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WorkCandrakīrti

Bodhisattvayogācāracatuḥśatakaṭīkā

A commentary on Āryadeva's four hundred verses that answers objections with stories of fortune, kings and actors.

by Candrakīrti196 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Original title
Catuḥśataka-ṭīkā
Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

A man who begs a god for Fortune finds Misfortune following her into his house, because where one goes the other must: the story is Candrakīrti's, told to show that whoever wants union gets separation with it. He tells it in a commentary on the Catuḥśataka, the "Four Hundred Verses" of Āryadeva, Nāgārjuna's disciple in the third century. The poem runs to sixteen chapters: eight on preparing for the Buddhist path, eight refuting rival doctrines of permanence, a self, time and the senses. Dharmapāla, an earlier commentator, belonged to the Yogācāra school, which treated the mind as more real than its objects. He had explained only the second half, reading it as refuting the natures the mind imagines while leaving real natures standing. Candrakīrti, an Indian monk (c. 600–650 CE), took the poem as one work and read it the other way: nothing has a nature of its own. His opening chapters take on four errors that keep people from becoming Buddhas: taking the impermanent as lasting, pain as pleasure, the impure as pure, and what has no self as a self. A chapter aimed at a king's pride compares royal rank to an actor's part, king one moment and servant the next. The complete text survives only in Tibetan translation; the surviving Sanskrit comes from a single fragmentary manuscript, edited by Kōshin Suzuki in 1994. Karen Lang's Four Illusions (2003), a translation of its opening chapters, presented Candrakīrti as a storyteller as well as a logician.

Key concepts

What are the four inversions the opening chapters attack?

They are four ways of seeing the world upside down: taking what passes for lasting, what hurts for pleasant, what is impure for pure, and what has no self for a self. Candrakīrti treats each as a habit that keeps people off the Buddhist path. His case for the third is the body, whose ornaments and perfumes are taken as signs of purity when they only cover what is unclean.

Why are impermanence, pain and having no self tied together?

All three follow from being conditioned, that is, produced by causes and conditions. Whatever is produced lasts only a moment; what never stays cannot be held or controlled, so clinging to it hurts; and what cannot be controlled is no self and nobody's own. Candrakīrti adds that all of these, impurity included, can describe one and the same thing, a single person rightly seen.

What is merit, and why does it not justify pride?

Merit (puṇya) is good done in the past that ripens later as good fortune: wealth, power, a high birth. A king's throne and treasury are the effects of earlier deeds, not proof of present worth, and like every effect they come to an end. Even heaven, the reward merit promises, frightens the wise, Candrakīrti says, because its pleasures end and its desires are fiercer than ours.

What does it mean that the self is only designated?

It means "I" is a name laid on the changing parts of a person, body, feelings, perceptions and the rest, and picks out nothing over and above them. Candrakīrti's test: a self with a nature of its own would be felt as "I" by everyone, the way heat belongs to fire wherever fire is found. Since each person's "I" is theirs alone, the self is a label that works, not a thing.

Whom does the second half of the commentary argue against?

Mostly non-Buddhist schools that believe in something permanent. The Sāṃkhya school holds that an unchanging self merely looks on while a primal nature unfolds into the world, and that every effect already exists in its cause, as the pot in the clay. Others take space and atoms to be eternal. Candrakīrti's reply to all of them is the same: whatever does not arise from conditions cannot be shown to exist at all.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Four Ways of Seeing Wrong

What keeps a person from the path is less a gap in doctrine than four habits of sight: the passing taken for lasting, pain for pleasure, the impure for pure, and what has no self for a self. Can such habits be unlearned?

Candrakīrti fills Āryadeva's opening chapters with cases rather than proofs. A man who prays for Fortune finds Misfortune following her through his door. Pleasure has few causes and palls as it grows, while pain has many. The same woman stirs desire as a stranger and none once she is known as a daughter, so desire lies in the seeing, not in her. The cure is clearer sight, not gloom, and with it the reasons for putting off the religious life until every duty is done fall away.

  • impermanence
  • suffering
  • pleasure
  • happiness
  • attachment
  • desire
  • renunciation
  • selflessness
  • liberation
  • nirvana
  • rebirth

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The King on the Stage

Rank, wealth and victory in war look like good grounds for pride. Whether anything a ruler holds is truly his own, and what his power costs others, is the question pressed against him.

A king, Candrakīrti says, is like an actor who plays the king one moment and a servant the next: the role is borrowed, and the wealth came from merit earned before. Against the warrior's code he denies that dying in battle wins heaven when cruelty drove the fighting, and he notes that a ruler can share out his spoils but never the wrongdoing that won them. Power breeds pride, pride breeds cruelty, and custom, which changes from country to country, cannot settle what is right.

  • pride
  • ethics
  • karma
  • compassion

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Pots, Selves and Empty Space

Here the things that seem most solid are put to the test: a pot, the self that says "I", space, time and the senses. Does any of them survive being asked what it is on its own?

Against Dharmapāla, an earlier commentator who left real natures standing beneath the imagined ones, Candrakīrti reads Āryadeva's refutations as leaving nothing with a nature of its own. A pot is neither its colour and shape nor a further thing apart from them; "I am a man" names no feature of an inner self; space is only the absence of anything in the way. He also answers the fear this provokes: people think they will cease to exist, when only a mistake goes, as a rope recognised ends the fear of a snake.

  • emptiness
  • intrinsic nature
  • dependent origination
  • causation
  • arising
  • parts and wholes
  • self
  • selfhood
  • identity
  • consciousness
  • perception
  • sense perception
  • time
  • conventional truth
  • teaching

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Within this work

passages held
196
distinct concepts
254
by passages held, corpus-wide
#357

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “dependent origination” and “emptiness”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
dependent originationemptiness13
attachmentimpermanence8
karmaliberation8
impermanencesuffering7
attachmentemptiness6
attachmentliberation6
causationemptiness6
emptinessliberation6
causationimpermanence5
emptinessimpermanence5
karmasuffering5
liberationsuffering5
causationdependent origination4
causationkarma4
impermanencekarma4
attachmentsuffering3
causationliberation3
causationsuffering2
attachmentkarma1
dependent originationkarma1
dependent originationliberation1
emptinesskarma1
impermanenceliberation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Bodhisattvayogācāracatuḥśatakaṭīkā (Catuḥśataka-ṭīkā) you are here SA
  2. Prasannapadā

    Candrakīrti's line-by-line reading of Nāgārjuna's root verses on emptiness, written after his Madhyamakāvatāra, to which it sends readers for fuller arguments.

     SA
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