I Come In Peace (1990)

Pratitya -Samutpada: Road to Peace and Socio-Political Justice

When this is, that is.

From the arising of this comes the arising of that.

When this isn’t, that isn’t.

From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.

Pratitya -Samutpada: Road to Peace and Socio-Political Justice

Dr.R.Murali

Head

Department of Philosophy

The Madura College (Autonomous)

Madurai-11

I

Buddha is the mighty symbol of peace and harmony for the entire world. Today, the whole world realizes the need to pay its attention towards Buddha’s teachings. Buddhist teachings tell us that hatred and aversion, like their opposites desire and greed, all spring from a fundamental ignorance. The basic ignorance is our failure to understand the self as an illusion. The illusion of the self is the cause of all our suffering. We want to protect our self from the dangers of the constant flux of life. We want to exempt our self from change, when nothing in the world is exempt from change”. That ignorance is our mistaken notion of our own permanent, independent existence. In ignorance, we see ourselves as separate beings, unconnected with others. Buddhists believe that the minds of all living beings are totally interconnected and interrelated, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Since each human being and each level of systems are interconnected, to create a positive peace compels efforts of everyone at every level of human structures.

Blinded to our true state of interdependence and interconnectedness, it is this basic ignorance that keeps us divided. Only practice that leads to overcoming such ignorance will help to free us from ignorance. The Buddha’s central doctrine of the “dependent co-arising” reveals the dynamic interdependence of all phenomena. Its insight and practices help to free us from the prison cell of egocentricity, and from the greed, hatred, and delusion it engenders. Hence, the awareness about this state is the prime criteria in Buddhist philosophy for attaining peace. But this is only the starting point.

II

At this juncture, this paper would like approach the problem of dependent co-arising from the position of Nagarjuna, especially from his views on pratitya samudpada. Though various sub-schools of the Madhyamaka argue with each other over the precise etymology and grammar of the term/concept pratitya-samutpada, and contend over its precise workings.

According to the analysis of Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna was an Indian philosopher, the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, and arguably the most inf…

, true causality depends upon the intrinsic existence of the elements of the causal process (causes and effects), which would violate the principle of anatta


The Buddhist term Anatman or Anatta is used both as an adjective, that specifies the absence of a permanent and unchanging self or…

, but pratitya-samutpada does not imply that the apparent participants in arising are essentially real.

Because of the interdependence of causes and effects (i.e. causes depend on their effects in order to be causes, and effects likewise depend on their causes in order to be effects), it is quite meaningless to talk about them as existing separately. However, the strict identity of cause and effect is also refuted, since if the effect were the cause, the process of origination could not have occurred. Thus both monistic

Monism is the metaphysical and theological view that all is of one essential essence, principle, substance or energy….

and a dualistic


The term dualism has a number of uses in the history of thinking….

accounts of causation are rejected.Therefore, Nagarjuna explains that the anatta (or emptiness

Sunyata, ??????? or Suata is a term, translated as “Emptiness” or “Voidness”, which constitutes an aspect of the Buddh…

) of causality is demonstrated by the interdependence of cause and effect, and likewise that the interdependence (pratitya-samutpada) of causality itself is demonstrated by its anatta.

The flip side of sunyata is pratitya samutpada. They are two sides of the same coin. They mean the same thing, but from two different perspectives. To the extent that sunyata is a negative concept (i.e., not svabhava), pratitya-samutpada is the positive counterpart. Pratitya-samutpada is an attempt to conceptualize the nature of the world as it appears to us, not (as with sunyata) by saying what the world is not, but by characterizing what is. pratitya-samutpada is wonderfully subtle, and Buddhist philosophers have developed it beautifully.

This concept is understood in two quite different ways in Theravada and Mahayana thought. In Theravada dependent co-arising (usually designated by its form in Pali, paticca-samuppada) is understood as a logical-causal chain which illustrates in a linear fashion the preconditions of suffering that can be analyzed and eliminated according to a strictly codified pattern of behavior. In Mahayana, on the other hand, which emphasizes the emptiness of things, dependent co-arising as a concept is used to clarify the nature of sunyata by showing that all things that appear to have independent, permanent existence are really the product of many forces interacting. Thus, in Mahayana it is stressed that all things are dependently co-arisen, because their seemingly independent existence really depends on the coming together simultaneously (the co-arising) of the various parts and forces that go into making them up.

One illustration of sunyata and pratitya-samutpada is a rainbow. We know that a rainbow is real in some sense, because we can see it, locate it, measure it, and so forth. However, it is also clear that a rainbow is no “thing”, but rather the product of various forces interacting as sunlight shines through an atmosphere that has water droplets in suspension. Mahayana thinkers have asserted that all phenomena, including especially individual human beings, are like this, inasmuch as it is impossible to locate any basic particle or entity that is dependent in no way for its definition and existence on the relationship that it has to other things. All things are, therefore, “empty” and “dependently co-arisen”.

Many great Buddhist philosophers have thought through with great care the nature of shunyata and pratitya-samutpada. This is but a simple illustration of much more complex reasoning, such as that found in the writings of Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, and other subtle thinkers. (See Smith, 82-112. See also Paul Ingram. 1990. “Nature’s Jeweled Net: Kukai’s Ecological Buddhism” on Electronic Reserve. )

It may seem that the articulation of such ideas “tends not to edification” or that it resembles absurd philosophical speculation such as “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” However, the study of these (and other) philosophical concepts has typically been linked with practices that train Buddhists to release themselves from attachment to or striving after “things” that might seem to offer some lasting sort of satisfaction. One of the most basic forms of attachment is the mind’s tendency to grasp after objects of thought and perception as real (i.e., as having svabhava), and this tendency is reinforced in ideas that we have about the world. The use of philosophical reasoning to deconstruct such misconceptions (as they are understood within Buddhism) is a powerful vehicle for eliminating seeds that can eventually grow into very serious obstacles in one’s orientation to the world.

Among the most important applications of these ideas with Mahayana has been to expose the emptiness and the co-dependently arisen qualities of even Buddhism itself. Mahayana claims itself to be an important vehicle to liberation, but it also points to its own provisional character. Mahayana does not see itself as an end, but as means to an end. That end is liberation, enlightenment, and an end to suffering. However, as with all religions, there is a tendency for the religion to reinforce itself as real, as an end in itself, within the minds of its adherents. The philosophical traditions of emptiness and dependent co-origination are important correctives to this tendency.

Thus, Shunyata” means: “which is devoid of entity”. That does mean that nothing exists independently from the rest. The Dharma teaching poses the notion that “things” –a better term would be phenomenon – only exists in relation with others. This is the idea of mutual causality. An event can only come to existence because of interaction of other events. So everything is interdependent. The word “interdependence” is a translation of the Sanskrit “pratityasamutpada” which means “being by co-emergence”. It seems that the stoic notion of “universal sympathy” is close in meaning.

So if everything is empty, then what’s the use of understanding the

four noble truths and practicing virtue?

Nagarjuna says such a reading of sunya is erroneous and will cause harm than good. The Buddhas have preached sunyata in order to enable us to raise above all the entangling categories of the intellect. Those who take sunyata in the sense of a category of intellect, in the sense of affirmation or negation or both or neither are incorrigible, hopeless and are destined to doom. The phenomenal world where things exist in dependence on one another (pratitya samutpada) is the relative truth – samvritti satyam (in the ultimate sense even pratitya samutpada is empty for it is not fully intelligible). The ultimate truth is the paramartha satyam.

So what’s paramArtha or nirvana?

Nirvana cannot be equated with existence, for what existence do we know

of, other than the phenomenal one? Nirvana cannot be non-existence, for

that itself cannot be without existence and hence is caused and dependent.

It cannot be both existence and non-existence, for that would be like light

and darkness together. It cannot be neither existence nor non-existence, for

that would make it beyond our reach. In this sense since it is beyond the reach of our intellect, like samsara, nirvana too is sunya. (But this is only in the epistemological sense and should not be confused as Nagarjuna ontological position).

In Prajnaparamita literature the term sunya is used to refer to absolutely everything, and it entails that absolutely everything is like a magical illusion. We need to be quite clear about the range of this claim, for there are scholars who would want to limit it and argue for some sort of monistic Absolute- a primary existent, an Ultimate Reality par excellence- behind the Prajnaparamita negations. But the Astasahasrika(Eight thousand verse) is quite unequivocal.

“Even nirvana, I say, is like a magical illusion, is like a dream. How much more so anythingelse!….Even if perchance there could be anything more distinguished, of that too I would say that it is like an illusion, like a dream.

(Astasahasrikaprajnaparamita, trans. Conze:99)

In other words absolutely all things have the same status as persons, tables, and forests. They are all conceptual constructs and therefore cannot be vested with own existence. Crucially, they therefore cannot be grasped, one cannot substitute grasping after tables and so on with grasping after dharmas as the refuge, the fixed point in a world of disappointment and suffering. Thus the classical earlier Prajnaparamita literature constantly asks what is referred to by the term X , what dharma this is, with the response that nothing can be found, nothing can be grasped, and yet the bodhisattva should heroically resist all fear. To see other wise is to grasp, and to grasp is to miss enlightenment. Thus enlightenment comes from ceasing to grasp even the most subtle sources of attachment, and this ceasing to grasp requires seeing those things which could serve as sources of attachment as empty, mere conceptual constructs. All this are empty. On the level of what is an ultimate, primary existent there is nothing. On such a level therefore there is an endless absence, an endless emptiness. Thus to think that dharmas have primary existence is to grasp. As an exhortation this is an appeal to complete letting-go. For both philosophical reasons and also perhaps existential reasons this teaching of emptiness may for some have been terrifying. It certainly looks like nihilism, and it encourages a deep letting-go in meditation that could indeed be the true spiritual equivalent of the going forth that the monk underwent in leaving family, friends, and village. At least, that is the impression one gets from the texts. Yet emptiness is also the antidote to fear, a fear which in its frequent mention must have been some problem for Buddhists at this time* For it all is empty, what is there left to fear?

Hence, for a Madhyamika, an understanding of emptiness (sunyata) as the middle between eternalism and annihilationism. This understanding undoubtedly can be traced back to universalisation of the idea of dependent origination

( pratitya-samutpada) as the middle between those who hold to the eternal existence of an unchanging Self, and those who hold to annihilation at death. Thus it should come as no surprise to find in Madhyamaka sources (MMK 24:18). Because even dharmas originate due to causes and conditions they too must be empty of primary, substantial existence.

In a famous discussion in MMK 24 an opponent accuses Nagarjuna with having destroyed the whole of Buddhism with his teaching of emptiness. Nagarjuna replies that his opponent has misunderstood emptiness and its purpose, and his commentator Candrakirti reiterates the relationship between emptiness and dependent origination. It is necessary to understand the two truths taught by the Buddha. Without relying on everyday practice (vyavahara) the ultimate is not taught, while without resorting to the ultimate there is no nirvana. The ultimate truth here is emptiness, in that it is what is ultimately true about things. Things themselves as empty of inherent existence are the conventional. Without reference to things there could be no teaching of emptiness. Moreover, Nagarjuna continues, where emptiness is seen to be rational and acceptable all things are seen to be rational and acceptable. This is because since emptiness is an implication of dependent origination, the alternative to emptiness would be inherent existence and therefore an unchanging block universe(or of course literally nothing at all) If X exists but is not empty, X would be inherently existent and thus would never go out of existence. And in the wonderful reversal, Nagarjuna accuses his opponent who denies emptiness with destroying the teachings of Buddha. Who could become enlightened if their state of unenlightenment were inherently existent, and thus not the result of causes and conditions?*

Note also that there is a very real sense in which emptiness is dependent on things. Emptiness is the absence of inherent existence in the case of X. If there were no X then there could not be an emptiness of X. In hypothetical case in which absolutely nothing existed, there could also be no emptiness. Thus emptiness exists in dependence upon that which is empty. As dependently originated emptiness is itself therefore empty. While emptiness is the ultimate truth in that it is what is ultimately true about X, it is not an ultimate truth in the sense that it is itself a primary existent. The ultimate truth is that all things, including any emptiness itself, lack ultimate truth.

Therefore Madhyamaka uses ‘ultimate truth’ in two senses:

1. The first is the ultimate truth as an ultimate truth, i.e. something resistant to analysis, primary existent. In this sense, Madhyamaka is saying that there is no such thing as an ultimate truth.

2. The second is the ultimate truth as the ultimate way of things (the dharmata), how it ultimately is what is found to be the case as a result of ultimate analysis, searching for primary existence. This is alack, the absence, of that primary existence, i.e.emptiness.

That it is the ultimate truth in sense (2) that there is absolutely no ultimate truth in sense(1).

From above arguments, it is that everything is a fluctuating flow, with no actual things at all. Hence, the stress for Nagarjuna on what follows from dependent origination. The centrality of dependent origination for Nagarjuna is the centrality of things as processes in time. The stability of things is appearance only. They collapse into process. Thus Nagarjuna is not concerned to questions the reduction to dharmas, but rather to probe what happens when it is relaised that all things, including dharmas, are actually dependently originated*. Nagarjuna accepts that everyday things are constructs out of, or conceptual imputations upon, dharmas. But if we turn out attention round and ‘project’, as it were, both the everyday thing and the dharmas into which they are analysed into time we find that things become processes. When things area processes the constituents of things must be processes too. There can thus finally be no ontological difference at all between the things and the dharmas themselves.*

Hence, we can understand that the doctrine of pratityasamutpada, teaches that everything is dependently arisen. What is being taught is a two-sided principle, the first side of which is this scientific and regulative principle that literally every phenomenon is dependently arisen. This pertains not just to the objects of our world, physical things or material form, but to any of our experiences in the broadest sense of that word. It holds importantly to all our ideas and beliefs of our world, even if an idea or belief does not seem to be experientially derived-for example, the beliefs that the world is eternal or not eternal, created or not created, that there is an indestructible self, and so on. This seems to be what Nagarjuna intimates in 4:7: “The method of treatment of all existents such as feeling, thought, perception, and dispositions is in every way similar to that of material form.”*

A crucial implication of the principle is that there are no transcendental categories of experience in the Kantian sense of innate ideas, with the possible exception of pratityasamutpada itself. But even in this case, as we shall see, Nagarjuna makes no distinction between empirically contingent ideas and rational, necessary ideas. And there are no ideas or beliefs inherent in the nature of the mind or in the way we think, no matter how abstract or universal. Whatever idea or belief we possess must have a causal explanation in a set of conditions that may include the circumstances and content of our experience, the background of ideas and beliefs, whatever biases we may have, and other psychological factors.

The true doctrine of pratityasamutpada, as a two-sided semantic and causal principle, frees us from the extremes of realism and anti-realism, absolutism and nihilism. Richard Rorty is talking about the bankruptcy of the extremes of realism and anti-realism, when he says:

“Determinacy” is not what is in question-that neither does thought determine reality nor, in the sense intended by the realist, does reality determine thought. More precisely, it is no truer that “atoms are what they are because we use ‘atom’ as we do” than that “we use ‘atom’ as we do because atoms are as they are.” Both of these claims … are entirely empty. Both are pseudo-explanations.*

The truth, Rorty explains (and this is the causal side of the doctrine of pratityasamutpada), is that our language, like our bodies, has been shaped by the environment we live in. Indeed, he or she insists on this point-the point that our minds or our language could not (as the representationalist skeptic fears) be “out of touch with reality” any more than our bodies could.*

Nagarjuna would approve of Hilary Putnam’s metaphorical remark that “the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.”26 That is to say, the existence of the world is just as dependent on language as the language that we use is dependent on the world. Or, as Nagarjuna asserts, “if characteristics do not appear, then it is not tenable to posit the characterized object. If the characterized object is not posited, there would be no characteristics either” (5:4).*

His contention in 24:18 that “whatever is dependently arisen, that is explained to be emptiness,” is simply the rejection of metaphysical realism, by declaring that there is nothing but the dependently arisen. And his further remark “that [the world as we know it] is dependent on convention [and] that is itself the middle way” is a warning against transgressing the boundaries of ordinary discourse, the boundaries of our natural language, and thus “losing the world.”

III

In the light of these arguments on emptiness and pratityasamutpada, the process of peace and justice could very well be understood.

Buddhism has long been celebrated as a religion of peace and non-violence.

In this world of multi-leveled plurality, according to Galtung, peace is not a stable, end state but a more interactive process of a series of changing and balancing acts, an on-going dialectic between our actions and the world. This contingent view of peace, as shared by many peace scholars and activists in the field, is similar to what Buddhist perceives peace to be. In fact, the complexity and the collectiveness in causes leading to peace or war have long been recognized in the morphological construction of those words. The view of peace as a collective product is well in line with the Buddhist worldview based on the principle of dependent origination which emphasizes the mutual influence of all the elements involved in any situation. With this interdependent frame of reference, Buddhists would prefer a holistic view of peace, instead of peace in separate contexts such as schools, families, or the environment. This is again very close to what many peace studies scholars have advocated as the ultimate vision of peace (Brock-Utne, 1997; Galtung, 1993; Galtung & Ikeda, 1995; Turpin & Kurtz, 1997). From this perspective, the connection between the concept of negative and positive peace becomes clear and imperative in the light of the Buddhist law of nature, dependent origination.

Absence of war and direct violence only constitutes a temporary peace if there is no justice present in the socio-economic international structure. The injustice and the violence causing suffering in every other node in the web of existence would inevitably and eventually weigh the negative peace away. Though the negative peace is only temporary, unstable and fragile, it is absolutely indispensable on the way to the positive peace. Since each human being and each level of systems are interconnected, to create a positive peace compels efforts of everyone at every level of human structures. The Buddhist view of the interconnected world demands that the ideal of world peace is less rhetoric at the negotiation tables among some “superpowers” in the international level than starting a personal transformation of one’s daily living. And this peacemaking effort is a continued striving at the every very moment because of the dynamic, constant changing nature of all the possible causal forces in this world.

Buddha was said to turn the Wheel of the Dharma. Indeed, his central doctrine is like a wheel, for through it he taught the dependent co-arising of all things, how they continually change and condition each other in interconnections as real as the spokes in a wheel.


I have been deeply inspired by the Buddha’s teaching of dependent co-arising. It fills me with a sense of connection and mutual responsibility with all beings. Helping me understand the non-hierarchical and self-organizing nature of life, it is the philosophic grounding of all my work.


The recognition of our essential nonseparateness from the world, beyond the shaky walls erected of our fear and greed, is a Dharma gift occurring in every generation, in countless individual lives. Yet there are historical moments when this perspective arises in a more collective fashion and when, within Buddhism as a whole (if we can even talk of “Buddhism as a whole”!), there is a fresh reappropriation of the Buddha’s central teaching. This seems to be occurring today. Along with the destructive, even suicidal nature of many of our public policies, social and intellectual developments are converging now to bring into bold relief the Buddha’s teaching of dependent co-arising–and the wheel of the Dharma turns again.


This is happening in many ways. I see it in the return to the social teachings of the Buddha, in the revitalization of the bodhisattva ideal, in the rapid spread of “engaged Buddhism,” be it among Sarvodayans in Sri Lanka, Ambedkarite Buddhists in India, or Dharma activists in Tibet, Thailand, or Southeast Asia. Western Buddhists, too, are taking Dharma practice out into the world, developing skillful means for embodying compassion as they take action to serve the homeless, restore creek beds, or block weapons shipments. The vitality of Buddhism today is most clearly reflected in the way it is being brought to bear on social, economic, political, and environmental issues, leading people to become effective agents of change. The gate of the Dharma does not close behind us to secure us in a cloistered existence aloof from the turbulence and suffering of samsara, so much as it leads us out into a life of risk for the sake of all beings.

Here new hands and minds, aware of the suffering caused by outmoded ways of thinking and dysfunctional power structures, help turn the wheel. Strong convergences are at play here, as Buddhist thought and practice interact with the organizing values of the Green movement, with Gandhian nonviolence, and humanistic psychology, with ecofeminism, and sustainable economics, with systems theory, deep ecology, and new paradigm science.

Reference:

1. 1.Brock-Utne, The Way to Peace: A Buddhist Perspective 1997

2. S.R.Bhat, Buddhist Thought and Culture in India and Korea, ICPR, New Delhi,2003.

3. Paul Williams, Buddhist Thought,Routledge, London,2000.

4. Smith, 82-112. See also Paul Ingram. 1990. “Nature’s Jeweled Net: Kukai’s Ecological Buddhism”

5. MMK

6. The Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution, Issue 2.2, 1999

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