Part II, Chapter 4: The Truth of the Path I: From Indirect Cultivation Back to Direct Confrontation¶

Introduction, Chapter 2 identified something rather counterintuitive in the early mechanism of liberation. The diagnosis clearly locates the root of suffering in craving and ignorance, yet the Noble Eightfold Path does not attack either head-on. It works only on cultivating ethics, concentration, and wisdom over time, allowing craving and ignorance to lose their breeding ground as the mind grows clearer. That chapter also set a standard: many later systems returned precisely to a framework of “direct confrontation,” and this volume would measure them against this path of cultivation. The preceding three chapters examined the location of suffering, the level of the diagnosis, and the definition of the endpoint. This chapter returns to the truth of the path to examine the direction of its effort. On which side of the standard does this theory of the path fall?

1. The same targets for antidotes, opposite directions of effort

Part I, Chapter 2 has already noted that the first eight chapters of Āryadeva's Catuḥśataka take up early Buddhism's oldest targets for antidotes: the four inversions of permanence, happiness, self, and purity. In its objects, this starting point is highly continuous with the baseline. Yet the same chapter showed that Āryadeva handles these topics by arguing in verse and urging people to break their attachments. Chapter 1 uses various arguments drawn from recollecting death to persuade readers that clinging to permanence is absurd; Chapter 3 offers various impurities of the body to persuade them that clinging to purity is groundless. This is a frontal, direct attack on the inversions themselves.

In examining the two-character Chinese term for “antidote” (对治), Introduction, Chapter 2 used the establishment of mindfulness of the body as an example. Here the “countering” (对) consists in settling the mind on observing the body as it is, letting attachment diminish of itself as the body is seen clearly. It does not argue that the body is impure, still less require the practitioner to be persuaded by a conclusion. The object is the same, but effort takes two directions: one observes and lets grasping loosen of itself; the other argues in order to refute grasping. Āryadeva's first eight chapters fall, overall, on the latter side. This is not a question of persuasiveness: the Catuḥśataka's exhortations are quite forceful. The question is at what level “being persuaded” occurs. The chapter on the truth of origin (Part II, Chapter 2) has already answered: what argument can directly change is judgment at the reflective level, whereas grasping operates day to day at the pre-reflective level.

2. Dissolving self-view through speculation: a route anticipated in the baseline

Introduction, Chapter 2 imagined what directly dissolving self-view might look like: “The method would roughly consist in continually persuading oneself that ‘there is no self,’ or seeking, through speculation or ritual, a state in which subject and object both disappear.” It pointed out that self-view does not actually loosen merely through repeated denial. Madhyamaka's approach is of course far more sophisticated than “self-persuasion.” Reductio derives contradictions from an opponent's presuppositions; it does not repeat a negative slogan. It understands itself as producing insight, rather than instilling belief. This difference must be acknowledged.

Structurally, however, “repeatedly speculating on emptiness to dissolve the view of intrinsic existence” shares the form of the direct confrontation described by the baseline. It faces self-view head-on on the terrain of concepts, judgments, and positions. Each victory of reductio wins a position at the reflective level. The automatic pre-reflective operation that appropriates everything as “mine” never appears on the battlefield and therefore cannot be defeated. Madhyamaka has a response from within its own tradition, already presented in Part I, Chapters 2 and 3: right view must be cultivated through habituation to bring about transformation, and the path of cultivation remains after the path of seeing. This response shifts the burden onto “habituation.” What its effective ingredient actually is was examined in Part II, Chapter 2, Section 4 and need not be repeated here. Only one point needs adding: when the content of habituation remains “repeatedly thinking about emptiness,” it remains within the framework of direct confrontation, merely moving the confrontation from debate into seated meditation.

This approach provoked a famous open conflict within the tradition: the Samyé debate of the late eighth century. The Chinese Chan master Moheyan advocated neither thinking nor contemplating, abruptly leaving discrimination behind. His reason bears a formal similarity to this chapter's criticism: good and bad thoughts alike bind, just as black and white clouds alike obscure sunlight. Kamalaśīla's response, in the three Bhāvanākramas, defended analysis. Mere absence of thought resembles a swoon or deep sleep: it suppresses thoughts without uprooting afflictions. Only discriminating wisdom born of observing things as they are (bhūta-pratyavekṣā), together with previously accomplished śamatha, can abandon afflictions. He also insisted that the gradual cultivation of ethics and concentration is the necessary foundation for the wisdom of insight.¹ The debate matters here because it shows the tradition itself continually circling within the framework of “direct confrontation.” Moheyan makes direct suppression of thoughts the path; Kamalaśīla makes direct analysis of grasping at true existence the path. Their dispute concerns the instrument of confrontation—stopping thoughts or analyzing them. The early approach, which does not attack head-on but changes the soil of the disease's root through the three trainings, appears in both positions only as groundwork, no longer as the mechanism itself. Kamalaśīla does retain the sequence of ethics and concentration, and this brings him closer to the baseline than his opponent. The Tibetan tradition judged Kamalaśīla the victor and thereafter institutionalized analytical observation as the core of the path. The direction criticized here thus took settled form.

Once settled, this direction developed an ingenious bridging device within the Gelug school, which deserves to be credited: alternating analytical meditation and placement meditation. In meditation on emptiness, one first analyzes through analytical meditation. When analysis induces a definite felt experience, one immediately shifts to placement meditation, letting the mind merge with what has been induced and remain undispersed. When the experience wanes, analysis resumes, and the cycle repeats, as set out in the vipaśyanā chapter of the Great Treatise. The device's very existence shows that the Gelug clearly understand that analysis does not itself transform: it must be handed over to attention and abiding to become effective. This is a substantial concession to the baseline's instruments. Yet the content handed over remains an understanding of emptiness produced by argument. The device changes the carrier, without changing the content's source. It makes direct confrontation more practicable; whether it thereby turns it into cultivation is debatable. This chapter makes only one point: the existence of the bridge has already acknowledged the existence of the river.

The Gelug practice manuals supply a ready-made blueprint for this bridge, and recording it in their own terms shows better than any summary what is handed over to abiding. In the Great Treatise, analytical meditation on the selflessness of the person is the sevenfold search of the chariot analogy; the Fifth Panchen Lama's Swift Path and Pabongka's Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand compress it into four key points. First, identify the object of negation: let innate self-grasping become manifest, for example when one is falsely accused of theft and an "I" that "did nothing of the kind" stands out vividly; then, with a small part of the mind, observe what this mind takes as "I" and how it takes it, since observing too forcefully makes the grasping disappear. What it grasps is an "I" on top of the aggregates that is not imputed by thought but stands on its own from the start, and this is what is to be refuted. Second, determine the full set of possibilities: if such an "I" exists among the aggregates, it must be either one with them or different from them, and there is no third option. Third, rule out oneness: if one with the aggregates, the "I" would be many because the aggregates are many, and would arise and perish as they do. Fourth, rule out difference: if different from the aggregates, an "I" should be identifiable apart from them, and none can be pointed out. At the end of this analysis, the Swift Path says, a beginner feels fear, sensing that there is no real "I" at all among the aggregates, that "I am entirely gone"; when such great fear arises, the Madhyamaka view has been found for the first time. One then holds this certainty with mindfulness, watches for laxity and excitement with vigilance, and enters absorption; when the certainty fades, one analyzes again from the beginning.²

The blueprint states plainly what is handed over to abiding: the conclusion of an inference, together with the conviction and the fright that the inference stirs up. Tsongkhapa does not avoid this; he makes it a premise. The Great Treatise holds that an ordinary being can meditate on emptiness only through a generic image, so that "to claim that a beginner meditates on emptiness with a mind that is free from conceptual thought" is a contradiction; if an ordinary being's mind could apprehend selflessness without conceptual thought, that would already be a yogic perception and the person would be a noble one.³ On this basis he refutes four ways of meditating on emptiness in turn: resting without conceptual thought before the view has been found; counting every nonconceptual resting after the view has been found as meditation on emptiness; analyzing once at the start of a session and then resting nonconceptually; and inducing certainty about emptiness first and then fixing the mind on it. The last differs from his own position by a hair, yet he rules it mere serenity, because it contains no analysis and so "cannot sustain the union of serenity and insight." His own rule is that once serenity is attained and the view has been determined, insight does not arise through stabilizing meditation alone, and the actual cultivation of insight must be analytical meditation. The Kadampa master Potowa put the rule in one line: whatever you meditate on, analyze it. The Fifth Dalai Lama, quoting him, added a simile for those who keep analysis for study and reserve meditation for nonconceptual rest: they are like someone who "feeds the horse well at home and then goes on the long journey on foot."⁴ Tsongkhapa also set a boundary marker: to be able to analyze the meaning of selflessness within an unbroken, stable nonconceptual abiding, "like a small fish moving beneath still water," must not be mistaken for the union of serenity and insight; the union counts only when analysis by its own force induces firm abiding.⁵ The marker states the premise most clearly: analysis within concentration is still analysis, and an inference does not become something else because it is performed in stillness.

Given that premise, the content of analytical meditation cannot but be fixed in advance by doctrine. The insight chapter of the Great Treatise runs to some eighty thousand characters in Fazun's Chinese translation. Measured by Tsongkhapa's own outline, the identification of the object of negation and the disputes between Madhyamaka sub-schools take up a little over half; the reasoning to be rehearsed on the cushion takes up less than a fifth; instructions on how to meditate also take up less than a fifth, and a third of those are spent refuting other schools' methods. He explains the proportions himself: because refuting mistaken ideas about the object of negation "is the most essential point for removing wrong paths to the Madhyamaka view, I have explained it at length." The object of negation is defined as an intrinsic nature that is "not posited by the force of one's own mind but exists as the object's own inherent way of being"; this definition is the outcome of the Prāsaṅgika refutation of Bhāvaviveka. Under another school's definition, what the first key point sends the meditator to look for in the mind would change.⁶

The chapter's verdict can therefore be stated more precisely. The bridge acknowledges the river, but both ends of the bridge stand on the same bank. What can be observed is only the manifest sense of "I" at the start and the conviction, fright, and pliancy at the end; in between, "intrinsic nature must be either one or different, and each option has its faults" is logic, not observation, and the pliancy said to be induced by insight is the body and mind's response to an inference repeated under the support of concentration. Tsongkhapa would reply that view and practice are one and the same. That reply itself fuses view and practice into a single thing, and what this book criticizes is precisely its premise: that an ordinary being has no access to selflessness except through inference. The baseline set in Introduction, Chapter 2 denies exactly this premise: the early path lets grasping loosen of itself under observation of things as they are, without first requiring the practitioner to be convinced by a conclusion. Once the premise is granted, insight can only be inference, and practice can only be the repetition of inference in concentration; everything this lineage does on the cushion follows from the premise, so the criticism falls on the premise and not on the procedures.

For the account of indirect cultivation in the missing third position, the Chinese figure refers to the Introduction, Chapter 2.

3. The absence of cultivation and the difficulty of attribution

In contrast to its rich resources for direct confrontation, Madhyamaka's theory of the path offers little cultivation. Nāgārjuna's principal works contain almost no explanations of concrete meditation methods. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is philosophical argument; the Vigrahavyāvartanī is a methodological defense; the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā expresses emptiness in verse. The Ratnāvalī offers exhortations to practice, but falls far short of practical instructions for meditation. The conclusion of the section “Which Kind of Practice?” in Part I, Chapter 2 carries weight here: the practice committed to writing by early Madhyamaka centers on antidotes and the accumulation of resources. Early Buddhism's cultivation procedure, with concentration as its substance and insight arising from concentration, is almost entirely absent from their writings.

The historical consequence of this absence is that Madhyamaka's meditation practice has long depended on fusion with other traditions: the Yogācāra meditation system in India, and Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā in Tibet. Fusion sometimes works very well, but creates a difficulty of attribution. When the resulting practice has effects, one cannot distinguish whether they come from Madhyamaka's view of emptiness or from the cultivation methods of the tradition incorporated into it—bodily awareness, calming thoughts, and developing concentration. This indeterminacy makes it difficult for practice experience to lend independent support to the claim that “the view of emptiness is the core mechanism of liberation.” In other words, the portions of Madhyamaka's theory of the path that belong to it tend to fall on the side of direct confrontation; those that involve cultivation tend to be borrowed. Fairness also requires acknowledging that the same difficulty of attribution applies to the baseline. Within ethics, concentration, and wisdom as a whole, which component accounts for how much transformation likewise cannot be isolated and tested from within. The difference lies in their claims. The baseline never claims that one link in the chain works alone: its claim is that the whole chain works. Madhyamaka claims that seeing emptiness is the core mechanism, with the rest as auxiliaries. The difficulty of attribution leaves “the whole chain works” unharmed but strikes at the heart of “a single point bears the weight.” This and the asymmetrical license discussed in the chapter on the truth of origin are two sides of the same matter.

4. Limits and conclusion

Two limits should be stated. First, early Buddhism already had meditation subjects that served as antidotes: contemplation of impurity to counter lust, and loving-kindness to counter hatred, are ancient arrangements. Within the early framework, however, these antidotes are local prescriptions suited to particular dispositions, placed within the entire process of cultivation, whose foundation is ethics, substance is concentration, and aim is wisdom.⁷ Their instruments are observation and cultivation, not argument. In Madhyamaka, antidotes rise to become the main structure while cultivation recedes into the background, and the instrument of the antidote changes to speculation. Second, this chapter does not assert that Madhyamaka practitioners never cultivated concentration and wisdom; historically, they plainly did. Its assertion concerns the part that Madhyamaka, as a theory of the path, wrote down, taught, and claimed as distinctive: the direction of its effort leans toward direct confrontation.

To conclude: measured by the standard in Introduction, Chapter 2, the direction of effort in Madhyamaka's theory of the path veers back from indirect cultivation toward direct confrontation. This shift and the mismatch of levels in the chapter on the truth of origin corroborate each other and share a root. Once the root of suffering is diagnosed as a mistaken judgment at the reflective level, a frontal attack by argument seems natural. The diagnostic mismatch gives direct confrontation its theoretical justification. Beyond these two difficulties in the mechanism—level and direction—Madhyamaka has set itself another problem: it claims to have no thesis whatever, yet must give practice a direction. That is the subject of the next chapter.

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