The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way

·期刊原文
The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:
Naagaarjuna's Muulamadhyamakakaarikaa.
Translation and commentary by Jay L. Garfield.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. xix + 372
Reviewed by Dan Arnold, University of Chicago
Philosophy East & West
Volume 49, Number 1
(January 1999)
pp. 88-92
Copyright by University of Hawaii Press
　

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Jay Garfield's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way represents the achievement of what might not have been thought to be a particularly urgent desideratum: a fourth complete English translation of Naagaarjuna's Muulamadhyamakakaarikaa. What, one might reasonably wonder, could be gained by such an addition to the already voluminous literature on this text?

As it turns out, Garfield's new translation does amount to a significant contribution. This estimate might, moreover, stand as an affront to more philologically inclined scholars of Buddhism; for Garfield is by training a philosopher who has only

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lately come to the study of Tibetan, and his translation lacks much of the text-critical apparatus that (some would say) alone could qualify it as a serious work. Let it be said, however, that even though it was not Garfield's intention to produce such a philological work, his book holds up well as a translation, in many respects improving upon the earlier translations of Streng, Inada, and Kalupahana (though, to be sure, Garfield's translation is from the Tibetan, and theirs from the Sanskrit).

That this is a competent translation can be seen from a quick look at the different renderings of 24.18; for not only is Garfield's translation of this well-known passage preferable to the others, but much of Garfield's philosophical interpretation (which, I will suggest, is by far the more important contribution of his book) hinges on his construal of this passage. In Naagaarjuna's Sanskrit, the passage runs:

ya.h pratiityasamutpaada.h `suunyataa.m taa.m pracak.smahe; saa praj~naptirupaadaaya pratipatsaiva madhyamaa.

The Tibetan translation is (characteristically) quite close:

rten cing 'brel bar 'byung ba gang/ de ni stong pa nyid du bshad/ de ni brten nas gdags pa ste/ de nyid dbu ma'i lam yin no.

(Note, though, that with brten nas, the Tibetan restricts the meaning of the rather ambiguous upaadaaya to "having depended." Garfield benefits from this.)

Inada's prolix translation goes: "We declare that whatever is relational origination is `suunyataa. It is a provisional name (i.e., thought construction) for the mutuality (of being) and, indeed, it is the middle path." [1] As in all of the previous translations, the problematic part is the third paada (saa praj~naptirupaadaaya); in this case, Inada completely misconstrues the gerund, and has made quite a stretch to his "for the mutuality (of being)." For the same phrase, Streng gives "This apprehension, i.e., taking into account [all other things]...." [2] Streng sees the gerund, but is not clear about its referent, and doesn't see the significance of the term praj~napti. Kalupahana comes closer: "We state that whatever is dependent arising, that is emptiness. That is dependent upon convention." [3] Kalupahana correctly reads "that" as referring to emptiness, and errs mainly in translating as though praj~napti were in the accusative case, when, in fact, it is in the nominative.

Garfield's translation has much to recommend it over these: "Whatever is dependently co-arisen, That is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, Is itself the middle way" (pp. 69, 93, 304). [4] Garfield alone understands "that" to refer to "emptiness" and correctly sees this as being in apposition to praj~napti, "designation," so that it is emptiness, being dependent, that is a "designation." The point of the text, that is, is precisely to correlate "emptiness" with its dependent "label" or "designation." And, while Garfield's preferable construal is from the Tibetan, it finds support in Candrakiirti, who glosses "that" as "emptiness" and says that emptiness, as dependent, "is termed a 'designation.'" [5]

This equivalence is the key to Garfield's interpretation of Naagaarjuna, and should return us from our brief philological excursus to what is, after all, the most salient contribution of Garfield's book: his very lucid and insightful philosophical com-

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mentary on the text. Having translated Naagaarjuna from the Tibetan translation, Garfield claims to advance an interpretation of the text that fundamentally follows the dGe-lugs-pa understanding of Praasa^ngika-Madhyamaka.

That interpretation, I have agreed with Garfield, centers on 24.18. What Garfield particularly notes is that this passage specifies three identities: "Here Naagaarjuna asserts the fundamental identity of (1) emptiness, or the ultimate truth; (2) the dependently originated, that is, all phenomena; and (3) verbal convention" (pp. 93-94). On Garfield's reading, then, the thrust of Naagaarjuna's argument is at once ontological and epistemological, in a way that collapses this very distinction. That is, the verbal conventions (in 24.18, the praj~napti) through which we know about and explain reality, are at the same time no different from the most "real" things that such explanations can specify; they are instances of the "dependent origination" that is Naagaarjuna's ontology. And "emptiness," itself simply specifying dependent origination, is not something other, or more "real," than these. As GarField aptly puts it, Naagaarjuna's "middle way" (his madhyamaa pratipat) "is achieved by taking conventions as the foundation of ontology, hence rejecting the very enterprise of a philosophical search for the ontological foundations of convention" (p. 122).

Garfield characterizes the resultant notion as a "regularity view" of reality. On this view, "we should seek to explain regularities by reference to their embeddedness in other regularities, and so on. To ask why there are regularities at all, on such a view, would be to ask an incoherent question: The fact of explanatorily useful regularities in nature is what makes explanation and investigation possible in the first place and is not something itself that can be explained" (p.116 n.).

There is, of course, a sense in which this reading has affinities with Kant. Summarizing a central point of the first critique, Kant writes in the Prolegomena that "how [any] peculiar property of our sensibility itself is possible, or that of our understanding and of the apperception which is necessarily its basis and that of all thinking, cannot be further analysed or answered, because it is of them that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects." [6] Similarly, Garfield's Naagaarjuna is concerned to show that we cannot possibly "get behind" interdependent, conventional phenomena to any independent explanation of them; that is, our explanations of the ultimate fact about existents (that they are pratiityasamutpanna) must themselves remain dependent -- emptiness, that is, must be "empty."

Emptiness, then, becomes at once the condition of the possibility of existents (as in 24.19: "Something that is not dependently arisen, such a thing does not exist. Therefore a nonempty thing does not exist") and the condition of the possibility of any explanation of existents: "for the central thrust of Naagaarjuna's arguments...is not that inherent existence is a property some things might have had but by global accident is uninstantiated or that emptiness just happens to characterize all phenomena. Rather he is arguing that inherent existence is simply an incoherent notion and that emptiness is the only possible analysis of existence" (pp.147-148). It should be clear that, to the extent that Garfield's reading might have affinities with Kant, it is not in the sense of an imputation of Kantian idealism, such as, say,

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Stcherbatsky and Murti have plausibly been seen to advance. On Garfield's reading (which seems to me to be correct), Naagaarjuna does not oppose ultimate "reality" to conventional "appearance." Indeed, it is precisely the point of Garfield's interpretation to show "the deep identity of the two truths" (p. 320).

Thus, it would be wrong to emphasize possibly misleading parallels with Western philosophy, since Garfield's reading of Madhyamaka, it seems to me, amounts to a particularly subtle expression of an interpretation very much indeed like the dGe-lugs-pa interpretation. On the latter view, the "emptiness of emptiness" consists in the fact that "when a phenomenon is not found by a valid cognition which analyzes the ultimate that does not mean that [such a valid cognition finds] the nonexistence of that phenomenon. This follows because a phenomenon's not being verified by a certain valid cognition does not imply that that valid cognition perceives that phenomenon to be nonexistent." [7] Just as the dGe-lugs-pas thus see the "emptiness of emptiness" to consist in the impossibility of positively finding anything that could answer to the description of a phenomenon's "emptiness," so, too, does Garfield's interpretation amount to a development of the insight that we cannot possibly identify anything that makes our explanations possible; and yet, this failure to find any such reasons cannot be taken as a positive finding of the nonexistence of any reasons. "Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that" (p. 122).

But whether, exegetically, Garfield's interpretation is or is not an adequate expression of the dGe-lugs-pa reading of Praasa^ngika-Madhyamaka is, in the end, rather beside the point. In any case, he has succeeded admirably in producing a commentary on Naagaarjuna's major work that is at once relevant to contemporary philosophy and yet chiefly informed by traditional Indo-Tibetan readings. There is, no doubt, much that will be controversial (I have not, for example, been able to go into Garfield's venturesome claim, in the first chapter, that Naagaarjuna posits a key distinction between hetu and pratyaya). Be that as it may, this is a remarkably lucid and philosophically serious reading of an important Buddhist text, and one that, while following Indo-Tibetan tradition, is strikingly free of Buddhological jargon. Not only is Garfield to be thanked for this, but his work is, in this regard, one that more traditionally trained scholars of Buddhism would do well to emulate.

Notes
1. Kenneth K. Inada, Naagaarjuna: A Translation of His Muulamadhyamakakaarikaa (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1970), p.148.

2. Frederick Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning (Nashville: Abingdon, 1967), p. 213.

3. David Kalupahana, Naagaarjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 339.

4. This passage also figures prominently in an article by Garfield, in Philosophy

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East and West, that represented a draft of the present work's commentary on Naagaarjuna's first chapter; see jay Garfield, "Dependent Co-origination and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why Did Naagaarjuna Begin with Causation?" Philosophy East and West 44 (1994): 219-250.

5. The Sanskrit is: saiva `suunyataa upaadaaya praj~naptiriti vyavasthaapyate. In Louis de la Vallée Poussin, ed., Muulamadhyamakakaarikaas (Maadhyamikasuutras) de Naagaarjuna, avec la Prasannapadaa Commentaire de Candrakiirti (St. Petersburg: Biblioteca Buddhica, 1913), p. 504.

6. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Can Qualify as a Science, trans. Paul Carus (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1902), p. 80; my emphasis. See also Critique of Pure Reason, A27/B43, and A63/B88.

7. This is the statement of mKhas-grub dge-legs-dpal-bzang-po, in José Cabezon, trans., A Dose of Emptiness: An Annotated Translation of the sTong thun chen mo of mKhas grub dGe legs dpal bzang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 100.