十二門論 義疏通講

The beginning of the Twelve Gate Treatise is not the treatise itself but two other things: a list of twelve gate titles, each with a short line beneath it, and then a preface. The same person placed both there. At the end he says, “I venture with dull words, straining to search my thoughts, to compose a preface that unfolds this treatise; and I have inscribed the titles and meanings of its gates at the beginning.”

Thus, the first of the thirteen units in a reader’s hands does not consist of Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva’s words. Preface is preface and treatise is treatise. Whenever the discussion below quotes the preface, the voice belongs to this preface writer.

1. Who Wrote This Preface?

The preface bears no title naming its author. Only when it turns to self-narration does one character appear: “Rui, with my shallow and contrary understanding.”

One character. Yet corroboration for that character lies at the beginning of the Treatise on the Middle along the same axis. The preface there, signed “Preface by the Monk Seng Rui,” also ends with the same sentence: “and I have inscribed the titles and meanings of the chapters at the beginning.” The two prefaces end through the same act: first composing a preface, then inscribing the titles and explanations of the chapters at the head of the fascicle. The Treatise on the Middle preface also uses the same expression in self-deprecation: “On seeing the breadth of this treatise, one knows that partial awakening is shallow and contrary.” This preface calls its own understanding “shallow and contrary,” using the same term.

The two prefaces also share a skeleton. The preface to the Treatise on the Middle says, “That the Way and the worldly are not leveled and the two limits are not extinguished is the bodhisattva’s concern. Therefore the great being Nāgārjuna analyzed them through the middle way.” This preface says, “That distinct destinations are not leveled and divergent orientations are not extinguished is the great being’s concern. Therefore Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva opened the path by which those going forth might pass and composed the Twelve Gates to set it right.” Sentence form, turn, and even the word concern are the same: first an uneven and unextinguished situation, then the great being’s concern, then Nāgārjuna acts.

The same brush and the same discipline of preface writing. As for this “Rui” and his work in the Guanzhong translation community, the preface itself says no more. It tells us only that he wrote the preface and inscribed the table, and the reader should acknowledge only those two facts. The translator’s name does not appear in the preface but at the head of the root text, beneath “Gate One: Examination of Causes and Conditions”: “composed by Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva” and “translated by the Tripiṭaka master Kumārajīva of Later Qin.” Preface and root text each keep their place; the reader should not assign the preface’s voice to the treatise author.

2. Why Write This Preface? One Principle Unexhausted, the Many Divergences Arise

The preface writer does not begin with praise. He first locates the work: “The Twelve Gate Treatise is the centered balance of the real mark and an essential rule for the place of awakening.” Centered balance is not worldly compromise in which each side yields a little; it is the centered correctness that returns to the real mark. An essential rule is the pivotal standard upon which cultivation depends. One sentence has two faces: inwardly, the real mark; outwardly, a rule for walking.

He then divides the three terms: “The twelve gates are the great number gathering the many branches. A gate is a name for opening passage without obstruction. To treatise upon them is to exhaust their source and take their principle to its end.” Twelve is the number encompassing the many branches; gate is the name for unobstructed opening; treatise is the work of tracing the source and exhausting the principle. Among the three terms, the middle one matters most.

He next states the consequence of failing to exhaust or trace them, and does so concretely: “If one principle is not exhausted, the many divergent claims arise in confusion and give rise to opposed orientations. If one source is not traced to its end, the many paths branch and spread and leave traces of different destinations.”

Read these two sentences slowly. They do not say merely that poor explanation produces misunderstanding. They say: leave one point unexamined and divergent claims will grow from it. To branch and spread is the appearance of leaves separating in every direction. When the source is not exhausted, the road forks like branches, and each branch leaves a trace leading to a different destination. People do not stray without cause; an unclosed gap remained in the original road.

Only then does the next sentence carry its weight: “That different destinations are not leveled and divergent orientations are not extinguished is the great being’s concern.” The great being is not concerned that sentient beings lack belief, but that the road beneath their hands is uneven. The concern is the road, not the person.

“Therefore Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva opened the path by which those going forth might pass and composed the Twelve Gates to set it right.” A road is opened for those who wish to leave. The preface writer gives this one occasion for the treatise’s composition: someone needs to go forth, so the road must first be opened.

3. Gate: The Image This Preface Gives the Entire Treatise

“A gate is a name for opening passage without obstruction.” These words are the sentence most worth remembering in the preface.

A gate is not a wall, a storehouse, or an object to collect. A gate means only this: one can pass through here. A place is called a gate because it lets someone cross without obstruction; once crossed, the gate has completed its task.

The preface writer carries the image through the whole text. He says, “Set right through the twelve, existence and nonexistence both pass freely, and no matter remains unexhausted.” The function of the Twelve Gates is called free passage. He calls the fortune of later students “the level road already lies open and the hidden path is already cleared”—level and open are still the language of road and gate. At the end, his own aspiration is only, “I hope through this intention to open a road of rapid progress.”

From beginning to end, he never once describes the treatise as a house in which one can settle.

Nor did the preface writer add this image from outside. Nāgārjuna himself says under “Gate One: Examination of Causes and Conditions,” “one should enter the meaning of emptiness through the Twelve Gates.” Gates are for entering. Preface and treatise agree exactly here: the Twelve Gates are twelve entrances, not twelve conclusions to be stored.

The twelve short lines beneath the names of the gates follow this image. Nearly each closes in the same form: “because it can be penetrated without obstruction, it is called a gate,” “this is made a gate,” or “therefore it is made a gate.” The short lines do not finish the reasoning behind each gate for the reader. They say only what the gate investigates and where one enters. Beneath the first gate: “The causes upon which the myriad dharmas depend appear each to possess nature; investigated and brought into communication, they in fact possess no intrinsic nature.” The distance between appears and in fact is the entire journey the Twelve Gates will make.

4. Existence and Nonexistence Both Pass Freely: What Is Corrected through the Twelve?

“Set right through the twelve, existence and nonexistence both pass freely, and no matter remains unexhausted.”

The word both cannot be omitted. The writer does not say to suppress existence and establish nonexistence, but to let both sides pass freely together. If a treatise refutes existence while retaining nonexistence, that nonexistence becomes a new point of attachment. The Twelve Gates’ twelve investigations arrive where neither side can be established; hence both pass freely.

The next two sentences form a pair: “When matters are exhausted within existence and nonexistence, accomplishment is forgotten within transformation. When principle reaches the utmost empty position, self is lost at the two limits.”

The first speaks from matters. Once matters are exhausted within the two sides of existence and nonexistence, accomplishment is forgotten within transformation; one no longer supposes that an operative power of creating and changing can be grasped. The second speaks from principle. When principle reaches the utmost empty position, self is lost between the two limits. Together, one releases the dharma grasped and the other the self that grasps.

5. Forgetting Trap and Self Together: The Preface’s Deepest Passage

Next come the preface’s three most important sentences: “Thus, losing self lies in dropping the fish trap; forgetting the trap consists in abandoning what was entrusted to it. Only when trap and self are both forgotten can one begin to draw near the real.”

A fish trap is a bamboo instrument for catching fish. To compare verbal teaching to the trap means that teaching is the implement for obtaining the fish, not the fish itself. The writer’s order is this: to lose self, one must first drop the trap; the possibility of forgetting the trap lies in abandoning the thing entrusted to it.

The layers are peeled with precision. One first grasps dharmas; after dharmas are refuted, one grasps the words that refuted them; after forgetting words, one grasps a self who has forgotten. He therefore says that trap and self must be forgotten together, not only one. Drop the trap while self remains and that self makes “not establishing words” into a new trap. Lose self while the trap remains and the words refuting attachment become what is grasped.

“Then one may begin to draw near the real.” The word is near, not attain. Drawing near is not taking possession. The single word guards the measure: the real mark is not something anyone can hold. Say, “I have attained the real mark,” and self has returned.

The next passage opens from this: “Drawing near the real, empty and real merge in obscurity, and gain and loss possess no boundary. Merged without boundary, one can forget haste between the two mysteries and dissolve distress into unity.” Empty and real merge; gain and loss have no limit. In moments of haste one does not panic, and amid distress one does not scatter. The preface has moved from the treatise’s meaning into daily life. Haste and distress are circumstances people actually encounter; the writer says that one who follows the Twelve Gates to their end can still return to unity there.

Only then comes the destination: “Set the returning carriage in order at the place of awakening and bring the mind’s orientation to completion in the ground of buddhahood.” The returning carriage is made ready and directed to the place of awakening; the mind’s course is finally placed in buddhahood. After traveling so far, this is a return, not a departure.

6. Beneath the Ornament: What Do Those Expansive Sentences Say?

The latter half of the preface suddenly opens into several grand sentences: “Vast indeed! It can truly be said to wield a blade without thickness where no gap exists and sound a rare music within the cosmos; to rescue those drowning and lost at the mysterious ford and carry existence and nonexistence beyond their bounds.”

These sentences are beautiful but not ornamental emptiness. “Wield a blade without thickness where no gap exists” describes a blade of no thickness moving where no space appears. The Twelve Gates investigate not by striking force against force; the blade of nongrasping passes precisely because it holds nothing. “Sound a rare music within the cosmos” speaks of a sound difficult for people to hear. “Rescue those drowning and lost at the mysterious ford” returns to the preface’s first practical concern: carrying people across water. “Carry existence and nonexistence beyond their bounds” returns to the principle: moving both existence and nonexistence outside their territory. The first two clauses concern the wisdom that refutes; the latter two, the people rescued and the attachment left behind.

Then come words for later generations: “Later students have met a fortunate time. The level road already lies open and the hidden path is already cleared. They can sound the carriage bells in the northern darkness, drive the white-ox cart southward in return, awaken to great awakening within a dream, and rest in return amid the hundred transformations.” Later students are fortunate: the road has been leveled, the hidden path opened. They can sound the bells and turn the white-ox cart back, awaken within the dream, and rest amid myriad transformations.

Pause at the words “rest in return amid the hundred transformations.” One does not leave transformation to seek a place of rest; one rests precisely amid transformation. This accords with the direction of the Twelve Gates. What is refuted is never the function of appearances, but the intrinsic nature established behind them.

7. Self-Narration: He Accepts Only One Accomplishment

At the end, the preface turns to self-narration and the voice immediately lowers: “Rui, with my shallow and contrary understanding, nevertheless dare with sincere intent to knock at the empty and mysterious gate and inwardly aspire to the ultimate aim.” With his shallow and contrary understanding, he still dares to knock at the gate with sincerity and cherish the final intent. He asks only that “my daily application may be fitting and the work accumulated through the years may grow.”

Then comes a question: “Could this truly add anything?” He does not claim to have added something to the treatise.

He accepts only the final sentence: “I merely hope that through this intention I may open a road of rapid progress.”

One word, “open”; one word, “road.” They are exactly the terms used at the preface’s beginning for gates and the path of departure. He assigns himself the same place he assigns the treatise: not somewhere for people to dwell, but a road on which they can move faster.

Carried Forward: Illumination from Two Prefaces along the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this preface itself. What follows is a cross-light from the axis of the Three Treatises. The illumination is not this preface; it simply records without deciding what the same person in the same translation community says about these treatises elsewhere.

In the preface signed “Preface by the Monk Seng Rui” at the beginning of the Treatise on the Middle, the writer lists four treatises and gives each a single judgment. Of this work he says, “the refined attainment of the Contemplation in Twelve Gates”; of the Hundred Treatise, “the Hundred Treatise governs the outside and bars error.” One governs the outside; one possesses refined attainment. Both statements belong to that other preface, not this one. This preface never mentions another treatise.

The Treatise on the Middle preface also says, “only then may those worthy in discussion of the Way speak together of the real.” This resembles the path of the present preface’s phrase, “only then may one begin to draw near the real.” Both place the real at the end, and neither is willing to say it has been attained.

Read together along one axis, each remains in its own place. The meaning of this preface is still governed by this preface’s own text.

Readers accustomed to Madhyamaka treatises may be surprised on opening the Twelve Gate Treatise. The Treatise on the Middle begins with eight instances of “not,” establishes the eight negations, and then dismantles going and coming, arising and ceasing, agent, time, and karma chapter by chapter. The first sentence of the Twelve Gate Treatise, by contrast, reads: “I shall now briefly explain the meaning of the Mahāyāna.”

There is no refutation. A treatise author steps forward and says: I am going to explain the meaning of the Great Vehicle for people, and I will do so briefly.

That sentence determines the form of the whole treatise. Nāgārjuna both composes and explains the Twelve Gate Treatise: he establishes the verses, and he also unfolds them in extended prose. No third party steps in to expound the text on the author’s behalf. In the question-and-answer exchanges, the phrases “the author says” and “the reply says” are the treatise author himself speaking. This differs from the Treatise on the Middle, whose extended prose was explained by the Brahmin Qingmu while Nāgārjuna supplied only the verses. Verse and explanation proceed from the same heart. In the opening three rounds of questions and answers, the author makes that heart entirely plain.

1. Why Compose This Treatise? Because Some Seek the Scriptures but Cannot Penetrate Them

The first question is practical: “What benefit is there in explaining the Mahāyāna?” What good does it actually do to explain the Great Vehicle? The author’s answer has two parts. The first names the height of the teaching: “The Mahāyāna is the exceedingly profound treasury of Dharma belonging to all buddhas of the ten directions and three times, taught for those of great merit and sharp faculties.” The second gives the true occasion for composing the treatise: “Sentient beings in the final age have little merit and dull faculties. Although they seek the scriptures, they cannot penetrate them.” Notice the words “although they seek the scriptures.” These are not people who refuse to read. They have read and opened the scriptures, but cannot find a way through. The problem is not laziness; a stretch of road lies between a profound Dharma and dull faculties.

The author therefore says, “Out of compassion for such people, I wish to enable them to awaken.” His first motive is compassion. He is not trying to establish a teaching of his own; he sees people standing outside the gate. Only then comes the second motive: “I also wish to spread and illuminate the Tathāgata’s unsurpassed great Dharma.” When compassion is the occasion, the form will not be a display of erudition. That is also why every example below is something immediately at hand: a jar, cloth, a house, clarified butter, a sprout.

2. “Brief” Is Not Modesty but a Declaration of Form

The second question speaks for the reader: “The Mahāyāna is measureless, boundless, and beyond calculation. Even the Buddha’s words cannot exhaust it, much less an explanation that unfolds and disseminates its meaning.” The Buddha himself cannot finish saying it; can you explain and spread out its meaning?

The author gives a one-sentence answer: “Precisely for this reason, at the outset I said ‘briefly explain.’” Because it cannot be exhausted, the opening says that the explanation will be brief. He does not defend himself by claiming that his treatise is actually complete. He accepts that the subject cannot be exhausted and points out that, from the first sentence, he never intended to exhaust it. “Brief” is not self-deprecation; it declares the treatise’s form. If a treatise claimed to have exhausted the Buddhadharma, readers would stop at the treatise when they reached its end. When it announces itself as a brief explanation, its readers naturally return to the scriptures. The opening sentence has already placed scripture and treatise in their proper relation.

3. Greatness Is Stated in Seven Meanings, All through Relation

The third question asks about the name: “Why is it called Mahāyāna?” The author gives seven reasons in succession, and all seven speak in the same way:

“It is above the two vehicles and therefore is called the Great Vehicle”—great in comparison with the two vehicles. “The buddhas are greatest, and this vehicle can reach them; therefore it is called great”—great in terms of where it can arrive. “Great persons—the buddhas—ride this vehicle; therefore it is called great”—great in terms of those who ride it. “It can extinguish the great suffering of sentient beings and bestow great benefit; therefore it is called great”—great in terms of the benefit it accomplishes. “The bodhisattvas Avalokiteśvara, Mahāsthāmaprāpta, Mañjuśrī, Maitreya, and other great beings ride it; therefore it is called great”—naming the great beings who actually ride this vehicle. “This vehicle can reach the utmost limit of all dharmas; therefore it is called great”—great in terms of the field it fathoms. “As the Buddha himself says in the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, the meaning of the Mahāyāna is measureless and boundless”—returning to the Buddha’s own words.

Not one of the seven says, “The Mahāyāna possesses in itself a quality called greatness.” Every one is stated through relation: above whom, able to reach where, ridden by whom, benefiting whom, fathoming what, and spoken of how by the Buddha.

This anticipates the entire treatise. The Gate of Causes and Conditions below says that all dharmas are established only within relations, never in themselves. The author establishes even the name “Great Vehicle” in just this way.

4. Its Deep Meaning Is Emptiness, and Its Entrances Are Twelve Gates

Having given the seven meanings, the author gathers them into a sentence: “Its deep meaning, broadly distinguished, is what is called emptiness.” The meaning of the Mahāyāna is vast, yet broadly distinguished its depth is one word: emptiness. He then speaks more strongly: “One who can penetrate this meaning penetrates the Mahāyāna, completes the six pāramitās, and meets no obstruction.” Thus, “I shall now explain only emptiness.” This treatise does one thing. How will it explain emptiness? “To explain emptiness, one must enter its meaning through twelve gates.”

Look closely at the word gate. The author does not say twelve principles or twelve arguments; he says twelve gates. A gate is a place through which one enters, not a thing one stores away. The twelve gates are not twelve conclusions but twelve entrances. Once one has entered, the gate has done its work. The first gate is causes and conditions.

5. The Verse That Opens the Gate: What Arises from Conditions Has No Intrinsic Nature

The author establishes a verse:

　　“Dharmas arising from a multitude of conditions are thereby without intrinsic nature;
　　if they lack intrinsic nature, how can one say that these dharmas exist?”

These four short lines are the root of the whole treatise. The first two say that any dharma arising from a multitude of conditions lacks intrinsic nature. Intrinsic nature means a nature able to establish itself without awaiting anything else. Once a dharma must rely on a multitude of conditions to arise, its establishment is no longer in its own hands. Dependence on conditions and intrinsic nature cannot coexist.

The last two lines ask a question: “If they lack intrinsic nature, how can one say that these dharmas exist?” If there is no intrinsic nature, in what sense can one still say, “This dharma exists”?

The question must be read precisely. It does not ask whether a jar is nonexistent. Every example below is a jar, cloth, or house, and the author never says these things cannot hold water, be worn, or be lived in. He asks: when you say “this dharma exists,” do you mean that something can stand on its own? If so, its arising from a multitude of conditions has already canceled that claim.

The verse refutes existence by intrinsic nature, not the functioning of dependent arising.

6. Five Cases of Outer Conditions: Jar, Cloth, House, Clarified Butter, Sprout

Once the verse is established, the author unfolds it. He first makes a twofold division: “Dharmas arising from a multitude of conditions are of two kinds: inner and outer. The multitude of conditions is likewise of two kinds: inner and outer.”

Dharmas are inner and outer, and conditions are inner and outer. This distinction matters. If only external things were refuted below, someone could think, “That may be true of the vessel-world, but not of the twelve links within my mind.” Both sides therefore must be traversed. The author gives five cases of outer conditions, each as a chain of factors:

“A lump of clay, wheel, cord, potter, and other factors come together, and so a jar arises.” A jar requires clay, wheel, cord, and potter; only when the four converge is there a jar. “Threads, cord, loom, weaver, and other factors come together, and so cloth arises.” Cloth requires threads, cord, a loom, and the person weaving. “Leveling the ground, setting foundation and beams, and adding rafters, mud, thatch, human labor, and other factors together produce a house.” A house requires still more: leveled ground, foundation, beams, rafters, mud, thatch, and human effort. “A vessel holding curds, a drill and its turning, human labor, and other factors together produce clarified butter.” Clarified butter requires vessel, churning, and labor. “Seed, earth, water, fire, wind, space, season, human labor, and other factors together produce a sprout.” A sprout requires not only seed but earth, water, fire, wind, space, season, and human effort.

The five are ordered from the most obviously man-made, the jar, to the sprout that most resembles natural self-growth. People are most likely to think that a sprout grows out of a seed by itself, so its conditions receive the longest enumeration: earth, water, fire, wind, space, season, and human labor. A seed never becomes a sprout alone. Having counted them, the author concludes: “One should understand that every other dharma arising from outer conditions is the same.”

7. Inner Conditions: Each of the Twelve Links Has a Prior Cause and Then Arises

After the outer comes the inner. Inner causes and conditions are the twelve links: “ignorance, volitional formations, consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, existence, birth, and aging-and-death.”

The author says only one thing about these twelve: “Each first has its cause and only afterward arises.”

Every link first has its cause and then arises. The sentence is short, but it places the twelve links squarely within the verse. Because each must await its preceding cause, each is a dharma arising from a multitude of conditions, and each lacks intrinsic nature. Inner and outer are then joined: “Thus inner and outer dharmas alike arise from a multitude of conditions. Since they arise from a multitude of conditions, are they not thereby without intrinsic nature?”

The final sentence is a rhetorical question: if they all arise from conditions, are they not precisely without intrinsic nature? The first circuit is now complete. What follows protects this meaning, because the opposing side still has something to say.

8. Other-Nature Is Also Absent: A Cow Does Not Exist through a Horse’s Nature

The first objection is that, beyond intrinsic nature, one can still speak of other-nature. The author lists the three possibilities at once: “If a dharma has no intrinsic nature, neither does it have other-nature, nor a nature consisting of self and other together.” Intrinsic nature is absent, other-nature is absent, and self and other combined are absent.

The reason is one sentence: “Because of other-nature, intrinsic nature is absent.” What is called other is established relative to self. Once self has no nature, the other side has nothing on which to depend. The author then poses a harder formulation: “If one says that a thing exists by virtue of other-nature”—if a thing exists through the nature of something else, what follows?

“Then a cow should exist through the nature of a horse, a horse through the nature of a cow, a pear through the nature of a crabapple, and a crabapple through the nature of a pear; everything else should be the same.”

If other-nature is a universal principle, everyone can take someone else’s nature as one’s own. The author concludes in only four characters: “Yet in truth it is not so.” A cow, after all, is not made a cow by a horse. No elaborate reasoning is needed. Push the claim to its consequence, and it cannot stand.

9. Rushes and Mat: Existing Because of Another Does Not Escape

The opponent retreats one step further: “If one says that it does not exist by virtue of other-nature but exists merely because of another.” I do not mean that something uses another’s nature as its own; only that it exists because of something else, as a mat exists because of rushes. The author replies, “That too is incorrect,” and divides the answer into two alternatives.

First: “If a mat exists because of rushes, then rushes and mat are one body and cannot be called other.” If they are one body, the rushes cannot be other; the “other” in “because of another” disappears.

Second: “If the rushes are other in relation to the mat, one cannot say the mat exists because of the rushes.” If you insist that the rushes truly are another thing relative to the mat, then you cannot say the mat exists by virtue of them. What is other remains other; how could it become the substance on which the mat depends?

Both exits are blocked: call them one, and ‘other’ falls away; call them other, and ‘because of’ falls away.

The author does not stop. He adds one more cut, the most important one: “Moreover, the rushes themselves have no intrinsic nature. Why? Because the rushes too arise from a multitude of conditions and therefore lack intrinsic nature.”

The rushes themselves are dependently arisen. Since even they lack intrinsic nature, “one cannot say the mat exists by virtue of the nature of the rushes; therefore the mat should not take the rushes as its substance.”

This cut pushes the problem back one level. You want to use rushes as the mat’s foundation, but the rushes themselves require a foundation. In dependent arising, the search upward for a final foundation never reaches bottom. The author concludes: “The same is true of jars, clarified butter, and every other dharma arising from outer causes and conditions: sought in this way, they cannot be obtained.”

10. The Challenge from the Seventy Treatise: In One Mind or Many?

Having defended the argument concerning outer conditions, the author returns to inner conditions. He says, “Dharmas arising from inner causes and conditions are likewise unobtainable when sought in this way,” and then cites outside testimony: “As the Seventy Treatise says.” This is a verse the author himself brings in:

　　“Dharmas of dependent arising are in truth non-arising; if one says they do arise,
　　do they exist in a single mind, or do they exist in many minds?”

Having cited the verse, the author unfolds its challenge: “The dharmas of the twelve links of dependent origination are in truth themselves non-arising. If one says they arise, do they exist within a single mind or within many minds?”

Take the first alternative: “If they exist within a single mind, cause and effect arise together at the same time.” What is wrong with simultaneity? The author says, “Cause and effect existing simultaneously is untenable. Why? Because in every case a cause comes first and its effect afterward.” If cause and effect are simultaneous, the cause no longer functions as a cause.

Take the second alternative: “If they exist within many minds, the dharmas of the twelve links become individually separate and mutually different.” If they are distributed among many minds, the twelve links become separate and mutually distinct. The question follows: “Once the mind shared by the earlier group of links has ceased, what serves as the cause and condition for the later links?” The author answers, “A ceased dharma is utterly nonexistent; how could it serve as a cause?” Once both alternatives have been traversed, he concludes: “If one says that the dharmas of the twelve links already existed beforehand, they should be found either in one mind or in many minds; neither is tenable.”

Notice where the challenge applies its force. Its premise is “if they already existed beforehand”—if there were already a set of twelve links possessing intrinsic nature. Only under that premise does the question arise of which mind contains them. Whether one answers one mind or many, the reasoning fails. What fails is not continuity but an intrinsic nature presumed already to exist.

11. Since Conditions Are Empty, What Arises from Them Is Empty: All Conditioned Dharmas Are Empty

Having traversed both inner and outer, the author gives his first conclusion:

“Therefore the multitude of conditions is empty. Since conditions are empty, dharmas arising from conditions are empty as well. One should therefore know that all conditioned dharmas are empty.”

The three sentences form one line. First, the multitude of conditions is empty, because each condition is itself dependently arisen—the cut concerning the rushes has already established this. Since conditions are empty, dharmas dependent upon them are naturally empty as well; therefore all conditioned dharmas are empty.

Notice that the sequence moves from conditions to effect, not from effect back to conditions. If one declared only the result empty while leaving conditions unempty, an ultimately real ground would remain on the side of conditions. The author first empties conditions themselves, and only then does the effect have nowhere to retreat.

12. If Even Conditioned Dharmas Are Empty, How Much More the Self: Burning and the Combustible

Once conditioned dharmas are empty, the author immediately asks, “Even conditioned dharmas are empty; how much more so the self?” Why is the self the easier case? He gives the reason: “It is because there are such conditioned dharmas as the five aggregates, twelve sense bases, and eighteen elements that a self is spoken of.”

A self is spoken of because these conditioned dharmas—the five aggregates, twelve sense bases, and eighteen elements—are present. The self is not a separate thing; it is named in dependence on these dharmas.

Then comes this gate’s only simile, and it belongs to the treatise itself: “Just as burning is spoken of because there is something combustible.” Fire is not an isolated thing; it must burn something. Reversing the relation: “If the aggregates, sense bases, and elements are empty, no other dharma remains that could be called a self, just as without anything combustible, burning cannot be spoken of.”

Once what it depends upon is empty, there is nowhere left to speak of a self—just as without anything combustible, burning cannot be spoken of. The author cites a scripture here: “The Buddha told the bhikṣus, ‘Because of self there is what belongs to self; without self, there is nothing belonging to self.’”

The placement of the scriptural quotation is revealing. The author does not quote scripture to prove the conclusion “the self is empty.” What he quotes is the linkage between self and what belongs to self. Scripture supplies the clue of dependence, and the author applies it to the self itself. What exists dependently lacks intrinsic nature—precisely what the opening verse says.

13. Because the Conditioned Is Empty, the Unconditioned Is Empty: Nirvāṇa Is Not One Last Really-Existing Thing

At this point, most readers would think enough has been said. The author does not stop. He turns the same measure toward nirvāṇa:

“Thus, because conditioned dharmas are empty, one should know that the unconditioned dharma of nirvāṇa is also empty.”

This is the deepest passage in the gate and the one most easily missed.

The first reason: “When these five aggregates cease and no further five aggregates arise, this is called nirvāṇa.” Yet “the five aggregates are originally empty in themselves. What, then, is extinguished such that it is called nirvāṇa?” The five aggregates were empty from the beginning; what exactly is extinguished so that one names nirvāṇa?

Extinction can be spoken of only if there is a real thing to be extinguished. Once the five aggregates have been emptied, the “extinction” on which the name nirvāṇa depends has no real entity to support it. The second reason is shorter: “Moreover, the self is empty as well. Who, then, attains nirvāṇa?”

The third reason concerns terminology: “Furthermore, the non-arising dharma is called nirvāṇa. If arisen dharmas could be established, the non-arising dharma should thereby be established. Yet arisen dharmas are not established—the reasons have already been explained and will be explained again below. Therefore arisen dharmas are not established.”

The name non-arising is established in contrast to arising. If arisen dharmas could be established, the non-arising dharma would be established in turn. But arisen dharmas are not established—the author says that the reasons have already been explained and will be explained again. Thus: “It is in dependence on arisen dharmas that non-arising is named. If arisen dharmas are not established, how can the non-arising dharma be established?”

Only because arisen dharmas are posited is the name non-arising established. Once arisen dharmas are not established, the name non-arising has no basis either.

The weight of this passage lies in its refusal to leave a safe place at the end. When conditioned dharmas are empty, one might retreat to the unconditioned; when the unconditioned is empty, one might retreat to the self that attains nirvāṇa; and the self too is empty. The author withdraws all three retreats at once.

This does not negate nirvāṇa. The earlier refutations concerning jars, cloth, and houses never say that a jar cannot hold water. Nor does this passage say that there is no nirvāṇa. It says that nirvāṇa is not a thing that can stand by itself or be grasped in someone’s hand. If it were, it would possess intrinsic nature, and anything possessing intrinsic nature was already refuted by the opening verse.

14. A One-Sentence Conclusion: Conditioned, Unconditioned, and Self Are All Empty

At the end, the author writes only one sentence:

“Therefore conditioned dharmas, unconditioned dharmas, and the self are all empty.”

The gate closes here. It began with “I shall now briefly explain the meaning of the Mahāyāna,” passed through the seven meanings of the Great Vehicle, the verse opening the gate, five outer cases, the inner twelve links, the challenge of other-nature, the refutation using rushes and mat, and the Seventy Treatise’s question of one mind or many, and finally lands on these few words. This is the gate that opens first among the twelve.

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, distinguish “without intrinsic nature” from “nonexistent.” The author uses jars, cloth, houses, clarified butter, and sprouts throughout—things that function. He does not cancel their use; he cancels their supposed ability to stand on their own.

Second, know where the search for an ultimate foundation leads. The mat depends on rushes; on what do the rushes depend? “The rushes too arise from a multitude of conditions and therefore lack intrinsic nature.” This path has no final floor. Once one sees this, one will not casually point to something halfway along and say, “Here at last is what truly exists.”

Third, notice where the measure turns at the end. “Because conditioned dharmas are empty, one should know that the unconditioned dharma of nirvāṇa is also empty.” The measure does not stop on the side of what it seeks.

Fourth, remember that this is a gate. A gate is used to enter. Once one has entered, one need not cling to it.

Carried Forward: Through the Other Treatises on the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows places beside it two illuminations from the other treatises on the same axis. They illuminate but do not belong to this treatise; they are recorded without adjudicating the parallel.

The Treatise on the Middle establishes the eight negations at its opening:

　　“Neither arising nor ceasing, neither permanence nor annihilation;
　　neither identity nor difference, neither coming nor going.”

That treatise begins from exclusion, blocking all eight grasped marks at once. This gate begins from a multitude of conditions, counting jar, cloth, house, clarified butter, and sprout one by one so that dependence on conditions discloses itself. One negates and the other displays, yet they enter the same meaning.

As for the twelve links, the “Examination of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination” in the Treatise on the Middle counts them forward in sequence—“sentient beings, obscured by ignorance, produce the three formations for a later life”—continues through grief, lamentation, suffering, and distress, then gathers the sequence back in reverse, and finally attributes the teaching to what “is extensively explained in the Abhidharma and sūtras.” That chapter explains how the twelve links accumulate and how they rightly cease. This gate takes a different angle: if the twelve links already possessed intrinsic nature, should they be placed within one mind or within many? The links examined are the same; the question asked is different.

Read along the same axis, each illumination remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate remains governed by its own extended prose.

Gate One says that every dharma arises from a gathering of conditions and therefore lacks intrinsic nature. Someone hearing this may move the question one step back: I accept conditioned arising, but before the conditions assemble, does the effect already exist in the cause or not?

This question gives intrinsic nature a new hiding place. The effect is prepared in advance within the cause, and conditions merely invite it out. Gate Two opens for this question. The author begins: “Furthermore, dharmas do not arise.” The point of the inquiry moves to a single word.

1. The Four-Line Verse Seals the Paths of Arising into Three

  “If previously existent, it does not arise; if previously nonexistent, it does not arise;   if both existent and nonexistent, it likewise does not arise—who, then, could be something that arises?”

The first three lines exhaust every possible answer: the effect already exists in the cause, is wholly absent there, or is both existent and nonexistent. There is no fourth path. The fourth line presses the question: when all three paths are sealed, “who, then, could be something that arises?”

The author immediately unfolds the verse in prose: “If the effect already exists in the cause, it should not arise; if previously absent, it should not arise; if both existent and nonexistent, it should not arise.” The many exchanges that follow make each path concrete. Gate One counts the conditions; Gate Two fixes upon the act “arising” itself. With the same jar, Gate One asks what supports it; Gate Two asks how it came.

2. If What Already Exists Arises, the Process Is Endless

“If the effect already exists in the cause and arises, the process is endless.”

Since the effect was already in the cause and has now emerged, the “existent” share in the cause has not been canceled—“because it is permanently present in the cause.” Since it remains, it should arise again: “Now that it has arisen, it should arise once more.” After arising, it still exists, and “from this existent side it should arise again”; thus the process has no end. The thesis of prior existence opens a gate of its own and gives arising no reason ever to stop.

The questioner tries to stop the bleeding: what has arisen does not arise again; only what has not arisen arises. The author answers, “If one says what has arisen does not arise again and the unarisen arises, there is no coherent principle of arising here.” On that account the difference between arising and not arising no longer comes from the effect itself, for the effect is existent throughout; it comes only from an improvised rule. One further cut follows: “If the effect already exists in the cause, yet you say the unarisen arises and the arisen does not, both are equally existent while one arises and the other does not. There is no such case.” One status cannot bear two treatments.

3. Arisen and Unarisen Contradict One Another

“If while unarisen it determinately exists, then after arising it should be nonexistent. Why? Arisen and unarisen contradict one another; because they contradict, the active marks they bear also contradict.” Arisen and unarisen are an opposed pair. Their positions conflict, and so must the active marks assigned to them. If you assign existence to the unarisen side, the arisen side should receive nonexistence.

Yet you insist on placing existence at both ends: “Existence contradicts nonexistence and nonexistence contradicts existence. If it exists both after arising and while unarisen, arisen and unarisen should not differ.” “What difference, then, is there between arisen and unarisen?” Whenever one speaks of arising, there must be movement from something to something. Fill both ends with the same status and the path has neither beginning nor end. The author concludes: “The claim that arisen and unarisen do not differ is untenable; therefore what exists does not arise.”

4. Already Existent and Accomplished—What Use Is Further Arising?

“Already existent and accomplished—what use is further arising? What is done should not be done again, what is accomplished should not be accomplished again; therefore an existent dharma should not arise.”

Once something is done there is no room to do it again; once accomplished there is no room to accomplish it again. This follows from the ordinary meanings of “doing” and “accomplishing.” If the effect is already complete in the cause, arising is merely a superfluous procedure. If the jar already stands whole inside the clay, what are the potter’s wheel, cord, and hands doing?

5. The Jar in the Clay Should Be Visible Now

“If what exists arises, the effect should be visible in the cause before arising, yet in fact it is not visible. A jar in clay and a mat in reeds should be visible, yet in fact they are not; therefore what exists does not arise.”

The preceding challenges argue from principle; this one argues from the matter before one’s eyes. Since you say it is there now, it should be visible now. The dispute moves from concepts into direct experience, and the questioner must explain why it is unseen. The treatise’s longest debate on perception begins here.

6. “Unseen Because Unchanged”: By What Mark Do You Say It Is There?

The questioner’s first explanation is: “The effect already exists, but because it has not yet changed, it is unseen.”

The author begins at the crucial point: “By what mark do you know and say that a jar already exists in the clay?” Is it “because the jar’s mark is present, or because the mark of a cow or horse is present?” If the clay has no jar-mark, it equally has no cow-mark or horse-mark. How does a thing with no mark at all differ from nonexistence? The author therefore asks: “Is this not called nonexistent?”

He then takes up the word “change” and forces the questioner to choose. First, if “the transformation itself is the effect, then transformation should already exist in the cause”; that transformation too “should be visible, yet in fact cannot be found.” What was invoked to explain invisibility is itself invisible. Second, “if the untransformed is not called an effect, the effect can never be found,” because “this transformation was previously absent and should be absent afterward.” Third, “if it is the effect only after transformation, the effect was previously absent in the cause”; then the questioner claims “at one time that the effect already exists in the cause and at another that it was previously absent.” One speaker has given two accounts in succession.

7. Eight Ways Something May Exist Yet Remain Unknown

The questioner brings forward a complete theory of perception: “Transformation already exists but cannot be seen. Things can exist yet remain unapprehended.” There are eight reasons why something present may escape awareness.

Too near, “as with medicine in the eye”; too far, “as with a bird soaring high in the sky and passing into the distance”; a damaged faculty, “as a blind person does not see form, a deaf person does not hear sound, one with a blocked nose does not smell fragrance, one with an impaired tongue does not know taste, one with a numb body does not know touch, and one with a deranged mind does not know reality”; an inattentive mind, “as a mind attending to form does not know sound”; obstruction, “as earth obstructs the great waters and a wall blocks an outside object”; sameness, “as an ink dot upon black”; dominance, “as the sound of bells and drums prevents hearing a faint brushing sound”; minuteness, “as motes do not appear.”

From damaged bodily faculties to distraction of mind, from obstruction to sameness of background, from strong sound overwhelming weak to the invisibility of motes, the eight examples are arranged with great precision. The questioner says: “Dharmas may exist yet remain unknown because of these eight conditions.” Therefore the claim that transformation in the cause and such effects as jars cannot be found is untenable. It is an elegant challenge: failure to see something has eight possible causes, and none proves that the thing is absent.

8. Turning Each Back: Every One of the Eight Has an Opposite

The author does not deny a single example; all eight are matters of fact. He instead brings each example’s conditions of validity into view: “Transformation and such effects as jars are not unapprehended in the same way as the eight conditions.”〔T30 0161a10〕

“If transformation and jars are unapprehended because extremely near, they should be apprehended from slightly farther away; if because extremely far, from slightly nearer; if because a faculty is damaged, by one whose faculties are sound; if because the mind does not attend, when it attends; if because obstructed, transformation and jar should be apprehended without the obstruction; if because the same as their location, at another time; if because overwhelmed by the stronger, when the stronger ceases; if because minute, such effects as jars are coarse and should be apprehended.”

Move the medicine farther away and it is seen; restore the eye and color is seen; remove the wall and the object is seen; stop the bells and drums and the brushing sound is heard. Each of the eight includes a way for its obstruction to end. Yet after all eight remedies are applied, the jar in the clay still cannot be found. The eight conditions explain temporary unknowability, not perpetual unknowability.

The author then follows the case of minuteness: “If the jar is unapprehended because minute, it should remain unapprehended after arising. Why? The minute mark is the same before and after arising, and it determinately exists both before and after.” According to prior existence, the effect is the same and equally existent before and after arising; therefore it should remain equally minute and equally unapprehended after arising.

9. To Say “The Minute Becomes Coarse” Abandons the Effect’s Prior Existence

The questioner revises the account: “Before arising it is minute; after arising it becomes coarse. Thus it is apprehended after arising and unapprehended before.”

The author answers: “If so, the effect is absent in the cause. Why? Because the coarse is absent in the cause.” You now admit that only the minute is in the cause, while the effect in hand is coarse. “The present effect is coarse, yet you say it was unapprehended because minute; this coarse thing is not called the effect. The present effect should then never be apprehended, yet in fact it is.” With that revision, the claim that the effect existed beforehand makes room for its own opposite. The author concludes: “Therefore it is not unapprehended because minute”; “the claim that the effect already exists in the cause is untenable.”

10. Threads Are Merely the Cloth’s Dwelling Place, Not Its Cause

Until now the question was whether the effect can be seen. From here the inquiry asks whether cause and effect still deserve their names. “If an effect already exists in the cause and then arises, the cause loses the mark of cause and the effect loses the mark of effect.” Why? “If cloth is in threads or fruit in a vessel, that is merely a dwelling place and is not called a cause.”

If cloth already exists in the threads, the threads are only a container, like fruit resting in a vessel. A container is not a cause—“threads and vessel are not the causes of cloth and fruit.” The consequence is grave: “If the cause collapses, the effect collapses; therefore threads and the rest are not causes of cloth and the rest. Because there is no cause, there is no effect. Why? An effect is established because of a cause; if the cause is not established, how can the effect be?” The thesis of prior existence set out to protect cause and effect and instead canceled the cause.

The author repeats the point through making: “What is not made is not called an effect, yet threads and other causes cannot produce cloth and other effects. Threads do not produce cloth merely because cloth rests upon them.” Threads merely let cloth reside there and do not make it; “there would thus be neither cause nor effect.” This reaches an intriguing point: “If cause and effect are both absent, one should not ask whether the effect previously exists or is previously absent in the cause.” The two disputed alternatives had depended on the words cause and effect from the outset.

11. What Exists Must Show a Mark, Yet the Effect Shows None

“If the effect exists in the cause but cannot be apprehended, a mark should appear.” Something hidden always sends some sign: “Smelling fragrance, one knows flowers; hearing a sound, one knows a bird; hearing laughter, one knows a person; seeing smoke, one knows fire; seeing a swan, one knows a pond.”

“In the same way, if an effect already exists in the cause, a mark should appear. Yet neither the effect’s entity nor its mark can be found; thus know that the effect was previously absent in the cause.” Neither entity nor mark can be found. This goes beyond saying it is unseen: it leaves not the slightest indication.

12. Insist on Prior Existence, and One Can No Longer Say “Cloth Exists Because of Threads”

“If an effect already exists in the cause and then arises, one should not say cloth exists because of threads or a mat because of reeds.” Since cloth already exists, threads did not make it. “If this cause did not make it, nothing else made it either. If cloth is not made by threads, could it be made from reeds?” Threads do not make it and reeds still less; then it is “made from nothing.” Yet “if made from nothing, it is not called an effect. If there is no effect, there is no cause, as already explained.”

Everyone says cloth exists because of threads and a mat because of reeds. The doctrine of prior existence can no longer utter that sentence.

13. Made from Nothing, It Falls into Permanence

“If the effect is made from nothing, it is permanent, like the nature of nirvāṇa.” What is not produced from anywhere does not depend on conditions and is therefore permanent. But “if the effect is permanent, every conditioned dharma is permanent. Why? Because every conditioned dharma is an effect.”

Every conditioned dharma is an effect. If effects are permanent, not one conditioned dharma is impermanent. Yet “if every dharma is permanent, there is no impermanence; if there is no impermanence, neither is there permanence. Why? Impermanence exists because of permanence, and permanence because of impermanence.” Permanence and impermanence stand in mutual dependence; erase one side and the other cannot stand. The author concludes: “Therefore the claim that permanence and impermanence are both absent is untenable. Thus one cannot say an effect already exists in the cause and then arises.” Prior existence sought a secure place for the effect; followed to its end, it destroys even the name permanence.

14. An Effect Does Not Become the Cause of a Different Effect

“If an effect already exists in the cause and then arises, the effect should become the cause of a different effect: cloth the cause of wearing, a mat the cause of covering, a cart the cause of carrying.” Cloth is the effect of threads and then cause of wearing; a mat is the effect of reeds and then cause of covering. By the general rule of prior existence, the effect for which it serves as cause should likewise already be prepared inside it, every use ready beforehand. “Yet in fact it does not become the cause of a different effect; therefore one cannot say the effect already exists in the cause and then arises.”

The questioner offers a subtle analogy: “Fragrance already exists in the earth but does not emerge without sprinkling water. The effect is the same: before the conditions assemble, it cannot serve as a cause.” Fragrance is present in the soil and water merely discloses it.

The author’s answer is tight: “On your account it is called an effect only when it can be known; then jars and other objects are not effects. Why? Being made knowable is produced, whereas jars and the rest previously existed and are unproduced. You thereby treat production as the effect.” If the assembling conditions merely reveal the effect, what you truly call effect is the moment of manifestation, and that moment is produced; the jar itself, by contrast, ceases to be an effect. This is the opposite of the claim that it already existed.

15. A Revealing Cause Discloses; It Does Not Produce a Thing

“A revealing cause can only disclose; it cannot produce a thing.” The analogy lies ready to hand: “If a lamp is lit to illuminate a jar in darkness, it also illuminates bedding and other objects. But when conditions assemble to make a jar, they cannot produce bedding and other objects.”

Light a lamp to see a jar and everything within its reach—bedding, vessels, and the rest—is illuminated as well. Assemble the conditions for making a jar and only a jar results. Disclosure can extend incidentally; production cannot. The doctrine of prior existence treats conditions as a lamp that merely reveals the effect, but a lamp does not make a jar.

The author adds a temporal point: “If the effect already exists in the cause and then arises, there should be no distinction between making now and making later. Yet you accept making now and making later.” If the effect stands complete already, there can be no difference between work presently underway and work yet to be done; the opponent himself accepts that distinction.

16. Refuting Prior Nonexistence: A Second Head and Third Hand

“If one says the effect is previously absent in the cause and then arises, this too is untenable.” Why? “If what is nonexistent could arise, a second head and third hand should arise. Why? Because what is nonexistent could arise.”

The questioner replies: “Jars and other things have causes and conditions; a second head and third hand do not. How could they arise?” The author answers cleanly: “A second head, a third hand, and such effects as jars are all equally absent in the cause.” Under the thesis of prior nonexistence, both occupy the same position. Since each is equally absent, “a jar is absent from clay and equally absent from stone; why call the lump of clay the jar’s cause and not call stone its cause? Why call milk the cause of curds and threads the cause of cloth, but not call reeds the cause?” The doctrine of prior nonexistence says “absent” but cannot produce the distinction between clay and stone.

17. Carts and Horses from a Fingertip; Sesame and Sand at the Same Price

“If an effect previously absent in the cause can arise, each thing should produce every thing: carts, horses, food, and the rest should arise from a fingertip; threads should not produce cloth alone but carts, horses, food, and all other things.” The reason is one phrase: “because all are equally absent.” If arising requires only absence, everything qualifies.

Then consider causal power: “Causes should not each possess a distinct power to produce an effect. One who needs oil seeks it from sesame and does not press sand.” “If oil is equally absent from both, why seek it in sesame and not press sand?” The questioner appeals to experience: “Oil has been seen to come from sesame and has not been seen to come from sand.” The author replies: “If the mark of arising were established, you could say that at another time oil was seen to come from sesame and not from sand, and therefore one seeks it in sesame rather than sand. But the mark of arising for every dharma is not established, so you cannot say that oil was formerly seen to come from sesame.”

The author does not claim that people’s pressing sesame for oil is false. He says that the disputed point is whether arising can be established, while the questioner uses a previous instance that already presupposes arising as evidence. He makes the point explicit:〔T30 0162a03〕“I do not now refute only this one matter; I refute every cause and effect together. The three forms of arising—effect already existent in the cause, previously nonexistent, or both existent and nonexistent—are all unestablished. Therefore your claim that sesame was formerly seen to produce oil falls into a reason identical with what is under doubt.”

18. Prior Nonexistence Leaves No Mark of Cause; Prior Existence Leaves the Agent Idle

“If an effect previously absent in the cause arises, the marks of causes cannot be established. Why? If causes are absent, by what can a dharma be made, by what accomplished? If there is neither making nor accomplishment, why call anything a cause?” A cause is named through its power to make and accomplish; if the cause side is entirely absent, cause remains an empty name. Consequently, “the agent cannot produce anything, and one who directs an agent likewise cannot produce anything.” The person who works directly and the one who instructs another both become idle.

Looking back at prior existence, the agent is equally idle: “If the effect already exists in the cause, there should be no distinction among action, agent, and what is made. Why? If the effect already exists, what need is there to make it? Therefore the causes you describe—action, agent, and what is made—cannot be found.”

The author then gives this gate’s most important confession: “I say action, agent, cause, and effect are all empty. If you refute action, agent, cause, and effect, you establish my Dharma and do not challenge it.” The questioner’s objections all presuppose the reality of action, agent, cause, and effect, but the author never establishes them as intrinsically existent. Each refutation of action and agent states the author’s point for him. He adds: “Only if someone accepted that the effect already exists in the cause should this challenge be made. I do not say it already exists in the cause, so I do not accept the challenge; neither do I accept that it was previously absent.” The author does not choose between the two cases. He accepts neither.

19. Both Existent and Nonexistent: Light and Dark Do Not Share One Place

“If one says the effect is both existent and nonexistent in the cause and then arises, this too is untenable. Why? Because existence and nonexistence possess mutually contradictory natures and marks. Since their natures conflict, how could they occupy one place?” Four pairs illustrate it: “Light and dark, pain and pleasure, going and staying, bondage and release cannot occupy one place.” Light comes as dark departs; pain and pleasure are relinquished in turn; going and staying do not coincide; bondage and release are not simultaneous.

Moreover, this case contains no new meaning: “The effect’s prior existence and prior nonexistence in the cause were already refuted above in the discussion of existence and nonexistence.” Combining two refuted statements cannot yield an unrefuted statement.

20. Reason Reaches Its Limit Here

“Therefore an effect existent in the cause does not arise, an effect absent there does not arise, and an effect both existent and nonexistent does not arise. Reason reaches its limit here.”

The phrase “reason reaches its limit here” is decisive. Seeking an instance of arising along cause and effect offers only three paths; all have now been traversed. Therefore “inquiry everywhere finds nothing, and the effect is ultimately unarisen.” From there the author continues: “Because the effect is ultimately unarisen, every conditioned dharma is empty. Why? Every conditioned dharma is both cause and effect.” There is no worldly conditioned dharma that is not the effect of something and the cause of something else. When the effect does not arise, conditioned dharmas have no intrinsic footing.

The conclusion rejoins Gate One: “Because the conditioned is empty, the unconditioned is empty. When conditioned and unconditioned are empty, how much more so the self?” Gate One proceeds from the emptiness of conditions to the emptiness of conditioned, unconditioned, and self; Gate Two proceeds from the unfindability of arising to the same place. The two gates open from different directions into the same room.

What Readers Can Carry Away from This Gate

First, distinguish “unseen” from “nonexistent.” The author denies none of the eight reasons for nonapprehension. He asks only whether this instance of not seeing has a way for its impediment to end. All eight do; the jar in the clay does not.

Second, distinguish disclosure from production. A lamp illuminates the jar and also the bedding; conditions making a jar make only the jar. To treat conditioned arising as switching on a lamp requires the effect to wait already in the darkness. If the effect is already there, the potter’s hands are superfluous.

Third, notice that the author accepts none of the cases. Refuting prior existence does not establish prior nonexistence; refuting prior nonexistence does not return to prior existence. What remains after all three are refuted is not a fourth thesis, but no need to continue asking the question.

Fourth, remember for whom this gate was opened. One who accepts conditioned arising may still hide intrinsic nature “inside the cause.” Gate Two examines that hiding place as well.

Carried Forward: Illumination along the Same Axis

The foregoing is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows sets beside it one passage on the same axis. The illumination is not this treatise; it is the same principle spoken elsewhere, recorded without adjudication.

Chapter Twenty, “Examination of Cause and Effect,” in the Treatise on the Middle points in the same direction as this gate. It first sets out the question: “Because an effect visibly arises from the conjunction of many causes and conditions, know that the effect exists from their conjunction.” A verse immediately blocks it:

  “If an effect arose when the many conditions conjoin,   it would already exist within their conjunction—what need would there be for conjunction to produce it?”

“What need would there be for conjunction to produce it?” is the same question as this gate’s “Already existent and accomplished—what use is further arising?” The next verse says:

  “If an effect existed within the conjunction of the many conditions,   it should be present within that conjunction, yet in fact it cannot be found.”

This corresponds directly to this gate’s “Before arising, the effect should be visible in the cause, yet in fact it is not visible.” On the side of prior nonexistence, that chapter answers: “If a thing lacks intrinsic nature, that thing will never arise,” then uses milk and water: “If curds are absent from milk, milk would be the same as water; one should not say curds come only from milk.” Its path matches this gate’s questions about clay and stone, sesame and sand.

The two passages differ in their unfolding. The Treatise on the Middle chapter proceeds verse by verse, questioning in turn the two entities cause and effect and their temporal sequence. This gate presses the single word arising to its limit through extended prose and inserts the long debate over eight reasons for nonapprehension, which the Treatise on the Middle does not contain. The matter examined is the same; the gate opened is different.

Treatises on the same axis illuminate one another while each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s extended prose.

The Twelve Gates have reached their third entrance. The preceding gate asks whether the effect first exists or does not exist within the cause. This gate begins, “Next, the conditions of dharmas cannot be established,” shifting the discussion from cause to conditions.

Changing one word changes the matter. A cause is one; conditions are many. When asked whether the effect lies within the cause, one still has a route of retreat: it is not within this single cause, but exists only when the multitude of conditions come together. This gate walks precisely to that retreat.

The opening word “next” also deserves attention. The author does not begin a new enterprise but continues from the preceding gate. The preceding gate has questioned the cause; now he asks the same matter another way. Most of the Twelve Gates succeed one another like this. They are not twelve unrelated arguments but twelve entrances through which the same matter is traversed.

1. Opening Verse: Whether Treated Broadly or in Summary, No Effect Exists

The author first gives a verse:

“Among the multitude of conditions, whether treated broadly or in summary, no effect exists; if no effect exists among conditions, how could it arise from conditions?”

The words “broadly and in summary” must be seen clearly. Broadly means spreading out the multitude of conditions and searching them individually. In summary means gathering them and searching within the conjunction as a whole. There are only these two ways to search—either separately or together—and no third place exists. Only after saying “no effect exists here” in both places can the next line ask, “If no effect exists among conditions, how could it arise from conditions?”

The extended prose immediately seats the verse in its example: “Such effects as a jar do not exist within each condition individually and do not exist within their conjunction. If they exist in neither approach, how can one say that they arise from conditions?” The example remains the jar. Clay, wheel, cord, and potter form a sequence already counted in the first gate. Separately, no jar exists in the clay, wheel, cord, or potter. Together, no jar can be extracted from the mass of conjunction. These are the “two approaches,” the two places of search.

Someone may think: how could no jar exist within the conjunction? The jar obviously appears only after conjunction. This is not the author’s question. He asks: when you say that the effect arises from conditions, is that effect something already there, merely waiting for the conditions to deliver it? If so, indicate the condition in which it rests or its position within the conjunction. If it cannot be indicated, then the arising within “arising from conditions” is not the carrying out of a finished object. The first gate says a jar cannot stand by itself; this gate goes farther. Even the conditions that are supposed to deliver the jar cannot deliver a self-standing jar.

2. Asking the Name of Conditions: Four Conditions and “No Fifth Condition”

At this point the opponent asks an important question: “What are called the multitude of conditions?” You say that no effect exists among conditions; what exactly do you mean by conditions?

The question asks the author to make his claim final. He answers just as directly with a verse:

“Four kinds of conditions produce all dharmas; beyond them there is no fifth condition: the causal condition, immediate antecedent condition, object-condition, and predominant condition.”

First he says, “four conditions produce all dharmas,” then “there is no fifth condition.” With this sentence the author closes the gate on the opponent’s behalf. Conditions are limited to these four. Once the number is exhausted, no fifth can be added later to save the claim. If a fifth were permitted, then after each condition was refuted the opponent could always say, “there remains another that you have not refuted.” Once four is final, the refutation below is exhaustive.

The same four lines appear in the Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of Causes and Conditions,” as a citation by the opponent: “the causal condition, immediate antecedent condition, object-condition, and predominant condition; four conditions produce all dharmas, and there is no fifth condition.” Their sequence differs. This gate places “four conditions produce all dharmas; there is no fifth condition” first—exhausting the number before listing the names.

3. Each of the Four Conditions Has Its Function

The author next explains each name in turn. All four are spoken in terms of function; none states some nature belonging to the condition itself.

“The causal condition is named according to the dharma arising from it. If that dharma has arisen from it, is now arising from it, or will arise from it, this dharma is called a causal condition.” The causal condition is named by reference to “that from which something arises.” The effect has arisen, is arising, or will arise from it. All three times are stated, meaning that the name hangs upon the side of the effect throughout.

“The immediate antecedent condition means that after the preceding dharma has ceased, the next dharma arises in sequence.” A prior dharma ceases and the next immediately arises. The words “has ceased” are exactly where this condition receives its name.

“The object-condition follows the dharma recollected. If bodily action, verbal action, or mind and mental factors arise because of it, it is called the object-condition.” The object-condition is the object recollected. Attend especially to the words “follows the dharma recollected.” An object is called a condition because a recollecting mind apprehends it; if no one recollects it, it is no one’s object-condition. The author names three things it can initiate—bodily action, verbal action, and mind with mental factors—moving from body and speech through mind, showing this condition’s broad reach.

“The predominant condition means that because this dharma exists, that dharma can arise. This dharma is a predominant condition for that dharma.” A predominant condition assists completion: because this dharma exists, that dharma can arise. The sentence makes this clearest—“this dharma is a predominant condition for that dharma.” The name hangs not upon this dharma alone, but upon its relation “for that dharma.”

After reading all four definitions, one matter becomes visible: not one of the four names stands on itself. Each must point to another side to be spoken. The causal condition points to what is produced, the immediate antecedent condition to what next arises, the object-condition to the apprehending mind, and the predominant condition to that other dharma. Since the names are established this way, the author’s next question is: where exactly is the effect to which they point?

4. In Every Case the Effect Is Absent from the Cause: Apart from Conditions No Effect, Apart from Cause No Effect

The author gathers them in one sentence: “In each of these four conditions, the effect is absent within the cause.” He then tests this through three sections.

“If the effect existed within the cause, it should exist apart from the multitude of conditions; yet in fact no effect exists apart from conditions.” You say the effect already rests within the cause. Remove the other conditions, then, and it should remain. If a jar truly lies hidden in the lump of clay, no wheel, cord, or potter should be needed; the jar should still emerge. In fact it does not.

“If the effect existed within the conditions, it should exist apart from the cause; yet in fact no effect exists apart from the cause.” Conversely, if the effect rests within the conditions, remove the cause and it should remain. In fact it does not.

“If the effect existed in both conditions and cause, it should be obtainable. Yet sought through reason, it cannot be obtained. Therefore it is absent in both places.” Finally, cause and conditions are taken together. If the effect exists in both places, it should be obtainable; searched rationally, it is not. Thus, “it is absent in both places.”

After completing the three tests, the author restates the verse: “Thus, no effect exists within each condition individually and none exists within their conjunction. How can one say that the effect arises from conditions?” After going in a circle, the argument returns to the two places of broad and summary. However finely the four conditions are named, they cannot escape those two places of search.

5. Since No Effect Exists among Conditions, Why Does It Not Emerge from Nonconditions?

At this point the opponent still has one final claim: the effect originally is not within the conditions, but conditions possess the power to produce it. The author therefore gives another verse:

“If the effect does not exist among conditions but emerges from conditions, why does this effect not emerge from nonconditions?”

The extended prose states it more directly: “Suppose one says that although the effect is absent among conditions, it arises from them. Why does it not arise from nonconditions? Because both sides equally lack an effect.”

The point of the question lies in the words “both sides equally lack an effect.” Your reason is that what does not contain an effect can give rise to one. Yet no effect exists among conditions and no effect exists among nonconditions. In the single respect of not containing an effect, conditions and nonconditions are exactly alike. Once what lacks an effect is permitted to produce an effect, no reason remains to allow conditions but prevent nonconditions. The author therefore concludes, “Thus no causes and conditions can produce an effect.”

See what the author refutes here. He does not say that clay cannot become a jar while milk can. He says that once conditions are treated as something able by themselves to produce existence from nonexistence, the boundary between condition and noncondition immediately fails. A condition is a condition only by receiving its name in dependence upon an effect, not through possessing an intrinsic capacity to produce.

Together with the preceding section, this objection forms a two-jawed pincer. The preceding section tests the path of “preexistence.” If the effect already exists in the cause or conditions, it should remain when the others are removed, yet it does not. This section tests the path of “prior nonexistence.” If the effect does not first exist among conditions but the conditions nevertheless produce it, then nonconditions also do not contain it and should likewise produce. Preexistence fails; prior nonexistence fails. Since there is no third claim, conditions have nowhere from which to establish a power to produce an effect.

This pincer is the return here of the preceding gate’s topic, “Examination of an Existing or Nonexisting Effect.” That gate asks through the cause whether the effect exists or not; this gate asks through conditions whether what is absent can emerge from them. The form of the question is the same, while its object differs. That one question works in both places shows that what is refuted is not one specific thesis, but the thought behind the thesis that “it is simply thus of itself.”

6. Because the Effect Does Not Arise, Conditions Do Not Arise Either

The final turn is fastest and easiest to overlook: “Because the effect does not arise, conditions do not arise either. Why? Because conditions precede and the effect follows.”

Why do conditions fail when the effect fails? The author’s reason is that “conditions precede and the effect follows.” The name condition is spoken as prior to an effect: first the condition, then the effect. This is the order established by the person who speaks of conditions. Yet this prior is prior only relative to the effect. Without the later effect, the earlier prior falls empty. When the effect is empty, the name condition has nowhere to hang.

The first gate says, “because conditions are empty, dharmas produced from conditions are empty too,” moving from condition to effect. Here the movement returns from effect to condition. Read together, neither condition nor effect first stands by itself.

7. Proceeding All the Way to Self

The three concluding sentences reach farther with every clause: “Because conditions and effect do not exist, all conditioned dharmas are empty; because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are empty too; because conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, how could there be a self?”

Since neither conditions nor effect exist intrinsically, all conditioned dharmas arising in dependence are empty. Once the conditioned are empty, the name unconditioned, established in contrast to them, is empty. Once conditioned and unconditioned are empty, the self spoken on the basis of those dharmas has nowhere to rest.

These three sentences follow the same road as the first gate’s conclusion, “thus conditioned, unconditioned, and self are all empty.” Only the entrance has changed. The first gate enters through intrinsic nature; this one through conditions. They are called the Twelve Gates precisely because their entrances differ while what they reach is not two.

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, remember that there are only two places to look: the individual and the conjunction. Anyone saying that an effect arises from conditions must indicate where the effect is; the answer cannot escape these two.

Second, attend to “there is no fifth condition.” Fixing the number leaves no escape. When a treatise exhausts what can be said in this way, the sentence is usually a hinge.

Third, distinguish the use of conditions from a power intrinsic to conditions. The author never says that clay, wheel, cord, and potter are useless. What he rejects is that conditions themselves possess a capacity to produce existence from nonexistence.

Carried Forward: Illumination along the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows is one cross-light from the Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of Causes and Conditions.” The illumination is not this treatise; it simply records without deciding how the same doctrinal meaning is stated elsewhere.

That chapter refutes the four conditions at much greater length. It first refutes the causal, immediate antecedent, object, and predominant conditions individually, one verse per condition, and only then says:

“Sought among causes and conditions, whether in summary or broadly, the effect cannot be obtained; if it does not exist among causes and conditions, how could it emerge from conditions?”

“If one says that the effect is absent among conditions yet emerges from them, why does this effect not emerge from nonconditions?”

These two verses have the same edge and almost the same wording as the two verses in this gate. Their forms differ. The Treatise on the Middle first refutes each of the four conditions and then gathers them; this gate omits those individual refutations and takes only the broad-and-summary search for the effect and the objection from nonconditions. It gathers the four conditions beneath one sentence: “in each of these four conditions, the effect is absent within the cause.” This gate has its own economy of text. The Twelve Gates was composed “to explain briefly the meaning of the Mahāyāna,” and here that brevity becomes visible.

Read together along one axis, each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s own extended prose.

We recognize a cow by its horns, hump, hanging dewlap, and tuft of hair at the end of its tail. We recognize a jar by its flat base, broad belly, narrow neck, and thick lip. We recognize a person or cart in the same way: first there is a group of visible features, and then a name is applied.

This seems so reliable that we extend it all the way. Since every thing has its marks, the great class called “all things”—all conditioned dharmas—should also have shared marks. Buddhism does indeed name such a group: arising, abiding, and cessation. Whatever is conditioned arises, abides, and ceases.

The “Gate of Examining Marks” asks about precisely this claim. It does not ask whether a cow’s marks are real or a jar’s marks accurate. It asks: if you take arising, abiding, and cessation as the marks of every conditioned dharma, to which side do these three themselves belong?

The treatise master opens by taking both alternatives: “If arising, abiding, and cessation are the marks of conditioned dharmas, are they conditioned or unconditioned?”

1. The Gate’s Opening Verse: Empty Because Markless

Before the exchange begins, the treatise master establishes a verse:

“Conditioned and unconditioned dharmas, these two kinds, are both without marks; because they are without marks, both kinds of dharma are empty.”

He adds only one prose sentence: “Conditioned dharmas are not established by relying on marks.”

Those seven words form this gate’s pivot. We ordinarily assume that the marks of arising, abiding, and cessation are first attached to a dharma, thereby establishing it as conditioned: the marks are credentials, and through them the dharma acquires its identity. The treatise master is saying that these credentials cannot themselves be issued.

What follows implicates both sides. If conditioned dharmas cannot be established through marks, unconditioned dharmas cannot be established either, because the name “unconditioned” is posited only in reliance on the conditioned. Thus the verse treats both kinds of dharma together, not as two separate matters.

2. If Arising Is Conditioned, the Three Marks Need Another Three Marks Above Them

Take the first alternative. The opponent asks directly: “What fault follows if they are conditioned?” The master answers in verse:

“If arising is conditioned, it too should have the three marks; if arising is unconditioned, how can it be called a mark of the conditioned?”

The inference in the first two lines is extremely simple—almost coldly so. You say that every conditioned dharma possesses the three marks. That is a general rule. If the mark of arising is itself conditioned, it must fall under the same rule: it too must have its own arising, its own abiding, and its own cessation. Since those three are also conditioned, each must possess another three. The master closes in one sentence: “These three marks should again have three marks; proceeding recursively in this way produces an infinite regress.”

And this applies not only to arising: “Abiding and cessation are likewise.”

The master does not import another principle to suppress the opponent. He uses the opponent’s own rule. If the rule you posit is truly general, it bites the very mark by which you explain it. Calling a halt at the second level amounts to conceding that the second level is exempt from the rule. But then it is not conditioned and cannot serve as the mark of the conditioned. A rule cannot grant itself an exception halfway through.

3. If Arising Is Unconditioned, What Cannot Be Distinguished Cannot Serve as a Credential for Recognition

What of the second alternative? Since calling the mark conditioned creates an infinite regress, one might simply call the mark of arising unconditioned. The master replies with three questions, each coming closer than the last:

“If arising is unconditioned, how can the unconditioned serve as a mark for the conditioned?” This concerns the boundary between the two.

“Apart from arising, abiding, and cessation, who could know that this is arising?” This concerns recognition. If you claim there is a mark of arising independent of the events of arising, abiding, and cessation, who could recognize it as arising once those events are removed?

“Further, because arising, abiding, and cessation are distinguished, there is arising. The unconditioned cannot be distinguished, and therefore there is no arising; the same applies to abiding and cessation.” This concerns the origin of the name. We speak of an arising precisely because we distinguish the three phases of arising, abiding, and cessation. Yet the unconditioned is said to be beyond distinction. One thing cannot be both indistinguishable and the ruler by which other things are distinguished.

With both alternatives blocked, the master gives his first conclusion: “Because arising, abiding, and cessation are empty, conditioned dharmas are empty. Because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are also empty, for it is because of the conditioned that there is the unconditioned. Because conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, all dharmas are empty.”

Notice the small reason at the end: “because of the conditioned there is the unconditioned.” The unconditioned stands only because the conditioned stands. When the conditioned side gives way, the unconditioned is not another thing left safely intact.

4. Seven Co-Arising Dharmas: Replacing Infinite Regress with Mutual Support

Here the opponent proposes the most carefully devised solution in the entire gate. He first concedes that the challenge “you say the three marks must again have three marks and therefore regress infinitely” is formidable, and then says: I have another arrangement. The verse reads:

“What the arising of arising brings into arising is its primary arising; what the primary arising brings into arising in turn brings the arising of arising into arising.”

The prose lays out the plan: “When a dharma arises, seven dharmas arise together, including its own entity: first, the dharma; second, arising; third, abiding; fourth, cessation; fifth, the arising of arising; sixth, the abiding of abiding; seventh, the cessation of cessation.”

When one dharma arises, seven things arrive together, counting the dharma itself. Among them, “the primary arising, excluding its own entity, can bring the other six dharmas into arising.” The primary mark of arising produces the other six but does not produce itself. What, then, produces it? “The arising of arising can bring the primary arising into arising, and the primary arising in turn brings the arising of arising into arising.” The second-level arising produces it, and it in turn produces the second level.

The opponent’s calculation is ingenious. Infinite regress occurs because each level requires another level above it. Now the first and second levels support each other, putting a roof over the staircase at the second floor. Thus he dares to say: “Although the three marks are conditioned, there is no infinite regress.” And “abiding and cessation are likewise”; the same arrangement applies to all three.

This proposal is not evasion. It genuinely tries to complete the account within a finite structure. The treatise master next shows what it has substituted for infinity.

5. Refuting the Seven Dharmas: Both Wait for the Other to Move First

The master’s refutation comes in three consecutive verses, each pressing closer than the last.

The first verse:

〔T30 0163a01〕“If this arising of arising can in turn bring the primary arising into arising, yet the arising of arising comes from the primary arising, how can it bring the primary arising into arising?”

The prose offers just one sentence: “If the arising of arising can bring the primary arising into arising, but the primary arising has not brought the arising of arising into arising, how can the arising of arising bring the primary arising into arising?” The arising of arising is supposed to produce the primary arising, yet it is itself produced by the primary arising. Before the primary arising produces it, it simply is not there. How can something not yet there set to work?

The second verse turns the same question around:

“If this primary arising can bring the arising of arising into arising, yet the primary arising comes from that arising of arising, how can it bring the arising of arising into arising?”

The prose is more precise: “The dharma called arising of arising should bring the primary arising into arising and is therefore named arising of arising. Yet the primary arising has not in fact arisen; how can it bring the arising of arising into arising?” The very meaning of the name “arising of arising” is that it is charged with producing the primary arising. Before it performs that function, the primary arising has not arisen. By what could a primary arising that has not arisen produce the arising of arising?

The opponent’s final retreat concerns tense: do not speak of before and after; speak of the process underway. While the arising of arising is arising, it simultaneously produces the primary arising. The master’s third verse:

“While this arising of arising is arising, it may bring the primary arising into arising; yet the arising of arising has not arisen, so how can it bring the primary arising into arising?”

The prose adds only: “Yet the entity of this arising of arising has not arisen and cannot bring the primary arising into arising.”

After these three verses the matter is clear. The seven-dharma proposal has not brought the staircase to a top; it has bent an endless straight road into a circle. The circle looks closed and complete, but every point on it awaits the point before it. In an infinite regress, one never reaches the end; in mutual dependence, one cannot take even the first step. The opponent meant to avoid the first difficulty and has entered a tighter one.

6. The Lamp Illuminates Itself: If Dispelling Darkness Is Illumination, What Did the Lamp Illuminate?

Pressed this far, the opponent introduces a powerful analogy—an everyday experience that everyone assumes needs no proof: “Suppose that while the arising of arising is arising, it can bring itself and others into arising, just as a lamp, when lit, can illuminate itself and others.”

When a lamp is lit, it illuminates the things in the room and at the same time reveals itself. If illumination can illuminate itself and others, why can arising not bring itself and others into arising?

The master’s reply does not begin with arising. It first dismantles the lamp itself:

“Within the lamp itself there is originally no darkness, nor is there darkness where it stands; only dispelling darkness is called illumination, so what exactly does the lamp illuminate?”

The third line is crucial: how does the word “illuminate” earn its meaning? Illumination is not an isolated power; it is spoken in relation to darkness—only the dispelling of darkness is called illumination. The prose is steady: “The lamp’s own entity has no darkness, and the place where its light abides has no darkness.” There is originally no darkness inside the lamp, and where the light is present darkness is already absent. If there is no darkness to dispel in either place, what portion of darkness does so-called self-illumination remove?

Thus the master concludes: “The lamp does not dispel darkness in itself or elsewhere; therefore it illuminates neither itself nor others.”

This refutation does not claim that the room is not bright. Of course the room is bright. The master dismantles the word “illumination” when treated as a single activity possessing its own intrinsic nature. You hoped to use it to prove that one thing can act upon itself, but the word itself can be established only through what stands opposite it.

7. Does the Lamp Reach Darkness? One Lamp and All the Darkness in the World

The opponent is unconvinced and replies naturally: “Because a lamp can dispel darkness when it is lit, there is no darkness within the lamp or where it stands.” Precisely because the lamp dispelled the darkness at the moment it was lit, no darkness can now be seen. You say there is no darkness to dispel only because it has already been dispelled.

The master answers in two verses. The first asks about time:

“How can one say that a lamp dispels darkness when it is lit? At the moment this lamp is first lit, it has not reached the darkness.”

“If the lamp does not reach darkness when it is lit, then because it has not reached the darkness, it should not be said to have dispelled it.” At the moment the lamp is first lit, its light has not reached the darkness. Without reaching it, one cannot speak of dispelling it.

If the opponent says contact is unnecessary and the lamp can dispel darkness across a distance, the master’s second verse immediately presses the principle to its limit:

“If the lamp has not reached the darkness and can nevertheless dispel it, then lighting a lamp here should dispel all darkness everywhere.”

“Lighting a lamp here should dispel all darkness throughout the world, because it equally fails to reach any of it.” If noncontact permits dispelling, noncontact applies equally to nearby darkness, distant darkness, and all darkness under heaven. One lamp lit here should extinguish the whole world’s darkness at once. “Yet in fact lighting a lamp here cannot dispel all darkness throughout the world.”

This is the master’s consistent method: accept the opponent’s principle and carry it through completely. If it is truly a principle, it must hold everywhere. If it becomes absurd somewhere, it was not a principle.

8. Darkness Should Also Conceal Itself: Privilege Cannot Be Granted to Only One Side

The refutation is not yet complete. The master adds a stroke from the side of symmetry:

“If a lamp can illuminate itself and also illuminate others, then darkness likewise should conceal both itself and others.”

Lamp and darkness stand in opposition. If you grant the lamp a power that acts upon itself—illuminating itself and others—then the darkness on the opposite side should likewise conceal itself and others: it should obscure elsewhere and obscure itself as well.

Yet “although darkness and the lamp are opposed, darkness cannot conceal itself or others.” No one says that darkness has concealed itself. The master therefore concludes: “The claim that a lamp illuminates itself and others is untenable; thus your analogy is incorrect.”

Once the analogy falls, the measure of persuasiveness borrowed from it falls too. An analogy can accompany an argument for a distance, but it cannot stand in the argument’s place.

9. Neither What Has Arisen nor What Has Not Arisen Can Bring Itself into Arising

With the analogy dismantled, the master returns to the issue and directly examines the words “self-arising”:

“If this arising has not yet arisen, how can it bring itself into arising? if it brings itself into arising only after it has arisen, then since it has arisen, what need is there to arise?”

There are only two possibilities: “It should arise either after it has arisen or while it has not yet arisen.”

On the side of not yet arisen: “If it arises while it has not yet arisen, ‘not yet arisen’ means that it does not yet exist. How can it bring itself into arising?” Not yet arisen means the thing is not yet there. Something not yet there cannot perform any act—including the act that would produce itself.

On the side of already arisen: “If one says that it arises after it has arisen, once it has arisen it is already arisen. Why must it arise again?” Once it has arisen, the work of arising is complete; doing it again is superfluous. The master stamps the point with an everyday sentence: “Once it has arisen, there is no further arising; once an act has been done, there is no further doing.”

Both sides empty out, and the conclusion follows: “Therefore arising does not bring itself into arising. If arising does not bring itself into arising, how can it bring another into arising?”

Something that cannot produce itself has no means to produce another. Thus “abiding and cessation are likewise”: abiding cannot make itself abide, and cessation cannot make itself cease.

At this point the gate’s positive work is complete: “Therefore the claim that arising, abiding, and cessation are the marks of the conditioned is untenable. Since arising, abiding, and cessation cannot be established as marks of the conditioned, conditioned dharmas are empty.”

10. The Unconditioned Side: Only the Cessation of the Conditioned Is Called Unconditioned

The master does not stop at the conditioned. He turns the same ruler toward the other side: “Because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are also empty. Why? The cessation of the conditioned is called unconditioned nirvāṇa; therefore nirvāṇa too is empty.”

The name “unconditioned” originates in the cessation of the conditioned. If what is ceased has no intrinsic nature, the side that ceases it likewise has no real basis upon which to depend.

The master then speaks once more from the unconditioned’s own marks: “Further, nonarising, nonabiding, and nonceasing are called the marks of the unconditioned. Nonarising, nonabiding, and nonceasing mean that the dharma is absent; what is absent should not serve as a mark.”

People often take nonarising, nonabiding, and nonceasing as the marks of nirvāṇa. But these three negations say precisely that the dharma is absent, and what is absent cannot serve as a credential. A negation does not become something one can hold merely because it is spoken solemnly.

11. Can Marklessness Serve as a Mark?

The opponent now refines this move: let marklessness itself be the mark—the mark of nirvāṇa is precisely that it has no mark.

The master’s pursuit consists of a single question, yet there is nowhere to hide: “If marklessness is the mark of nirvāṇa, by relying on what mark is this known to be markless?”

If you claim to know that it is markless, by what do you know it?

“If it is known as markless by relying on a mark, how can it be called markless?” If a positive mark allows you to recognize it, then it is still recognized by relying on a mark, and the word “markless” collapses.

“If it is known as markless by relying on marklessness, marklessness is absence; what is absent cannot be known.” If marklessness recognizes marklessness, marklessness is simply absence. Absence offers nothing to recognize.

One alternative collapses; the other offers no point of entry. Marklessness can function as a name but cannot stand as a credential.

12. The Unpatterned Robe: Why Can This Robe Be Recognized?

The opponent’s final example is clever precisely because it seems entirely successful: “Just as many robes all possess marks, while a single robe is markless, its marklessness is precisely taken as its mark; thus, when someone says to fetch the markless robe, the markless robe can be known and retrieved.”

A pile of robes all bear patterns, and only one is plain. Tell someone to bring the markless robe and the person really can bring it. This proves that marklessness can serve as a mark. Accordingly, “if arising, abiding, and cessation are marks of the conditioned, wherever arising, abiding, and cessation are absent should be known as a mark of the unconditioned.”

The master’s reply identifies the condition that makes the example work: “When arising, abiding, and cessation are sought through many causes and conditions, they are all empty; no mark of the conditioned can be found. How could the unconditioned be known through them?”

The plain robe can be recognized only because the patterned robes beside it are definite and countable. “Plain” is spoken relative to that group. Yet the work of this gate has been to dismantle that group of conditioned marks. If the three marks are conditioned, they regress infinitely; if unconditioned, they cannot serve as marks. The seven dharmas await one another and cannot begin; the lamp analogy fails; and both alternatives of self-arising are exhausted. That group never stood. There is therefore no fixed field of comparison that can, in reverse, point here and call it the unconditioned.

Thus the master presses: “Which fixed and determinate mark of the conditioned have you obtained, such that by it you know a markless place to be unconditioned?” Which determinate mark of the conditioned do you actually hold in your hand?

At the end the master adds an ordinary aside: “The analogy of the robe will be discussed in detail in the fifth gate below.” The robe will be examined once more. He has not expelled the analogy; he has reserved it for the place where it belongs.

13. Because the Three Things Are Empty, All Dharmas Are Empty

The gate closes in three sentences: “Therefore all conditioned dharmas are empty. Because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are also empty. Because conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, the self is also empty. Because these three things are empty, all dharmas are empty.”

Conditioned, unconditioned, and self—the three avenues of retreat are closed at once, with the same gesture that closes the first gate. The difference lies in the entrance. The first gate enters through conditions and counts jars, cloth, houses, butter, and sprouts. This gate enters through marks and counts the cow’s horns, jar’s lip, cart’s yoke, and a person’s hands and feet. Conditions ask how something came to be; marks ask by what it is recognized. The paths differ, but behind the gates lies the same ground.

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, distinguish recognizability from intrinsic entity. The master never once denies a cow’s horns or a jar’s lip. From beginning to end, he asks only this: can the three things you use as the shared credentials of conditioned dharmas stand on their own? Marks can be used for recognition; that does not make them a dharma’s intrinsic entity.

Second, notice whether a rule bites itself. The entire difficulty of the three marks lies here. If a general rule is truly general, it governs the very thing used to explain it. If you want to call a halt midway, you must first explain why that level receives an exemption.

Third, see that a circle too can be motionless. The seven-dharma proposal looks most like a solution because it has boundaries, a number, and assigned functions. Yet every item on the circle waits for another to move first. Avoiding infinity does not necessarily supply a starting point.

Fourth, do not let an analogy replace reasoning. Self-illumination by a lamp comes so readily to the tongue that one assumes it needs no examination. Once examined, the word “illumination” turns out to rely on darkness for its establishment.

Fifth, negation is not a final place to stand. Once the marks of the conditioned are refuted, one tries to retreat to the unconditioned; once marks of the unconditioned fail, one tries to retreat to marklessness. Even marklessness must have a credential if it is to be established. This gate examines that final plain robe as well.

Carried Forward: Illumination along the Same Axis

Everything above belongs to this gate’s own meaning. What follows looks alongside it through the “Examination of the Three Marks” in the Treatise on the Middle. This illumination is not the present treatise, but another formulation of the same principle elsewhere. Record without adjudicating.

On the difficulty of the three marks, the Treatise on the Middle establishes a verse almost identical to this gate:

“If arising is conditioned, it too should have the three marks; if arising is unconditioned, how can it be called a mark of the conditioned?”

The proposal of seven co-arising dharmas also appears in that chapter unchanged, its verse differing from this gate only in punctuation. The lamp analogy does as well. That chapter’s objection reads:

“Just as a lamp can illuminate itself and also illuminate others, the dharma of arising likewise brings itself and others into arising.”

Its answer reads:

“Within the lamp itself there is no darkness, nor is there darkness where it stands; only dispelling darkness is called illumination; without darkness there is no illumination.”

The two texts disclose one distinction. In this chapter of the Treatise on the Middle, Nāgārjuna gives the verses and Qingmu comments. The prose pursues an additional line through “because they mutually oppose”: abiding and cessation should not coexist at the time of arising, “just as light and darkness do not coexist.” This gate does not take that route but proceeds directly through infinite regress and mutual dependence. Further, the Treatise on the Middle ends the verse “without darkness there is no illumination,” whereas this gate asks “what exactly does the lamp illuminate?” One is a judgment, the other a question. The mark examined is the same; the force employed differs.

As for the analogy of the unpatterned robe, this gate itself states that it “will be discussed in detail in the fifth gate below.” That is an internal matter of the present treatise and need not be sought outside it.

Let parallel axes illuminate one another while each remains in its own place. This gate’s meaning is still governed by the prose of this gate.

We recognize things through marks. Seeing a pair of long tusks and a hanging trunk, we say it is an elephant; seeing upright ears and a hanging mane, we say it is a horse. A mark is the most ready instrument in our hands, so ready that ordinarily we never consider how it works.

This gate picks up that instrument and asks it one question: before you mark the thing you mean to indicate, does that thing already have a mark, or does it still lack one?

The author opens, “Next, all dharmas are empty.” The word “next” shows that this continues the preceding gates. Each gate has its own entrance, and this gate enters through the instrument itself. He asks “why?” and then gives a verse:

“A mark does not mark what has marks; nor does it mark what lacks marks; apart from what has and lacks marks, what could a mark possibly mark?”

The word mark appears six times in four lines, making the verse sound like a tongue twister, but its structure is very simple. The first two lines close one end each; the third says that no place exists beyond those two; the fourth leaves the instrument suspended by a question. The verse is not three arguments. It exhausts every place where one thing could stand. The extended prose below simply unfolds each of its four lines.

1. If It Already Has a Mark, What Does Your Mark Come to Do?

First end: “A mark does not mark a thing that has a mark.” Among things already possessing a mark, a mark does not mark.

Why? The author’s reason is only one short sentence: “If a dharma already has a mark, what further use is a mark?”

The force falls upon the word further. It does not say that marks are false. It says that here a mark has no work to do. If before you arrive a thing already possesses its own mark, then it is already recognizable. Your mark approaches something already recognized. The tool is not broken; it has no task.

Fearing that someone might think there is no harm in doing the work twice, the author takes another step: “If a mark could mark a thing that has a mark, there would be the fault of two marks.” Suppose you insist that this act of marking is effective and genuinely accomplishes its work. The thing then has two marks: “first, the mark already present; second, the mark that comes and marks it as having a mark.” The first is the mark the thing originally possessed; the second is the later mark that comes and makes it something marked.

See where the fault lies. It does not lie in the number two—an elephant already has tusks, trunk, and ears, and marks were never limited to one. The fault is that these two marks are two agents doing the same job. If the first mark already makes the thing marked, the later one is superfluous. If only the later one makes the thing marked, the first never truly did its work. The inference has no end: if the second mark alone counts, then the second itself already has a mark and requires a third to mark it. The author does not elaborate; he simply concludes, “Therefore, among things having marks, a mark has nothing it can mark.”

2. If It Lacks Marks, What Do You Give the Mark to Mark?

Once one end is blocked, the mind naturally retreats to the other: say that the thing originally lacks marks and receives them only when a mark arrives. The author answers just as directly: “Among things lacking marks, a mark likewise has nothing it can mark.”

What follows is the gate’s most important question: “What dharma is called markless such that what has a mark could mark it?”

What dharma is called markless, allowing you to mark it with what has a mark? The question seeks not a reason but an object. You say a markless thing waits to be marked; point it out. Once you can point it out, the point indicated is already a mark. If you cannot point it out, nothing waits there. This question does not ask for a reason. It asks for the thing itself.

The author does not remain in abstraction. He immediately brings in an elephant:

“An elephant has a pair of tusks, a hanging trunk, three swellings on its head, ears like winnowing baskets, a spine like a bent bow, a large hanging belly, hair at the tip of its tail, and four thick round feet. These are the elephant’s marks.”

Eight things are counted one by one: two tusks, one hanging trunk, three swellings upon the head, ears large as winnowing baskets, a back curved like a bow, a great hanging belly, hair at the tip of the tail, and four thick round feet. This is an ancient person’s complete list for recognizing an elephant—not a definition, but a method of recognition.

After counting, the author gives the next sentence: “Apart from these marks, there is no further elephant for a mark to mark.”

Remove these eight things. What remains for you to mark? No bare and markless elephant stands there waiting to be dressed in tusks and trunk. There is not first an elephant to which elephant-marks are later added. Once the elephant’s marks are exhausted, the elephant is exhausted.

The same question is then asked again with a horse: “A horse has upright ears, a hanging mane, four hooved feet, and hair along the entire tail.” Its ears are upright, its mane hangs, its four feet are hooves—unlike the elephant’s “four thick round feet”—and its tail is covered in hair. “Apart from these marks, there is no further horse for a mark to mark.”

Why give two examples? With only one, someone may suspect a peculiarity of the case. Elephant and horse, one massive and one familiar, have completely different forms, yet are counted in exactly the same way: the conditions of recognition are listed, and apart from those conditions, the thing does not exist. Two examples using the same method show that this is not a property of elephants but a property of marks.

3. Beyond the Two Positions There Is No Third

After traversing both ends, the author gathers them: “Thus among what has marks, a mark has nothing to mark; among what lacks marks, a mark likewise has nothing to mark.”

At this point a reader may still hope for an intermediate state—half marked and half unmarked, or perhaps “about to have marks but not yet.” The author closes that road as well: “Apart from what has marks and what lacks marks, there is no third dharma for a mark to mark.”

Having marks and lacking marks form an exhaustive division. A thing either already has marks or does not yet have them; there is no third status that can serve as what is marked. Since neither position receives a mark, and no place exists outside them, only one conclusion remains: “Therefore, a mark has nothing to mark.”

A mark has no place to mark. This does not mean that we cannot recognize elephants and horses—the author himself has just recognized an elephant through eight things. It means that marking cannot find an independently standing position from which to operate. There is not first a thing called mark that then acts upon another thing called object.

4. The Recognized Side Falls Empty Too

Having refuted this far, the author turns his hand and examines the other side: “Because a mark has nothing to mark, the dharma called what is marked is unestablished too.”

“What is marked” is the side indicated by the mark. Since the mark has nowhere to mark, the identity of “what is marked” cannot stand. The reason is one sentence: “Through a mark one knows that this matter is called what is marked.”

This sentence is the hinge of the gate. What is marked is not a preexisting thing to which a label is later attached. Its identity as “that which is marked” comes from the mark itself. Since the side of the mark cannot be established, the side of what is marked has no source for its identity. The two sides are not one real and one nominal; each gives the other its name.

Thus, “through this conditioned relation, mark and what is marked are both empty.”

The author next carries this step to the myriad things: “Because mark and what is marked are empty, the myriad things are empty too.” How does he move from marks to the myriad things? He answers: “Apart from mark and what is marked, no thing exists.”

Every “thing” of which we speak is nothing but something recognized through certain marks—the pair of mark and what is marked. Apart from this pair, no other collection called the myriad things exists. When mark and what is marked are empty, the myriad things are naturally empty as well.

5. Even “Nothing” Depends upon “Something” in Order to Stand

Once things are empty, the mind has one last place to go: say there is no thing, a nonthing. The author anticipates this step too: “Because no thing exists, nonthing does not exist either.”

His reason is extremely concise: “Because a thing ceases, it is called no thing. If no thing exists, what ceased such that it is called no thing?”

How does the name no thing arise? Only when a thing ceases does one speak of no thing. If fundamentally no thing exists, what ceased to give it that name? “Nothing” is a name that must be fed by “something.” When the side of something is empty, the side of nothing loses its support.

This move has the same intent as the preceding refutation of marks. There the identity of what is marked came from the mark; here the name no thing comes from thing. Whatever stands only through its opposite cannot in turn become its own ground.

6. Threefold Exhaustion

The final three sentences gather the argument upward:

“Because thing and no thing are empty, all conditioned dharmas are empty; because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are empty too; because conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, self is empty too.”

Because thing and no thing are empty, all conditioned dharmas are empty, for conditioned dharmas are nothing but these matters of thing and no thing. Because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are empty too, for the name unconditioned is established against the conditioned, and the preceding gate already used the same reasoning for nirvāṇa. Once conditioned and unconditioned are empty, self is empty too, for self is spoken on the basis of these dharmas; when the dharmas afford no support, self has nowhere to rest.

The gate closes here. It began with the most ordinary instrument: where does a mark fall? The answer is that it cannot fall upon what has marks, cannot fall upon what lacks marks, and has no place outside the two. Follow this question to its end and it arrives at the final words: “because conditioned and unconditioned are empty, self is empty too.”

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, remember the eight things. The author recognizes an elephant through tusks, trunk, head, ears, spine, belly, tail, and feet, omitting none. He first makes the method of recognition clear, then asks: apart from these, whom do you intend to mark?

Second, keep watch over the word “further.” “What further use is a mark?” This refutation does not say that the mark is wrong, but that at this position it has no work to do. Having no work and doing the work wrongly are two different things.

Third, do not search for a third position. Between two difficulties the hand most readily reaches toward the middle. The author expressly says, “there is no third dharma for a mark to mark.” Having and lacking marks exhaust what can be said.

Fourth, notice that “no thing” is a name as well. To think one can retreat from existence to nonexistence is to treat “nothing” as solid ground. “Because a thing ceases, it is called no thing”—even its name is borrowed.

Carried Forward: Illumination from Treatises along the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows is a cross-light from the axis of the Three Treatises. The illumination is not this treatise; it simply records without deciding how the same doctrinal meaning is stated elsewhere.

When the Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of the Six Elements,” discusses space, it follows almost the same road. It first establishes the side lacking marks:

“This dharma without marks does not exist anywhere; within a dharma without marks, a mark has nothing to mark.”

It then says that neither side receives a mark and no further place exists outside them:

“Within what has marks and lacks marks, a mark has nowhere to abide; apart from what has marks and lacks marks, it abides nowhere else.”

The example in that treatise’s extended prose is likewise an animal, though there it is a cow: “Having a hump and horns, hair at the end of its tail, and hanging dewlap beneath its neck—these are called a cow’s marks. Apart from these marks, no cow exists.” It first counts hump, horns, tail hair, and hanging flesh beneath the neck, then says that no cow exists apart from them. The method is exactly the same as this gate’s counting eight marks of an elephant and four of a horse. The difference lies in what is addressed. That chapter examines space among the six elements and thus begins by asking about “the time before the mark of space existed.” This gate examines marks themselves and therefore directly establishes its objection through what has and lacks marks. The road is the same; the faculties addressed differ.

As for the specialized commentary on this gate, Jizang’s Commentary on the Twelve Gate Treatise is indeed extant. Its text was not independently rechecked in this round, so its existence alone is recorded without excerpt.

Read together along one axis, each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s own extended prose.

We recognize things through marks. Seeing smoke, we know there is fire; smoke is the mark. Seeing someone constantly visit a monastery, ask everyone about the Dharma, and give whenever meeting suffering, we say that person has faith; those three acts are marks. The word mark is used plainly in the treatise: through it a dharma is recognized. The side recognized is what the author calls “what is marked.”

This gate asks only about the seam between these two sides, mark and what is marked. Are they the same thing? If they are the same, recognizing and recognized are not distinct, so recognition has nothing upon which to operate. If they are two things, each independently established, why does the mark happen to indicate that particular dharma? When the author opens this seam and looks inside, he finds that neither identity nor difference can hold the two sides. The pair of names, mark and what is marked, therefore has no self-standing foundation.

1. Opening Verse: Neither Identity nor Difference Can Be Obtained

Like the other gates, this one begins by establishing its principle: “All dharmas are empty. Why?” Then comes the verse:

“Mark and what is marked cannot be obtained as identical or different; if neither identity nor difference exists, how could these two be established?”

The verse says only two things. First, neither identity nor difference can be obtained between mark and what is marked. Second, if neither identity nor difference exists, the two have no means of establishment.

The extended prose lays these statements flat: “The mark and what is marked cannot be obtained as one and cannot be obtained as different. If neither identity nor difference can be obtained, these two are unestablished. Thus mark and what is marked are both empty.” It then moves one step farther: “Because mark and what is marked are empty, all dharmas are empty.”

This inference matters. Mark and what is marked are not two obscure things. They are the positions occupied whenever any dharma is known: every dharma spoken lies on the side of what is marked, and whatever is used to speak it lies on the side of mark. If this pair lacks intrinsic nature, all dharmas established through the pair lack intrinsic nature too. The gate seems to refute only two terms, but it comes to rest upon all dharmas.

2. The Opponent’s Three Proposals: An Honest Inventory

The questioner is not vague. He exhausts the possibilities in one breath: “Among things, sometimes the mark is precisely what is marked; sometimes the mark differs from what is marked; sometimes one part is the mark and the remainder what is marked.” The mark is what is marked; the mark differs from what is marked; the mark is one part of what is marked—identity, difference, and part exhaust the proposals. Each comes with examples rather than empty assertion.

For the first proposal he gives consciousness and feeling: “The mark of consciousness is consciousness; apart from the consciousness used, there is no further consciousness.” What marks consciousness? Cognition. Yet outside cognition there is no separate consciousness standing there; mark and dharma are one. Feeling is the same: receiving is feeling, and apart from feeling that receives, there is no other feeling.

For the second proposal he gives nirvāṇa and faith. The cessation of craving is called nirvāṇa, yet craving is conditioned and contaminated while cessation is unconditioned and uncontaminated. Mark and what is marked belong to two categories; how could they not differ? Faith is even clearer. The three marks of faith are delight in approaching good people, delight in hearing the Dharma, and delight in practicing giving. “Because these three are bodily and verbal activities, they belong to the form aggregate; because faith is a mental factor, it belongs to the formations aggregate.” The marks lie in the form aggregate, what is marked in the formations aggregate. Two aggregates are plainly distinct; if this is not difference, what is?

For the third proposal he gives right view and the three conditioned marks: “Right view is the mark of the path, but within the path it is one part.” Right view is indeed a mark of the path, yet it is only one of eight factors. Arising, abiding, and cessation are marks of conditioned dharmas, and these three are likewise only a small part within the vast field of conditioned dharmas.

After listing the three proposals, the opponent concludes that the claim “mark and what is marked are unestablished because identity and difference are unestablished” is incorrect.

This inventory deserves respect. It is not sophistry; it honestly states the three ways recognition appears in ordinary life. Sometimes we speak as though mark and marked were one, sometimes as though they were two, and sometimes as though one were a part. The author does not say that these expressions cannot be used conventionally. He asks whether any one can stand as the real relation between mark and what is marked.

3. A Finger Cannot Touch Itself; an Eye Cannot See Itself

He first refutes the proposal of identity. The author begins by explaining the origin of the two names: “Because it is knowable through a mark, it is called what is marked; that which is used is called the mark.” Through one side a dharma is known; the side known is called what is marked, and what is used is called the mark. Once the names are established, agent and object are separated: one side is used, the other is reached by that use.

Then come the gate’s only two similes, both extremely short: “No thing can know itself, just as a finger cannot touch itself and an eye cannot see itself.”

A finger touches everything yet cannot touch itself; an eye sees everything yet cannot see itself. This is not that the finger lacks sensitivity or the eye lacks brightness. The acts of touching and seeing themselves require two sides. When agent and object are the same entity, the act cannot be accomplished. If consciousness were both mark and what is marked, it would have to recognize itself, exactly like a finger touching itself or an eye seeing itself.

4. Once Distinguished, They Cannot Be Called One

The second cut is lighter but harder to avoid: “If the mark were precisely what is marked, one should not distinguish and say, ‘this is the mark and this is what is marked.’” Conversely, “if one distinguishes this as the mark and this as what is marked, one should not say the mark is precisely what is marked.”

This cut uses the opponent’s own statement. Once he says, “the mark is precisely what is marked,” the sentence already contains two terms and two positions. If they truly were one thing, the sentence could not arise. The sentence asserting one has itself already stated two. The author needs no additional reason; he simply returns the opponent’s words.

5. The Mark Is Cause; What Is Marked Is Effect

The third cut turns to cause and effect: “If the mark were precisely what is marked, cause and effect would be one. Why? The mark is cause and what is marked is effect, so the two would be one.”

Why is the mark cause and what is marked effect? Because it is through the mark that the dharma becomes known. The mark is relied upon first; the dharma then occupies the position of the knowable. There is an order and a dependence between them. If mark and what is marked are one, this order collapses and cause becomes effect. The author judges in only three words: “yet in fact they are not one.”

These words should be read with the preceding gates. The author already said under causes and conditions that in ordinary things cause precedes and effect follows. A cause is a cause precisely by not being its effect. Once mark is identified with what is marked, the pair of cause and effect disappears as well. The first proposal has now been exhausted.

6. Your Own Words Say “Cessation of Craving,” Not “Craving”

He turns to the second proposal, that mark differs from what is marked. Again, the author does not establish another principle but returns to the opponent’s example.

In the nirvāṇa example, the author points to the opponent’s own words: “You say that the cessation of craving is the mark of nirvāṇa; you do not say that craving is the mark of nirvāṇa.” Your mark is the cessation of craving, not craving. The distinction is subtle but governs the whole argument. If you said craving was nirvāṇa’s mark, the mark would lie in the conditioned and contaminated while what is marked lay in the unconditioned and uncontaminated; the two would indeed be apart. “If you said craving is nirvāṇa’s mark, one could say that mark and what is marked differ.” But you said cessation of craving. The cessation of craving is precisely nirvāṇa itself and not outside it. Therefore, “if you say that the cessation of craving is nirvāṇa’s mark, you cannot say mark and what is marked differ.”

The opponent tried to prove difference through craving and cessation belonging to two categories. The author looks and finds that the mark actually posited already lies on the side of what is marked. The author has changed no word for him; the opponent said it himself.

7. If Faith Lacked Faith, These Three Things Would Not Exist

The faith example is refuted in the same way, through the opponent’s own words. The three marks and faith “do not differ,” for one reason only: “If faith lacked faith, these three things would not exist.”

Approaching good people, hearing the Dharma, and giving occur through body and speech and may appear separate from faith in mind. But remove faith and these three cease to be marks of faith. A person may approach good people, hear the Dharma, or give for other reasons; then those acts mark nothing called faith. They can serve as faith’s marks precisely because they do not separate from faith. Belonging to the form and formations aggregates concerns their classification, not that this pair can be divided into two independently standing things.

8. The Mark Would Require Another Mark, Leading to Infinite Regress

The third cut reaches every case: “Furthermore, if mark and what is marked differed, the mark itself would require another mark, leading to infinite regress.”

If the mark truly were another thing external to what it marks, then it too would be a dharma. As a dharma, it needs a mark to be recognized; that mark is another dharma and needs a further mark. The road has no end. The author judges only, “This is incorrect. Therefore mark and what is marked cannot differ.”

The author already used infinite regress when discussing the three conditioned marks. Whenever the marking side is established as an independent thing, this road of regress opens by itself. The second proposal is now exhausted.

9. The Lamp Simile: Can It Illuminate Itself?

At this point the opponent changes route and brings forward a powerful simile: “A lamp can illuminate itself and also illuminate another; likewise a mark can mark itself and also another.”

A lamp truly appears to work this way. Lit in a dark room, it illuminates everything in the room and illuminates itself. If a lamp can illuminate itself, why can a mark not mark itself?

The author’s answer has two parts, both extremely short. First: “Your lamp simile was already refuted under the three conditioned marks.” The treatise has already addressed this simile when discussing arising, abiding, and cessation. There it considered light and darkness: “the lamp itself contains no darkness, and the place occupied by its light contains no darkness either.” Darkness must be broken for the name illumination to arise. With no darkness to break, self-illumination points nowhere. The conclusion there is that “the lamp neither breaks its own darkness nor another’s; therefore it neither illuminates itself nor another.” The simile need not be refuted again in this gate; it has already fallen in the preceding one.

The second part is more direct: “Moreover, you contradict your prior statement. Above you said mark and what is marked differ, but now you say the mark can mark itself and another.” You just maintained their difference, yet now say that the mark can be its own mark. If the mark marks itself, it is also its own what-is-marked. Where, then, is the difference? The two claims strike each other.

10. A Partial Mark Still Falls within Identity or Difference

The final return is to the third proposal, the part. The author handles it in only two sentences: “This meaning falls either within identity or within difference. Since identity and difference have already been refuted, one should know that a partial mark is refuted too.”

You take one part of what is marked as its mark. Is that part identical to or different from the whole? If identical, every cut used to refute identity applies unchanged; if different, every cut against difference applies unchanged. A partial relation sounds like a third kind, but only cuts once more between identity and difference; the two resulting pieces still stand as identical or different. Right view and the path, or arising, abiding, and cessation and conditioned dharmas, are all the same.

11. There Is No Third Dharma

Once the three proposals are exhausted, the author closes the gate: “Through these various conditioned relations, mark and what is marked cannot be obtained as one and cannot be obtained as different. There is no third dharma that establishes them. Therefore mark and what is marked are both empty.”

The words “there is no third dharma” are the bar across this gate. After identity and difference are refuted, the mind often retains one hope: perhaps a relation exists that is neither identical nor different. The author expressly says there is no third dharma. Between mark and what is marked no relation beyond identity or difference can be established. Since neither can be obtained, this pair has nowhere to rest.

The final sentence thus answers the opening: “because these two are empty, all dharmas are empty.”

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, recognition is always two-sided. A finger cannot touch itself and an eye cannot see itself; this does not describe defective faculties, but that agent and object cannot be the same entity. Every account claiming that something recognizes or proves itself stands beneath this cut.

Second, attend to the author’s method of refutation. He establishes almost no new principle. In three of four movements he returns the opponent’s own sentence: you said cessation of craving; you distinguished the two; you said they differ. The conditions of a statement follow as soon as the statement is uttered.

Third, know that “part” is not a retreat. Driven into the dilemma of identity and difference, one readily says that things are neither completely the same nor completely different. This gate closes that road beforehand: part merely divides identity and difference into smaller pieces; it does not produce a third thing.

Fourth, remember that what is empty is not recognition but intrinsic nature. The author never says one cannot know fire through smoke or faith through three acts. He asks whether, when you speak of mark and what is marked, each side possesses an entity standing by itself. If so, identity and difference cannot be avoided. If not, knowing a dharma through a mark continues unchanged, only without a foundation.

Carried Forward: Illumination along the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows is one cross-light from the axis of the Three Treatises. The illumination is not this treatise; it simply records without deciding how the same simile is stated elsewhere.

The simile of a lamp illuminating itself also appears in the Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of the Three Marks,” where it is used to prove that the dharma of arising can produce itself:

“As a lamp can illuminate itself and also illuminate another, so the dharma of arising produces itself and produces another.”

That treatise first refutes it through light and darkness:

“Within the lamp itself there is no darkness; where it abides there is no darkness either; breaking darkness is called illumination—without darkness there is no illumination.”

It then turns the objection around:

“If a lamp can illuminate itself and also illuminate another, darkness should likewise darken itself and also darken another.”

If a lamp, because it opposes darkness, can illuminate itself and another, then darkness, because it opposes light, should cover itself and another. Yet darkness does not cover itself, and that passage concludes, “therefore the lamp simile is incorrect.”

That chapter obstructs the self-production of the dharma of arising; this gate obstructs the self-marking of a mark. The same lamp illuminates different questions in the two places, while the reason it fails is shared. The meaning of this gate remains governed by its own extended prose.

The preceding gates ask about arising, conditions, marks, and identity and difference. At the seventh gate, the author changes to a question closest to ordinary life: when a dharma “exists” and when that dharma eventually “does not exist,” do these occur at the same time or at different times?

The opening remains the same general statement: “Next, all dharmas are empty.” But the reason given by this gate is new: “Existence and nonexistence cannot be obtained at one time; nor can they be obtained at different times.” Placed within the same time, they cannot be found; placed in separate times, they still cannot be found. Both panels of the gate close together. It is not that one side is first refuted and the other later repaired.

1. The Verse’s Four Lines Ask about Conjunction and Separation at Once

“Existence and nonexistence do not occur at one time; existence apart from nonexistence does not exist either; if existence exists without separating from nonexistence, then existence should always be nonexistent.”

The first line closes conjunction: existence and nonexistence do not occur at the same time. The second closes separation: remove nonexistence and leave existence alone, and no such existence exists. The third and fourth turn back and press the side of separation once more. If existence does not separate from nonexistence and still exists, this existence should “always be nonexistent”—it would have been within nonexistence from beginning to end.

Not one of these four lines says that a jar cannot hold water. What is asked is the word exists: when you say that a thing exists, do you mean it possesses an entity standing by itself and having nothing to do with nonexistence?

2. Opposition: No Death at Arising, No Arising at Death

Why does conjunction fail? “The natures of existence and nonexistence oppose one another and should not coexist within a single dharma.” Two opposing matters cannot sit together in the same dharma.

The example lies within one’s own body: “There is no death at the time of arising and no arising at the time of death.” The instant of arising is not the instant of death. The author says little more here, noting only that “this has already been explained in the Treatise on the Middle,” and saves his force for the more difficult side below.

3. Separation: Apart from Nonexistence, How Could Existence Exist?

The opponent therefore changes to separation: “If existence exists apart from nonexistence, there is no fault.” Move nonexistence entirely away and speak only of existence. Surely this avoids the difficulty.

The author says, “This is untenable,” and immediately asks, “Apart from nonexistence, how could existence exist?”

The reason is not added by the author from outside; it already belongs to the opponent’s own account of dharmas. The author first recalls a statement from the preceding gate: “As explained before, when a dharma arises, seven dharmas arise together, counting its own entity.” Among them is this one: “Existence and impermanence always arise together.” What is impermanence? “Impermanence is the mark of cessation and is therefore called nonexistence.”

This point must be seen clearly: “nonexistence” is not something the author has added to the opponent’s view; it is one member of the opponent’s own account of dharmas. You say impermanence arises together with the dharma, impermanence is the mark of cessation, and the mark of cessation is nonexistence. To speak of existence “apart from nonexistence” is therefore to remove one member from your own system. The author concludes: “Thus, apart from nonexistence, existence cannot arise.”

4. It Cannot Be Removed, but It Cannot Remain Either

Separation fails, so let them remain unseparated. Yet nonseparation also exacts a price: “If existence arises without separating from impermanence, existence would always be nonexistent.” If impermanence arises and remains together with existence, existence bears destruction from the very moment of its birth and so remains in nonexistence from start to finish.

Once within nonexistence, one thing immediately loses its place: “at the beginning it would have no abiding, because it would always be perishing.” There would be no initial interval of abiding, for the dharma would always be in destruction.

Here the author uses no remote principle. He simply points to a presently evident fact: “yet abiding does in fact exist; therefore existence is not always nonexistent.” Dharmas do possess an interval of abiding, something the opponent himself acknowledges by establishing a mark called abiding. This very abiding blocks the claim of perpetual nonexistence.

Thus both ends are blocked: “If existence arises apart from impermanence, this too is incorrect. Why? Apart from impermanence, existence in fact does not arise.” Apart from impermanence, existence cannot arise; not apart from impermanence, existence is always nonexistent. The two words existence and nonexistence cannot cohere together or separately.

5. The Opponent’s Strongest Move: Impermanence Is Present but Has Not Yet Acted

At this point the opponent offers the gate’s strongest solution: “When existence arises, impermanence is already present but not yet active; at cessation it becomes active and destroys this existence.” Impermanence is indeed there, but simply has not acted. Only at the time of cessation does it act.

Unfolded, this is an entire system: “arising, abiding, cessation, aging, and acquisition all await their time to become active.” When existence begins, arising functions and makes it arise; in the interval between arising and cessation, abiding functions and holds it; at cessation, impermanence functions and destroys it; aging “changes arising into abiding and abiding into cessation”; impermanence destroys; and acquisition “constantly brings the four matters to completion.” Six factors coexist within one dharma, each doing its work at its appointed time. The conclusion is: “Therefore, although a dharma arises together with impermanence, existence is not always nonexistent.”

This solution is difficult to refute because it divides being present from functioning: the thing has long been there, but its function is not yet manifest. The author’s three following “furthermores” all enter precisely through this seam.

6. First Answer: If They Are Together, They Must Remain Together throughout

The author’s first sentence simply recites the opponent’s rule in the opponent’s own terms: “You say that impermanence is the mark of cessation and arises together with existence. Then when it arises, this existence should perish; and when it perishes, this existence should arise.”

Co-arising means being present together. Since the mark of cessation is already present at arising, the dharma should perish as it arises. By the same token, because the mark of arising remains present at destruction, it should arise as it is destroyed. To be half together and half in a queue is not co-arising.

7. Second Answer: Neither Arising nor Cessation

Next comes the shortest cut: “Furthermore, neither arising nor cessation is established.” Why? “At the time of cessation there should be no arising, and at the time of arising there should be no cessation, because arising and cessation oppose one another.”

This turns the rule of opposition from the second section back upon the marks of arising and cessation themselves. Opposites do not coexist. The opponent used this rule to say that existence and nonexistence do not share a time; the author establishes no new rule, but only requires consistency.

Not one new premise enters this cut. Since the opponent uses opposition to establish that existence and nonexistence are not simultaneous, the author uses the same measure upon arising and cessation: these two marks likewise oppose one another and cannot share a place. The instrument that refutes the opponent’s system is taken from the opponent’s own rule. This is the shared method of all three answers and why the gate reads without digression.

8. Third Answer: Abiding Opposes Destruction, Aging Opposes Abiding—“This Is Confusion”

The third answer applies opposition across the entire set of marks: “In your account, impermanence arises together with abiding. When existence perishes there should be no abiding, and if abiding exists there should be no destruction. Why? Because abiding and destruction oppose one another.” There is no abiding at the time of destruction and no destruction at the time of abiding. Another pair follows: “at the time of aging there is no abiding, and at the time of abiding there is no aging.”

The conclusion is severe: “Therefore, your claim that arising, abiding, cessation, aging, impermanence, and acquisition originally arise together is confusion.” The six do not each occupy their place; they obstruct one another.

9. Seven Examples: A Mark Is Spoken in Terms of What Can Actually Be Done

Where is the root of the confusion? The author asks: “If existence arises together with impermanence, and impermanence is the mark of destruction, then ordinary things have no mark of destruction when they arise and no mark of destruction while they abide. At those times, is this not precisely the absence of the mark of impermanence?”

You say impermanence is now present, but now no mark of destruction exists. When there is no mark of destruction, to what do the words mark of impermanence point?

The author gives seven examples in succession, all drawn from mind and life without borrowing a single external object: “Because something can cognize, it is called consciousness; if it cannot cognize, it lacks the mark of consciousness. Because something can receive, it is called feeling; if it cannot receive, it lacks the mark of feeling. Because something can remember, it is called mindfulness; if it cannot remember, it lacks the mark of mindfulness.” One must be able to cognize to be called consciousness, receive to be called feeling, and remember to be called mindfulness. Then come the four marks: “Emergence is the mark of arising; without emergence there is no mark of arising. Sustaining is the mark of abiding; without sustaining there is no mark of abiding. Transformation is the mark of aging; without transformation there is no mark of aging. The exhaustion of life is the mark of death; without the exhaustion of life there is no mark of death.”

All seven examples speak in one voice: a mark is not something hidden inside; it is spoken in terms of the work it can perform. When the work can be performed, the mark exists. When it cannot, the mark is absent.

The final sentence now follows naturally: “In the same way, destruction is the mark of impermanence; apart from destruction there is no mark of impermanence.” Destruction is the mark of impermanence. Apart from destruction, the word impermanence points nowhere. The phrase “already present but not yet active” has lost its footing: when it is not active, its mark is precisely absent.

10. What Use Is There in Co-arising?

The author therefore asks directly: “If during arising and abiding impermanence is present but cannot destroy existence, and only later can destroy it, what use is there in co-arising?”

It does not destroy at arising and does not destroy during abiding. What does it do by co-arising now? If co-arising performs no work, the words are an empty attachment.

The author carries the opponent’s claim to its end for him: “Impermanence should exist only when existence is destroyed.” Then simply speak of impermanence when destruction occurs. This is exactly what the author establishes: impermanence is not a thing hidden in advance awaiting activation, but a name spoken upon destruction. He therefore concludes, “Thus, the claim that impermanence co-arises but destroys existence only later is untenable.”

11. Empty All the Way to Sentient Beings

〔T30 0165a04〕 Both ends exhausted, the author concludes: “Thus, existence and nonexistence cannot be established together and cannot be established separately. Therefore, existence and nonexistence are empty.”

What follows is a line reaching farther with every clause: “Because existence and nonexistence are empty, all conditioned dharmas are empty; because all conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are empty too; because conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, sentient beings are empty too.”

Conditioned dharmas are called conditioned precisely through such marks as arising, abiding, and cessation. Since the marks cannot stand independently, the conditioned are empty. The unconditioned is named in contrast to the conditioned; when the conditioned are empty, the unconditioned have nothing against which to stand. Sentient being is a name spoken upon conditioned and unconditioned dharmas; when both sides are empty, this name too points to no intrinsic nature.

The gate’s weight lies in refusing to let anything remain within an object under the guise of “not yet active.” Destruction is not a thing buried in advance within the object, but a name established when the object reaches that point. A dharma abides for a time and also perishes; destruction is absent while it abides and abiding is absent while it perishes. This is precisely the appearance of dependence on conditions, not six intrinsically existent marks first installed within one dharma and then arranged in an order of activation.

Carried Forward: Illumination along the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows is one cross-light along the same axis. The illumination is not this treatise; it simply records without deciding how the same doctrinal meaning is stated elsewhere.

Chapter fifteen of the Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of Existence and Nonexistence,” shares this gate’s name and edge but enters elsewhere. That chapter first gives a verse:

“If existence is not established, how could nonexistence be established? Because an existent dharma exists, its destruction is called nonexistence.”

The extended prose explains: “Because an existent dharma is destroyed, it is called nonexistence; this nonexistence exists in dependence upon the destruction of existence.” The name nonexistence is established through the “destruction of existence.” This follows the same road as the present gate’s conclusion that “impermanence should exist only when existence is destroyed.” Neither nonexistence nor impermanence exists beforehand; each receives its name upon destruction.

That chapter gives another verse:

“Fixed existence is clinging to permanence; fixed nonexistence is clinging to annihilation; therefore the wise should not cling to existence or nonexistence.”

Clinging to fixed existence falls into eternalism; clinging to fixed nonexistence falls into annihilationism. This gate does not enter through these two views. It directly tests, mark by mark, the opponent’s own account of seven co-arisen dharmas and functions awaiting their time. What both obstruct is the twofold attachment to existence and nonexistence; the roads by which they do so differ.

Read together along one axis, each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s own extended prose.

Jizang wrote a specialized commentary on this gate in Taishō T42n1825. Its text was not extracted and checked word for word in this round, so its location alone is recorded without paraphrase.

The preceding gates successively refuted causes and conditions, conditions, marks, unity and difference, and existence and nonexistence. At the eighth gate, the treatise author brings the blade to rest upon a single word: nature.

The gate is called “Examination of Nature.” What it examines is not the nature of any one dharma, but the very thing called nature—the foundation people imagine behind each dharma, standing on its own, depending on nothing else, and never changing. This gate does only one thing: it holds that foundation to the light and asks whether it can withstand alteration and dependence.

1. The Opening Gives Its Reason: “All Dharmas Are Empty. Why? Because Dharmas Possess No Intrinsic Nature.”

The author begins with one sentence: “All dharmas are empty. Why? Because dharmas possess no intrinsic nature.”

Notice the order. He does not first declare emptiness and then find absence of intrinsic nature as a gloss. Absence of intrinsic nature is the reason from which emptiness follows. Emptiness is the conclusion; absence of intrinsic nature is its ground. Everything said below in this gate establishes the four words “dharmas possess no nature.”

As evidence, the author first sets down a verse:

“Seeing that dharmas bear the mark of alteration, one knows that dharmas possess no intrinsic nature; even a dharma of no intrinsic nature does not exist, because all dharmas are empty.”

The first two lines follow a visible path: one presently sees that dharmas all bear the mark of alteration, and therefore knows that they possess no intrinsic nature. The final two immediately turn back: even “absence of intrinsic nature” is not another dharma that can be established, because all dharmas are empty.

These last two lines are easily overlooked. After refuting intrinsic nature, people often turn the absence of intrinsic nature into a common substrate shared by all dharmas. That would merely be intrinsic nature under a changed name. The author closes that escape route within the verse itself.

2. First Demonstration: “If Dharmas Possessed Intrinsic Nature, They Should Not Alter”

The author unfolds the first two lines: “If dharmas possessed intrinsic nature, they should not alter; yet one sees all dharmas altering. Therefore one should know that dharmas possess no intrinsic nature.”

This demonstration proceeds from what is immediately evident. If nature truly belonged to a thing of itself and were not acquired elsewhere, that thing would have no reason to change. If it changes, then what was supposedly “already there in itself” never governed it. Yet all that is presently seen is changing; not one dharma fails to alter. Since everything changes, nothing possesses intrinsic nature.

The author’s evidence is not an abstraction but what stands before the eyes. “Yet one sees all dharmas altering”—these words are the first point at which the whole gate applies its weight.

3. Second Demonstration: Once Nature Arises from Conditions, It Becomes Something Made

The second demonstration changes angle: “If dharmas possessed fixed intrinsic nature, they should not arise from a multitude of conditions.”

Something with fixed nature need not wait for conditions. Whatever waits for conditions in order to exist does not possess fixed nature. Suppose the opponent retreats and says: what if I concede that nature itself arises from conditions? The author answers: “If nature arose from a multitude of conditions, nature would be a made dharma.” What arises from conditions is produced; how can something produced still be called nature?

He then defines what it means to be nature: “What is not made and does not depend upon another is called nature.” Not produced, and not dependent on anything else: if either condition is absent, the name nature cannot hold. Dependently arisen dharmas lack both. The author therefore concludes, “Thus all dharmas are empty.”

The first demonstration speaks from alteration; the second from dependence on conditions. Alteration and dependence are two faces of one matter: because something cannot govern itself, it changes; it changes precisely because it cannot govern itself.

4. The Great Counterobjection: You Have Said Away the Four Truths and Three Jewels

At this point the opponent raises the weightiest objection in this gate, and indeed in the entire treatise: “If all dharmas are empty, there is no arising and no cessation.” Without arising and cessation, the truth of suffering does not exist; without the truth of suffering, the truth of origin does not exist; without suffering and origin, the truth of cessation does not exist; without the cessation of suffering, there is no path.

“If dharmas are empty and possess no intrinsic nature, the four noble truths do not exist.” Without the four noble truths there are no four fruits of recluseship; without those fruits there are no noble persons; without noble persons there is no Buddha, Dharma, or Saṅgha, and worldly dharmas too disappear. The opponent therefore says, “This is untenable. Thus dharmas should not all be empty.”

This is no forced argument. It places emptiness and cultivation-realization on opposite sides: if you say that everything is empty, what do I cultivate, and what do I realize? The treatise author does not answer by shrinking the scope of emptiness. He points out that the opponent has mixed two levels together.

5. The First Step of the Answer: Distinguish the Two Truths

The author answers: “There are two truths: first, the conventional truth; second, the truth of the ultimate meaning.”

He then states their order: “Through the conventional truth one can state the truth of the ultimate meaning; without relying on the conventional truth, one cannot state the truth of the ultimate meaning.” The truth of the ultimate meaning is not a separate place reached by leaving conventional truth behind; only through the language of conventional truth can it be spoken. The next step concerns the fruit: “If one cannot attain the truth of the ultimate meaning, one cannot attain nirvāṇa.”

Three segments thus form a single road. Conventional truth is the reliance for stating the truth of the ultimate meaning, and the truth of the ultimate meaning is the reliance for attaining nirvāṇa. Remove any segment in the middle and what follows cannot begin.

What happens to those who do not know the two truths? “If a person does not know the two truths, that person does not know benefit to self, benefit to others, or shared benefit.” All three forms of benefit are established through the two truths. Without knowing conventional truth, no sequence of cause and effect can be practiced, and benefit cannot arise. Without knowing the truth of the ultimate meaning, the path of practice is grasped as truly existent, and benefit cannot reach completion.

Once known, the two truths communicate in both directions: “If one knows the conventional truth, one knows the truth of the ultimate meaning; if one knows the truth of the ultimate meaning, one knows the conventional truth.” It is not that one first knows one end and then learns the other. To know either end is to know the other.

6. “You Now Hear a Teaching of Conventional Truth and Take It to Be the Truth of the Ultimate Meaning”

The author next identifies the opponent’s illness in one sentence: “You now hear a teaching of conventional truth and take it to be the truth of the ultimate meaning; therefore you fall into error.”

The arising and cessation, four truths, and fruits of recluseship heard by the opponent are spoken at the level of conventional truth. He instead takes them to exist by intrinsic nature at the level of the ultimate meaning. Consequently, when he hears that the ultimate meaning is empty, he thinks they have all been canceled. His illness is not that he trusts the four truths, but that he reads them as four truths possessing intrinsic nature.

The author immediately states his own meaning of emptiness positively: “The conditioned dharmas taught by the buddhas are called the profound truth of the ultimate meaning. Because these conditioned dharmas possess no intrinsic nature, I call them empty.”

The profound truth of the ultimate meaning is nothing other than conditioned dharmas. Conditioned dharmas possess no intrinsic nature and therefore are called empty. Emptiness is not a separate meaning established outside conditioned dharmas; emptiness is the fact of conditioned dharmas themselves made clear.

7. The Reversal: What Truly Destroys the Four Truths Is Fixed Nature

In the latter half of his answer, the author turns the opponent’s entire objection around: what destroys the four truths is not emptiness but fixed nature.

“If dharmas did not arise from a multitude of conditions, each should possess fixed intrinsic nature, and the five aggregates should not bear marks of arising and cessation.” If the five aggregates each possessed fixed nature, they would neither arise nor cease. “If the five aggregates neither arose nor ceased, there would be no impermanence; if there were no impermanence, there would be no noble truth of suffering.” Suffering is suffering precisely because of impermanence; impermanence exists precisely because there is arising and cessation; arising and cessation exist precisely because things come from conditions. Establish fixed nature and the chain breaks at its beginning.

Without the truth of suffering, there is no truth of origin. Then comes the next step: “If dharmas possessed fixed nature, there would be no noble truth of the cessation of suffering. Why? Because nature does not alter.” This sentence is the hinge of the entire gate. If suffering possessed fixed nature, it would forever remain itself and could not cease. Without the truth of cessation there is no truth of the path, because there is nowhere for the path to lead.

All four truths have thus fallen away. On this basis the author judges: “If a person does not accept emptiness, the four noble truths do not exist.” Without the four noble truths there is no realization of them; without realization, “there is no knowing suffering, abandoning origin, realizing cessation, or cultivating the path.” Without these four practices there are no four fruits of recluseship; without fruits there are no attainers and no persons proceeding toward attainment. Without attainers or those proceeding, there is no Buddha; because conditioned dharmas have been destroyed, there is no Dharma; because no fruits exist, there is no Saṅgha. “If there is no Buddha, Dharma, or Saṅgha, there are no Three Jewels. If there are no Three Jewels, worldly dharmas are destroyed.”

The author returns unchanged the entire chain the opponent used to accuse emptiness, replacing only one premise. Attached to emptiness, that chain of inference does not hold; attached to fixed nature, every link holds.

8. With Fixed Nature, the World Would Always Possess a Single Mark

After the reversal, the author adds one passage, extending the argument from the noble Dharma to the world: “If dharmas possessed fixed intrinsic nature, there would be no arising, no cessation, no demerit, and no merit. Without the fruits of demerit and merit, the world would always possess a single mark.”

Under fixed nature there is no arising or cessation and therefore no activity. Without activity, demerit and merit cannot be established; without demerit and merit, their fruits cannot be established. What, then, would the world be? It would forever possess only one mark, neither increasing nor diminishing, neither wholesome nor unwholesome, with no one ever becoming otherwise.

The world presently before us is not like this. The author therefore concludes, “Thus one should know that dharmas possess no intrinsic nature.”

9. Other-Nature Cannot Save the Claim

The final passage returns to the word nature for its general conclusion. The opponent’s last retreat is to abandon self-nature and propose other-nature: “If one says that dharmas possess no self-nature but exist through other-nature, this too is incorrect.”

There are two reasons. First: “If no self-nature exists, how could something exist through other-nature? Other-nature exists on the basis of self-nature.” The name other is established in opposition to self. If the self-side possesses no nature, the other-side has nothing against which to stand.

The second reason cuts more sharply: “Other-nature is precisely the other’s own self-nature.” What you call other-nature is, from that other’s own position, exactly its self-nature. Changing the angle cannot produce a new nature. Other-nature is only self-nature moved elsewhere. Therefore, “if self-nature is not established, other-nature is not established either.”

If neither is established, is there a third place? “Apart from self-nature and other-nature, where could any further dharma exist?” There is none.

10. If Existence Is Not Established, Nonexistence Is Not Established Either

At the end, the author gathers existence and nonexistence together: “If existence is not established, nonexistence is not established either.”

This sentence must be read precisely. Refuting self-nature and other-nature refutes existence. At that moment, one easily turns around and establishes a nonexistence. Yet nonexistence is a name posited against existence. Since existence cannot stand, nonexistence has nothing against which to stand and cannot stand either. Existence is not refuted in order to establish nonexistence; existence and nonexistence are dismissed together.

The whole gate therefore closes with one line: “Since conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are empty too. Since conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, how much more so the self?”

From conditioned to unconditioned, and then to self: this is the same intent as the order at the end of the first gate. No safe place is permitted to remain at the end.

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, take alteration as evidence already at hand. One need not search in remote abstractions for the absence of intrinsic nature. All dharmas before the eyes are altering; this is the author’s first demonstration.

Second, remember that absence of intrinsic nature cannot itself be made into a nature. The latter half of the verse—“even a dharma of no intrinsic nature does not exist”—is the gate’s most important sentence for its reader.

Third, recognize that emptiness and the four truths establish rather than destroy one another. For the four truths to operate, there must be arising and cessation, impermanence, and something that can be abandoned and realized. These are possible only in the absence of intrinsic nature.

Fourth, know that the two truths are not two truths standing apart, but two segments of one path. “Through the conventional truth one can state the truth of the ultimate meaning.” Apart from the language of conventional truth, the truth of the ultimate meaning cannot even be spoken.

Carried Forward: Illumination along the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows is a single cross-light from the same axis of the Three Treatises. The illumination is not this treatise; it simply records without deciding how the same doctrinal meaning is stated elsewhere.

Chapter fifteen of the Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of Existence and Nonexistence,” is the closest parallel to this gate. It too begins from nature and conditions:

“That nature exists among conditions is not so; nature arising from conditions is thereby called something made.”

It then defines nature:

“Nature is called unmade, not dependent on another dharma for its completion.”

Unmade and not dependent on another dharma: this is the same boundary as this gate’s “what is not made and does not depend upon another is called nature.” That chapter further states:

“If a dharma truly possessed nature, it should not become different afterward; that nature could bear a mark of difference is ultimately untenable.”

This is precisely the first demonstration in the present gate. Their routes differ. That chapter follows the two views of existence and nonexistence until it obstructs annihilationism and eternalism, ending at “one should not cling to existence or nonexistence.” This gate instead takes the objection from the four truths and Three Jewels as its axis: it first receives the opponent’s accusation, then reverses and returns it unchanged. The nature examined is the same; the faculties addressed are different.

Read together along one axis, each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s own extended prose.

At the ninth of the Twelve Gates, the author uses fewer words than in any gate before it. The entire gate contains a single four-line verse and only a few lines of extended prose; it can be read in one breath. Precisely because the gate is short, no further stage-setting is needed. Drawing on the force of the first eight gates, it isolates one question and presses it to the end: you say that an effect exists—where, then, will you look for it?

The opening word is “next.” It shows that the author is not beginning afresh. He has already refuted arising, marks, existence and nonexistence, and intrinsic nature; now he adds another approach. The statement of the principle follows at once: “all dharmas are empty.” Once the principle is stated, he immediately asks himself, “Why?”—on what basis is this said?

1. The Author’s Answer Already Contains the Skeleton of the Entire Gate

His answer is only one sentence: “Dharmas themselves possess no intrinsic nature and do not come from elsewhere.”

Only two clauses, yet they do two things. The first says that dharmas themselves possess no intrinsic nature, continuing the path established by the preceding gates. The latter is the one sentence genuinely added by this gate: nor do they come from anywhere else.

Why must this sentence be added? Someone driven by the preceding gates to concede that no effect can be found within the conditions still has one last step of retreat: perhaps the effect is not within the conditions but comes from elsewhere. The move sounds natural. People habitually imagine that a cause is one container and an effect is an object: if the object is not in this container, it must be in another. The author’s sentence questions that other container as well.

The entire gate therefore has two places to traverse: among the conditions and elsewhere. Once both have been traversed, the gate closes.

2. The Verse: Four Lines Establish Two Places, and the Last Is a Question

The author gives a verse:

“Among the multitude of conditions, the effect is ultimately unobtainable; nor does it come from elsewhere—how, then, could an effect exist?”

The first two lines concern the conditions. Attend to the word “ultimately.” It does not mean that the effect is temporarily unfound or that the wrong method was used; sought completely, it cannot be obtained.

The third line concerns elsewhere: the effect does not come from another place.

The fourth is not a declaration but a question: “how, then, could an effect exist?” If the effect is in neither place, what do you mean when you say that an effect exists?

The form of this question is the same brushwork as the verse in the first gate. The first asks, “how could this dharma exist?” This gate asks, “how could an effect exist?” Neither asks whether things function; both ask to what the word exists on your lips actually points. The author does not demand that you abandon cause and effect. He asks you to state where that effect is located.

3. First Test: No Effect among Conditions, and the Author Does Not Explain It Again

After the verse, the extended prose gathers the first place: “Whether within each of the multitude of conditions individually or within their conjunction, no effect exists, as explained before.”

This sentence contains two levels. First, “among the conditions” is divided into two sides: within each condition and within their conjunction. The distinction is necessary. If one says only that no effect exists within each condition, the opponent can reply that of course no single condition contains it—it exists only when all conditions gather. If one says only that no effect exists within the conjunction, the opponent can reply that although it is not manifest within the whole, each condition contains a portion. Only by saying “no effect exists” on both the individual and combined sides is the road genuinely closed.

The second level consists of three words: “as explained before.”

The author does not explain the argument again. The second gate, “Examination of an Existing or Nonexisting Effect,” has already worked through the path that what previously exists does not arise and what previously does not exist does not arise. An effect previously existent in the cause, previously nonexistent, or both existent and nonexistent has been examined alternative by alternative. Since that work is complete, this gate points back with only “as explained before” and does not repeat it.

Those words also remind the reader that the ninth gate cannot be extracted and read alone. It is one among the Twelve Gates; the force of what precedes is the foundation upon which it stands. Only because the foundation is already laid can this gate be so short.

4. Second Test: If the Effect Truly Came from Elsewhere, Two Things Would Be Forfeited

The second place is this gate’s proper topic, and the author writes more about it: “Moreover, this effect does not come from elsewhere. If it came from elsewhere, it would not be produced from causes and conditions, and the conjunction of the multitude of conditions would have no efficacy.”

First consider the supposition: the effect genuinely comes from some other place. Following this supposition produces two consequences.

First: “it would not be produced from causes and conditions.”

If a thing is carried in from outside, its origin lies outside and not in these causes and conditions. Then the claim that causes and conditions produce the effect becomes empty speech. Since the causes and conditions did not produce it, they are not its causes and conditions. This first consequence shows that the person claiming an effect comes from elsewhere has already discarded causality.

Second: “the conjunction of the multitude of conditions would have no efficacy.”

This reaches ordinary understanding even more closely. People speak of conjunction because conjunction has an efficacy: clay, wheel, cord, and potter gather, and something happens. But if the effect is a finished object transported from elsewhere, whether these conditions gather has nothing to do with it. Their conjunction becomes a display without function. To preserve the effect, you have instead forfeited the efficacy of conjunction.

Taken together, these two consequences mark the point where this gate differs in emphasis from the first eight. Most earlier gates ask whether the effect can arise; this gate asks whether it can come from outside. Once asked, the price of that retreat is precisely the two things its proponent most wishes to preserve: arising through causes and conditions and the efficacy of conjunction.

5. Both Tests Exhausted: “That Precisely Is Emptiness”

Having traversed both places, the author gathers them in one sentence: “If the effect is absent among the multitude of conditions and does not come from elsewhere, that precisely is emptiness.”

The weight of the sentence falls upon the word precisely. The author does not say that from these facts one infers emptiness. He says: this is precisely emptiness. Absence among the conditions and not coming from elsewhere are themselves the content of emptiness, not evidence for something else called emptiness.

One must also see what is being emptied here. From beginning to end, the author asks whether “the effect is ultimately unobtainable among the multitude of conditions.” What cannot be obtained is an effect-entity whose location could be indicated. He does not say that karmic results do not exist, that a seed does not produce a sprout, or that actions bear no result. The first eight gates use jars, cloth, and houses without ever saying that a jar cannot hold water. Since this gate continues them, what it empties is the same thing: an effect able to stand on its own and be lodged in some place.

6. The Final Three Inferences: From the Emptiness of the Effect to the Emptiness of Self

As the gate closes, the author’s final sentence makes three moves: “Because the effect is empty, all conditioned dharmas are empty; because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are empty too; since conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, how much more so the self?”

First move: because the effect is empty, conditioned dharmas are empty. Every conditioned dharma occupies the position of an effect—whatever exists in dependence on conditions is an effect in this sense. Once the position of effect is empty, the entire class follows.

Second move: because conditioned dharmas are empty, unconditioned dharmas are empty too. The name unconditioned is established in contrast to the conditioned. When the side against which it stands is empty, the name on this side has nothing upon which to depend.

Third move: “since conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are empty, how much more so the self?” The self is spoken on the basis of these dharmas. Once both sides are empty, nowhere remains that can be called self.

The order of these three moves follows the same line as the first gate. The first gate proceeds from the emptiness of conditions to the emptiness of conditioned dharmas, unconditioned dharmas, and self; this gate begins from the emptiness of the effect. Their entrances differ; their conclusion is exactly the same. That is why the treatise calls them gates: twelve entrances open upon the same ground.

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, remember which sentence this gate adds. The first eight gates generally search for the effect within the conditions; this gate also questions “elsewhere.” When driven into a corner, the most common move is to relocate a thing somewhere else. This gate calculates the cost of that move.

Second, see the cost clearly. To say that the effect comes from elsewhere seems to preserve the effect, but actually forfeits both “it would not be produced from causes and conditions” and “the conjunction of the multitude of conditions would have no efficacy.” Preserving an effect by losing cause and effect is a poor bargain.

Third, attend to the words “as explained before.” A short gate is not a thin gate; it stands on the foundations of the preceding gates. The Twelve Gates gain force when read in sequence rather than selectively.

Fourth, attend to the final question. The author does not end by declaring that there is no self, but by asking, “how much more so the self?” The question remains so the reader must look for where that self depends.

Carried Forward: Illumination from the Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of Cause and Effect”

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows is one cross-light from chapter twenty of the Treatise on the Middle along the same axis. The illumination is not this treatise; it simply records without deciding how the same doctrinal meaning is stated elsewhere.

The Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of Cause and Effect,” asks the same named question but follows a longer road. It begins by positing an effect in the conjunction:

“If an effect arose when the multitude of conditions conjoin, the effect would already exist in the conjunction; why would conjunction be needed to produce it?”

Qingmu explains: “If the effect already possessed a fixed entity, it should not arise from conjunction.” The chapter then turns to the other side:

“If no effect exists within the conjunction of the multitude of conditions, how could an effect arise from their conjunction?”

The alternatives of an existent and a nonexistent effect each receive objections. The chapter proceeds further to ask whether the cause ceases or does not cease, whether cause and effect coexist at one time, whether the effect has previously arisen, and more. This gate makes none of those separate divisions. It exhausts the issue through only two places—among the conditions and elsewhere—then directly makes the final three moves to self. What is examined is the same; the routes differ in detail.

Read together along one axis, each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s own extended prose.

The architecture of this gate is easy to see. It establishes one verse, divides the origin of suffering into four cells, and empties them one by one. Yet halfway through, the treatise master suddenly stops arguing on his own and introduces a scripture. The naked ascetic Kāśyapa asks the Buddha the same four possibilities, and the scripture records only four words: “The Buddha remained silent and did not answer.”

A book devoted to argument cites silence as evidence at a crucial point. That fact itself deserves a pause.

1. The Gate’s Opening Verse: If Suffering Has an Agent, It Must Come from One of Four Places

〔T30 0165c08〕The master states his conclusion in the opening sentence: “Next, all dharmas are empty. Why? Because self-production, production by another, production by both, and production without a cause cannot be found.” He then establishes a verse:

“Produced by oneself, produced by another, produced by both, or produced without a cause—when sought in these ways, suffering is not found.”

The four cells divide as follows. If the power producing suffering lies in suffering itself, this is self-production. If it lies in something outside suffering, this is production by another. If each side contributes a part, this is production by both. If neither side counts, this is production without a cause. Every answer to the question “Who produced suffering?” must fall into one of these four cells. The treatise master has not merely summarized outsiders’ positions; the shape of the question itself determines them. Once one asks “Who produced it?”, the answer can only be self, other, both, or neither.

Thus the last line is decisive. If none of the four cells can stand, then suffering bearing an agent does not exist.

2. Self-Production Fails: Consciousness Cannot Cognize Itself, a Finger Cannot Touch Itself

The first cell is shortest and hardest. The master says: “If it produced itself, it would produce its own entity; yet this very thing cannot be used to produce this very thing.”

Self-production means suffering creates suffering’s own entity. But maker and made must occupy two ends. If both ends are the same thing, the word “produce” has nowhere to land. The master gives two ready examples: “Consciousness cannot cognize itself, and a finger cannot touch itself.”

Consciousness is capable of discrimination, but it cannot discriminate the very consciousness now discriminating. A finger can touch, but it cannot touch the same finger as an object. For contact, something other must stand opposite it. When subject and object collapse into one end, activity cannot be established.

3. Production by Another Fails: Clay Is Not Other than the Jar, Gold Is Not Other than the Bracelet

For the second cell, the master first passes over it in one sentence: “Production by another is likewise untenable. How can another produce suffering?”

It is so brief that it seems to say nothing. But someone immediately takes up the point, and this question is the most important in the gate:

“The many conditions are called other. Because the many conditions produce suffering, it is called production by another. How can you say that it is not produced by another?”

The questioner is astute. You yourselves teach that suffering arises from many conditions. Are the many conditions not things outside suffering? Is that not production by another? He wants to fit dependent arising itself into the second cell.

The master’s answer has two parts. First: “If the many conditions are called other, suffering is produced by the many conditions. Yet since this suffering arises from the many conditions, it is the nature of the many conditions. If it is precisely the nature of the many conditions, how can they be called other?”

Because suffering arises from the many conditions, suffering is the form made from those conditions. What is called other would have to be something entirely separate. Between what arises from the many conditions and the conditions from which it arises, precisely this total separation is absent. The master names two objects: “Clay cannot be called other than a clay jar; gold cannot be called other than a gold bracelet.”

Clay is not an outsider to the jar made from clay. Gold is not an outsider to the bracelet fashioned from gold. Point at clay and say, “This is something wholly other than the jar,” and the sentence cannot be completed. Suffering and its many conditions are just like this.

4. The Conditions Themselves Cannot Govern

The second part goes deeper: “Further, these many conditions do not exist through intrinsic natures and therefore cannot be autonomous. Thus one cannot say that a result is produced from the many conditions.”

Even if we provisionally permit the many conditions to be called an agent, we must ask whether this agent qualifies. To create, an agent must first stand on its own. Yet each condition exists only in dependence on others; not one exists through intrinsic nature. A group of things that cannot govern themselves cannot be assembled into a governing creator. The master cites the Treatise on the Middle:

“A result arises from many conditions, yet these conditions cannot govern themselves; since the conditions cannot govern themselves, how could they produce a result?”

We must see which side is refuted here. The master does not retract the statement “suffering arises from many conditions.” He will use that very statement to close the gate. What he refutes is reading “arises from many conditions” as “the agent called many conditions manufactured suffering.” Conditioned arising concerns conditions, not a sovereign. When conditions come together, the result is present; no one between them issues commands.

Thus the second cell closes: “In this way, suffering cannot be produced by another.”

5. Production by Both and without a Cause: One Doubles the Fault, the Other Makes It Measureless

The third cell hardly needs a separate refutation: “Self-production and production by another are both untenable because they have two faults. To say suffering is self-produced and produced by another carries the faults of both; therefore production of suffering by both is likewise untenable.”

Production by both adds self-production to production by another. Since each of the first two cells fails on its own, combining them merely brings both faults home.

The fourth cell takes the opposite route: “If suffering arises without a cause, this too is untenable because it entails immeasurable faults.” The master does not elaborate here, for uncaused arising entails not one or two but measureless faults. If suffering can exist without a cause, nothing determines when it exists, in whom, or how much. The world’s reasoning disintegrates with it.

All four cells are now empty.

6. Scriptural Evidence: Four Questions, Four Nonanswers

After the refutation, the master cites scripture: the naked ascetic Kāśyapa comes to question the Buddha.

First question: “Is suffering self-produced?”—“The Buddha remained silent and did not answer.” The second question changes to production by another; “again the Buddha did not answer.” The third asks production by both self and other; “again the Buddha did not answer.” The fourth asks production without causes or conditions; “again the Buddha did not answer.”

All four possibilities have been exhausted, and the Buddha has not spoken once. The master therefore judges: “The Buddha did not answer any of these four questions. One should know that suffering is empty.”

The four cells are exhaustive, yet the Buddha accepts none. There is only one explanation: what the Buddha rejects is not one cell but the premise shared by all four.

7. The Buddha Did Not Answer Because a Spirit Was Already Hidden in the Question

Someone immediately objects to this judgment: “When the Buddha taught this scripture, he did not say that suffering is empty.” The Buddha plainly said nothing in the scripture. How can one make emptiness speak for him?

The master’s reply first states a principle: “He spoke in that way in accord with the beings who could be liberated.” The Buddha speaks while looking at the person before him. To understand why he did not answer, we must first see who asked.

The master therefore gives Kāśyapa’s background: “This naked ascetic Kāśyapa regarded the person as the cause of suffering.” The doctrine of self behind him said: “The fine and ugly are all created by the spirit. The spirit is eternally pure and free of distress. Everything known and understood is the spirit. The spirit creates the fine and ugly, suffering and pleasure, and then itself receives various bodies.”

There is a spirit: permanent, pure, and itself free of distress. Everything known and understood is that spirit. It creates fine and ugly, suffering and pleasure, and after creating them goes on to receive various bodies.

Once this doctrine is seen, the four questions change shape. When Kāśyapa asks, “Is suffering self-produced?”, the “self” in his mind is not suffering itself but that spirit. When he asks about production by another, the “other” is the same spirit standing in a different place. All four questions ask about the same thing, arranged in four ways. If the Buddha answered within any cell, he would concede that permanent self. Therefore, “the Buddha did not answer.”

8. If the Self Were the Cause of Suffering, It Would Already Be Impermanent

After explaining the silence, the master supplies the reasons himself. The first follows impermanence: “Suffering is in fact not produced by the self. If the self were the cause of suffering and suffering arose from the self, the self would be impermanent. Why? Every dharma that acts as a cause and every dharma arising from a cause is impermanent.”

Whatever acts as a cause must move and meet its result; whatever moves is impermanent. By establishing the self as the cause of suffering, one has already pulled it into arising and cessation—yet permanence was the very reason for positing it.

The result collapses on both sides: “If the self were impermanent, the karmic results of demerit and merit would all be annihilated, and the meritorious results of cultivating the holy life would also come to nothing.”

Read this sentence slowly. Those who posit a self generally do so to preserve a bearer: something must carry demerit and merit through the path. Yet the moment the self is made a cause of suffering, it becomes impermanent. With impermanence, continuity between before and after is cut; the karmic results of demerit and merit are destroyed, and even the merit of cultivating the holy life collapses. The self posited to preserve a bearer is precisely what causes the bearer to be lost.

9. If the Self Can Produce Suffering, No One Can Get Out

The second reason follows liberation: “If the self were the cause of suffering, there would be no liberation. Why? If the self produces suffering, apart from suffering there is no self capable of producing suffering, because it has no body.”

To produce suffering requires somewhere for production to occur. Apart from suffering—apart from this body and mind of the five aggregates—the self has no body. By what could it produce?

Only one route remains: say it can produce without a body. The master has been waiting for precisely this: “If suffering could be produced without a body, one who has attained liberation should still suffer.”

If producing suffering does not require a body, then one who has relinquished the body and attained liberation still meets the conditions for producing suffering, and suffering should still fall upon that person. “There would then be no liberation. Yet liberation does exist. Therefore the claim that suffering is self-produced is untenable.”

Liberation exists—this is the side the master refuses to surrender. Any inference ending in “there is no liberation” proves the inference mistaken.

Production by another receives the same single sentence: “The claim that suffering is produced by another is also untenable. Apart from suffering, where is there a person producing suffering to give to another?” Apart from suffering, no person stands there carrying suffering over to someone else.

10. Production by Another Ultimately Means Production by Maheśvara

The master next reveals the true identity of the second cell: “Further, if suffering is produced by another, it is produced by Maheśvara.”

Follow the outsider’s “other” to its end and only one remains: Maheśvara, creator of all things. “Because the question concerned this wrong view, the Buddha did not answer.”

The master then begins his own work: “In fact, suffering is not produced by Maheśvara. Why? Because their natures and marks contradict one another, just as a calf born from a cow is still a cow.”

Like produces like and the offspring follows the kind: what a cow bears is still a cow. “If all things were born from Maheśvara, they should all resemble Maheśvara, because they are his children.” If all things are his children, they should resemble him. Yet he is said to be eternally pure and free of distress, while the myriad things are filled with suffering. Their natures do not correspond.

The point advances: “Further, if Maheśvara created beings, he should not give suffering to his children.” What father would personally hand suffering to his own children?

11. The Defense “They Do Not Recognize the Cause of Pleasure” Cannot Restore Autonomy

The outsider immediately supplies an explanation. Beings are Maheśvara’s children and both suffering and pleasure are produced by him. Because beings fail to recognize the cause of pleasure, he gives them suffering—as a father punishes a child in order to teach.

The master answers from the nearest point: “If beings were the children of Maheśvara, he should give them only pleasure to ward off suffering and should not give them suffering.” To teach children to recognize pleasure, give them pleasure; why create suffering? “Moreover, merely worshiping Maheśvara should extinguish suffering and bring pleasure.” If suffering and pleasure lie entirely in his hands, worshiping him alone should solve everything. “Yet this is not so. Each person independently creates the causes and conditions of suffering and pleasure and personally receives the karmic results; these are not created by Maheśvara.”

In fact, people each create the causes of their own suffering and pleasure and each receive their own results. Anyone can verify this personally; no one need wait for another’s judgment.

12. A Chain of “Further”s: Dismantling Autonomy until It Has Nowhere to Stand

From here, the master follows one “further” with another and dismantles the doctrine of Maheśvara item by item. The items may look miscellaneous, but their arrangement is deliberate: first autonomy is dismantled, then agency, and finally the world supposedly created.

First dismantle autonomy. “If he were autonomous, he should have no needs. One who has a need and sets about producing something cannot be called autonomous. If he needed nothing, why would he magically create all things like a child at play?” If he wants something, he is constrained by what he wants. If he wants nothing, creating all things is merely play without a reason. Neither resembles an autonomous lord.

Next ask where he himself came from: “If Maheśvara created himself, this is untenable, just as one thing cannot create itself. If another created him, he is not called autonomous.” Self-creation was already refuted in the first cell. If another created him, the place of autonomy belongs to that other.

Next dismantle his production. “If Maheśvara were an effective agent, he would meet no obstruction in creating and would accomplish whatever he conceived.” A true creator accomplishes merely by conceiving and need not labor. Yet what does their own Maheśvara Scripture say? “Maheśvara wished to create all things and practiced many austerities; crawling creatures were then born. He again practiced austerities, and birds were born. He again practiced austerities, and humans and gods were born.”

He must first practice austerities to produce crawling creatures, practice again to produce birds, and practice once more to produce humans and gods. Following this sequence, the master sees not an autonomous lord but a sequence of karma: “If through austerities venomous creatures were born first, birds next, and humans and gods afterward, one should know that beings arise through the causes and conditions of karma, not through austerities.” Their own scripture records a process of karmic maturation.

Next ask where he stands while creating: “If Maheśvara created all things, where did he abide while creating them?” If he also created this abode, where did he stand when creating it? “If he created it while abiding elsewhere, who created that other place? This produces an infinite regress. If another created it, there would be two autonomous lords.”

Next ask from whom he seeks: “Why would he practice austerities and make offerings to another, hoping to please that being and obtain what he wished? If he had to seek from another through austerities, one should know that he was not autonomous.” One who must offer to another and seek that being’s favor is no autonomous lord.

13. The World He Created Does Not Look as Though He Created It Either

Having dismantled the creator, the master turns to the world. If such a determinate creator truly existed, what should the world look like?

It should be unchanging: “Upon initial creation it should have been fixed and should not change: a horse should always be a horse and a person always a person. Yet things now change in accordance with karma.” Once created and fixed, a horse should remain a horse forever, yet what stands before us plainly changes with karma.

It should have no demerit and merit: “There would be no demerit or merit, good or evil, fine or ugly, because all would be created by Maheśvara. Yet demerit and merit do exist.” If he created everything, beings could bear no responsibility. Yet the world plainly has demerit and merit.

Everyone should love him: “All should revere and love him as children love a father. Yet this is not so; there is hatred and there is love.”

Suffering and pleasure should be uniform: “Why did he not create only happy people or only suffering people? Why are some afflicted and others pleased?” Whence comes the distinction between suffering and pleasure? “One should know this arises from hatred and love, and therefore he is not autonomous.” What is moved by hatred and love cannot be autonomous.

Beings should do nothing: “If Maheśvara were the agent, beings should do nothing.” Yet in fact “beings each devise means and undertake actions”; everyone makes plans and sets to work.

Practice should be useless: “Good and evil, suffering and pleasure would arrive without being produced, and this would destroy conventional dharmas. Observing precepts and cultivating the holy life would be entirely useless.” This is the weightiest point. If everything arrives by itself without action, observing precepts and cultivating the holy life are wasted, and every effort in the world is canceled. The master returns only three words: “Yet this is not so.”

Finally, even his greatness is dismantled: “If through the causes and conditions of meritorious karma he became great among beings, then other beings who cultivate meritorious karma should likewise become great. Why honor Maheśvara alone?” If merit made him great, others can become great by cultivating merit, and he is not unique. “If he is autonomous without causes and conditions, all beings likewise should be autonomous.” “If Maheśvara received autonomy from another, that other would again have received it from another, producing an infinite regress; an infinite regress is equivalent to having no cause.”

The master concludes: “One should know that the myriad things are not born from Maheśvara and that no Maheśvara exists. Because the question concerning production by another involved this wrong view, the Buddha did not answer.”

Not only do the myriad things he supposedly created not exist as his products; neither does he. The second cell is now entirely empty. The third and fourth close in passing: “Production by both is likewise untenable because it has two faults. Because myriad things arise from the conjunction of many causes and conditions, they do not arise without a cause; the Buddha did not answer.”

14. To Refute Wrong Views Is to Teach Emptiness

The objector has one final sentence: “Thus this scripture merely refutes the four wrong views and does not say that suffering is empty.” After all this, the argument only proves that the Buddha refuted four outsider views; it has not reached emptiness.

The master’s reply is the gate’s landing point: “Although the Buddha spoke in this way—saying that suffering arises from many causes and conditions—refuting the four wrong views is precisely to teach emptiness. To say that suffering arises from many causes and conditions is to teach the meaning of emptiness. Why? What arises from many causes and conditions has no intrinsic nature. Absence of intrinsic nature is emptiness.”

Read these sentences layer by layer. Refuting the four wrong views refutes the claim that suffering has an agent. When the agent is refuted, the remaining statement is “it arises from many causes and conditions.” Whatever arises from many causes and conditions does not hold its own establishment in its own hands and thus has no intrinsic nature. Absence of intrinsic nature is emptiness.

Emptiness is therefore not a fifth cell added outside the four. Emptiness is precisely the remaining sentence, “arises from many causes and conditions,” after all four cells have emptied together. The master does not posit another agent after completing the refutation. He removes the question “Who produced it?” at its root and replaces it with the conditions upon which it exists.

The final sentence expands this gate to the width of the whole treatise: “Just as suffering is empty, one should know that conditioned dharmas, unconditioned dharmas, and beings are all empty.”

Suffering is only one specimen. The same ruler measures conditioned dharmas, unconditioned dharmas, and beings, and passes through them all.

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, see clearly that the four cells are produced by the question. Self, other, both, and no cause are not four truths of the world but the four answers permitted by the question “Who produced it?” If none can stand, the question itself must be relinquished.

Second, distinguish conditioned arising from production by conditions. The master never denies that suffering arises from many conditions. He denies reading the conditions as an agent. “Clay cannot be called other.” Clay forms a jar, but it is not an other standing opposite the jar.

Third, remember what the two arguments preserve. In refuting the self, the master refuses to surrender two things: karmic results of demerit and merit must continue, and liberation must truly allow someone to leave suffering. Any thesis that makes either collapse is itself mistaken.

Fourth, know that silence too can answer. “The Buddha did not answer any of these four questions.” When a question is built upon something nonexistent, the most honest response is not to select one of four wrong answers.

Carried Forward: Illumination from Treatises along the Same Axis

Everything above belongs to this gate’s own meaning. What follows looks alongside it through treatises on the same axis within the Three Treatises corpus. This illumination is not the present treatise, but another formulation of the same principle elsewhere. Record without adjudicating.

The opening verse of the “Examination of Suffering, Chapter Twelve” in the Treatise on the Middle has first two lines identical to this gate and different final two lines:

“Produced by oneself, produced by another, produced by both, or without a cause— to speak of sufferings in these ways is untenable with regard to the result.”

This gate says, “When sought in these ways, suffering is not found,” and closes on suffering’s absence. That chapter says, “To speak of sufferings in these ways is untenable with regard to the result,” and closes on the failure of the assertion. The same four cells: one concludes from suffering, the other from the statement.

That chapter refutes self-production with another analogy: “Suffering is not called self-produced; a dharma does not produce itself.” Its commentary uses the example of a blade unable to cut itself; this gate uses consciousness unable to cognize itself and a finger unable to touch itself. The analogies differ, but what they block is the same.

That chapter also has a verse: “If a person produced suffering himself, apart from suffering where would there be a person?” Its force resembles this gate’s “Apart from suffering, where is there a person producing suffering to give to another?” Both challenge the existence of a person apart from suffering. In refuting production without a cause, that chapter notes “Uncaused production has many faults, as explained in the ‘Examination of Action and Agent’”; this gate says only that it “entails immeasurable faults” and does not elaborate.

As for extension, that chapter’s closing verse says: “Not only can suffering not be explained through the four alternatives; for all external things, the four alternatives likewise cannot be established.” It extends to external things. This gate says, “Just as suffering is empty, one should know that conditioned dharmas, unconditioned dharmas, and beings are all empty.” It extends to the conditioned, the unconditioned, and beings. The directions differ in breadth, while the principle on which they rely is one.

What belongs uniquely to this gate and not to that chapter is the long passage on Maheśvara: from contradiction of natures and marks, absence of needs, and the regress of abodes, to demerit and merit, hatred and love, and the uselessness of precepts and the holy life. Its weight lies precisely in refusing to remain at the level of terminology; point after point returns to what a person can verify directly.

Let parallel axes illuminate one another while each remains in its own place. This gate’s meaning is still governed by the prose of this gate.

Through the preceding ten gates, the author has repeatedly asked whether a given dharma possesses intrinsic nature. At Gate Eleven, the question suddenly turns: it no longer asks directly what cause and effect are in themselves, but instead asks—if you say an effect arises from a cause, at what time do cause and effect meet?

There are only three possibilities: cause first and effect afterward; effect first and cause afterward; or cause and effect at the same time. Once all three paths have been traversed, no fourth remains. This gate walks each path before the reader.

The author’s opening sentence states the point of entry with perfect economy: “Cause and the dharma that has a cause cannot be found to arise at a prior time, a later time, or the same time.”

The phrase “dharma that has a cause” must first be read precisely. It does not mean “effect” in a loose sense, but “that which exists through a cause and is called what it is only in dependence upon that cause.” From the outset, the author refuses to use the isolated word “effect,” because what this gate examines is the line connecting cause and effect. If the line cannot join, the names at both ends lose their footing.

1. The Opening Verse: Before, After, and Together Are Blocked at Once

The author gives the verse:

  “If a dharma is before, after, or together, and none can be established,   how could this dharma be established as arising from a cause?”

The first two lines enumerate every possibility: before, after, together. These three words are not arranged casually. They exhaust every temporal form that “meeting” could take. One thing is either before, after, or—if neither before nor after—simultaneous.

The last two lines ask one question: if none of these three positions can be established, on what basis could the statement “this dharma arises from a cause” stand?

The force of the verse must be seen. It does not first concede an existent cause and existent effect and then arrange a time for them. It says: your phrase “arises from a cause” can be spoken only by relying on one of these three temporal positions. When all three collapse, the phrase has nowhere to land.

2. The First Time: The Cause Is Prior—At That Time the Effect Does Not Exist, So Whose Cause Is It?

The author begins with the path most congenial to common sense, the one people naturally state first: cause first, effect afterward. His judgment has only a few words: “A prior cause followed by a dharma that has a cause is untenable.”

The reason is one question: “If a cause exists first and something afterward arises from it, then at the prior time of the cause there is no dharma that has a cause. For what is it a cause?”

The question looks light but bears enormous weight. “Cause” is not a quality that belongs to a thing in isolation. It is a name that stands only in relation to something else. A father is father in relation to a child; before there is a child, that person is not a father. In the same way, something is called a “cause” because a “dharma that has a cause” stands in relation to it.

Now you say that the cause is prior and the effect later. During the interval in which the cause stands alone, the effect does not yet exist. At that moment you possess only a thing with nothing yet opposite it. On what basis do you already call it a cause?

People commonly answer: “It will produce an effect later, so it is already a cause now.” The author does not accept this sentence. The future effect does not yet exist; the statement “will produce later” itself becomes valid only when the effect has arisen. To reach backward from something not yet there and name the present thing by it is not genuinely to have secured the name.

3. The Second Time: The Effect Is Prior—It Is Already Established, So What Use Is the Cause?

When the first path fails, one naturally tries the second: then let the effect precede and the cause follow. The author again asks only one question: “If the dharma that has a cause exists first and the cause afterward, then while there is no cause the dharma that has a cause is already established. What use is the cause?”

This question is shorter still and harder to evade. While the cause is absent, the “dharma that has a cause” has already established itself. Since it stands without relying on the cause, the later cause is superfluous—a cause that is not needed is no longer a cause.

The illness in this path lies even deeper. If the effect is established without a cause, it is no longer a “dharma that has a cause.” Once the name is lost, this route no longer even possesses the thing it proposed to discuss. The author need not add a second sentence.

4. The Third Time: Simultaneous—the Analogy of the Bull’s Horns

With the two sequential paths collapsed, only simultaneity remains. The author answers decisively: “If cause and the dharma that has a cause are simultaneous, there is likewise no cause, as when a bull’s horns arise at the same time and left and right do not cause one another.”

The gate’s one analogy appears here, and it belongs to the treatise itself: a bull’s two horns.

No one denies that the horns grow at the same time. When the left horn is present, the right horn is present. They face and correspond to one another and appear intimately paired. Yet the left horn does not produce the right, nor the right the left. Simultaneity gives copresence; it does not give an origin from one another.

The mind often holds a vague assumption: when two things always appear together, one of them must cause the other. The horns separate precisely these two ideas. Appearing at the same time is one matter; one thing emerging from the other is another. No matter how close the first relation, it does not yield the second.

The author therefore concludes: “Thus the cause is not the cause of the effect, and the effect is not the effect of the cause, because they arise at the same time.” Of two simultaneous things, this one does not become the cause of that one, nor that one the effect of this one.

Having traversed all three paths, he gives the general judgment: “Therefore cause and effect cannot be found in any of the three times.”

5. The Counterattack: Your Refutation Cannot Pass These Three Times Either

At this point the questioner makes an intelligent move. He stops defending cause and effect and turns the author’s blade back upon its wielder: “Your refutation of cause and effect likewise cannot be established in any of the three times.”

He then applies the same three-time analysis to “refutation” and “what can be refuted” without changing a word: “If refutation exists first and what can be refuted afterward, then what can be refuted does not yet exist—what does this refutation refute? If what can be refuted exists first and refutation afterward, what can be refuted is already established—what use is refutation? If refutation and what can be refuted are simultaneous, there is likewise no cause, as when a bull’s horns arise together and left and right do not cause one another.”

—If refutation is first, the object to be refuted does not yet exist; whom does your refutation refute? If what is refuted is first, it has already established itself; what use is refutation? If both are simultaneous, they resemble the bull’s horns, left and right not causing one another. The questioner concludes neatly: “Thus refutation does not depend on what can be refuted, and what can be refuted does not depend on refutation.”

This is a challenge of great weight in the treatise. It no longer disputes a particular dharma; it disputes the author’s right to speak. If you can overturn cause and effect with the three times, I can overturn your inquiry with the very same three times. If the tool itself cannot stand, everything you dismantled with it must collapse as well.

Every treatise that speaks of emptiness must answer when it reaches this point.

6. Answer: Precisely Because Refutation and What Is Refuted Are Empty, What I Say Stands

The author’s answer has two parts. The first is one sentence: “The same fault occurs in the refutation and what can be refuted that you posit.”

This is not a retort. It first makes the fact clear: the challenge through the three times is fatal to an “intrinsically existent refutation.” Since you imagine refutation for me as an existent thing, the fault belongs to the refutation you posit, not to mine.

The second part is the direct answer and the most important words in the gate: “If dharmas are empty, there is neither refutation nor what can be refuted. I now teach emptiness, so you establish what I teach.”

—If every dharma is empty, then neither refutation nor what can be refuted exists intrinsically. What I now teach is precisely emptiness. Your challenge does not injure my account; it states for me the very point I intend to make.

The questioner thinks he is dismantling a house, yet in fact he is fixing the last rafter into place for the author. What he proves is that “refutation too lacks intrinsic nature”—exactly what the author has been saying throughout.

The author then marks the boundary with perfect clarity: “If I said that refutation and what can be refuted determinately exist, you should raise this challenge; because I do not say they determinately exist, you should not raise it.”

This sentence is the treatise’s own confession of method: the author has never erected a separate, intrinsically existent thesis of his own outside the opponent’s position. His refutation follows the intrinsic nature posited by the other side and presses it to the point where it reveals its own impossibility. Once refutation has completed its work, it need not remain. If one continued to clutch an intrinsically existent knife, that knife would eventually cut its holder.

This also explains why in the preceding movement the author returns the fault with a single sentence: there never was such a knife in his hand.

7. The Questioner Appeals Again to What Is Seen: Potter, Teacher and Disciple, Lamp and Illumination

Unable to prevail in doctrinal argument, the questioner appeals to direct sight. The move is natural and powerful: regardless of your analysis, when I open my eyes I see three kinds of cause.

“One sees a prior cause, as when a potter makes a jar.” The potter is there first and the jar is completed later: a prior cause.

“There is also a later cause, as a teacher exists because of a disciple; after teaching the disciple, one later recognizes this as the disciple.” A teacher exists because there is a disciple, and only after the disciple has been taught do people later recognize this relation: a later cause.

“There is also a simultaneous cause, as with lamp and illumination.” When the lamp is present, illumination is present at the same time: a simultaneous cause.

Three examples, each neatly assigned to one time. The closing challenge presses the point: “The claim that a prior, later, or simultaneous cause cannot be found is untenable.”

Notice where the three examples are drawn from. A potter making a jar is manufacture; teacher and disciple are a human relation; lamp and illumination are a natural event. The questioner takes one example from each corner of the visible world. His meaning is: what you deny is what everyone sees every day.

8. Answering the Potter: Before the Jar Exists, For What Is He a Cause?

The author answers each in turn. The first sentence is a general judgment: “The analogy of a potter making a jar is untenable.”

The reason is the same question, with not one word changed: “Before there is a jar, for what is the potter a cause?”

One must see what the author answers here and what he does not. He does not say that a potter cannot make a jar, nor that clay cannot take shape upon a wheel. From the first gate onward, the treatise has never canceled the practical use of a jar. He asks about the name: at the moment when no jar yet exists, when you call the potter “the cause of this jar,” in relation to what is that name established?

What direct sight actually provides is only that a person is present earlier and a jar present later. The sentence “he is its cause” is added by the mind. Yet the correlate required by that sentence is absent at the time when the supposed cause stands first.

The author therefore extends this case universally: “As with the potter, no prior cause can be found.” The potter is only one specimen; every claim of a prior cause is the same.

9. Answering Teacher and Disciple: The Name Is Applied Later, but the Cause Must Be Prior

The author answers the second example more quickly: “A later cause likewise cannot be found. Before there is a disciple, who is the teacher? Therefore a later cause cannot be found.”

The questioner intended the example to reveal a cause established afterward. Instead, it states the author’s point more clearly. The name teacher must wait upon a disciple to be established. Before the disciple exists, no teacher is waiting there. If there is no teacher, what was the so-called “cause” during the earlier interval?

The questioner’s own words are “one later recognizes this as the disciple.” The recognition is later, but the cause you seek must be earlier. Direct sight supplies a later recognition; you use it as though it constituted an earlier cause. The gap between them is precisely the difficulty of the three times.

10. Answering Lamp and Illumination: What Is Still under Question Cannot Serve as Proof

The third example matters most, because it looks impregnable. Lamp and illumination truly are simultaneous, and illumination truly comes from the lamp.

The author answers: “If a simultaneous cause is said to resemble lamp and illumination, this is itself a cause identical with what is doubted. Since lamp and illumination arise at the same time, how could they cause one another?”

The phrase “a cause identical with what is doubted” is the key. The evidence you offer is the very thing presently under question. The section on the bull’s horns has already asked: by what right can one of two simultaneous things be called the cause of the other? Now you answer with lamp and illumination, but lamp and illumination are themselves a pair that “arise at the same time.” To answer the question with an example still subject to the question is simply to restate the question.

The author adds only a final question: “Since lamp and illumination arise at the same time, how could they cause one another?” It is exactly the question raised by the horns, with lamp and illumination substituted.

11. Conclusion: From the Emptiness of Conditions to the Emptiness of Conditioned, Unconditioned, and Sentient Beings

Once all three analogies have been refuted, the author gathers the whole gate:

“Because conditions are empty in this way, know that every conditioned dharma, every unconditioned dharma, and every sentient being is empty.”

The sequence of this sentence is exactly the same as in the first gate: first conditions are empty, then everything that issues from conditions is empty. Conditions are the root; when the root is empty, everything spoken of in dependence upon it is empty as well.

Its three items must be read one by one. Conditioned dharmas are empty: these are dharmas born through conditions. Unconditioned dharmas are empty: “unconditioned” is a name established over against “conditioned”; a name depends upon what it opposes, and when that correlate is empty, the name has nothing to rely upon. The final item is sentient beings.

Here the author says “sentient beings,” not “self.” The first gate says, “Therefore conditioned, unconditioned, and self are all empty,” addressing the self that is grasped. This gate speaks of sentient beings and carries the statement across all living beings. What this gate dismantles is the line joining cause and effect; and a sentient being is called a sentient being precisely by depending on that line—former life as cause of later life, these aggregates as cause of those aggregates, connected onward. Each link of the line must occupy one of the three times. Since none of the three can be found, the line is not an intrinsically existent chain.

What Readers Can Carry Away from This Gate

First, simultaneous does not mean mutually productive. A bull’s horns are present at the same time, yet left and right do not cause one another. Whenever two things occur together and one immediately concludes that one produces the other, the author regards that step as a leap, not a traversed argument.

Second, “cause” is a name that can stand only in relation to something else. Before the potter makes the jar, he is not the cause of that jar; before there is a disciple, there is no such teacher. A name needs a correlate. The challenge of the three times asks precisely whether that correlate is present.

Third, there is no intrinsically existent knife in the author’s hand. “Because I do not say that refutation and what can be refuted determinately exist, you should not raise this challenge.” He does not establish a thesis of his own and contend with another. He only presses the intrinsic nature posited by the other side to its conclusion. If the knife existed intrinsically, it should already have cut him.

Fourth, do not answer with the very thing still under question. Lamp and illumination cannot establish simultaneous causation precisely because they too “arise at the same time.” An example must already stand; it cannot share the illness of what it is meant to prove.

Carried Forward: Cross-Illumination from Treatises on the Same Axis

The foregoing is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows places beside it two passages from treatises on the same axis. The illumination is not this treatise; it is the same principle spoken elsewhere, recorded without adjudication.

The Treatise on the Middle has an “Examination of Time,” which asks about time itself. That chapter first refutes the three times as established through mutual dependence and concludes by returning them to things:

  “Time exists because of things; apart from things, how could time exist?   Things themselves cannot be found—how much less could time!”

That chapter speaks of time by examining time: time depends on things, and when things cannot be found, time has no support. This gate does not ask about time itself. It borrows the three positions before, after, and together to examine how cause and effect meet. One borrows temporal positions; the other examines the essence of time. They enter the same meaning by different questions.

The Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of Going and Coming,” also begins with a threefold inquiry:

  “In what has already gone there is no going; in what has not yet gone there is no going;   apart from what has gone and has not yet gone, in the time of going there is no going either.”

That analysis divides the act of “going” among what has gone, what has not yet gone, and the time of going, and finds it nowhere. Its division resembles this gate’s: one matter is sought across three times. The difference is that the other chapter seeks an action, whereas this gate seeks the connection between two endpoints.

Treatises on the same axis illuminate one another while each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s extended prose.

A treatise commonly ends by looking back and summarizing. The Twelve Gate Treatise does not. The twelfth gate opens in exactly the same register as all the gates before it: “Next, all dharmas are empty.” The author neither changes his tone nor reviews what the preceding eleven gates have said. He simply takes up one more word for examination—arising.

There is a reason this word closes the work. In the end, all that the preceding eleven gates refute is one thing: the belief that somewhere there is something able to stand on its own. Yet the statement “there is something” must finally rest on the statement “it arose.” So long as arising can stand, the intrinsic nature already refuted retains one road by which to return. The final gate adds no new meaning; it only follows that road to its end. If arising is not established, what was refuted before has nowhere to arise again.

1. The Opening Gives Three Positions, Not One

The author first gives the statement in full: “Because arising cannot be obtained in arising, not arising, or the time of arising, what has now already arisen does not arise, what has not arisen does not arise either, and the time of arising does not arise.”

There are only three times at which one could say that a thing arises: it has already arisen, it has not yet arisen, or it is presently arising. There is no fourth position. The author sets out all three together and then gives a verse:

“An arisen effect does not arise; what has not arisen does not arise either; apart from the arisen and not arisen, the time of arising too does not arise.”

The third line must be seen clearly: “apart from the arisen and not arisen.” What is called the time of arising is posited as another interval apart from what has already arisen and what has not yet arisen. The author means that if you establish this time of arising outside the already and the not-yet as the site where arising occurs, this interval too does not arise. Once the three positions have been stated exhaustively, no route of retreat remains.

2. First Fix the Three Terms

Before refuting, the author first defines his terms, as he consistently does: “Arising means that the effect has emerged; not arisen means not yet begun, not yet emerged, and not yet existent; the time of arising means just beginning to emerge but not yet complete.”

Arising is an effect already begun and emerged; not arisen is what has not begun, has not emerged, and does not yet exist; the time of arising is what has just begun to emerge but is not complete. Once these three terms are fixed, the inquiry below has precision. The question is not whether a jar is present, but where the word arising can coherently be placed.

3. What Has Arisen Does Not Arise: Two Faults

The first section is shortest, but its reasons hit hardest: “because there is the fault of infinite regress and the fault that what has already been done must be done again.”

First, infinite regress. If one arising itself needs another arising to make it arise, then “if after the first arising has arisen, it produces a second arising; after the second has arisen, it produces a third; after the third, a fourth”—this line has no endpoint. The author closes it with one sentence: “This is untenable. Therefore arising does not arise.”

Next, “doing again what has been done.” The author gives three immediate examples: “Just as what has been done should not be done again, what has been burned should not be burned again, and what has been realized should not be realized again, so too what has arisen should not arise again.” A completed act need not be performed another time; what has already burned need not burn again; what has already been realized need not be realized again. Apply the same operation again to what it has already completed, and the operation comes to nothing. Arising is the same.

4. One Step of Retreat: What Was First Fixed Is Now Unfixed

The opponent may retreat: the arising that produces can itself be “not arisen yet able to produce.” It need not first be produced. The author answers with care: “If the first arising can produce while not arisen, there are then two kinds of arising: arising after having arisen, and arising while not arisen. Thus what you first stated as fixed is now unfixed.”

See where this blade falls. The author does not say that “arising while not arisen” is verbally incoherent. He says that the opponent first proposed arising as one fixed meaning but, to escape infinite regress, now installs beneath the same word arising two mutually opposed kinds: one counts as arising only after it has arisen, the other counts as arising without having arisen. In saving one point, you have made unfixed the very meaning you originally fixed. A device that saves the claim once thereby concedes that the meaning was never fixed.

5. What Has Not Arisen Does Not Arise: Arising Apart from Arising Destroys Worldly Dharma

The second section turns to the not-arisen. The author gives two reasons: “because it does not conjoin with arising, and because there is the fault that every not-arisen thing would arise.”

The first reason concerns relation. Precisely because a not-arisen dharma has not arisen, it has not conjoined with arising. To say that something not conjoined with arising nevertheless arises is to posit “arising apart from arising.” The author displays the fault in worldly language: “If arising existed apart from arising, there would be doing apart from doing, going apart from going, and eating apart from eating; in this way worldly dharmas would be destroyed.”

Doing apart from doing, going apart from going, and eating apart from eating—these statements are not abstruse. They show that if an operation can exist independently of the event upon which it depends, the entire convention of worldly speech becomes disordered. The author is protecting the conventional here, not refuting it.

The second reason presses the statement to its limit: “The unsurpassed complete awakening not yet arisen in ordinary people should all arise; afflictions that no longer arise in an arhat of the irreversible dharma should arise while not arisen; and the horns of rabbits, horses, and the rest should arise while not arisen.”

If what has not arisen can arise merely in virtue of not having arisen, then everything not arisen should arise. The unsurpassed complete awakening not yet produced in ordinary people should appear at once; the afflictions that will no longer arise in an arhat of the irreversible dharma should arise anew; and things that have never existed, such as rabbit horns and horse horns, should emerge. The three examples descend from highest to lowest, and the last is uncompromising. The author’s closing words are only, “This is untenable.”

6. An Exchange: Is the Completion of Conditions an Exception?

Someone therefore sets a limit: “What is not arisen arises when causes and conditions conjoin, the time and agent are present, and facilitating conditions are complete. Then the not-arisen arises; it is not that every not-arisen thing arises.” The objector adds: I do not say that everything not arisen arises, only that the not-arisen arises when the multitude of conditions conjoin and time, agent, and means are all complete.

This is a sincere objection and the most concrete thought in an ordinary person’s mind: when the conditions are complete, does the effect not arise?

The author’s answer does not deny conditions. He asks what status the produced effect has within the cause at the moment the conditions are complete. “Within this, if it is first determinately existent, it does not arise; if it is first nonexistent, it does not arise; if it is both existent and nonexistent, it likewise does not arise. Sought through these three alternatives, arising cannot be obtained, as explained before.”

If determinately existent beforehand, it need not arise; if nonexistent beforehand, existence does not emerge from nonexistence; if both, mutually opposed alternatives cannot coexist. All three have already been examined, so the author says, “as explained before,” referring to a road traversed in earlier gates. The conjunction of conditions is precisely evidence for the absence of intrinsic nature, not an exception permitting arising by intrinsic nature. Conditions explain what becomes manifest and what does not; they never place within the cause a thing waiting to emerge.

7. The Time of Arising Does Not Arise: Four Inquiries

The third section is densest. The author first says that the time of arising commits the faults of both preceding sections: “it has the fault of arising after arising and the fault of arising without having arisen,” because “within the time of arising, the already arisen portion does not arise, as explained before; the not-yet-arisen portion does not arise either, also as explained before.” The interval called the time of arising has only two portions when analyzed: the part already arisen and the part not yet arisen. Neither portion arises, and combining them cannot produce a third arising.

The succeeding inquiries grow progressively tighter:

First, through dependence: “If a time of arising existed apart from arising, something could arise within the time of arising; yet in fact there is no time of arising apart from arising.” To say that something arises during the time of arising, one must first have an interval called the time of arising independently of arising. Yet the time of arising is identified only through the operation of arising. Before arising exists, from where could this interval be spoken?

Second, through duplication. If one maintains that the time of arising arises, “there are two arisings: one takes the time of arising as arising, and one arises within the time of arising.” One occurrence is counted as two arisings. The author asks, “There are not two dharmas. How can one speak of two arisings?”

Third, through place: “Before arising exists, there is no time of arising. Where does arising travel?” Without arising there is no time of arising; where, then, would arising move? The question is plain yet reaches the hinge. The mind commonly imagines arising as a road that can be traversed—but that road exists only by relying on someone traversing it.

8. When Arising Fails, Abiding and Cessation Are the Same

After traversing the three positions, the author gathers them in one sentence: “Thus arising, not arising, and the time of arising are all unestablished, and therefore the dharma of arising is unestablished.”

He then carries all three marks with seven characters: “Non-arising; abiding and cessation are the same.”

There is no need to establish two more gates to refute abiding and cessation. Abiding and cessation would have to face the same threefold inquiry into what has already abided, what has not yet abided, and the time of abiding, or what has already ceased, what has not yet ceased, and the time of cessation. The pattern is the same. The author’s refusal to repeat it is economy of form, not insufficiency of statement.

9. The Final Gate’s Conclusion: All Dharmas Are Non-Arising, Ultimately Empty and Quiescent

The final sentence is the place where all twelve gates of the treatise come to ground together:

“Because arising, abiding, and cessation are unestablished, conditioned dharmas are unestablished. Because conditioned dharmas are unestablished, unconditioned dharmas are unestablished. Because conditioned and unconditioned dharmas are unestablished, sentient beings are unestablished. Therefore one should know that all dharmas are non-arising because they are ultimately empty and quiescent.”

The order of this chain must be seen: first the three marks, next the conditioned, then the unconditioned, and finally sentient beings. It precisely echoes the first gate’s “therefore conditioned dharmas, unconditioned dharmas, and self are all empty.” The opening gate begins from dependent arising and reaches conditioned, unconditioned, and self; the final gate begins from the mark of arising and reaches conditioned, unconditioned, and sentient beings. The treatise begins with dharmas produced from a multitude of conditions and ends with all dharmas non-arising: these are the two ends of a single road.

Notice where the reason in the final sentence falls. The author says that all dharmas are non-arising “because they are ultimately empty and quiescent.” He does not first observe that nothing arises and infer that things are empty; because they are ultimately empty and quiescent, he speaks of non-arising. Non-arising is another way of speaking emptiness, not a separate conclusion established outside dependent arising.

What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Gate?

First, know why the last gate must ask about arising. If the intrinsic nature refuted through the preceding eleven gates retains the thought “it nevertheless did arise,” a crack in the door remains. The final gate examines all three positions of arising and closes even that crack.

Second, remember that the three positions are exhaustive: already arisen, not yet arisen, and the time of arising. There is no fourth position. Any claim that something arises by intrinsic nature must fall into one of the three.

Third, do not read “non-arising” as saying that nothing exists. Throughout the gate the author is concerned that “doing apart from doing, going apart from going, and eating apart from eating” would destroy the conventional. What he protects is precisely this dependently spoken world. Non-arising cancels the self-standing point of origin imagined within arising.

Fourth, the twelve gates close here. The first gate says, “one should enter the meaning of emptiness through the Twelve Gates,” and the final gate says, “all dharmas are non-arising because they are ultimately empty and quiescent.” Entrance and what is entered become one sentence here.

Carried Forward: Illumination from Treatises along the Same Axis

The preceding is the meaning of this gate itself. What follows is a cross-light from the axis of the Three Treatises. The illumination is not this treatise; it simply records without deciding how the same doctrinal meaning is stated elsewhere.

The Treatise on the Middle, “Examination of the Three Marks,” likewise examines arising through the three times. Its verse reads:

“Arising does not arise after it has arisen, nor does what is unarisen arise; the time of arising too does not arise—this has already been answered under going and coming.”

After completing its inquiry, the extended prose in that chapter concludes: “Sought in this way, what has arisen has no arising, what has not arisen has no arising, and the time of arising has no arising.” The three positions examined are the same as in this gate. Yet that chapter states them after a series of objections concerning secondary arising and primary arising and a lamp illuminating itself, while this gate directly establishes its inquiry through the three positions and does not enter the distinction between secondary and primary arising. What is examined is the same; the objections traversed differ.

Within this treatise itself, this gate and the first form the head and tail of the work. The first says, “one should enter the meaning of emptiness through the Twelve Gates”; this gate says, “therefore one should know that all dharmas are non-arising because they are ultimately empty and quiescent.” One opens and one closes; what is entered is the same meaning.

Read together along one axis, each remains in its own place. The meaning of this gate is still governed by this gate’s own extended prose.