The Historical Development of the Negation of Arising from Other in Madhyamaka Tradition: The Turning Point by Kamalaśīla

Abstract

The negation of arising from other in Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and its commentaries aimed to validate the ultimate Madhyamaka doctrine of non-arising by refuting the Ābhidharmika Buddhist view that a thing arises from its conditions. As epistemology and logic developed and debates took place between Buddhists and non-Buddhists, the theory of causality or the question of how to establish a causal relation became a point of interest for scholars, so that the Mādhyamikas faced the new task of disproving any means of establishing a real causal relation in order to defend their ultimate tenet of non-arising. Kamalaśīla’s discussion in his Madhyamakāloka is remarkable from this viewpoint; he thoroughly refutes various possibilities that ultimately things arise from something other–whether it is permanent or impermanent. Moving beyond the context of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and its commentarial tradition, he devotes a large portion of his argument to refuting the causal relation between momentary entities (kṣaṇika) that are considered to be real. This was definitely a new stage in the negation of arising in the history of Madhyamaka thought, which encouraged later Tibetan interpreters to further expand the scope of the discussion.