Chapter 6: The Preservation Theorem¶

The chapter on the noble truths opens with the fullest indictment the opponent ever brings: if everything is empty, there is no arising and no ceasing, and if so there is no dharma of the four noble truths; and from there the four fruits, the jewels of Saṅgha, Dharma and Buddha, and the causal working of evil and merit collapse all the way down.¹ The indictment is still being repeated two thousand years later, in plainer words: you have talked tables and chairs out of existence. This chapter proves the other half of the theorem, the Preservation Theorem, in two directions. First, no loss: T and the rejections it licenses do not touch a hair of the E1 and E2 levels. Second, only thus: only if T holds do the E1 and E2 levels stand at all. Taken together: emptiness is not a subtraction, it is the condition on which the world runs. Once this chapter is proved, the charge of nihilism is reversed entire.

The Preservation Theorem, formally stated. (a), the direction of no loss: for any assertion A at the E1 or E2 level, T and the rejections it licenses do not alter the truth conditions of A. The argument runs in two steps. The first is classificatory: the range clause of D3 already places E1 and E2 assertions outside the scope, and every rejection carries a type mark and applies to D3-type claims alone. The second is substantive, and it is the crux: individuation at the everyday level has never once drawn upon an E3 substratum. The two worked samples of Chapter 4 demonstrated this on the spot — the goer is individuated by the going, a condition is certified as such retrospectively by its fruit, and the web of relations is self-sufficient and turns by itself; withdraw the substratum, and every knot in the web bears its load as before. The substratum is an idle machine, and removing an idle machine alters the reading of no working machine.

Direction (a) must meet head-on one classical counter-principle, the axis of the Sarvāstivāda line of semantics, summed up in later ages in four characters: the nominal must rest on the real. What exists by designation can be designated only in dependence upon the existence of real dharmas. (Its criterion was cited in Chapter 2; its regress form was cleared up in a chapter of its own, Part 15, Chapter 7.) If that principle holds, then withdrawing the E3 substratum alters the very conditions under which E2 assertions are established, and the claim of no loss is lost. One step in reply: to ground is to do work. To rest upon, to support, to sustain, to give rise to: every one of these is a task discharged among conditions. But the real thing the opponent offers has for its oath that it is not altered as conditions change and is not produced by conditions. That it neither enters into causation nor serves as a condition is then the direct consequence of its definition, and direction (b) below turns on just this. What is inert cannot ground: grant the substratum to be posited, and still it cannot take the job on. What has actually carried individuation and support has always been causes, conditions, parts, and conventions, every one of them dependently arisen and every one of them at the E2 level. With this, the claim that it has never once been drawn upon acquires at the same stroke its universal warrant: not by counting through every case and finding no exception, since the two samples were only demonstrations, but because conceptually the task could never fall to it — whatever is at work is, by the contraposition of direction (b), not a thing possessed of intrinsic nature. The nominal must rest on the real is then left with two readings. Read as resting on a real thing possessed of intrinsic nature, the ground it summons has been excused by its own oath from every capacity to carry anything, and the reading destroys itself. Read as being established in dependence upon the assembly of conditions, it is dependent arising, which is the very mechanism of this part. The warrant for this step is taken from the consequences of D2 and not from the main theorem: direction (a) borrows no guarantee from it, and its independence is intact.

(b), the direction of only thus: if some dharma has intrinsic nature, then by the second and third conditions of D2 it does not arise, does not cease, and does not alter; and by the first condition of D2 together with the difference horn of Chapter 3, it stands in no relation to any other dharma. The four taken together make a thing possessed of intrinsic nature functionally inert throughout: it cannot be produced, cannot undergo change, cannot enter into causation, cannot serve as a condition. The contraposition follows at once: whatever functions, whatever arises and ceases and alters and stands in relations, is without intrinsic nature. The text puts this half in a pair of verses, positive and negative: because emptiness holds, all dharmas are made possible; if emptiness did not hold, nothing at all would stand.² If things had determinate nature, the manifold appearances of the world would neither arise nor cease, but would abide permanently without decay; and Piṅgala's commentary supplies the empirical side: it is plainly seen that the myriad things each bear the mark of alteration, arising and ceasing and changing about, and from this one knows that they have no determinate nature. If there were no emptiness, what has not been attained would not be attained, there would be no cutting off of the defilements, and no ending of suffering: practice and liberation stand alike on the list of what is preserved, and dharmas beyond the world no less than those of the world are held up by emptiness.³

The reductio reversed. Now to settle the charge of nihilism. Nihilism is defined as the denial that the everyday level is established. Test both parties. The side of emptiness: direction (a) is proved, nothing at E1 or E2 is lost, and the farmer sows his seed, the traveller presses down the road, the practitioner cuts off his defilements, each secure in his place. The side of intrinsic nature: direction (b) is proved, and everything freezes — with no arising and ceasing there is no sowing, with no alteration there is no practice, with no relation there is no causation. Who is it that destroys the everyday? The answer is given by the derivation and not by anyone's attitude. At this point the exchange in the text has an exact structural symmetry, worth displaying as it stands. The opponent opens: if everything is empty, there is no arising and no ceasing, and if so there is no dharma of the four noble truths. Nāgārjuna returns it in the same form: if everything is not empty, there is no arising and ceasing, and if so there is no dharma of the four noble truths.⁴ The same verse, thrown back with one word changed. The opponent's inference goes through only on his own reading: only when emptiness is read as annihilation does it entail that there is no arising and ceasing. On the typed reading, the antecedent that really entails the absence of arising and ceasing is intrinsic nature. The letter of indictment has the contents right and the addressee wrong. The sentence of judgment is likewise the text's own: you say that I am attached to emptiness and so charge me with a fault; the fault you now state does not attach to emptiness at all. The fault is your own, and you turn it back upon me, like a man riding a horse who forgets what he rides.⁵ The simile of the horse is of a piece with the exhibit of Chapter 5: every step the accuser takes (laying down a position, inferring, speaking and being heard) rides on the horse of dependent arising, and he uses everything emptiness preserves for him in order to prosecute emptiness.

The verse of the three "it is": one verse, three readings. Whatever arises from the assembly of conditions, I declare to be nothing; it is also a conventional designation; it is also the meaning of the middle way. There has never been a single dharma that does not arise from causes and conditions; therefore there is no dharma whatever that is not empty.⁶ One verse gives the three clauses of the Preservation Theorem. Reading one, empty: whatever arises dependently is without intrinsic nature, which is to say that every E3 reading of it is rejected; this is the rejecting face of the theorem. Reading two, conventional designation: what arises dependently is individuated and established through the network of names and conventions; this is the positive mechanism of the E2 level. Conventional designation is not a term of disparagement, it is the name of a mode of individuation; conventional existence, the E2 sense, has been waiting here since Chapter 1 laid down the definitions. Reading three, the middle way: apart from the two extremes of existence and nonexistence, real existence is rejected and annihilation is rejected as well, and what stands between the two rejections is the E2 level itself. The middle way is not a third metaphysical position; it is the joint name of two rejections plus one layer of preservation. Piṅgala's commentary closes on exactly this note: because this dharma is without nature it cannot be said to exist, and since there is no emptiness either it cannot be said not to exist.

Where the two truths stand. The Buddhas teach the Dharma to beings in dependence on two truths: the first conventional truth, the second the truth of the ultimate sense; without relying on the conventional truth the ultimate is not obtained, and without obtaining the ultimate, nirvāṇa is not obtained.⁷ This part assigns the two truths their formal positions: conventional truth is the legitimacy of assertions at the E1 and E2 levels; ultimate truth is T itself. What the two truths divide is levels of assertion, not two worlds; there is one world, and speech about it has two layers. One convergence across the camps deserves to be entered here: the Sarvāstivāda's own definition of conventional truth says that to speak by conventional reasoning of there being a pot and the like is real and not false (cited in Chapter 2). Neither party will rule the everyday level false, and they differ only over what is left standing at the ultimate level: the Sarvāstivāda leaves a list of what does not break up under analysis, while at the ultimate level of this part nothing is left but a single meta-theorem. One further sentence of Piṅgala's commentary is to be extracted on its own, because it fastens the inventory of resources of Chapter 5 to the ground: the ultimate is in every case stated by means of speech, and speech is conventional; therefore, without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be stated. The meta-level is spoken in the language of the conventional, and conceptual grammar and logic are conventional instruments to begin with. This is not a leak, it is the design: the ladder has to be set up on the floor below. The dispute among the several readings of the two truths is the proper subject of the next part; here the door is opened and not entered.

What this chapter hands in. Both directions of the Preservation Theorem, proved. The record of the reversal of the charge of nihilism, with the symmetrical verse of the text and the simile of the horse. The verse of the three "it is", as the classical statement in one place of the theorem's three clauses. The formal placing of the two truths, and one convergence across the camps. With this the theorem stands in its full shape: with one hand it rejects every combination of real existence with intrinsic nature, with the other it holds up the whole of everyday life and of practice. Chapter 7 audits it; Chapter 8 takes it outdoors and tries its edge; Chapter 9 delivers the verdict.

[The Chinese text closes with a restatement of this chapter in plain language — the same content in a different register, the academic half governing wherever the two diverge. That restatement is not yet translated; nothing in the argument is missing from what stands above.]

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