Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way The Essential Chapters from the Prasannapada of Candrakirti Translated from the Sanskrit by Mervyn Sprung in collaboration with T. R. V. Murti and U. S. Vyas Prajfia Press Boulder 1979 Prajflii Press Great Eastern Book Company 1123 Spruce Street Boulder, Colorado 80302 © 1979 G.M. C. Sprung Printed in Great Britain Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Candrakirti. Lucid exposition of the middle way. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Niigiirjuna, Siddha. Madhyamakakiirikii. 2. Miidhyamika (Buddhism) I Sprung, Mervyn. II Murti, Tirupattur Ramaseshayyer Venkatachala. III Vyas, U. S. IV. Title. BQ2868.E5S66 1979 294.3'8 79-13033 ISBN 087773 711 8 Contents Preface: Text and Translation vii Ackntlwledgments xvi The Thought of the Middle Way: Translator's Introduction Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way Candraklrti's Salutation to Nagarjuna 31 Concern, Method and Assumptions of the Middle Way Philosophy 32 I II Attack on the Possibility of Knowledge: Controversy with a Buddhist Epistemologist 53 III Enquiry into Conditions 65 IV Motion and Rest 76 V Vision and the Other Sense Faculties 91 VI Material Objects and the Other Factors of Personal Existence 98 VII The Primal Elements or Character and Characteristic 103 VIII Desire and the Other Afflictions 109 IX The Agent Subject and his Doing 115 X Self as Subject of Perception 125 1 ~ XI Fire and Fuel 132 XII The Absence of Being in Things 144 t:XIII Self-Existence 152 XIV Self and the Way Things Really Are 165 XV Time 187 XVI The Perfectly Realized One 192 XVII The Basic Afflictions and the Four Misbeliefs 207 vi ('ONTI' NTS XVIII Tho Four Buddhist Truths 223 XIX NirJlalJa 247 Glossary 265 Bibliography 279 Preface: Text and Translation This translation of the essential chapters from the Prasannapada rests on the work of several scholars in different ways. The English of the translation is, throughout, my own, but the reading of the Sanskrit is very much the result of close and repeated collaboration with Indian and Japanese scholars. During the winter of 1965, after reading the Baghavad GTta with my Sanskrit tutor, U. S. Vyas, I happened on some passages from the Prasannapadii which concerned the mystifying Madhyamika theory of two truths, and read several pages with Tervyoshi Tangi of Kyoto, at that time a fellow student at Banaras Hindu University. A year or two later, still pursuing philosophical ideas and without the remotest thought of translation, I read the whole of the chapter on the 'Four Buddhist Truths' with Professor T. R. V. Murti of Banaras while he was a visiting professor at Brock University. This led on to a reading of the NirvalJil chapter with him the following year and I became strangely seized with the way of thinking of Candrakirti and Nagilrjuna. By the time I returned to India in 1970 the thought of translating, and not just reading, the Prasannapadii had occurred to me. I read the chapter on 'The Perfectly Realized One' with Professor Murti and, with my former tutor, U. S. Vyas, who was now at the Buddhist Research Institute in NaIanda, I read the chapters on 'Vision and the Other Sense Faculties', 'The Factors of Personal Existence',' and 'Self­ Existence'. In the spring of 1971, in Kyoto, for two months Professor G. Nagao and Dr N. Aramaki painstakingly and enjoyably worked through the chapter on 'Self and the Way Things Really Are' with me. In the summer of 1975, again in Banaras, I read the chapter on 'Motion and Rest', the most difficult of all to translate, with Professor Murti, and the chapters on 'Time', 'Fire and Fuel', 'The Agent Subject and his Doing' and 'The Absence of Being in Things' with V. S. Vyas in Simla and Niilanda. The remaining chapters given here I struggled with on my own. Even so the fine translations available in French and German were always a help. The Douze Chapitres of Jacques May was the best model. The sometimes quixotic, but always inspired transla­ tions of T. Stcherbatsky were more than a help: I must regard him as a tutor. Without his pioneer work in Buddhist logic I do not believe ylll "ltHA('li 'ITXT AND TRANSLATION I 1'1111111 lillvt' rlllkcd a translation of the chapter, 'Attack on the Possi­ hllli y of Knowledge'. The present translation has, in these ways, emerged from the closest working together of four or five scholars over some ten or twelve years. I stumbled into the task, unaware of what I was doing, and then found it unthinkable to desist before the Madhyamika philosophy had been presented to Western readers in English. Without my tolerant and gifted friends, my collaborators, the thought of translating the Prasannapadii could never have entered my mind; yet the interpretation of the middle way philosophy is my own and I ask no one to share that responsibility with me. Aim of the translation This translation was undertaken and is presented with one single pur­ pose in mind: to make an important work of Indian philosophy avail­ able to philosophers who read English. It is not directed at Sanskritists who themselves have access to the original and whose interest would be more in the translation of technical terms and in the interpretation of the Prasannapadii within Buddhist and Indian philosophy. My concern is to place thePrasannapadiisquarely within the live philosophical thought of our own time. This concern determined the choice of chapters for translation, the writing of footnotes, and the relatively austere biblio­ graphy. For this reason there are no Sanskrit words left untranslated in the English text (nirviif/a is the sole exception) though this sometimes results in a regrettable prolixity. I have attempted to expound the middle way philosophy in plain, non·technical English. My model was Richard Wilhelm's translations from the Chinese. Wilhelm is not afraid to make every sentence perfectly intelligible to the contemporary reader: obscurities or difficulties in the original are no excuse for an obscure translation. It is, I believe, widely accepted that literal translations tend to obscure the sense of the original, being unfaithful to the sense through being lexicographically exact. The widespread, though not universal, practice among Sanskrit translators has been to proceed as if transla­ tion were a matter of finding the most precise European equivalents for Sanskrit technical terms. This is understandable in a pioneering phase of the exploration of a strange tradition, and there is no doubt much of this still to be done. Yet this approach permits certain stultifying abuses. One such idiosyncrasy is the practice of bracketing,! a device which I An !)xample: 'But how can we (Miidhyamikas who do not believe in logic attogcti1llf) produce an argument (like the one produced by Bhavaviveka) about tIlt' (transcendental) reality (of all mental phenomena)?' T. Stcherbatsky, The Conceptiol1 of Buddhist Nirvana, p. 97. PREFACE: TEXT AND TRANSLATION ix tends to obscure the relationship of the two languages. It implies that what is outside the brackets tells us what is factually said in the San­ skrit, and what is inside is missing and must be gratuitously added in order to make sense in the language of translation. As there are very few precise word-to-word correspondences between Sanskrit and other languages, especially English, two faults ensue: on the one hand the translator implies the claim of finding an illusory precision, and, on the other, he often includes explanatory or paraphrase material within the bracket which is not to be found in the Sanskrit. One is often left with crippled sentences outside the bracket and unjustified material within. It does seem more suited to the purpose of making a Sanskrit text available to those who do not read Sanskrit to drop the bracketing practice and to attempt to say in the plainest, most intelligible way what the translator thinks is being said in the Sanskrit. However that comes out in the language of translation -longer or shorter, altered in syntax, adapted to a new vocabulary -- that, just as it stands, will be the translation. It will not be a 'free' translation, nor a paraphrase, nor an 'interpretation'; it will be a translation. Yet this is not offered as a defence of my own English style. There could be many different kinds of English used to convey the meaning of the Sanskrit of the Prasannapadll, and some would be closer to the style of Nagarjuna and Candraklrti than my own. By the second cen­ tury AD - Nagarjuna's time - Sanskrit had become a delicately sophis­ ticated medium for philosophers, poets, religious writers, scientists and bureaucrats. Its elaborate syntax permitted the tersest of formulations and favoured aphorisms and witty paradoxes expressed in verse. Nagar­ juna was a master of this literary Sanskrit and composed his philosophi­ cal works in metred couplets (kllrikiis). At times these are so open and clear that they lend themselves to verse translation. At all times they are balanced in sense but often so terse as to be cryptic, worthy to be treated as word puzzles. Here is one of the most cryptic (p. 133, kllrikii 5): ajyate kenacit kascit kimelt kenacid ajyate; kuta{l kimcid vina kascit kim cit kamcid vina kutab. Word-for-word it must go like this: 'Something (masculine) becomes evident because of something; because of something, something (neuter) becomes evident. How something (masculine) without something? How something (neuter) without something?' From the thOUght context, however, the translation must go like this: 'Every effect implies a cause; every cause implies an effect. How can there be an effect without a cause? How can there be a cause without an effect?' The word-for-word approach, eked out by bracket­ ing, breaks down, I believe, in the face of such a text.