Candrakīrti's Definition of Own-Being: Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and the Great Perfection
I. The Sentence before the Argument
Almost everything the Madhyamaka says rests on a single sentence that most readers pass over on the way to the arguments. It is the sentence in which Candrakīrti, commenting on the second verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Noble Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, says what the word svabhāva, own-being, actually means. The verse itself is short:
akṛtrimaḥ svabhāvo hi nirapekṣaḥ paratra ca
Own-being is unmade, and independent of anything else. The preceding verse had asked how own-being could ever be made, since whatever arises from causes and conditions is a made thing. Candrakīrti now takes the second line and unpacks it, and in doing so he writes what may be the most clarifying paragraph in the whole literature of emptiness.
He begins with the word itself. Svo bhāvaḥ svabhāvaḥ: own being is the being that is one’s own. And what is truly one’s own, ātmīya? That, he says, which is not made, akṛtrima. What is made does not belong to the thing, as the heat of water does not belong to water. And what depends upon oneself, āyatta, is also one’s own, as one’s servants and one’s wealth are. But what depends upon another, parāyatta, is not one’s own, like something borrowed for a time at one’s request, tāvatkālikāyācitakam, which has no independence, asvatantram.
From these examples he draws the conclusion that fire’s heat is not fire’s own-being either. It depends on causes and conditions; it did not exist before it was kindled and came into being afterwards; it is therefore a made thing. And then he says what an own-being would have to be: something proper to the thing, unmade, not arising later after not existing before, not dependent on causes and conditions, never varying across the three times. He adds that the heat of water, the near and the far shore, the long and the short are all things that fail this test. He asks whether fire possesses any such own-form, and answers that it does not, and yet cannot simply be said not to. And he ends with a remark of disarming candour: still, so that those who are listening may not be terrified, we superimpose existence by convention and say that fire exists.
Every phrase in this paragraph repays attention, and the whole is far more unusual than it first appears.
II. A Concept Taken from Property
The first thing to notice is where the concept comes from. Candrakīrti does not define own-being by a metaphysical theory. He defines it by the logic of ownership. The word sva means "own" in the plainest sense, the sense in which one speaks of one’s own house, one’s own servants, one’s own wealth. The question he asks of the world is a question of title: does anything own what it is?
The examples are chosen with care, and one of them contains a point of real subtlety. Servants and wealth are yours not because they are independent of you but because they depend on you. This tells us the direction of dependence that ownership requires. What is mine is what rests on me. What I rest on is not mine. A person who depends on a landlord does not own the house, however long he has lived in it, and a borrowed object, however useful, is not his, because its availability is at the pleasure of another.
Now apply this to anything at all. Suppose I try to say that some quality is the own-being of a thing, that it is simply what the thing is. The quality may depend on the thing, as servants depend on a master. But if the thing itself depends on conditions, then the quality ultimately depends on those conditions too, because dependence passes upward. A tenant cannot convey a title he never held. So the demand of ownership does not stop at the first level: to own anything, the owner must be unowned, independent of everything above it. And since every actual thing arises from causes and exists in relation to other things, there is no owner without a landlord anywhere in the world.
This is why the argument has such reach. It is not about this thing or that. It is a structural observation about what own would have to mean, and it finds that nothing can satisfy the meaning, not because things are poor, but because the requirement is a requirement of sovereignty.
It also explains the choice of words that the tradition later makes about the person. The word for self, ātman, and the word for what belongs to self, ātmīya, come from one root, and Candrakīrti’s own-form of a thing, ātmīyaṃ rūpam, is the same idea applied to objects. The selflessness of persons and the selflessness of things are therefore one argument at two scales. The sense that I am the owner of my body, my feelings and my thoughts, and the sense that this flame is simply hot, are both claims of title. Each claims to be the unowned owner.
III. Two Ways of Being Borrowed
Candrakīrti identifies two different ways in which something can fail to be one’s own.
The first is being made, kṛtrima or kṛtaka. Water is cool by nature, we say, and when it is hot the heat has obviously come from elsewhere: a fire, the sun, a hot stone. It will leave again. The heat is on loan.
The second is being relative, and the examples are pārāvāra, the near shore and the far shore, and dīrghahrasva, the long and the short. Nobody makes a shore the far shore. It is the far shore only from where one stands, and it becomes the near shore the moment one crosses. A stick is long beside a short stick and short beside a long one. Here the dependence is not causal but comparative. The property exists only within a relation, and cannot be found in the thing taken alone.
Between them these two audits catch a great deal. Whatever has a cause is made; whatever has an opposite or a comparison is relative. And a surprising number of the qualities we treat as simply there, size, speed, beauty, usefulness, value, are relative in the second way. The value of a banknote is a perfect case. Nobody believes that the paper contains its worth, yet the same mind that knows this about money readily believes that a person’s standing, a profession’s dignity or a nation’s greatness is simply what it is.
To these two Candrakīrti adds a third test, which is easy to overlook and which is the most revealing. Own-being, he says, would be unvarying across the three times, kālatraye 'pi avyabhicāri, and would not be something that, not existing before, comes into being afterwards, pūrvam abhūtvā paścād yan na bhavati. In plain terms: it would have no biography. It would never have begun and would never be altered. Everything that has a history, a first appearance, a development, a decline, is for that reason not its own. And this is a far more demanding standard than it sounds, for it means that anything we can tell the story of has already been excluded.
IV. Why Fire Looks Self-Owned
Now we come to the most instructive feature of the passage, the choice of fire. Water’s heat is an easy case, for its borrowing is conspicuous. But Candrakīrti presses the argument where it is hardest, on the one thing in the ancient world that seemed hot by its very nature. Fire is hot. Surely, if anything has an own-being, heat is the own-being of fire?
He answers by looking at the history. Heat in fire arises from fuel, from friction, from the coming together of conditions. There was a time when it was not there. When the fuel is exhausted it will be gone. It is as clearly produced as the heat of water, and the only difference between the two cases is that in fire the borrowing is hidden.
And here lies the thought that I find the most illuminating in the whole passage. Why is it hidden? Because the conditions of fire’s heat are not absent for a moment. As long as there is fire, there is the very thing that makes the heat. The dependence is perfectly regular, so regular that it does not show itself as dependence at all. Reliability looks exactly like independence. What always comes with a thing seems to belong to it, and what can be separated from it seems to have been borrowed. We take the regularity of conditions for the ownership of a property.
This is a principle that can be tested in one’s own life. Ask which of your features seem most inherently yours: your temperament, your native tongue, your sense of humour, your characteristic fears, the manner in which you occupy a room. These feel like what you simply are. And the reason they feel so is exactly that the conditions that sustain them, your body, your upbringing, your language, your habits, your surroundings, are constant, and so invisible. The features that seem most intrinsic are not those with the fewest conditions. They are the ones whose conditions never vary. The sense of own-being is what a deeply regular dependence feels like from the inside.
V. The Definition Is Not a Straw Man
The usual objection to the Madhyamaka is that it refutes a notion of own-being that no one holds: that its definition is so extreme that of course nothing meets it, and the conclusion is trivial. The passage answers the objection, though it takes a moment to see how.
The answer is that the definition is not extreme. It is simply what the word own means, once the meaning is spoken aloud. Suppose we weaken it. Suppose we say that the own-being of fire’s heat is the power that fire reliably has to burn, even though that power depends on fuel. Candrakīrti has no quarrel with this as a conventional description, and he is happy to say that fire burns. But this weaker thing is not what we take ourselves to be saying when we feel that something is simply so. In the deep grammar of "mine", "its own", "just how it is", the claim is of the strong kind: that the thing has its character in itself, regardless of anything else. It is that unspoken claim, and not any scholastic theory, which the argument aims at.
This is why the Madhyamaka can say that the view it refutes is innate, sahaja, and need not have been learned from any philosopher. The own-being under attack is not a doctrine anyone holds. It is a feature of the way things are taken, a presumption written into the language of possession and carried by every ordinary sentence in which a thing is said to be a certain way. To define it strictly is therefore not to set up a target, but to make the presumption visible. Once it is stated, anyone can check whether it has ever been satisfied.
VI. What Is Left of the World
It does not follow that nothing is hot. This is the point at which the passage is most often misread, and Candrakīrti guards against the misreading with great care. The heat of fire is perfectly real, and fire burns. What has been shown is that the heat is made, dependent and relative to a history, and that is exactly why it is capable of doing anything.
For consider what an own-being of heat would be like. Unmade, independent, never varying, it could not be kindled, since it was always there. It could not be extinguished, since nothing could affect it. It could not respond to fuel, to air or to the passing of time, since responding is the opposite of independence. A thing whose character were truly its own would be inert to everything. It would not be a hot thing that scorched. It would be a hot thing that could never begin to scorch or cease. The Noble Nāgārjuna’s line that for whomever emptiness is possible, everything is possible, says the same: if things had intrinsic being, nothing could ever happen, and so it is their borrowed being that makes the world workable. A world of owners would have no commerce.
VII. The Sentence at the End
The last sentence of the passage deserves to be read slowly. Candrakīrti has just shown that fire has no own-being and cannot simply be said not to. And then he says that, in order to spare those who are listening from terror, śrotṛṇām uttrāsaparivarjanārtham, we say by convention that it exists.
Two things are remarkable here.
The first is that he names the emotion. The truth that nothing has intrinsic being is, for the one who first sees it, frightening. The reason is not hard to find. A life organised around ownership, of a self, of a body, of a name, of a place, of a relationship, of a view, cannot take the news of universal tenancy as a mere piece of philosophy. It is felt as dispossession. And a teacher who ignores this frightens his students out of hearing him. The conventional language in which fire is simply said to be hot is, in this passage, an act of mercy.
The second is the word he uses. He says that we superimpose, samāropya. Everywhere else in Madhyamaka and Yogācāra writing, superimposition is the name of the error, the thing that is added to what is there and mistaken for it. Here it is used by a teacher knowingly, as an instrument. The same operation can be a delusion or a skill, and the difference is only whether one knows that it is being done. The student who says "this fire is hot" and believes in an own-being of heat, and the teacher who says "this fire is hot" and knows it to be a conventional courtesy, speak the same words. The difference between them is the entire path.
And the answer to the question "does fire have such an own-form?" is carefully double. It does not exist. Yet it cannot simply be said not to exist. The reason is that to say that something does not exist presupposes that it was a candidate for existing, as a guest may fail to arrive. But own-being was never a candidate. The concept was never satisfied, and its being unsatisfiable is not a fact about an absent object. The flat denial would still treat the concept as meaningful. So the verdict is not a negation of something that might have been there. It is the discovery that the question had no possible positive answer.
VIII. The Yogācāra Reading: Appearance Hides Its Workshop
How does the Yogācāra tradition read this definition? It reads it as true, and as incomplete in a particular way.
The Yogācāra masters use the same word for the same test. When the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra explains the Buddha’s teaching that all things are without own-being, it gives three explanations, one for each of the three natures. The imputed is without own-being because it is only name and designation. The perfected is without own-being in that it is the ultimate, in which no imagined own-being is found. And the dependent nature, paratantra, is without own-being because it arises not by its own power but by the power of other conditions. Vasubandhu in the Triṃśikā says in the same sense that the second nature has no self-origination. And note the very name of this nature. Paratantra means "under another’s control" or "dependent on another". It is Candrakīrti’s parāyatta. The Yogācāra’s own technical term for the way things ordinarily are is a description of borrowed being.
So there is no disagreement about the audit. Both schools agree that nothing in experience passes the test of being unmade and independent. What the Yogācāra adds is the question that Candrakīrti’s paragraph leaves in the dark: why does everything appear as though it did pass?
This is the point at which the passage’s last sentence becomes interesting from the other side. Candrakīrti says that we superimpose existence, as a courtesy to the listener. But the Yogācāra analysis shows that this superimposition is not something that teachers decide to do. It is what the mind does to itself before any teaching is heard.
Consider how anything appears. The object arrives in experience as finished. A cup is simply there on the table. It does not display the conditions that made it, the clay, the kiln, the hands, the light that reveals it, the eye that sees it, the habits of recognition that make it a cup. Appearing is the end of a process, and the format of appearance shows only the end. A thing that appears whole and present, and shows no workshop, looks exactly like something unmade and independent. In other words, the look of own-being is not an extra belief laid over perception. It is the default look of whatever shows up, because showing up conceals the conditions of its showing. This is what the Yogācāra means when it says that consciousness presents the object and not the process of its construction, and that the imputed grasped and grasper are the form in which the stream of experience appears to itself.
And so the tradition gives a psychology to match the logic. The seeds and impressions, vāsanā, deposited in the storehouse, are what make each new appearance arrive in the same finished way. Habit is the machinery by which borrowed things are presented as given. Vasubandhu’s definition of the perfected nature in the Triṃśikā is accordingly exact: it is the constant absence of the imputed in the dependent. The perfected is not another thing. It is the dependent stream seen as lacking exactly what Candrakīrti has defined, the own-being that it was taken to have.
Where the two traditions do differ is on what remains once the audit is done. For Candrakīrti, nothing within the dependent stream can be allowed any ultimate standing, since that would be a reintroduction of intrinsic being by the back door. For the Yogācāra, the stream of cognition, however dependent, is the one thing that has to be there for the audit itself to be carried out, and so it is given a different status: real as a process, empty of the imputed. The dispute is genuine, but the definition lets it be stated without confusion. Both ask the same question of the stream: is it unmade, and independent? Both answer that it is not. They differ in whether the fact of its being a conditioned process is the last word, or whether its being the process in which recognition occurs needs a name of its own.
IX. The Great Perfection: Unmade, Independent, and Not a Thing
When the definition is turned toward the Great Perfection, something startling happens, and it is worth stating plainly: the Great Perfection describes its own subject in precisely Candrakīrti’s words.
The base, gzhi, is called unfabricated, ma bcos pa, which is the Tibetan for akṛtrima. It is said to have been so from the very beginning, ye nas, and not to have come into being later. It is self-originated, rang byung, and its presence is accomplished of itself, lhun grub, which is to say not produced by anything else. Its purity is not a purification, and it is not dependent on a path to bring it about. Read against the passage we have just studied, this is a description of own-being: unmade, independent, unvarying through the three times, without a first appearance. And the technical word that the Madhyamaka denies, rang bzhin, which is the Tibetan for svabhāva, is the very word the Great Perfection uses for the second aspect of the base. Madhyamaka says that things are without rang bzhin. The Great Perfection says that the base has a rang bzhin that is spontaneously present.
It is impossible to avoid the question this raises. Has the Great Perfection done what the Madhyamaka prohibits, and posited an own-being behind appearances?
The answer lies in a feature of the definition that has been quietly present throughout. The word is sva-bhāva, own being. What would satisfy the definition would have to be a bhāva, a being, an item, a something that has the unmade and independent character. But the masters of the Great Perfection are exact about this. The Omniscient Longchenpa teaches that the base is a groundless ground: it appears to be a ground and is posited as such only from the relative standpoint, while in the true nature of reality it is empty of being a ground. The tantras as he cites them have the base say that it does not come into being as a ground. And Mipham the Great says in the Beacon of Certainty that appearance abides in a baseless great emptiness. The unmade independence of which the Great Perfection speaks is not the property of a thing. It is not even a thing.
And Candrakīrti himself had already said as much. In the same chapter he remarks that the one nature of things which could be called their own-being, their non-arising, is, being nothing at all, a mere absence, precisely no own-being. The only candidate that passes the test is not an owner. It is the fact that there is no owner. The Great Perfection says the same, with an addition that is its own: this absence is not blank, for it shines. The emptiness that Candrakīrti identifies is, in the Great Perfection, known: the unmade is luminous and self-aware, though never a thing.
There is a second, more intimate way in which the definition clarifies the Great Perfection, and it concerns the structure of ownership. Recall that what depends on me is mine, and that I depend on nothing. The Great Perfection speaks of a base and of its display, of rigpa and its radiance, and one might say that these stand to each other as owner and possessions. But the Great Perfection insists on their inseparability, dbyer med. In the grammar of ownership this is decisive. Ownership requires a gap: an owner distinct from what is owned. Where there is no gap, where the "owner" is nothing apart from its "possessions", the word own has nothing to do. This is the case that Candrakīrti’s phrase svabhāva, own-being, points to at its limit: the own and the being coincide. What appears is not owned by awareness, nor lent to it. It is how awareness is. And an awareness that is not the owner of its display has no need to defend its title.
Finally, the definition gives the Great Perfection’s central practice a new intelligibility. If own-being must be unmade, then the only way to meet whatever in experience is unmade is to stop making. This is exactly what the instruction of non-fabrication, ma bcos pa, directs. The practitioner does not search for the unmade by thinking; he subtracts the making. He drops the adjustments, the corrections, the commentary, the effort to be a particular way, and sees what is left once the fabricating stops. What is left is not an object he has found, because the unmade is not a thing. It is the fact that appearance and awareness, left alone, were never produced and never owned. And the way in which thoughts free themselves where they arise is simply what happens when nothing is made of them: the borrowed appearance is not renewed, treated as mine, followed or defended, and lapses of itself.
X. Why It Matters
It is worth saying plainly what is at stake in understanding this definition, because it is easy to take emptiness for granted as a slogan.
Without the definition, emptiness collapses in one of two directions. Either it becomes nihilism, the idea that nothing is really there, which Candrakīrti’s careful words exclude, since heat burns and fire exists as a convention. Or it becomes a vague mysticism of oneness, in which the word "empty" is used to point at some ineffable fullness, which his clear criteria exclude no less, since they ask very specific questions: is it made, is it dependent, does it vary, did it begin?
With the definition, the practitioner knows precisely what is being let go. It is not the world, and not function, and not the conventional self that gets up and eats and speaks. It is the claim of title: the felt assumption, running beneath every sentence, that something is simply so, and is so in itself. And he has a method for finding the claim. Wherever something feels like "just how it is", "just who I am", "just what this is", he can ask the three questions: where did it begin, what does it depend on, and in comparison with what is it so? And he will find, each time, that the answer is a story of conditions that are too regular to be noticed.
For the practitioner of the Great Perfection it protects the most delicate point of all. The base is unfabricated and independent, and that very description is the one place where the mind most easily builds a subtle self: an unchanging witness, an eternal presence behind experience. The definition shows exactly how the base differs from a self: not in having less than an own-being, but in not being a being at all. The unmade is not something one has, or is. It is what remains when the claim of ownership has gone.
And there is a last thing that Candrakīrti’s final sentence teaches, and it is perhaps the most practical. The truth can be frightening, and the fright is not a sign of having failed to understand it. It is the sign that one has understood a little. Candrakīrti’s sentence implies that the teaching must be given in a way the listener can bear. To hold this knowledge lightly, to say "the fire is hot" without clinging and without correcting everyone who says it, is not a compromise of the view. It is the view in practice: a superimposition that is known to be one, offered in kindness, and set down when it has done its work.
