Pocast 18.5 · May 21, 04:20 PM by Kukkurovaca
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Rough Script
Introduction

Greetings, and welcom to MūlamadhyamakakārikaCast. This week’s episode covers chapter 18, verse five of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikāḥ of Nāgārjuna.
Text

karmakleśakṣayānmokṣaḥ karmakleśā vikalpataḥ|
te prapañcātprapañcastu śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate||5

(repeat)
Translation

Because of the destruction of the defilements of action, there is liberation. The defilements of action are from the imagination.

They are from prapañca,but prapañca ceases in emptiness.
Commentary

In Indian philosophy going back to well before Buddhism, it is understood that there is a connection between karma and liberation. Karma is a concept that is often misunderstood and/or abused in the West; in particular, it is often conflated with Judeo-Christian notions of judgment and justice. There is an obvious similarity in that, in terms of social control, both are narratives which convey to people the idea that good and bad actions will return to them. However, the judgmental function in Western religion is an aspect of the personal relationship between the person and God, and actions and consequences are often disprortionate. (I don’t mean to critize; it’s not that the Western system is in some sense unfair; it just functions differently.)

Karma is totally impersonal, and functions in a way more analogous to the impersonal forces of physics. It is a chaini of causes and effects, devoid of positive or negative value in themselves, but taking on positive or negative aspects when perceived by a subject who is caught up in the chain of rebirth.

One of the traditional views of the relationship between karma and enlightenment was that you had to resolve the whole karmic process, let the entire chain of cause and effect play out, prior to being fully liberated. This view is still in play for some groups, but for others, both in Buddhism and in several branches of orthodox Indian philosophy (which most people would identify as “Hinduism”), the reality and substantiveness of this karmic chain have come into question, and along with it, the notion that the karmic cycle is this big important thing that needs to be taken care of on its own terms.

I think it’s in this spirit that Nāgārjuna says that while liberation is from the destruction of bad karma, karma itself is an imaginary construct which emerges from something called prapañca, which is often translated as “delusion”, but which I sometimes translate as “metastasis,” because what it means is multiplication—in the sense of duplicity or multiplicity as a falsifyinig process of adding unreal alternatives to the actual situation, or in the sense of the opposite of parcimony—meaning the unnecessary multiplication of entities.

Anyway, the point is that it’s a source of ideas or understandings which are (a) false and (b) problematic in that they cause suffering. But these ideas, like karma, go away when prapañca goes away; and prapañca goes away in something called “emptiness.”

Emptiness, or śūnyatā, is a concept that has led to much confusion. It’s often been conflated, both by its opponents and by some western observers, with the sort of nihilism one encounters in the west—western nihilism being a basically negative doctrine which denies the possibility of meaning in human experience and endeavor. This is not the right way of looking at it, but it’s often where we go when we hear that phrase, “emptiness,” because of course we usually use the term “empty” in a negative sense. This connotative dissonance led Nancy McCagney to argue, in a book-length form, for the replacement of “emptiness” with “openness.” I’m disinclined to agree, because while there are issues with our kneejerk response to the idea of emptiness, śūnyatā as a word really does mean emptiness or hollowness. Nor are the positive connotations attached to it in many Buddhist circles intrinsic to the word; if you shopped it around to orthodox thinkers of the same periods, you’d probably get a wide range of responses, some of which might not be so far from that of the average westerner. After all, the subsantialist metaphysics underpinning traditional western philosophy is largely contiguous with the substantialist metaphysics underpinning traditional eastern philosophy, a fact which often escapes casual readers of either. And if you look at what thinkers like Nāgārjuna are talking about, a lot of it has to do with hammering out his proprietary interpretation of śūnyatā—why? Because the terminology was a problem back then. If Nāgārjuna had wanted unambiguous upbeat language, he would have coined himself a new term—something which was very, very easy for a philosopher writing in Sanskrit to do. So, rather than ditch “emptiness” for some other term, I’d rather keep it and work on shifting how we understand it.

As to what śūnyatā really is, we’ll be coming back to that question over and over and over again, because it really is Nāgārjuna’s central preoccupation. For now, let’s just say that it’s the opposite of the substantialist metaphysics I mentioned a minute ago—substantialist metaphysics being the viewpoint that if you take a patch of the world or a patch of yourself, or what have you—and if you go as deep inside that as you can, down to the real basement of the universe, you’ll find something solid and real and specific and eternal. In the case of a person, this “something” might be a soul or an ātman: the view that behind the shifting, temporal mask of my mundane ego, there is something which does not change, which existed prior to this body and will exist after it, etc. śūnyatā is the refutation of this idea, and in śūnyatā, the delusions which are anchored in these substantialisms, including the delusion that I as an agent am engaged in the process of acting and reacting in the karmic chain.
Textual Notes

Given the ungainly terminoloigical disquisition I just rambled through, I’m going leave the textual notes alone, except to rattle off the bits:

karmakleśakṣaya(m5s) mokṣa(m1s) karmakleśa(m1p) vikalpatas(ind)
tad(m1p) prapañca(m5s) prapañca(m1s) tu(ind) śūnyatā(f7s) ni-rudh(PrePass3pSing)