Steven’s Reviews > Ocean of Reasoning: A Great Commentary on Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika > Status Update

Tsongkhapa once again reiterates that action cannot happen in a vacuum, nor can it arise through anything other than causes and conditions. The only reason that we can impute both action and agent is because actions have effects, and these effects imply both an agent and prior conditioning. If action did not have an agent, action would happen endlessly. If agent were not the basis for action, no action could happen

Tsongkhapa makes an interesting point that exhaustion of a phenomena is not the same thing as a phenomena not existing. Exhaustion is based on an object referent (meaning that something that used to be there is no longer there) whereas nonexistence is simply an absence of causes, conditions, and effects. The effect of an action destroys the causes and conditions phenomenologically, leading to their exhaustion.

Tsongkhapa makes another complicated argument about why arising necessarily entails enduring and ceasing. If arising existed but not endurance and ceasing, then the produced would be like space. If enduring existed but not arising or ceasing, the produced could not endure (because it never arose nor ceased). If the produced ceased without arising or enduring, this is nonsensical, because nothing arose at all

So at this point we're refuting the elements, and Tsongkhapa gives a very convoluted explanation of the untenable sequential arising of characteristics and the things that they characterize. Basically, he is saying that they are both dependent on one another and their ultimate absence--They cannot arise sequentially, because if one existed without the other, the syllogism would fall apart

Okay so, I think the first two chapters of the commentary are the most important--If you can understand those chapters, you will probably be able to understand the rest of the commentary without any issue. Tsongkhapa is very adamant in pointing out that 1) nothing has an inherent, permanent essence, and that 2) action produces the agent, not the other way around (although neither are essentially real)