Chapter 2: The Three Natures¶

The three natures are the central semantics of this school, and the doctrine is laid down in the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra: "first, the character of the imagined; second, the character of the dependent; third, the character of the perfected." The imagined is "the intrinsic nature and the differentiations of all dharmas as set up by nominal designation," and it arises in the train of speech: language fastens intrinsic nature and differentiation onto things, and the layer so fastened on is the imagined. The dependent is "the conditionally arisen nature of all dharmas, that is, this being, that comes to be": the machinery of conditioned arising itself. The perfected is what stands disclosed when the imagined is perpetually unobtainable in the dependent, and the sūtra likens it to the field of a clear eye. The figure that carries all three registers is disease of the eye: "as with the affliction of blurring in the eye of a man whose sight is blurred" — the imagined is the film upon the eye; the hairs and down and flies and whirling circles that appear within the film are the dependent as wrongly seized; and the field of a clear eye is the perfected.¹

The three non-natures follow upon the three natures, and are this school's procedure for taking the teaching of emptiness onto its own books. "The non-nature of character, the non-nature of arising, the non-nature of the ultimate": the Buddha's saying that all dharmas are without intrinsic nature is an utterance made with an underlying intent, and it must be parcelled out among the three natures. The imagined is without intrinsic nature as to character, and the reason is written out with the utmost clarity: "this is established as a character by nominal designation, and not established as a character by a character of its own" — what language sets up had no character of its own to begin with. The dependent is without intrinsic nature as to arising: it is produced by the force of conditions and is not there of itself. The perfected is without intrinsic nature as to the ultimate: it is what the ultimate discloses, and it stands apart from the imagined nature.² The reading: the sense emptiness had in the second period is here redistributed, and the single phrase "without intrinsic nature" is drawn up as three separate receipts, each paid on its own account.

The Triṃśikā compresses the same apparatus into eight lines: "By this and that act of imagining, all manner of things are imagined; and this, the imagined, has no intrinsic nature of its own at all. The dependent nature is discrimination arisen from conditions. The perfected is, in that, the perpetual removal of the former nature."³

A structural reading. The three natures cut the two truths into three registers. The imagined is the layer of sheer misconstrual, where an E3 projection is taken for a solid thing, and by definition not one item in this layer exists. The dependent is the layer of conditioned machinery, the positive inventory of the E2 level in its consciousness-only version. The perfected is nothing other than the fact that, in the dependent, the imagined is perpetually unobtainable. The first two registers answer almost point for point to the distinction of the senses of existence drawn in Part 18; the third is new, and it is also the doubtful item this chapter enters on the docket. A negative fact, the absence of grasper and grasped, has been nominalized into a nature, and its Chinese name carries the word "real" besides. Is this a convenience of notation, or an ontological commitment? If notation, then the perfected nature is the consciousness-only way of writing the Preservation Theorem; if commitment, it must stand trial as a D3-type claim. Filed, for Chapters 7 and 8 to hear together.

The two readings of the dependent nature go into the file as well. The division of the dependent into a defiled and a pure side is the one reading; whether the dependent, taken at the level of the ultimate, has intrinsic nature or not is the other, and the latter is the fuse of the dispute between emptiness and existence. The next chapter first erects the machinery; Chapter 7 lights the fuse.

References¶