[Buddha-l] MMK 25.09 (was: as Swami goes...)

[Dan Lusthaus]

I wrote:
>> Bhāva remains the key term -- to treat it as a stable locus is a symptom 
>> of
>> svabhavic thinking.

Richard replies:
> Not at all. A word formed with the suffix cvi followed by a nominalized 
> form of the verb bhavati is an idiomatic expression, for heaven's sake. It 
> is completely wrong-headed to take an idiomatic expression literally.

There is nothing figurative about bhāva for Nagarjuna.

>I honestly can't understand what your problem is with this whole thing. If 
>someone sees a process one way, it is saṃsāra, but if one sees it another 
>way, it is saṃsāra.

You mean "nirvana" for the latter occasion. This is exactly where our 
interpretations of Nagarjuna diverge, and why you sometimes mistakenly 
believe that he is commiting logical errors. You think it is common sense 
that thing Q can be apprehended by different perspectives, and still be the 
self-same thing; or a process can be interpreted, i.e., "seen" differently. 
This is like wanting the cake and eating it too. You want something really 
there (the process, the things produced in/by the process), and yet 
everything hinges on the psychology of the viewer.

Nagarjuna's most cross-referenced chapter is ch. 2 on coming and going -- he 
refers to it in other chs., saying that is where the current argument, 
whatever it might be, has been fully explained. The pretense that the word 
"process" avoids all the svabhavic problems is a delusion that has sprouted 
in Britain in the last two decades, and embraced by Anglo-American-style 
philosophers in order to dovetail into current thinking among Analytic 
philosophers about Self, philosophy of Mind, etc. -- but the "process" 
recourse only works if one ignores nearly half of the chapters in MMK, 
starting with Ch. 2. Nagarjuna doesn't only deconstruct things and 
substances, but relations and processes as well. There are no things without 
processes, and no processes without things. Relations and processes are 
especially under the microscope in these chapters:

ch.2: Gatāgata-parīkṣā (going and coming)
ch.6: Rāga-rakta-parīkṣā (desire and the desirer)
ch. 8: Karma-kāraka- parīkṣā (action and actor)
ch. 9: Pūrva-parīkṣā (the past, what has preceded)
ch. 10: Agnīndhana-parīkṣā (fire and fuel)
ch. 11: Pūrvāparakoṭi-parīkṣā (Prior and Succeding; past and future)
ch. 14: Saṁsarga-parīkṣā (unifying, putting together)
ch. 16: Bandha-mokṣa-parīkṣā (bondage and liberation)
ch. 17: Karma-phala-parīkṣā (action and its consequences)
ch. 20: Sāmagrī- parīkṣā (collation, grouping)
ch. 21: Saṁbhava-vibhava-parīkṣā (coming together and breaking apart)

One could add the chapter on time, etc. as dealing with the same range of 
issues, applied to various domains.

We are having this discussion because several of these chapters receive 
little attention in the secondary literature.

As for "process" avoiding the problems, the idea of a non-relational process 
is already a non sequitur. Process presupposes time, presupposes things in 
flux, presupposes some sort of development or change (what changes?), etc. 
The idea that one and the same bhāva can have opposing properties is a 
svabhavic notion on several counts, and one commits the fault of 
self-contradiction.

>It's a dynamic process, not a stable locus.

Then it's not the self-same bhāva, in which case the entire karika is 
nonsense, since I believe a consensus was already reached that the 
predicates in the second part of the karika were to be attributed to the 
same subject as the first part of the karika, viz. the bhāva that is the 
coming and going of things.

Oh, yeah... it's just figurative.

At least we agree on one thing: we both like Candrakirti's comments.

Dan