Nagarjuna · Theology
Nagarjuna’s dazzling deconstruction of motion - arguing that under analysis, the most obvious thing in the world cannot be found to exist independently at all.
Nothing seems more certain than that things move. You walk across a room; a bird flies; the river flows. To doubt motion looks absurd - refuted by a single step. Yet Nagarjuna devotes one of his most famous chapters to arguing that motion, when you actually analyse what it is and where it is, cannot be found to exist in the independent, inherent way we assume. The most obvious thing in the world, examined closely, slips through our fingers. This is the Madhyamaka method applied to a concrete, vivid case - and it is meant to teach us about everything.
Nagarjuna tightens the screw. We want to say motion is in the ‘presently-moving’ stretch. But what makes that stretch ‘presently-moving’? Only that motion is occurring in it. So ‘the present moving has motion’ either says nothing (it just repeats that the moving moves) or splits into absurdity: it implies two motions - one that makes the stretch ‘moving’ in the first place, and a second that is the motion we’re attributing to it. And two motions would require two movers. The attempt to locate motion in the present either spins in an empty circle or multiplies into nonsense. Motion cannot be coherently pinned to any of the three times of the path.
Nagarjuna extends the analysis from the motion to the mover. Consider a ‘goer’ who goes. Does the goer have going? If the ‘goer’ already is a goer apart from the going, then a goer exists who is not going - a contradiction (a goer with no going). But if ‘goer’ just means ‘one who goes,’ then to say ‘the goer goes’ is empty repetition, and again threatens two goings (the one that makes him a goer, and the one he performs). The agent (goer) and the action (going) cannot be cleanly separated - neither exists independently of the other; each is a dependent designation defined through the other. There is no independent ‘goer’ who then performs ‘going.’ Agent and action arise together, empty, mutually dependent - like everything else.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Nagarjuna analyses motion into three ‘times’ of a path and finds it in none. Reconstruct his trilemma and what it is meant to prove, in your own words.
Leads to Zeno of Elea.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.