Chapter 7: Emptiness versus Existence, Bhaviveka and Dharmapala¶

The dispute between emptiness and existence comes, in the traditional telling, with a piece of history attached: Bhāviveka and Dharmapāla were contemporaries who sent difficulties back and forth across the distance between north and south, and are said never to have come face to face. This part passes no judgment on the quality of that record, because it need not. The textual scene of the dispute is in the corpus itself. In the first fascicle of the Karatalaratna, Bhāviveka transcribes a long stretch of argument by the Masters of Correspondence (xiangying lunshi, the old name for the Yogācāra line), and then answers it sentence by sentence. The form is the same as that of the case of Buddhapālita in Chapter 1 of Part 19: the opponent's own words are preserved by a book on this side of the quarrel. Both parties to the dispute between emptiness and existence are present in Chinese in the shape of transcript; the transcript comes from the adversary, and it is testimony that both parties acknowledge all the same.¹

The case on the consciousness-only side turns on two sentences: "that by reason of which a thing is empty is truly non-existent; this in dependence on which it is empty is truly existent," with scripture cited in its own support, "emptiness so understood is what the Teacher of gods and men declared as it truly is." Reading: this is a conception of emptiness by remainder. What is emptied is the that, the imagined nature; what bears the emptying is the this, the dependent nature, and the bearer must really exist. Should the dependent be non-existent as well, the consequence is spoken out by the passage itself: "if this were non-existent it would be annihilation; upon what thing, then, and of what, would one say that it is empty?" Emptiness must have somewhere to be laid down, and the table on which the emptying is done cannot itself be emptied, or one falls into annihilation and there is no basis left for defilement and purity. This is the fear of a wrongly grasped emptiness in its standard form, and it is of one blood with the indictment the opponent opens with in Chapter 6 of Part 18.

Bhāviveka's answer is a dilemma, and its sentences are clean enough to go straight into a table: "again, if you establish the dependent nature as existent because conventional, then you establish what is established already. If you establish this nature as existent by ultimate truth, you have no homologous example." Existent conventionally? Madhyamaka grants that from the start: direction (a) of the Preservation Theorem long since held up the whole of the E2 level, and what you establish this side has established already — you establish what is established. Existent ultimately? Then produce a homologous example: at the ultimate level there is no commonly granted subject term (dharmin) that could serve as the ground of an example, and the inference cannot be got up at all. Here the machinery of qualification runs in full view; the two edges of the dilemma are exactly the offensive and the defensive use of that set of qualifiers from Chapter 1 of Part 19.

A review in the form of the theorem. The point at issue can be written on one line: in which sense of existence does the existence of the dependent nature fall? If the existence the consciousness-only side means is orthodox standing at the level of the machinery, a seat for dependently arisen dharmas within a correct theory, then that is a matter internal to E2, which Madhyamaka has never disputed, and the dispute is a misrecognition of levels brought on by the absence of the qualifier, the word existence being taken by the two sides at two different levels. If what is meant is real existence with intrinsic nature at the level of D2, then Madhyamaka need not lift a hand, for the six articles of the seed testify against it of themselves: momentary cessation excludes permanence, awaiting the assemblage of conditions excludes independence, and the definition that consciousness-only wrote for the dependent nature had already barred intrinsic nature at the door. Tested by the criterion of resistance to paraphrase: the Cheng weishi lun argues from end to end by dependent arising, by momentariness, and by reliance upon conditions, and it resists the E2 paraphrase nowhere at all; π is not present. This book's judgment therefore is that the greater part of the dispute between emptiness and existence dissolves under the form of the theorem, the machinery the two sides hold in common far exceeding what they dispute over; and that the genuine point at issue which remains narrows down to a single one, the reading of the perfected nature and of the uncontaminated realm, where the two cases filed in Chapters 2 and 6 now converge, and which goes to Chapter 8.

A sentence on the mutual judging of doctrinal classifications closes the chapter. The doctrine of the three turnings takes the teaching of emptiness in as the underlying intent of the second period; the reading by way of the two truths takes the three natures in as a science of conventional machinery. Two techniques of annexation, and neither gives way. By the adjudication of Chapter 6 of Part 19, the quarrel over which way the annexation is to run carries no new logical content; what it carries is a line of pedagogy. As for the portion that is logical content, this chapter has judged it.

References¶