Heart Sutra

When I first read Nattier's article, "The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?" (1992), ca 2007, I found the case compelling. I could immediately see how the method was applied to the evidence and how this led to certain conclusions, namely that the Heart Sutra could only have been composed in Chinese.

Subsequently Huifeng and I independently published confirmation of Nattier’s research. We both applied the same method to other parts of the text and reached the same conclusion. Nattier’s results from comparing versions of the “core section” apply to the text as a whole. Sixteen years and fourteen published articles later, I'm completely convinced by the evidence we have, that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese, on the model of a chāo jīng 抄經 (digest text). Although I have also stated what kind of evidence would refute my view.

I was, therefore, amazed to learn that the Chinese origins thesis is not only rejected amongst Japanese academics, but that they consider the thesis to have been refuted. The issue is difficult to understand because the principal documents are in Japanese and, as a non-Japanese speaker, I can only get glimpses of the arguments through translations and the occasional article published in English. Still, I have been afforded many such glimpses since 2007 and have begun to see the outlines of their arguments.

A key moment in the modern history of Heart Sutra studies was the 1994 publication of a rebuttal of Nattier (1992) by the theologian Fukui Fumimasa (1934–2017), who was not only a senior academic, but also head priest at a major Buddhist temple. Japanese society being what it is, an older man who has high status as an academic and as a priest enjoys a kind of prestige that we can scarcely imagine in Europe and her colonies. In effect, Fukui cannot be publicly contradicted. In Japanese academia such men are considered untouchable. Contradicting one of the big men would be career suicide for a Japanese academic.

Fukui’s denunciation of Nattier was, therefore, a big deal. And it set the tone for Japanese scholarship that followed. A number of articles by other Japanese theologians began to appear. As I say, non-Japanese speakers only get glimpses into the world of Japanese Heart Sutra studies. I'm piecing this together from fragments and hearsay.

By contrast, Jan Nattier was at the time an early-career academic, a youngish woman, and an American. From what I can tell, this combination of qualities meant that she was not taken very seriously in Japan, which may account for the patronising tone of Fukui's criticism. And yet, Tanahashi (2014: 77) reports Fukui's comment that Nattier (1992) "shook the Japanese academic world". Fukui is reported as saying (in Tanahashi's translation)

"As the Prajñā Heart Sutra is one of the most revered sutras in Japan, it would be a matter of grave concern if this were proved to be an apocryphon produced in China."

One might be forgiven for thinking that Fukui therefore took Nattier's article very seriously indeed. And yet, as we will see, his attempt as a rebuttal cannot be taken seriously. His assertions are full of misunderstood English idioms, trivial arguments that don't address the issues raised by Nattier, and many kinds of logical fallacy.

Note the essentially theological nature of Fukui's remark. That a text is "revered" is at best incidental to philology. Nor would it be "matter of concern" for philologists, let alone a grave concern, if the text was composed in China using extracts of other (genuine) Buddhist texts. The provenance is what it is. The ideal philologist (or historian for that matter) is concerned to establish the facts of the matter, where and to the extent that they can be established, and to present them in some kind of coherent framework that helps to answer questions about the text. Of course, in practice we never attain the ideal, but we do aim to make progress towards it. This is in fact one of the criteria for getting published, i.e. that the article makes progress.

It is the religious who worries about how the facts will look or, more to the point, who worries how they will look, if the provenance pointed to by the facts is not the traditional provenance. Because let's face it, being wrong about the most popular Buddhist text in Japan leaves Fukui et al with some explaining to do. The potential loss of face entailed may be literally unimaginable for a European.

That said, secular academics might also feel some embarrassment if they are forced to admit how very wrong they have been about the Heart Sutra and Prajñāpāramitā generally. They should certainly be embarrassed that none of them noticed mistakes in Conze's Sanskrit text, for example. Or that we still don't reliable editions of our basic texts. In Europe and her colonies, many academics in the field of Buddhist Studies are also religious. Perhaps not to the extent of being abbots or head priests in religious organisations, but they are believers who experience enhanced disappointment when some aspect of their religion is contradicted by facts.

In any case, despite the obvious flaws in the arguments of Fukui, no one stepped up to defend Chinese origins until Huifeng (2014) was published. European academics continue to display an intense reluctance to talk about the issue. Most prefer to support the status quo and continue to refer to the emic view of the Heart Sutra as an Indian text composed in Sanskrit. Jonathan Silk is widely considered a leading Heart Sutra scholar on the basis of his 1994 edition of the Tibet text as it occurs in the Kanjur (ignoring the Tibetan texts found at Dunhuang). And yet Silk is one of those who continue to refer to the "Sanskrit original" despite being shown, step by step, that the Sanskrit is a back-translation from Chinese. Another senior scholar privately told me, he's "not qualified" to assess our work, because he "doesn't know Chinese". Despite exposing T 250 as an apocryphon, Shōgo Watanabe also resists our conclusions about T 251 and promotes the idea that there is insufficient evidence and that we must return to the Sanskrit manuscripts. The mask slipped a little in 2019 when he criticised our conclusions as "unnatural". Not a term I ever expected to see in a scholarly context.

Thus Fukui has become the posthumous poster boy for orthodox Japanese theology which rejects Chinese origins and then scrambles around for reasons to reject it. Those who follow in his footsteps seem to genuinely think that Fukui refuted Nattier. I don't have direct access to Fukui's writing, he only wrote in Japanese, but I do now have access to an unpublished rebuttal of Fukui by Jan Nattier. And today, I'm typing up my notes on this.

Nattier's Response

In 2019, I was corresponding with Jan Nattier about the Heart Sutra and she shared her unpublished response to Fukui (1994), which I read with interest. I urged Nattier to make this response more widely available and last week (Apr 2023) she kindly uploaded the response to academia.org. Re-reading it after four years I was again struck by how poorly Fukui did in trying to refute Nattier. And by this time I had also seen other articles that were said to be influential in Japan. I have subsequently published two formal critiques of other scholars work on the Heart Sutra (Attwood 2020, 2022), including a number of Japanese scholars. I also composed informal reviews of other works on my blog (cited in the bibliography below).

My method here is to use Nattier's response to take a back-bearing on how Fukui thought about the Heart Sutra with a view to better understanding his objections; and to show that he certainly did not refute our Chinese origins thesis. And with his methods he could never refute it.

Core Section

Nattier first raises what seems to be the central issue for Fukui, the notion of the "core" of the text. Nattier referred to the quoted passage that was the focus of her article as "the core passage". As she says, this term "core" was not intended as a value judgement, nor as a metaphysical statement, it is just that the section falls in the middle of the text, which Nattier divides up for methodological reasons.

In fact, Heart Sutra manuscripts tend not to divide the prose text up into sections at all. I haven't seen all the surviving manuscripts but I have seen a majority of them, and they are all like this. Both in Sanskrit and in Chinese. The famous Hōryūji manuscript has neither word nor sentence breaks, let alone paragraphs or sections. Each akṣara (roughly "a syllable") stands alone on the page. So all divisions of the text, for whatever reason, are entirely arbitrary and imposed on the text by scholars.

For Fukui, however, correctly identifying the "core" of the text requires a radical shift in outlook. For Fukui the core of the text is the "mantra", which strongly implies a Tantric outlook (Fukui was head priest of a Tendai temple, in which tantric Buddhism is practiced). He apparently claims to have shown that a shift in the general title of the text from Duō xīn jīng «多心經» to Xīn jīng «心經» can be interpreted as evidence that the emphasis shifted from the mantra to emptiness only in the fifteenth century.

Nattier notes that Fukui is making a theological argument rather than a scholarly one. For example, Nattier notes that if we are saying that some part of the text represents "the core" (as a value judgement) then it simply begs the question, "represents the core, for whom?" And Fukui has nothing to say about this. That the Heart Sutra means different things to different people, at different times, can be amply demonstrated by glancing at any two commentaries taken at random.

By "theological" here, I mean a religious outlook that aims to legitimise and authenticate some religious doctrine. Theology takes doctrine as a starting point; as a given. Theologians collect and collate evidence in support of that doctrine. As a science undergraduate I called this "cooking" the result, not sure of the origins of that phrase. Cooking a result amounted to making the data fit the expected norm. One did this in school, for example, to hide experimental failures that might adversely affect one's grades. It is of course, fatal to the process of doing science to allow cooking in real world situations. Theology seems to me to be entirely concerned with cooking the results.

Fukui apparently argues, and Nattier apparently agrees that Xīn jīng «心經» would have been interpreted as meaning "mantra text". As Nattier points out, even if Xīn jīng «心經» were perceived as meaning "mantra text" this does not translate into a belief that Buddhists were focused on the mantra. For example, Nattier reminds us, the undated commentaries by Kuījī and Woncheuk do not think in Tantric terms. They encompass Madhyamaka and Yogācāra thought, with a clear preference for the latter. Long before the fifteenth century, these earliest Chinese commentators focused almost all their efforts on explicating the emptiness doctrine (albeit it from a Yogācāra point of view).

We can short circuit this discussion by looking at my 2017 article: "‘Epithets of the Mantra’ in the Heart Sutra." There I showed that word mantra does not occur in the Chinese Heart Sutra.

Credit for this discovery goes to Nobuyoshi Yamabe. Rather than publish, he pointed it out to Jan Nattier in a letter. The observation made its way, at the last minute, into Nattier (1992) as footnote 54a (typesetting was a lot more clunky in the early 90s). Nattier added a few more examples to flesh out Yamabe's, and my contribution was to provide a comprehensive survey of the relevant texts.

I was able to show, per Yamabe, that where the Heart Sutra has zhòu 咒 or zhòu 呪 (same character written two different ways), the source text in Kumārajīva's Large Sutra translation (T 223) has míngzhòu 明呪. By referencing the extant Sanskrit manuscripts we showed that Kumārajīva was translating vidyā, not mantra. Hence the epithets sections of the Sanskrit Large Sutra manuscripts refer to Prajñāpāramitā as mahāvidyā, anuttarā vidyā, and asamasamā vidyā. The Sanskrit Heart Sutra by contrast suggests (using very different syntax also) that Prajñāpāramitā is a mahāmantra, mahāvidyāmantra, anuttaramantra, and asamasamamantra. This can be explained as a simple mistranslation from Chinese into Sanskrit, but I don't see how it can be explained if the passage was copied from the Large Sutra in Sanskrit. Copying, in this way, ought to be inherently conservative. Even where scribal errors distort words, the syntax of a sentence should not change to something completely different.

Moreover, where the character zhòu 呪 occurs on its own in the Heart Sutra, where it introduces the incantation, it almost certainly means dhāraṇī. This seems to be the case because the incantation that follows is not a mantra, since it has none of the characteristic features of a mantra. Rather, it has all the characteristic features of a dhāraṇī. Samuel Beal (1865) translated the word zhòu 呪 as dhāraṇī, based on a Tang Dynasty commentary, long before the Sanskrit text was known in Europe.

We can be quite confident that the Heart Sutra was not a "mantra text" and does not contain a mantra. The answer to what kind of text the Heart Sutra is can also be found in Nattier's footnotes (48). Robert Buswell, also wrote to Nattier, and pointed to the possibility of the Heart Sutra being a chāo jīng 抄經, i.e. a "digest text" or "condensed sutra". A chāo jīng 抄經 consisted of copied passages intended to convey the gist of a larger text. Many hundreds of these texts were produced in China, in one early medieval catalogue, chāo jīng 抄經 make up around one in five Buddhist "translations" in circulation. European scholars have long overlooked this genre and the catalogues of Buddhist translations which are our main source of evidence about them when writing about the Heart Sutra.

Thus Fukui's first complaint is shown to be invalid. He not only mistakes the wording of the text, he also mistakes the meaning of the words. In responding to this, Nattier was far more accommodating than she needed to be and had the tools at hand to solidly refute Fukui. But perhaps the ideas in her footnotes still appeared to be unclear at that time.

Nattier then shifts to consider twelve more specific criticisms.

Minutiae

The reader may have to bear with me to some extent, because, a) I have nowhere near as much patience as Nattier displays; and b) I've written about some of the issues raised by Fukui and resolved them in ways that refute his conclusions (before I knew what his conclusions are).

Having dealt with the issue of the "core", Nattier then moves onto considering several points made by Fukui with only her summaries of his complaints to guide us (given in Arial font). In reproducing what follows, Chinese transcriptions are converted to Pinyin and characters supplied.

A. There are no sources that state that the Heart Sutra is an apocryphal scripture (Jap. gikyō 偽経), while sources accepting it as a translation by Xuanzang are voluminous. For example, an inscription dating from 672 credits Xuanzang with the translation of the sūtra. Nattier must show that this inscription is a forgery. If she cannot do so, her entire argument becomes unreasonable.

It is entirely true that none of the traditional commentaries on the Heart Sutra refer to it as "an apocryphon", but so what? This is a plain old fallacy that logicians call an "argument from popularity" (argumentum ad populum). It doesn't matter how many people believe something, popularity does not make a proposition correct or meaningful.

It is surely a fact that, by the time the earliest artefacts appeared, it was widely believed in China that the Heart Sutra was a translation from Sanskrit by Xuanzang. A belief is not a fact, even if everyone we know believes it. A belief is an emotion about an idea. Note that we actually have an earlier inscription, the Fangshan Stele (13 March 661), that also credits Xuanzang as the translator. But, again, so what? This attribution has no bearing on Nattier's methods or conclusions. And we know that Chinese attributions cannot always be trusted.

Here Nattier (1992: 206, n.33) raises an issue that I also explored in Attwood ("The History of the Heart Sutra as a Palimpsest." 2020). Both Kuījī and Woncheuk did not see the text as a sūtra preached by the Buddha. Rather they refer to it as bié shēng 別生 "separately produced", which means they didn't think of the text as a sutra preached by Śakyamuni. So not only is Fukui's argument inherently fallacious, it's simply wrong to say that no one ever questioned the authenticity of the text.

Nattier also points out that the Biography of Xuanzang (T 2053) composed by Yàncóng 彥悰; 688 CE), still naively used as a source historical evidence throughout the Buddhist world (see Kotyk 2019), doesn't mention Xuanzang translating the text. The general reader may not appreciate the impact of this absence. The Biography makes a point of describing all of Xuanzang's translations and the circumstances in which they occured. And that list coincides with other evidence of Xuanzang's translations. None of these mention Xuanzang translating the Heart Sutra.

The first literary mention of Xuanzang as translator, apart form attributions on inscriptions (which date from Xuanzang's lifetime), occurs in the Kāiyuán shìjiào lù «開元釋教錄» (Record of Śākyamuniʼs Teachings Compiled During the Kaiyuan period. T 2154); compiled in 730 CE by Zhìshēng 智昇. Earlier catalogues don't mention this.

The inscription Fukui refers to is better known in English as the Beilin stele, and his thinking on this appears to be reproduced in Tanahashi (2014). Fukui and Tanahashi seem to be unaware of the Fangshan Stele which is somewhat older (661 CE) and attributes the Heart Sutra as a translation by Xuanzang during his lifetime. But so what? We have shown that the Chinese text is definitely not "a translation" and that the Sanskrit text definitely is a back-translation from Chinese. Ergo, the text was not "translated by Xuanzang" and we must seek an alternative explanation for the attribution.

In a telling note Nattier (6, n.11) points out that the phrase attributing the text to Xuanzang is ambiguous because "a substantial number of the canonical sutras that a labelled 'imperially commissioned translations' [zhào yì 詔譯] ... are not new translations at all, but only slightly touched-up renditions of versions that already existed in Chinese". Thus the tag yì 譯 might not necessary indicate "translator/translation" in the strict sense, but might stretch to the collator of a chāo jīng 抄經 (this is something a Sinologist needs to investigate by looking at attributions on other chāo jīng 抄經).

In light of this comment, I went and looked at the attributions of some of Xuanzang's translations. The attribution of T 220 (Xuanzang's Prajñāpāramitā translations), for example, takes the standard form:

Sānzàng fǎshī Xuánzàng fèng zhào yì 三藏法師玄奘奉　詔譯
“Tripiṭaka Dharma-master Xuanzang translated with imperial authorisation.”

The phrase 奉□詔譯 might also be read, "translated with the blessing of the Emperor" or "... by order of the Emperor". The space before the character zhào 詔 "edict" is there as a sign of respect for the Emperor, although there was also a taboo against writing the name of the reigning emperor. Note that the Emperor paid for the translations, he paid for the upkeep of the monks involved, and he paid for the monasteries the monks lived in. Getting his approval was necessary because it came with the financial backing of the Chinese Imperium. The formal role of the state in supporting Buddhism meant that even emperors hostile to Buddhism, such as Tàizōng 太宗 (r. 626–649 CE) and Gāozōng 高宗 (r. 649–683 CE) were constrained to continue state support for the religion.

The attribution on the Fangshan Stele (661 CE), which predates the completion of T 220 by a few years, follows the same pattern. The attribution of the canonical Xīn jīng is different in the Taishō based. The main text says:

Táng sānzàng fǎshī xuán zàng yì 唐三藏法師玄奘譯
Tripiṭaka Dharma-master Xuanzang translated

And a variant reads:

Táng sānzàng fǎshī Xuánzàng fèng zhào 唐三藏法師玄奘奉詔
“Tripiṭaka Dharma-master Xuanzang, imperial authorisation.”

The variant is obviously a simply scribal error where a copyist has omitted the expected character 詔. The main text is more interesting because yì 譯 on it's own does mean "translation" (as well as translator, and "to translate" in all conjugations), but as Nattier says, it was also used for redactions of existing translations. And mention of imperial sponsorship is missing here. I don't know why.

In any case, the attribution has to be taken with a grain of salt, because we have shown that the Chinese Heart Sutra is not a translation from Sanskrit, it was composed in Chinese, using passages from T 223 and T 901.

Fukui's comment that "Nattier must show that this inscription is a forgery. If she cannot do so, her entire argument becomes unreasonable" is incoherent. Between us, Kotyk and I have shown that the Heart Sutra was composed ca 654-656 CE. To see an inscription of it in 672 is not some big reveal. The existence of the Beilin stele and the even older Fangshan stele simply tell us that the text must have existed by then and be attributed to Xuanzang by Chinese Buddhists. The attributions of Chinese Buddhist texts are still being checked and are often disproved, even now.

B. Nattier's division of the Heart Sūtra differs from that of traditional Buddhist scholarship. There is no authority for her division, and it cannot be accepted.

Again my response is, so what? As Nattier says, she divides the text this way for methodological reasons. Nattier acknowledges that she uses the term "core" before defining it, but the definition is there for anyone who kept reading. Moreover, her choice of "core" to label the core passage doesn't have the value laden interpretation in Nattier's mind that it appears to have in Fukui's. It's just in the middle.

Points B, C, D & E are variations on the theme "Nattier can't divide the text up that way because it is not traditional" and "Fukui valorises the mantra over the body of the text so Nattier is wrong about everything." In my view, Nattier is too generous in her discussion of these trivial complaints. I will skip over them.

F. The interpretation that "the mantra was added later to the core passage" is an error of the same kind. This kind of thinking is probably due to the interpretation that the core (kakushin) or essence (honshitu) of the sūtra is in the idea of emptiness. But this is an interpretation that was established only during the Ming dynasty, around the fifteenth century. Before that, the essence of the Heart Sūtra was correctly (tadashiku) [sic!] seen as ni the mantra at the end.

Fukui seeks to understand the text primarily as a mantra, as befits his role as a senior cleric in a Tendai temple. As we have seen however, Fukui was comprehensively wrong about this: there is no mantra, Prajñāpāramitā is superlative vidyā, and the incantation in the text is a dhāraṇī.

Moreover, we can say with some confidence that the dhāraṇī was copied from Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901), translated by Atikūṭa ca. 654 CE.

The transliteration of dhāraṇī using Chinese characters was a very hit and miss affair. There was some crossover where a dhāraṇī used Buddhist technical terms, however, no standards were ever adopted and each translator adopted a different, not always consistent, approach. As such the source text is often obscured and cannot be reconstructed with any confidence, even using Middle Chinese phonology.

Thus we can say that if a dhāraṇī in a Chinese source is identical to another source then they are likely the same dhāraṇī transcribed by the same translator. Either one copied the other, or both copied a third source. In the case of the Heart Sutra dhāraṇī, we find exactly the same dhāraṇī in the Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經». Similar dhāraṇī have been noted, but the dhāraṇī in the Heart Sutra is identical to the one in Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經». If we stipulate that the Heart Sutra is a text largely composed of copied passages, then it makes sense to think that the dhāraṇī was copied as well. And given that the dhāraṇī in the Tuóluóní jí jīng is identical to the one in the Heart Sutra, we can infer than the Heart Sutra author copied it from there.

Note that inference also gives us a fixed date, 654 CE, before which the Heart Sutra cannot have existed because the Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» was first translated into Chinese in that year, by Atikūṭa.

G. Taking as her basis the fact that sources documenting the existence of the Sanskrit Heart Sūtra in India prior to the eighth century are lacking, while there are many references to the Chinese Heart Sūtra prior to the eighth century, Nattier makes this a major reason for the argument that the Sanskrit text is a back-translation (han'yaku) from the Chinese. But how many sūtras are there for which we have evidence of their existence in India propor to the eighth century?

Nattier is quite polite here, given that this assertion is an outrageous falsehood. This is a classical example of the straw man fallacy. As she patiently explains, Nattier (1992) does not make this argument from absence. The lack of evidence from India is circumstantial, not probative. Nattier knows, full well, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The argument that the Heart Sutra is a back-translation is, in contrast to Fukui's blatantly false assertion, supported by numerous examples of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra paraphrasing the text of the Large Sutra and several of these paraphrases being blatantly non-idiomatic. I now often cite the occurrence of avidyākṣaya in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra as an illustrative example. Every other known Buddhist text refers to "cessation of ignorance" in the nidānas as avidyānirodha (nirodha is also the word used in Pāḷi and Gāndhārī texts). Avidyākṣaya can be explained as a plausible, but non-idiomatic, translation of wúmíng jǐn 無明盡. If it occured on its own, we might simply scratch our heads at this oddity (not that academics ever have). However, there is a pattern of this type of unexpected deviation from Buddhist norms across the whole of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. I think Nattier (1992) establishes this beyond a reasonable doubt, but Huifeng (2014) and I have made this as certain as anything ever is in our field.

Fukui's last comment is another example of the argument from popularity fallacy.

H. Isn't it a contradiction to argue that the mantra is "a perfectly good Sanskrit mantra... a genuine Sanskrit mantra" while at the same time saying the grammar of the passage concerning the six senses is not right, thus having both good and bad grammar in one and the same text? Moreover, the conclusion of studies up to now is not that the mantra is "a flawless (kanpeki) Sanskrit mantra" as she says. And the fact that it is not her "own ear" to which the grammar of the passage on the six senses sounds wrong makes it lose its persuasiveness.

Let me state right away, that there is no grammar in the "mantra" [not a mantra], it's just a list of words in the nominative singular case (of a Prakrit language). Of course, there is no mantra either, which does not help Fukui's case.

Nattier notes that this is an odd criticism. Fukui has once again misunderstood Nattier's idiom (which is ironic). The phrase "perfectly good" in idiomatic English means "adequate" rather than "flawless" as Fukui seems to think. When Nattier says that the mantra is "perfectly good Sanskrit" she doesn't mean it is flawless, she means it is not gibberish (unlike, say, some of Conze's Sanskrit sentences).

I'm not going to dwell on Nattier's response because I've already shown that Fukui's views on the mantra are wholly mistaken, or at least, the kind of idiosyncratic sectarian reading of the Heart Sutra we would expect from a senior Tendai priest in the last century.

There is no requirement that a Sanskrit text be well formed across the board. Bad grammar occurs in the ancient world too, and it often occurs in patch. On the other hand Sanskrit Heart Sutra is chock full of grammatical mistakes, both ancient and modern. I have published many articles on this topic. If I can see those mistakes, anyone can.

The last comment refers to Nattier again crediting one of her colleagues, Richard Salomon (a widely acknowledged expert in Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions) with providing helpful information (see 1992: 214, n.57). She does this a lot in Nattier (1992).

As it happens another independent like me (I don't know his name) recently wrote to Paul Harrison about a related matter, and he noticed a counter-example to one of our examples (out of 22 examples in Attwood 2022). A compound like na cakṣuḥ-śrotra-ghrāṇa-jihvā-kāya-manāṃsi is rare, but an example of it has been found in the Large Sutra.

The contrast here is interesting. Harrison's interlocutor gives us a model for how one refutes an argument: one gives evidence that contradicts the conclusion. I took up and asserted the idea that compounds like cakṣuḥ-śrotra-ghrāṇa-jihvā-kāya-manāṃsi don't occur in Prajñāpāramitā when they are being negated; the texts prefer to negate each term individually: na cakṣuḥ na śrotra, etc. I had a good pole around the Large Sutra in Sanskrit to see if I could find any counter-examples and could not. A single counter-example weakens our claim. We may still, I think, generalise that this syntax is the most common way of saying it, but we were wrong about this distinction being an absolute. If our argument had been based on this fact alone, we would have been refuted at this point. But this particular argument is incidental and we have published a mountain of much better evidence that Fukui appears to ignore in favour of lesser arguments, which get worse.

I. At first glance Nattier's work abounds in persuasiveness and appears logical. But in fact, in spite of the small quantity of evidence, she presses forth full of self-confidence with decisive-sounding words, thus creating the "optical illusion" of an established theory.

Again, Nattier is very patient here given the outrageous nature of this ad hominem fallacy.

As she explains, Fukui has ignored the strongest evidence and his objections to the weaker evidence only make sense if he is not even thinking about the facts that he has ignored. The evidence has to be taken as a whole. Nattier notes that Fukui doesn't even acknowledge the oddities in the Sanskrit text let alone provide an alternative explanation.

J. Insisting that the Sanskrit Heart Sūtra is a back-translation from the Chinese, her argument gradually becomes more and more unreasonable. For example, she argues that there is no Sanskrit word in the Heart Sūtra corresponding to the Chinese shén 神 of shén zhòu 神咒; but there are many examples of "mantra" being translated into Chinese as shén zhòu 神咒. It is far from unreasonable to simply see shén zhòu 神咒 as a translation from Sanskrit into Chinese. What has she done is to put the argument first and the evidence second.

Note that the argument in I and J is about how reasonable the Chinese origins thesis is, not how accurate or true it is; nor about the explanatory power of the thesis. The truth can sometimes seem unreasonable to religieux because their religious beliefs don't conform to the truth, they conform to the religious orthodoxy.

Nattier again demurs: she acknowledges that that her choice of this example is one of the weakest and she might leave it out if writing the article in 1995. But the method of cherry picking a weak example and saying on the basis of any ambiguity that it destroys the whole argument is example of the nut picking fallacy. As Nattier says, "If Fukui wishes to argue against the back-translation hypothesis, he must confront the evidence as a whole, not simply suggest that a particular word can be viewed better the other way around" (10. Emphasis added).

However, here Fukui is still fixated on the mantra as the most important part of the text (to him at least). And we know that he is simply wrong about this because the incantation at the end of the Heart Sutra is not a mantra.

It is true, however, that some scholars do read zhòu 呪 as mantra. A good example of this can be found in Heng-ching and Lusthaus's (2006) translation of Kuījī's Heart Sutra commentary (T 1710). They routinely translate zhòu 呪 as mantra even though it must be considered anachronistic for the Yogācāra scholar. I can substitute dhāraṇī in their translation in every case with no loss of sense. Even if I had not shown that the gate gate incantation is a dhāraṇī, there is no principial reason to translate zhòu 呪 as meaning "mantra" in a non-tantric context, such as the Heart Sutra.

K. In order to make her argument complete, there are additional issues that she would have to discuss. For example:

(a) a comparison of the differences between old-translation (kyūyaku) and new-translations (shin'yaku) terminology, e.g. vs Guānzìzài 觀自在 [two different Chinese translations of the name of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara].
(b) the fact that there is no evidence or argument in the Chinese historical materials (e.g. scripture catalogues) that would support the idea that the Heart Sutra is an apocryphal text (gikyō 偽経). If she wants to claim that is it apocryphal, she must explain where there is no proof of this in the text evidence.

In short, hers is an inferential argument based on logic, and as such it lacks persuasiveness.

As Nattier notes, she does in fact discuss this issue raised in (a) citing pages 187, 190, and notes 82 and 84. And the second point is just a reiteration of complaint A, already dealt with in detail above. As Nattier (p. 11) says, "... the last point is genuinely worrisome: would Fukui prefer an illogical analysis?" As a religious, sure, he probably would as long as it left his worldview and his ecclesiastical status intact.

L. Can reasoning based on such an extremely small body of evidence—that is, only on a comparison of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, the Sanskrit Large Sutra, and the Chinese Large Sutra—really allow one to establish the theory that the Chinese Heart Sūtra is an apocryphon?

Nattier answers, "of course not". But here, I think she means to allow for the uncertainty that never goes away in dealing with ancient history. And for the Popperian doctrine that no theory can be proven, because of the black swan effect; theories can only be refuted. At any time, some evidence may crop up that refutes our arguments: I've even spelled out what kind of evidence would be required to refute our arguments. But Fukui does not have any such evidence. What he has is a series of trivial arguments that make no impact at all on Nattier's conclusion that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese.

In fact, our thesis does rest almost entirely on this body of literature. To call it "extremely small", however, when it takes up several volumes of the Taishō Tripiṭaka, is a bit rich.

The situation is a little more clear, some thirty years after Nattier first made her observations, now that we have a decent facsimile edition of the Gilgit manuscript and Kimura's edition of the Nepalese Large Sutra, both of which greatly improve on sources available to Nattier and Fukui in the 1990s. Huifeng and I have also made use of the Sanskrit Aṣṭasāhasrikā, and the Chinese Large Sutra translations by Dharmarakṣa, Mokṣa, and Xuanzang. Some of my articles also look at phrases in the broader Prajñāpāramitā literature as well. And having extended the work, Huifeng and I came to same conclusion as Nattier: the Heart Sutra could only have been composed in Chinese.

Right at the end, Nattier sets out the challenge to her detractors (which is very similar to my own challenge):

In the meantime, though, the data I have collected in my article—whether or not the reader wishes to accept the back-translation theory—must now be confronted in toto by those who wish to affirm or deny the sutras Indian origins. I have suggested one flowchart to diagram the relationship between the Heart Sūtra and the Large Sūtra in their Chinese and Indian versions; those who are not happy with the results are welcome to try their hand at coming up with another.

The textual evidence—especially the virtually word-for-word identity between the core passage of the Chinese Heart Sūtra and its parallel in the Large Sūtra of Kumārajīva, in contrast to the divergence between their Indian counterparts—is anomalous as it stands, and requires that we attempt an explanation. If another scholar finds a better way to account for the totality of this evidence, I will be the first to applaud her success

I agree with every word of this.

Heart Sutra Politics?

Nattier (1992) was published in the leading English language journal for Buddhist Studies: The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (JIABS) and as such it was scrutinised by the editorial board and by at least two anonymous reviewers from the field. Contra Fukui and his trivial objections, the article is well argued, provides ample evidence, follows a clear and simple method (that anyone can understand), and does arrive at conclusions logically. If Fukui were the voice of reason, he'd acknowledge this.

Fukui is not a voice of reason, he appears to be playing his ecclesiastical role as spokesman for his Tendai sect. Instead of reasoned argumentation, he argues from the popularity fallacy, from the nut picking fallacy, from the straw man fallacy, from the ad hominem fallacy, and from general confirmation bias. His thesis about the emphasis shifting from "mantra" [not a mantra] to emptiness only in the 15th century is contradicted by numerous facts, not least of which are the late-seventh century commentaries by Kuījī and Woncheuk, which don't treat the incantation as a mantra, and which don't treat the text as being about mantra.

Fukui's arguments, though wholly fallacious, found fertile ground amongst his peers who sought to extend the argument against Nattier in similarly ways. I don't want to say that they are all being disingenuous, since they appear to be sincere. But it is the sincerity of religieux who are aggrieved to discover that their unicorn has been exposed as a donkey onto which someone has fixed a narwhal tusk. Which leads to them sincerely shooting the messenger in the hope of suppressing the news.

I've read and reviewed a number of these articles (see selected blog posts below) including now two published critiques in 2020 and 2022. The articles that I've seen all seem to be quite poorly written and to fail in their stated objective of refuting Nattier. The anecdotal accounts I hear about the unimpeachable status of men like Fukui and his colleagues helps to make sense of this.

We see many scholars who specialise in some other field, write one article on the Heart Sutra and never return to it (Nattier and Huifeng included). Even highly regarded scholars seem to lose their objectivity when they write about this text. Critical thinking goes out the window, and we see a series of theological arguments and apologetics for sectarian Buddhist doctrines.

Nattier's magnificent, era-defining article was thus sabotaged by highly motivated theologians who were able to leverage their exaggerated social status as hierarchs and professors, as well as the intense sexism and, dare I say it, racial bias* of Japanese culture to mobilise a wall of rejection in Japan. And in the face of this, Nattier's European colleagues sat in stony silence and let it happen. Thirty years have passed with little change in academia; progress has come from outside of the ivory towers, from Huifeng (at the time a Buddhist monk in the Fo Guang Shan movement) and I.

* To be fair I think religious apologetics, sexism, and racial bias are rife in European Buddhist Studies as well. I've written about this. Here, I am specifically trying to understand the rejection of Chinese origins by Japanese academics led by Fukui. I think these generalisations are fair.

I'm glad Nattier finally decided to release this unpublished essay to the public. It's good that she now feels able to take the risk of pointing out how weak the arguments against her were back then (and now). As the only scholar actively exploring and writing about this today, I take heart. [Thanks, Jan].

The facts as I understand the are like this. The Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese, in the mid seventh century, from passages copied from T 223 and a dhāraṇī from T 901. It was probably composed by Xuanzang. It was modelled on a chāo jīng 抄經 "digest text" and was acknowledged by Kuījī and Woncheuk to be a bié shēng 別生 "separately produced" text rather than a sutra. The Sanskrit text is a back-translation from Chinese and, as far as I know, none of us thinks Xuanzang was responsible for this. The myth of the Heart Sutra emerged in various texts in the decades following Xuanzang's death in 663 CE.

How believers feel about these facts is a separate issue and that would seem to be their problem, not mine or scholars generally. No one expects a religious believer to have an easy time dealing with reality, especially when they claim to have an exclusive understanding of "the nature of reality" that is denied the rest of us. Ironically, Buddhists who religiously assert that the nature of reality is "everything changes" are the last people to embrace change if it involves their belief system.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Selected Blog posts and Unpublished Essays

"Japanese Reception of the Chinese Origins Thesis." (24 November 2017). A critique of Ishii Kōsei (2015).

"Review of Ji Yun's 'Is the Heart Sutra an Apocryphal Text? A Re-examination'." (01 June 2018). Ji argues for Chinese origins, but against the term "apocryphon". His article is problematic in many ways.

"Another Failed Attempt to Refute the Chinese Origins Thesis." (13 September 2019). A critique Harada (2002) based on an English language summary in the Wikipedia "talk" pages.

"The Heart Sutra Was Not Composed in Sanskrit - Response to Harimoto." (2021. academia.org).

"Just How Crazy is the Heart Sutra?" (23 Sept 2022). A critique of Karl Brunnhölzl’s absurdist article “The Heart Sutra Will Change You Forever” in the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar (September 29, 2017).

"An Open Letter to Buddhist Studies Academics." (23 December 2022). A request for fair treatment by academics.

Published Works Cited

Attwood, J. (2017). "Epithets of the Mantra in the Heart Sutra." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies,12, 26–57. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/155

———. (2020). "The History of the Heart Sutra as a Palimpsest." Pacific World, Series 4, no.1, 155-182. https://pwj.shin-ibs.edu/2020/6934

———. (2020). "Studying The Heart Sutra: Basic Sources And Methods (A Response To Ng And Ānando)." Buddhist Studies Review, 37 (1-2), 199–217. http://www.doi.org/10.1558/bsrv.41982

———. (2022). "The Heart Sutra Revisited." [Review article]. Buddhist Studies Review. 39(2): 229-254. [Critique of five articles on the Heart Sutra appearing in Acta Asiatica 121 and purporting to represent the "frontier" of Heart Sutra research]

Fukui, Fumimasa. (1994) ‘Hannaya shingyō no kenkyūshi - genkon no mondaiten.’ Bukkyōgaku 36: 79-99.

Harada, Waso 原田和宗 (2002). 梵文『小本・般若心経』和訳 [An Annotated Translation of The Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya] (in Japanese). Association of Esoteric Buddhist Studies. pp. L17–L62.

Heng-Ching, Shih & Lusthaus, Dan. (2006) A Comprehensive Commentary on the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita-hyrdaya-sutra). Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research.

Ishii, Kōsei. (2015). “Issues Surrounding the Heart Sutra: Doubts Concerning Jan Nattier’s Theory of a Composition by Xuánzàng.” [Translated 2017 by Jeffrey Kotyk]. Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies (Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu) 64 (1): 499-492.

Nattier, Jan. 1992. "The Heart Sūtra : a Chinese apocryphal text?" Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15 (2): 153-223.

———. (1995). "Response to Fukui Fumimasa on the Heart Sutra 1995." [Unpublished Essay] https://www.academia.edu/99934922/Response_to_Fukui_Fumimasa_on_the_Heart_Sutra_1995

Tanahashi, Kazuaki. (2014). The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism. Shambala.

On the Cognitive Linguistics of Emptiness

This essay applies an analytical method developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, especially as it occurs in the book Metaphors We Live By, originally published in 1981, with a revised edition 2003. I will also draw on their other published works, notably Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987). Lakoff and Johnson tell us that "cognitive metaphors" are ubiquitous in human language. These metaphors involve treating a target domain as if it were a member of the same category as the source domain. In these metaphors the source domain is usually some form of physical interaction that humans have with the objective world, and the target domain is some feature of cognition. In this way, cognitive metaphors are what enable us to think about the world in abstract terms. 

This is a modern form of philosophical analysis not available to the ancient world. So this type of analysis offers the possibility of new insights when applied to old discourses. This method has occasionally been applied to Buddhism in the past, though the application has been patchy and the methods involved have not become mainstream. In this essay, I am going to use the methods developed by Lakoff and Johnson to critique the abstract concept of "emptiness" as we mainly meet it in accounts of Buddhism. In this case, I'm not criticising any particular usage, but want to make some general points about the concept. 

Cognitive Metaphors

A metaphor involves treating one things as if it were another. In a series of five blog posts in 2016, I outline John Searle's account of social reality in which "as if" plays a major role (see Social Reality). In that account of social reality I noted that language is an institutional fact:

Language itself only works because of collective intentionality, i.e. we all agree that certain verbal sounds count as words; that certain words count as representing concepts; that certain combinations of words count as sentences, and so on. (Institutional Facts & Language: Social Reality. II).

What this means is that language relies on us all agreeing that a given word means what it means.  As Wittgenstein famously said, 

“For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (Wittgenstein 1967, section 43)

This is often abbreviated to "meaning is use". Individualism has a role to play in the evolution of language, especially where the individual is influential.  But, generally speaking, language relies on our collective agreement on what words mean (semantics) or do (pragmatics). Cognitive metaphors are no different; other people must understand our use of cognitive metaphors in order for us to communicate about abstractions. 

The metaphor relation is not arbitrary. It is not that anything can be anything. The relation requires that the target domain has some properties that make it a good candidate for metaphorical projection. I won't go more deeply into this since it involves invoking the image schema and explaining this is too involved for an essay like this one. The standard work on image schemas is still (as far as I know) Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind (1987). Suffice it to say that the target domain for the metaphor must be a good fit. 

For example, we may state a commonly used cognitive metaphor: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. (I use Lakoff and Johnson's convention of citing metaphors in small caps). In this metaphor, the source domain is our physical interactions with objects, while the target domain is a subjective experience of thought. If we accept the metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, then any operation we can physically perform on an object we can perform mentally on an idea. If I can grasp an object, then under this metaphor I can grasp an idea, as if it were an object. I can turn an idea over and look at it from another angle. I can look at an idea from different angles. If I have more than one idea, I can juggle them. I can throw an idea out, toss it around, and kick it into the long grass. Virtually anything I can physically do with an object finds a metaphorical application to an idea under the cognitive metaphor, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS.

A poor metaphor might be IDEAS ARE COWBOYS. Cowboys ride, bait, and subdue semi-wild animals for entertainment. It's not clear in what way an idea is like a cowboy. This metaphor is not intuitive. Another one might be FISH ARE BICYCLES. Note that these propositions are not forbidden by the rules of English grammar. Still, they don't make for obvious metaphorical usage. The metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS works because ideas have a limited scope, they can often expressible in a succinct way that makes each idea seem discreet from other ideas. Expressing the idea leads to a transfer of that discreet piece of knowledge to another person. It's not that an idea is an object, but that an idea is sufficiently like an object in specific ways. The similarity occurs at the level of "image schemas", which I'm trying to avoid for reasons of brevity. 

It may seem simplistic to labour the point, but I think it's worth saying that ideas are not real objects. In making the metaphor, we are not reifying the abstraction. Moreover, contrary to the prevailing view of humans amongst Buddhists, people are not easily fooled into reifying cognitive metaphors. It would be odd for a person to claim that ideas are objects in a substantial sense. We know this is not true. No one ever literally held an idea in the palm of their hand, for example. We know it's a metaphor and we intuitively deal with thousands of such metaphors every day. If we had to stop to analyse each one, abstract thought would not be possible.

Unlike a computing language I don't have to "declare" the metaphor before using it. We effortlessly decode hundreds and thousands of these cognitive metaphors on the fly without even noticing that we are doing it. When people are sitting around a table at a meeting and someone says, "we need to move on", and they change the subject rather than getting up and leaving the room, no one is surprised by this.

In this case, it is because we can form a cognitive metaphor: A CONVERSATION IS A JOURNEY. For example, we might be having a conversation and it "takes a turn" (perhaps a strange or unexpected turn, or a turn for the worse). Someone might wish to "return" to what was said earlier. If it's going badly, we might say "Let's start over". If the conservation was difficult but productive, we may say: "we got there in the end". When a conversation is at an impasse, we might say that we have to move on and leave the impasse unresolved. And a conversation may reach a natural conclusion: "let's stop there".

These cognitive metaphors are not incidental but rather they form an integral part of language use. The richness of our metaphorical use of language is part of what makes us human. Our ability to talk about one thing as if it were a member of a completely different class of thing is what distinguishes human communication from all other animals. Clearly, some animals and birds are capable of abstract thought to some extent. But they don't communicate in metaphors. We do. 

Once we get attuned to this idea of cognitive metaphors, we begin to see them everywhere. When I talk about typing on my keyboard (a physical act) and words appearing "on my screen" this is two cognitive metaphors: WORDS ARE OBJECTS and SCREENS ARE SURFACES. Of course the screen is literally a surface, but the words are not on it in a physical sense. I can't physically interact with words on a screen. Even on a touch screen that's not what is happening. Rather the patterns of light and dark created by pixels make words seem to appear on the screen, and electrical interactions between surface and finger help to create the illusion of physical interaction. At the end of the day there is dust and fingerprints on my screen, but no physical objects called "words". Still, all the verbs that can be used to describe interacting with objects on a surface, can now be applied to "words on a screen".

In order to get at the underlying metaphors involved in talking about emptiness in a Buddhist context, we have to consider the use of container metaphors.

Container Metaphors

A very common cognitive metaphor involves likening something to a container. For example, in English we have the metaphor: A BOOK IS A CONTAINER. A book can, for example, be filled with ideas (here again: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS). With this combination we make a complex source domain: putting objects into a container maps onto putting ideas or words into a book. We use the same verb in each case, but use it substantively on one hand and metaphorically on the other.

A very common metaphor in English is MIND IS A CONTAINER and more specifically, mind is a container of experiences. In this view, experience happens in the mind; experience is the content of the mind qua container of experiences. Interestingly, however, Indian Buddhists do not seem to have used a specific container metaphor that we take for granted: i.e. sensory experience is contained in the mind. In Buddhism, the mind (manas) is more like a translator that turns (physical) sensory experience into (mental) perception. An ancient Buddhist could not, for example, say something like "empty your mind" because this relies on the container metaphor and they did not conceive of the mind as a container or sensory experience as the content of the mind. They are more likely to use a surface metaphor for the mind, and to talk about sensory experience as a disturbance of that surface. They may also talk about a sensory event in terms of the sense organ being struck by the appearance of an object. Keeping in mind that "appearance" (rūpa) is to the eye as sound is to the ear.

Despite the fact that ancient Buddhists did not use the container metaphor for the mind, it is so ingrained in us as English speakers that it's almost impossible to not think of the mind as a container and sensory experience as the content. 

Given all this, what can we say about how to understand the term "emptiness" (Skt. śūnyatā)

Emptiness and Experience

The adjective "empty" and the abstract noun "emptiness" are part of the broader cognitive metaphor involving containers. There is no abstract "emptiness" in the absence of a container that could potentially contain something. Moverover, emptiness in the dictionary sense boils down to "the absence of content". "Emptiness" is defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary as "the state of containing nothing". Similarly Merriam-Webster defines emptiness as "containing nothing, not occupied or inhabited" and "lacking reality, substance, meaning, or value."

These definitions are curiously opposed to Buddhist definitions of "emptiness" which specifically state that it does not mean "void" or "nothingness". As one writer seeks to clarify:

"Emptiness is not complete nothingness; it doesn't mean that nothing exists at all. This would be a nihilistic view contrary to common sense." - Lewis Richmond.

In other words, in a Buddhist the concept "emptiness" does not mean emptiness, at least in any general sense. Rather it means, we are told, that things are not as they appear to us. It is the difference between appearance and reality. In which case, "emptiness" is obviously the wrong term for this concept. Still I want to press on and consider the cognitive metaphors that apply to our English word and circle back to the doctrinal mismatch.

Any given container—physical or metaphorical—may contain something or not, but to be a container it must potentially contain something. If a container contains anything, then it is not empty. If it contains nothing, it is empty. 

Note that this is unrelated to the expected content of the container. I drink my morning coffee from a teacup I like. The rest is in a thermos and stays hot. One could say that my cup is empty of tea, for example, but by being specific one falls down a rabbit hole. My cup may well be empty of tea, water, lime-juice, cooking oil, kerosene, and every other kind of liquid, but it presently is filled with coffee and thus my cup is not empty at all. This gives emptiness an important parameter. Emptiness tends to be an absolute: if my cup has any kind of content, then it is not empty. My cup is only empty when there is no liquid in it; i.e. when there is emptiness.

So far, so logical. But this is not how Buddhists, especially Mādhyamikas, use the termin practice. Mādhyamikas use the abstract noun "emptiness" in a concrete sense. The classic example is the statement "form is emptiness". This is a valid English sentence, but there is something wrong with it. Even when we take "form" to be "form in the abstract" (or matter generally as many Mādhyamikas do), this sentence is not logically valid because it is trying to equate two different levels of abstraction. "Form" here is generally taken to mean "phenomena". If the metaphor is FORMS ARE CONTAINERS then we might validly state that form is empty. 

There are several problems here. The first is that rūpa is (in English at least) not the container of experience, it is the content of experience (or part of it). Rūpa is to eye what sound is the ear. And note that this applies across the senses. Importantly, rūpa is to the eye as tangibles (spraśtavya) are to the body (kāya). Rūpa is on the wrong side of the equation to be equated with body, even metaphorically. In Chinese, rūpa is routinely translated as sè 色 "hue (from original meanings "form, appearance, complexion"); visual surface quality." (definition from Kroll). In Sanskrit, rūpa is typically a property of a surface reflecting light, it is not a metaphorical container. 

That said, there is no doubt that some modern Buddhists do take rūpa to mean "substance", "matter", or "body". We can see that this is incoherent even at face value since the word is neither defined that way nor used that way in ancient texts. Even the translation "form" misleads most English-speakers into thinking in substantive terms about rūpa. Rūpa means "appearance". Moreover, even if we invoke the container metaphor, it can't be applied to rūpa because rūpa is an element of experience, this is to say that rūpa is content. Ancient Buddhists preferred to see rūpa as a disturbance on the surface of the mind, but even in this metaphor, rūpa is not substantive.

The second problem is that even if rūpa were a container we could go as far as saying that it is empty if it did not contain anything. We could not logically assert that it is "emptiness". If emptiness is the absence of content and rūpa is content, then the two are logical contraries. Despite a great deal of hand waving in modern Buddhist philosophy, "form is emptiness" simply does not make sense in English. But then it doesn't make any more sense to state this in Sanskrit; rūpameva śūnyatā is still equating two different levels of abstraction. This is an egregious wrong turn in Buddhist philosophy.

I might never have thought of this had I not discovered that the phrase was not originally rūpaṃ śūnyatā "form is emptiness", but rūpaṃ māyā "appearance is illusion" (Attwood 2017). This equation occurs in Aṣṭa and in a few places in Pañc as well. It is clearly translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva as 色不異幻、幻不異色，色即是幻、幻即是色。 (e.g. at T 223, 8.239c6-7). Here huàn 幻 translates māyā "illusion", though it originally meant "creation" or the creative power of the devas to keep the world in harmony (ṛta). Given the long history of Buddhists comparing sensory experience to an illusion this makes perfect sense. A classic example of this is the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta, which concludes with a well-known verse:

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ, vedanā bubbuḷūpamā /
Marīcikūpamā saññā, saṅkhārā kadalūpamā;
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ, desitādiccabandhunā (SN iii.142).

Appearance is like a ball of foam, valence like a bubble.
Recognition is like a mirage, volition like a plantain.
Discrimination is like an illusion. So Ādiccabandhu taught.

Here, Ādiccabandhu means the Buddha, but it is a distinctively Brahmin name completely unconnected to any of the standard myths of the Buddha. A similar verse occurs at the end of the Vajracchedikā, where the simile becomes a metaphor:

tārakā timiraṃ dīpo māyāvaśyāya budbudaḥ |
supinaṃ vidyud abhraṃ ca evaṃ draṣṭavya saṃskṛtam ||Vaj 22 || (Harrison and Watanabe 2006)

We should see the conditioned as a star, a kind of blindness, a lamp;
An illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble, a dream, a lightning flash, a cloud.

We also find the simile in Aṣṭa, “appearance is like an illusion” (māyopamaṃ rūpam. Vaidya 1960: 9). And this is all quite straightforward: experience and reality are not the same thing; different rules apply. 

There is a popular rhetorical strategy for dealing with "form is emptiness" amongst Buddhists which can be illustrated with a random example from the Tricycle website:

Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But, empty of what? The key word is empty. To be empty is to be empty of something.

If I am holding a cup of water and I ask you, “Is this cup empty?” you will say, “No, it is full of water.” But if I pour out the water and ask you again, you may say, “Yes, it is empty.” But, empty of what? Empty means empty of something. The cup cannot be empty of nothing. “Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what. My cup is empty of water, but it is not empty of air. To be empty is to be empty of something. This is quite a discovery. When Avalokita says that the five skandhas are equally empty, to help him be precise we must ask, “Mr. Avalokita, empty of what?”

What we see here is a fantastic distortion of reality, leading to a false conclusion. It is nonsensical for you to ask me what my cup is empty of, because to be empty in any sense, it has to be empty of everything. As I noted above, my cup could be and regularly is empty of tea (and all other liquids) but full of coffee: in which case my cup is not empty at all. The conclusion here—“Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what—is simply not true. This is a case of the tail wagging the dog. That is to say, we know what the answer had to be in order to legitimise Buddhist dogma on emptiness, and the question is phrased in such as way as to elicit only that answer. But in doing so, Buddhists blithely defy the conventions of language. 

We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" The question is meaningless and the answer is simply a restatement of a dogma that doesn't make any sense. The idea that "empty of what" is a natural question is either extraordinarily naive or disingenuous. Either way, Buddhists propagate this falsehood in all sincerity. 

This invalid method and false conclusion are often parlayed into an even worse question using the abstract noun: "emptiness of what?" Such a thing is not allowed under English grammar. Emptiness is emptiness. "Of what" is an entirely meaningless question because if the answer is not "everything", then the vessel is not empty at all. 

We do sometimes suggest that emptiness might have degrees.  For example, we may say that a cup may be half full or half empty. Still, it's only from the point of view of being half full that we can ask "of what?" The "of what?" question only applies to the content of the container. An empty container has no content; a half empty container is half empty of all content. Even if we say the glass is half empty, no one in their right mind asks "Half empty of what?". This is simply not how the container metaphor works. 

We can see that the cognitive linguistic perspective is a powerful method for understanding utterances. But it also highlights how dogmatic the Buddhist discourse on emptiness is. This kind of invalid logic is de rigueur for Buddhist philosophy and is almost never questioned or critiqued: either from within or without. Rather such views are carefully curated by Buddhists, in the sense of being framed as deep truths, discovered by visionaries and mystics, and accompanied by frenzied hand waving so that they can be presented as something they are not, i.e. true. This is what we expect of a religious philosophy or theology. There are axioms that cannot be questioned or the whole thing would fall apart. The fabric of Madhyamaka is held together with unquestioned, religiously inspired, axioms. 

The same argument holds for Sanskrit which has identical cognitive metaphors. In Sanskrit it is nonsensical to say rūpaṃ śūṇyatā, but it is sensible to say rūpaṃ māyā, and even better to say rūpaṃ māyopamaṃ "appearance is like an illusion"

So my, rather awkward conclusion is this: Buddhists don't seem to understand the concept of empty, let alone the concept of emptiness. If they did understand, the question "empty of what?" would never occur to them. Worse, Buddhists routinely insist that this flawed concept of emptiness is what makes sense of Prajñāpāramitā. Two wrongs don't make a right. 

In this case, how should we understand the word emptiness?

Making Sense of Emptiness

The key here is to note that the first use of śūnyatā as a technical term is to refer to the state of meditative concentration in which all sensory experience has ceased due to the withdrawal of attention from the senses. This state is called suññatāvihāra or śūnyatāsamādhi. Since sensory experience is dependent on attention (manasikāra), by practising non-attention (amanasikāra), one prevents sensory experience from arising and causes arisen sensory experience to cease. 

Here, sensory experience can be seen as the content of experience or, in Buddhist terms as a distortion of the (naturally) smooth surface of the mind. As such, sensory experience may be present or absent and even admit degrees of these. Hence, between ordinary waking awareness and emptiness there are numerous stages (āyatana) of increasingly attenuated sensory experience. But here, too, absence is absolute; the presence of an any sensory experience means that emptiness doesn't apply. This point is made repeatedly in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, for example. Emptiness in this case, is the complete absence of sensory experience. 

There are several Buddhist approaches to analysing the content of experience: a range of reductive ontologies into which experience is analysed. For example, the skandha-ontology, which focuses on the processes that give rise to experience, or the dhātu-ontology, which is focussed on the sense faculties and their objects. Mainstream Buddhism foregrounds this reductive, analytic approach of breaking experience down into simpler components in order to eliminate it as a source of absolute being. That complex objects disappear under analysis is not some great metaphysical truth, it is simply a consequence of methodological reductionism. 

If I dismantle my chariot, of course I no longer have a working chariot because I've just broken it on purpose. Who does that? Why would I want to dismantle a working chariot in the first place? And why would my destruction of the thing constitute proof that it never existed in the first place? This is the claim that many Buddhists make but, again, it is nonsensical.   

Prajñāpāramitā Buddhists, building on a tradition that is probably older than Buddhism itself, sought first to bring sensory experience to a halt. They didn't analyse sensory experience in any depth because the acme of their program was not an insight into sensory experience. What they sought, first and foremost, was an insight into death and rebirth. The whole fetish of emptiness was originally established on the analogy of emptiness with death. Mastery (vidyā) over sensory experience, in the form of the ability to voluntarily make it stop, equated to mastery over repeated death. This mastery was and is the driving force of Buddhism, even when it is buried in centuries of intellectual accretion. 

My current thinking is that the discovery of how to do this probably arose around the same time as major socio-political changes in India, reflected in, for example, the replacement of red and black pottery type by the painted grey ware style of pottery. Within a few centuries we see the emergence of walled city states which are stable for some 200-300 years before the Moriyan Dynasty of Magadha overwhelmed all the others, founding the first pan-Indian empire. One possible source of mind-training techniques that limit sensory experience is the "interiorisation" of Brahmanical rituals. In this development, some Brahmins began to perform their daily rituals in imagination rather than physically. This led to the discovery of radical changes in sensory experience, especially in the form of hallucinations due to sensory deprivation, and ultimately to the cessation and absence of sensory experience. By the time the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad was composed (in or around the Kingdom of Kosala) the correct performance of rituals was being linked to one's afterlife destination. Buddhists and Jains had similar ideas but focussed on actions more generally, with Buddhists refining this to just volitional actions. 

However it happened, it is apparent that in this milieu some religieux developed and shared the techniques that allowed them to bring sensory experience to a halt and to dwell in a state in which there is awareness but no content. Some Buddhists called this "emptiness" (śūnyatā). Other Buddhists called it "extinction"(nirvāṇa) and other names. This state is also known in modern times as "contentless awareness", "minimal phenomenal awareness", or "non-dual awareness". 

This is how I presently understand "emptiness" in Prajñāpāramitā.  I believe this is a better approach than anything based in later traditional interpretations based on the Madhyamaka telos (which sees Prajñāpāramitā merely as proto-Madhyamaka). 

Dharma as Container?

One of the key concepts in Madhyamaka is "the emptiness of dharmas". In this usage, dharmas have to be considered as metaphorical containers. The broader translation of dharmas as "phenomena" (as distinct from noumena; i.e. appearances rather than reality) seems to fit here, but what is the content of  a phenomenon? Is there really any phenomenon that is not sensory experience?

Nāgārjuna tells us that he expects that we will expect a dharma to have svabhāva in the sense of being autopoietic or self-creating. Nāgārjuna points out that this self-creating property of dharmas cannot exist in any changeable phenomenon. So far so good. The problem is that no one ever believed in self-creating dharmas. No one ever proposed this before Nāgārjuna. But he said that everyone believed it. Nāgārjuna appears to have lied about this. What puzzles me is that no one really cares about the lie. Many people seem to prefer this lie. 

The svabhāva of a dharma, according to Abhidharma lore, is the sui generis quality that gives us the ability to identify it. For example, it's important to all Buddhists to distinguish skillful (kuśala) motivations (cetanā) from unskillful (akuśala) ones. If I experience a moment of greed or generosity, I identify it as such by introspecting the content of the experience. The fact that I can identify an experience as motivated by greed or generosity doesn't imply anything like Nāgārjuna's autopoietic dharmas. As far as I can see, there is no way to even infer autopoietic dharmas from any early Buddhist doctrine. We have different kinds of experiences and these are identifiable by certain characteristics. No one disputes this, not even Nāgārjuna. 

However, Nāgārjuna also assumes that to be real a dharma must have svabhāva in his autopoietic sense. This axiom is incoherent, but is blindly accepted by all and sundry; even Graham Priest, the academic logician, seems to fail to see this basic logical error in Nāgārjuna's argument. Since he can (trivially) prove that no dharma can be autopoietic, he then deduces that dharmas are not real, that they don't exist. But this definition of "real" is completely incoherent. Not only did Buddhists never use this definition of real, they weren't even interested in the question of the reality or unreality of dharmas. They were interested in the arising and ceasing of dharmas; especially in the light of a state in which all dharmas cease except for the asaṃskṛtadharma, i.e. emptiness. Emptiness is asaṃskṛta because it does not occur due to the presence of a condition but rather occurs when all conditions for sensory experience are absent. 

In order to square the circle, Nāgārjuna has to introduce the nonsense idea of a "relative truth", which is not true at all. The ultimate truth, in this view, is that dharmas don't exist, because they are not self-creating. I can see no good reason to take Nāgārjuna seriously as a philosopher or even, frankly, as a Buddhist. He seems to have entirely missed the point of Buddhism and has gone off on a tangent. And still, he is routinely cited as "the most important Buddhist philosopher". 

Conclusion

The term "emptiness" is generally used in an incoherent way by Buddhists, especially in statements containing the idea "emptiness of...". We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" let alone "emptiness of what?" because this is not how the container metaphor works. 

The idea that the proposition "form is emptiness" is meaningful now seems doubtful. Moreover, when we look at the kinds of post hoc arguments put forward to justify this proposition, they simply don't make sense. In addition, we know that it used to make sense when presented in the form: "appearance is an illusion." A sensory experience is like an illusion. I doubt anyone would argue with this.

It is also true that in the state called "emptiness" there are no dharmas because that state occurs only when all dharmas have ceased and no new dharmas are arising. This sense of the term is far more coherent than the general religious consensus that emptiness is reality. 

The incoherence reaches its apotheosis in Madhyamaka rhetoric about the emptiness of dharmas, by which Mādhyamikas mean that they think dharmas don't exist, since they tie existence to self-creation and it is trivial to show that dharmas cannot be self-creating. Nāgārjuna insists on an incoherent definition of what "real" means and uses that to argue that the concept of existence is incoherent. Prior to Nāgārjuna no one ever used this definition of real. Apart from his devotees, most Buddhists still don't use this definition. 

The standard ways we have of talking about this all seem to miss the point. Early Buddhists did not venture opinions on the existence or nonexistence of dharmas, except in the case of the sarvāsti doctrine. Even the Sarvāstivādins did not argue that the existence of dharmas was due to self-creation. The logic of sarvāsti is completely different but not difficult to follow. If a past dharma can be the cause of a present effect, then the doctrine of dependent arising itself says that it presently exists since imasmin sati, idaṃ hoti and imasmin asati, idaṃ na hoti. If the dharma doesn't exist now, then it cannot be a factor in the arising of a dharma in the present. This central argument is not even considered by Nāgārjuna, let alone refuted. 

The nature of dharmas is irrelevant in light of the fact that dharmas arise and cease, depending on where our attention goes. To say that dharmas lack svabhāva in Nāgārjuna's sense is trivial. To say that they have svabhāva in the Abhidharma sense is also trivial since we routinely recognise hundreds of different kinds of experience (for which we have thousands of words). The key to understanding Prajñāpāramitā lies in another direction entirely. The main point is that attention can be withdrawn from sensory experience. When we withdraw attention from sensory experience, it ceases, leaving us in a particular state characterised by some kind of basic awareness without any experiential content. That is, in a state of emptiness.

While it is not essential to my critique of Madhyamaka, it helps to understand the cognitive metaphors of emptiness and how cognitive metaphors function generally. This is so because "the emptiness of dharmas" is a cognitive metaphor: DHARMAS ARE CONTAINERS. But this is only true if dharmas exist and are capable of acting as metaphorical containers.

Still, it is only Madhyamakas who believe that in order to exist, to be real, a dharma must be self-creating. "Self-creation" is an odd choice for the content of that container. I can imagine a thing being self-creating, but I cannot imagining a thing containing self-creation. Self-creation doesn't fit the cognitive metaphor. 

So even if we could legitimately ask "empty of what?" the answer "empty of self-creation" is nonsense on several levels. For example, it would require us to relate to "self-creation" as content. To my mind this simply doesn't work. "Self-creation" is not a suitable target for the source domain of things we put in containers, except in the very broadest sense that IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. The idea of self-creation might be the content of a metaphorical container, the fact of self-creation cannot be.  

On the other hand, the emptiness of the mind, i.e. the concept of the absence of mental content in meditation, is not plagued by these inconsistencies and incoherences. In English it is natural to use the container metaphor for this. It is not so natural in scriptural languages, but, nevertheless, the absence of dharmas in meditation is the key concept here, not the absence of being self-creating. The whole idea of self-creating dharmas is a red herring. 

The metaphysical speculations that attract us as explanations for emptiness are largely based on prior indoctrination. In my reading, such speculations are absent from both early Buddhism and Prajñāpāramitā. This is not to say that metaphysics is generally absent from or irrelevant to Buddhism.  All ancient Buddhists believed in karma and rebirth, for example. These involve commitments to metaphysical views that we now know to be false, though few Buddhists will admit to this. 

The methods of cognitive linguistics are a powerful tool for thinking critically about Buddhist doctrines. That said, most existing applications of these methods have been in the service of tradition, i.e. used purely descriptively by scholars who have no interest in critiques of Buddhist philosophy. Whatever the reason for it, this side-stepping manoeuvre allows those people to continue evangelising for traditional Buddhism without ever confronting the inevitable antinomies between Iron Age or Medieval thought in India and present day science and philosophy. Many Buddhists seem attracted by the idea of subsuming all knowledge within Buddhism. This tends to involve a rather blasé form of dualism in which science is merely concerned with the "physical" and Buddhism is concerned something that we often see called "spiritual".

Unfortunately, this exceptionalist discourse appears to obscure and devalue the real contribution of Buddhists, i.e. the cultivation and exploration of states of contentless awareness. I see this as a lose-lose scenario. I see the neuroscience community studying this phenomenon and developing their own terminology for it, though at present we still see a proliferation of different terminologies. At some point, an objective account of the methods and consequences of meditation will eclipse the religious accounts. Those who insist on the religious accounts, with all their incoherence and misdirection, will be relegated out of the conversation and become irrelevant. I'd prefer to see experienced meditators staying in the game, but as long as they cling to outmoded forms of talking about emptiness, they will not be part of the conversation for much longer. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. (2017). "Form is (Not) Emptiness: The Enigma at the Heart of the Heart Sutra." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 13,52–80. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/issue/view/15/showToc.

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.

Dependent Arising: Presence And Time

We can think of the following essay as a coda to my critique of the Perennial Philosophy since dependent arising is often presented as a singular universal metaphysical truth. In this essay I will begin by stipulating that paṭicca-samuppāda is a metaphysical doctrine and then proceed to draw out the implications of this premise.

The first task is to establish exactly what paṭicca-samuppāda says, using the standard methods of philology: analysing the grammar, syntax, and lexemes of the sentences. With a clear understanding of what the traditional formula says, we can try to understand what it means. I will show how the effect and condition relate under paṭicca-samuppāda. In addition, Buddhists were forced to accept a particular account of time and I will show why it had to be that account and no other. By the end of Part I, we will have a pretty good idea of how paṭicca-samuppāda performs as metaphysics.

If anyone thinks this is an elementary exercise and that we can hardly learn anything new about this most famous of all Buddhist doctrines at this late stage, let me assure them that in this case I learned something new or I wouldn't be writing about it. Most of what we learn about Buddhism in the present is only loosely correlated to the ancient texts and in this case there are major discrepancies.

In Part II, I will take the usual step and discuss paṭicca-samuppāda in terms of the nidānas (or bases) and what is often called the Spiral Path or upanisās. In particular, I will show, contrary to the received wisdom, that it is inconsistent with the nidānas, that the two describe very different kinds of conditionality. Unexpectedly, paṭicca-samuppāda turns out to be exactly consistent with the conditionality described in the upanisās. This is a major new observation.

Finally, in Part III, I will return to the issue of metaphysics and argue that paṭicca-samuppāda has nothing to do with metaphysics, but was employed as a description of subjective experience arising and passing away. Attempts to make it a metaphysical doctrine resulted in the kind of nonsense epitomised by Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā. Relieved of the necessity to make sense on the level of metaphysics, we are in a better position to see what the early Buddhists were getting at.

Let us begin at the beginning:

Dependent Arising

The classic formulation of paṭicca-samuppāda (Skt. pratītya-samutpāda) can be found in the four phrases found scattered through the Nikāyas:

imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti
imass' uppādā idaṃ uppajjati
imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti
imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati

Since there is no regular pattern of metre we cannot think of these as verses. This is prose and, since each phrase has its own finite verb and there are no conjunctions, we can say that they are grammatical; four separate sentences, presented on separate lines to aid discussion. The formula occurs just a few times in Pāli: MN i.263, ii.32, iii.63; SN ii.28, 65, 70, 78, 79, 95, 96, v.388; AN v.184; Ud 1, 2.

The usual Sanskrit version is:

yaduta asmin satīdaṃ bhavaty asyotpadād idam utpadyate | yaduta asmin asatīdaṃ na bhavaty asya nirodhād idaṃ nirudhyate ||

Although in Sanskrit this often be abbreviated to just the first two sentences. And in Chinese the phrase is typically:

         此有故彼有、此生故彼生、此無故彼無、此滅故彼滅。

For reference, the verbs here are 有 "being", 生 "arising", 無 "non-being", and 滅 "ceasing". And Chinese does not have the rich grammar of the Indic languages so the structure is the same in each of the four phrases. It comes out sounding like something from the 道德經 Dàodé Jīng and this may not have been an accident since Daoism was a strong influence on Chinese Buddhism.

However, we will stick with a grammatical analysis of the Pāli. The two phrases imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti and imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti use a locative absolute construction with present participles to indicate the relationship between the conditioning factor (paccaya) and the conditioned factor (vipāka). This kind of construction is used to indicate an action that is simultaneous with the main action of the verb. The main clause is idaṃ hoti "this is". The deictic pronoun idaṃ is used for an object present to the speaker and hoti is a dialectical variant on the verb bhavati (√bhū) "to be, become". The dynamic sense of "becoming" is probably better since it parallels uppajjati (ud√pad) "arising", though the difference in this case is minimal.

The "absolute" clause is imasmiṃ sati or imasmiṃ asati. The (irregularly formed) present participle sata is from the verb atthi (√as) and is in the locative case, while the pronoun is from the same base as idaṃ and also declined as locative. The meaning is: "this exists", but the locative absolute construction makes it "when this exists" or "while this exists"; and negatively "while this does not exist". Note that the deictic pronoun is used for both condition and effect; i.e., both are present to the speaker. However, if we translated literally it would be ambiguous, so most translators substitute this/that for this/this.

With this in mind I read these sentences as, “while the condition exists, the effect comes into existence” and “while the condition does not exist the effect doesn’t come into existence.” or more briefly: "This being, that becomes" and "This not being, that doesn't become".

The phrases imass’ uppādā idaṃ uppajjati and imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati combine an action noun (uppāda, nirodha) in the ablative of cause with a present indicative verb from the same root (ud√pad, ni√rudh). These mean: “from the arising of this [condition], that [effect] arises” and “from the cessation of this [condition], that [effect] ceases.”

So the sentences may be translated as:

This being, that becomes.
From the arising of this, that arises.
This not being, that doesn't become.
From the ceasing of this, that ceases.

or:

While the condition exists, the effect exists.
From the arising of this condition, this effect arises.
While the condition does not exist the effect doesn’t exist.
From the cessation of this condition, this effect ceases.

This reading is supported by the influential Sri Lankan Buddhist writer, Kulatissa Jayatilleke, who expresses the relation as "Whenever A is present, B is present ..and... whenever A is absent, B is absent." (1963: 449). He notes that Buddhaghosa also saw it this way in the Visuddhimagga:

uppajjamāno ca saha samā ca uppajjati na ekekato no pi ahetuto ti sampanno (Vsm 521)

"Arisen (sampanno)" means arising together and arising equally, not one at a time and not for no reason.

There is not a lot of discussion about this, but my understanding is that the condition is both necessary and sufficient for the arising of the effect. The necessity part must be true, but the sufficiency is debatable. Conditionality might be underspecified and, indeed, in one way of talking about conditionality, multiple conditions are required to give rise to the effect (see Part III). We may ask if, in this standard case, the necessary condition could be present and not give rise to the effect? My reading of the formula is that this could not happen. Therefore the condition is sufficient. I deduced from Jayatilleke's translation and exposition that he also takes this to be the case.

To labour the point, the condition must be present for the entire duration of the effect, and as soon as it is not present, then the effect ceases. To put it another way, we could say that the effect and condition must coexist. This is one way to understand the world samuppāda, although more literally it means "co-arising".

Now that we know what the formula says and why, we can begin to explore the implications:

The Logic of Presence

The early Buddhist theory of conditionality says that an effect can only arise when the appropriate condition is present and that it must cease when the condition is absent; and thus we can say that the condition must be present for the entire duration of the effect. Note that Buddhaghosa himself has described arising as na ekekato "not one at a time" or "not from itself".

The doctrine of momentariness (focused on mental events) asserts that events can only happen one in each moment of time (the one citta rule). Under the conditions of momentariness, a condition can never coexist with its effect and therefore no effect can ever arise. Dependent arising simply does not work under these conditions. So the doctrine of momentariness fails, on its own terms, to explain karma (or anything). This puts the one citta rule in the spotlight, because this rule vitiates any attempt to link consequences to actions via dependent arising since it requires the two to always coexist (samuppāda).

There is a further profound consequence of the necessity for the coexistence implied by the paṭicca-samuppāda formula. Let us say that we have a number of events that (co)exist in conditioned relations as defined by dependent arising. We can call them a precondition, a condition, an effect, and an aftereffect (upanisā, paccaya, vipāka, and anuvipāka).

Each one is the basis (nidāna) for the arising of the next. If the precondition exists, then the condition arises. Once the condition arises, then the effect will arise, and the aftereffect will follow. And, of course, the system is not closed, but open-ended.

Let us say that the condition ceases, the effect immediately ceases, and thus the aftereffect also ceases. There is no backwards conditionality, so the cessation of the condition does not affect the precondition. This is good news for soteriology because if we can destroy the precondition then the whole edifice comes down. In Buddhism, ignorance (avijjā) is said to be the precondition for the whole miserable mess (kevala dukkhakkhanda), i.e., of rebirth, sentience, and suffering.

Another way to look at this is to begin with an event and trace back the conditions. Let us say that we observe the aftereffect and we analyse the conditions for that. We know that if the aftereffect exists, then the effect must exist at the same time. But if the effect exists, then the condition must exist, and if the condition exists then the precondition must exist. And so on. So if the aftereffect exists (i.e., if we perceive it) then all the preceding conditions must also exist at the same time.

... precondition condition effect aftereffect ...

→ → → → → → → → → → → → → →

In logic notation, ≡ stands for if and only if, thus the logic of this relation is:

aftereffect ≡ (effect ≡ (condition ≡ precondition))

We can generalise this as: For any system with N elements:

In order for anything to exist now, all the conditions for it must be in place stretching back in time. And at any point in the future, this must always be true. This was effectively the view of the Sarvāstivādins, although their process of inference was slightly different; they arrived at the same conclusion: in order to be consistent with paṭicca-samuppāda we are forced to conclude that everything exists all the time. See also my essay: Sarvāstivāda Approach to the Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance (02 May 2014).

There is a further problem here. This is a workable explanation of existence or becoming, but how could anything cease under these conditions? In order for something that is present to cease, the condition would have to ceased, and the condition for the condition, right back to infinity. But if all the conditions right back to infinity cease, then it would seem that all conditions whatever must cease. Thus if anything ceases than everything ceases. Though, of course, this is not what we experience, so it must be wrong.

One way around this would be to argue for a distinct thread of conditions for every phenomenon. However, in order for something new to arise, the conditions would have to stretch right back to infinity. In fact, if we follow the logic of paṭicca-samuppāda, nothing can come into existence and nothing can come out of existence. And since this is not the universe we observe, even on a superficial level, then something is wrong with our theory. Dependent arising does not describe the world at all. It cannot be thought of as a metaphysical theory. 

We also need to consider the implications of paṭicca-samuppāda for how Buddhists understood time:

Time

The precondition cannot be the condition for itself. Any event that is the condition for itself can only be always existent or always nonexistent. If it presently exists and is the necessary and sufficient condition for its own existence, then the condition is present and it must continue to exist forever. If it presently does not exist, then the condition does not exist for it to come into existence and never will.

There are only a limited number of scenarios that can explain the situation:

1. Time is linear and infinite towards the past. There is an infinite and constantly expanding stream of conditions which allow the present to exist.
2. Time is linear and finite in the past. This would lead to a first condition which must always exist for anything at all to exist.
3. Time is circular. This reduces to the case of an event being the cause for itself.

To clarify the problem with circular time. If a condition occurs in its own timeline, then it becomes a condition for itself. In the simplest case, two events A and B condition each other A ⇄ B. A conditions B, which conditions A. If we take an arbitrary slice of this stream and lay it out flat, we would see a series of conditional relations:

→ A → B → A → B →

If we spell this out:

• If A is present then B is present and then A is present...
• If A is not present then B is not present and then A is not present ...
• In other words, If A is present then A is present; if A is not present , then A is not present .
• If A is not present, the only way for it to be present is if B is present, but B can only be present if A is present. Therefore A is never present.
• If A is present, then the only way for it to cease is if B ceases. But the condition for B is A which is present, thus A is present. Therefore A is always present.

In logic notation, for any system A,B where the relation is dependent on presence:

A ⇒ B • B ⇒ A
¬A ⇒ ¬B • ¬B ⇒ ¬A
∴ A ⇒ A • ¬A ⇒ ¬A

which is equivalent to:

(A if A) and (¬A if ¬A)

If B stands for a relation such as (P ⇒ Q) then we can see that for any arbitrarily long chain of similar relations, circular conditionality with obligatory presence logically reduces to: (A if A) and (¬A if ¬A).

Traditionally, Buddhists opted for the idea that time was linear and infinite towards the past, but they combined this with epicycles of evolution (samvaṭṭati) and devolution (vivaṭṭati). Strictly speaking, it would not matter if the universe were spatially finite, or had a finite future, but under dependent arising time must be infinite in the past to avoid an eternally existing first condition.

Summary of Part I

The paṭicca-samuppāda formula describes a dynamic in which the condition must be present for the effect to arise and the effect ceases when the condition ceases. It says that the condition must be present for the entire duration of the effect. It has always said this, so if you learned something different then, I'm sorry, but your teacher misled you. Historically, only the Sarvāstivāda understanding of conditionality is consistent with paṭicca-samuppāda.

The requirement for presence means that the condition must be present for the effect to arise; and it means that the condition for the condition must also be present. And so on back through time. To avoid an eternal initial cause, Buddhists have to adopt a worldview in which time is infinite in the past. To avoid having conditionality collapse into something being a condition for itself, time must be linear, although within this linear time, Buddhists accepted the Vedic myth of epicycles of evolution and devolution. However, having explained presence this way, we struggle to explain ceasing.

I am sticking to the internal logic of paṭicca-samuppāda in this essay, but I cannot help but point out that early Buddhists were wrong on two counts: time is continuous rather than discrete; and time is finite in the past. As far as I can see paṭicca-samuppāda explains nothing on its own terms and it explains nothing on modern terms.

This concludes Part I. Part II will look at the relationship of paṭicca-samuppada to the concepts of nidāna and upanisā.

~~oOo~~


Bibliography

Jayatilleke, K. N. (1963). Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge. Motilal Banarsidass, 2010.