Dependence and emptiness › Causation without a self-sufficient cause

The opening verse of chapter 1 examines four possibilities: arising from oneself, from another, from both, and without a cause. The alternatives are easy to recite and harder to interpret. Reading them as a denial that seeds germinate would leave us unable to understand chapter 24's defense of conditioned arising. The question concerns how production could be established through independently existing things.

Take the first possibility. If the effect already exists through its own nature, saying that it produces itself does not explain its coming to be. The supposed production adds nothing to what has already been granted. This is a reconstruction of the difficulty with self-production, rather than a claim that Nāgārjuna offers a botanical theory of seeds.

The alternative of production from another needs equal care. A seed and a shoot can be different at the conventional level. Their difference does not by itself make them independent. If the cause and effect were wholly established apart from the relevant relation, we would still need to explain why this supposed cause produces this effect. Merely calling the effect "other" does not supply that explanation.

Chapter 1.5 asks why certain things are called conditions: something arises depending on them. Verses 1.11-12 then press the relationship between an effect and its conditions. If the effect cannot be found in those conditions, what explains its arising from them rather than from nonconditions? The argument challenges attempts to make production intelligible through self-established items. It does not follow that a seed and a stone are equally good conditions for a shoot.

A modern illustration helps separate these issues. Suppose a seed germinates in one setting and fails in another. Pointing to suitable moisture and temperature helps explain the difference. It would be a mistake to infer that the seed already contained an independently existing finished shoot. It would also be a mistake to conclude that, because the shoot was not already present as such, its emergence was unrelated to the conditions. These mistakes impose an unnecessary choice between a pre-existing effect and an inexplicable one.

Nāgārjuna's connection between dependence and emptiness becomes explicit in 24.18-19. He associates dependent arising with emptiness and dependent designation, and identifies this with the middle way. The point is not that dependence is an embarrassing defect awaiting a deeper independent foundation. Dependence is what the claim of emptiness allows us to acknowledge.

This still leaves a philosophical burden. A critic can ask whether the account explains causation sufficiently, or whether it only exposes difficulties in a rival explanation. The verses do not become a modern scientific model of causality. Their more specific achievement is to challenge the demand that a causal explanation must terminate in independently existing natures.