Buddhapālita’s and Candrakīrti’s Interpretation of the Concept of Causality

Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti relied on different traditions of commenting Nāgārjuna’s Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikās, and the tradition presented in Candrakīrti’s “Prasannapadā” is closer to Nāgārjuna’s autocommentary “Akutobhaya” than Buddhapālita’s tradition, though in conceptual aspect both of them are practically identical to each other. Causality is understood there as a law that permeates all saṃsāric existence and makes all existence empty, for only that which is the cause of itself could be non-empty. But Buddhist philosophy denies the very possibility of the existence of such realities, because, were saṃsāric existence based on something self-existent, saṃsāra would be insuperable. Both traditions treat the relationship of cause and effect as chronologically “adjacent” to each other. However, all the judgments presented above are true only on a relative level; from an absolute point of view, they are based on the differences between the true and the false, the meaningful and the meaningless, the being and the non-being, the subject and the object, etc., and therefore are empty. Hence any judgment about causality is also empty in the absolute sense.