Nagarjuna said
All answers are traps
No, he had a better answer.
He proved it.
As long as you're still looking for answers
You've already fallen in.
In the last issue, we dismantled the eight middle roads
Nagarjuna removes the shell of cause and effect, time and motion with eight no words
But what I'm going to talk about today
Ten times more ruthless than the eight no middle way
It's called four negatives.
This is the most extreme logical operation ever written by humans two thousand years ago
And to this day, mathematical logicians argue about it.
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
Let me ask you a question
Do you love your parents?
Of course you do
OK
That was the first sentence.
Yes.
Nagarjuna said
Are you sure about that?
Do you ever have a grudge against them?
Have you ever wanted to escape?
Let me rephrase that.
You don't love them
You said that's not right either.
Of course I love them.
It's just complicated sometimes.
OK
This is the second sentence
without
Nagarjuna said
Not right either
You think about it.
Fine
I love and I don't love
Love and hate
This is the third sentence
And some and none.
Nagarjuna said
That's not right.
You are in a hurry
Then I can't answer that question
It goes beyond love and not love.
This is the fourth sentence
non-existent
Nagarjuna said
You are still answering
Just a more delicate shell
Four options.
negative all
You may think this is just a bar
But remember how you felt just now
When I asked you whether you love your parents or not
Did a complicated thing flash through your mind in an instant?
That kind of thing can't be packed with words at all
Your true feelings are richer than any statement
More subtle than any judgment
And what Nagarjuna has to do
It takes you back to where you were before the language.
This is the most famous logical weapon in the history of Buddhism
Four negatives
It's called catuskoti.
The literal translation is the four corners.
It recurs in the theory
But the most concentrated and lethal section is in the twenty-fifth freak
Nirvana
Nagarjuna said something that provoked almost all philosophers there
After the destruction of the Tathagata
You can't say he exists
Can't say he doesn't exist
It cannot be said that he exists and does not exist
It cannot be said that he neither exists nor does not exist
Four roads
All blocked
Do you think he's cheating?
All options are negative
So what are you trying to say?
Don't worry.
This is precisely the most delicate part of the four negatives
Nagarjuna doesn't want to give you an answer
He wants you to see
Why do you want an answer?
Let's take it apart one by one.
Let me start with the first sentence.
Why is that?
Yes.
Is wrong
A tree stands in front of you
You say it exists
Then I ask you
Does it exist independently?
Can it escape the soil?
Can you get rid of moisture?
Can you live without the sun?
Without the genetic code in the seed?
Away from the eyes and the brain that you're looking at?
We talked about it in the last issue.
The core of the eight untruths is dependent origin
All phenomena are the result of karma and karma
Nothing exists by itself
You say trees exist
Actually what you said is
A bunch of conditions just happened to come together at this moment
It takes on a pattern that you call a tree.
You remove any condition
The pattern changes or even disappears
So
Yes.
The word implies a hidden premise
That is, things have an independent, fixed, independent nature that does not depend on any conditions
And Nagarjuna's entire theory is proving one thing
Self is not established
Origin is no self-nature
Emptiness without self
Since there is no self
What makes you think it exists?
The existence you mentioned
Just a bunch of makeshift scaffolding
You treat it as a real building
This, AI
It should be particularly easy for you to understand the times
You see a picture on the screen
Does it exist?
It's a bunch of pixels, a piece of code.
A temporary combination of electrical signals
You turn off the screen.
The picture is gone.
You say it exists
Actually what you said is
A set of conditions happens to exhibit patterns that you can recognize
Nagarjuna was demolished 2,000 years ago
It's the same thing.
The world you thought was solid
It's actually rendered frame by frame in real time.
Each frame depends on an infinite number of conditions being online simultaneously.
Any condition is broken.
The picture changes
You call this frame existence
But it was never a fixed thing
It's an ongoing event.
OK
So what about "none"?
You say trees don't exist
This is even more ridiculous
There's something photosynthesizing in front of you.
Growing leaves
In the result
You deny its phenomenal manifestation
What are you denying?
What you're denying is your own perceptual experience.
This is not wisdom.
That's a lie.
No problem goes deeper
It has a mirror image.
You say none
You've actually preset a reference
You imagine something that exists.
Then deny it
The harder you deny
It means that the clearer the shadow in your heart is
Like the more you try not to think about the white elephant
The bigger the white elephant gets.
This is why nihilism is not the end of the dragon tree
Many people misread the Middle Way
I thought Nagarjuna was saying that nothing exists
Everything is empty.
So there's nothing left to do.
This is a big misunderstanding
Nagarjuna denies there is
Also negate nothing
Empty is not empty
Empty is not what you think it is
If you treat emptiness as a kind of nothingness
Then you just jumped from one pit into another
Nagarjuna himself explicitly warned in the middle theory
To the effect that
Emptiness is used to let go of all attachments
If you in turn cling to emptiness itself
There's no cure.
Then the third sentence
And some and none.
It's the classic placebo of human reason.
You say
OK.
Then it exists to some extent
To some extent it doesn't exist
That's all right
Sounds dialectical
Very two-sided view of the problem
Many philosophical systems stop at this point
Hegel's dialectics stops there.
Theme, Anti-Theme, Combined Theme
Modern physics also often stops here
Light is both a particle and a wave
You could even say
Most of the judgments of our daily lives also stop here
You ask someone if they are happy in their marriage
He would probably say
There are good and bad
You ask an entrepreneur how the company is doing
He will also say
There are achievements and difficulties
That sounds like the most reasonable and moderate answer.
It just stacks two opposites on top of each other.
Pretend to be standing in the middle
But Nagarjuna doesn't buy it
Why is that?
Because there is no such thing.
It looks round.
In fact, it secretly does one thing
It treats both existence and non-existence as real, stackable properties.
You say something exists and doesn't exist
Then you must think in your heart that existence is a state of reality.
Non-existence is also a state of reality
So it can be both at the same time.
You think you transcend binary opposites
In fact, you just packaged the binary opposition
But Nagarjuna has already proven in the first and second sentences
There is something and there is nothing.
Two things that don't hold together
It still doesn't work.
You can't stack two blank checks and say you're rich
Finally, the fourth sentence
non-existent
This is the most gullible sentence
It is also the sentence that makes practitioners stumble the most
You say
Then I won't say anything.
I'm not saying it exists.
It doesn't exist.
I suspend judgment
Keep silent.
That's okay, right?
That sounds really zen.
Okay?
Nagarjuna said
No way.
Because non-existence is still a position.
You say I don't choose
That in itself is a choice
You say I don't define
That's a definition in itself.
You say I'm beyond what's and what's not
The transcendence itself is yet another concept.
It's still in the conceptual playground.
You respond with silence
Silence becomes your fifth answer
And that's what's really shocking about the four negatives.
It's not a no four answer.
It's a no. The whole thing.
It's not a point of view you want to take down.
It's the mechanism by which you hold your opinion.
I'll give you an analogy that you might understand right away
Have you ever experienced insomnia?
You lie in bed tossing and turning
Tell yourself first
I want to fall asleep
useless
Then tell yourself
I don't want to think about falling asleep
More useless
And then you think.
I want to relax without trying to relax too much
Brain is more messed up
Finally, you want to
Forget it. I don't want anything else.
As a result, I don't want anything anymore.
That's a big idea in itself.
It's buzzing in your head.
All four sentences are stuck
So when did you actually fall asleep?
It was you who suddenly realized
You are no longer among these four options.
It's not that you chose to quit
It's that you quit without knowing it
Once you know you're out
You go in again
Nagarjuna's four negatives point to this
Reality is not one of the four options
It's not the fifth option to go beyond the above four
The reality is when you no longer need options
Something that comes naturally.
You might ask
Does this have anything to do with modern logic?
The relationship is too big
In classical Aristotelian logic
A proposition is either true
Either fake
There is no third possibility
It's called the law of excluded middle
For more than two thousand years
The whole of Western logic is based on this
Nagarjuna's four negatives directly challenge this rule
A thing can be neither true nor false
The foundations of logic have been pried open
In the 20th century, there was an Australian logician
Graham Priest.
He proposed something called paraconsistent logic
In classical logic
If there is a conflict in a system
The whole system will crash
Anything can be deduced
It's called the explosion principle.
But in paraconsistent logic
Contradiction doesn't cause an explosion
A proposition can be both true and false at the same time
And the system works.
Priest wrote a famous treatise on it.
The title is called the logic of four sentences
Direct Modeling of Dragon Tree Reasoning with Modern Non-Classical Logic
A 2,000-year-old Indian monk
Inspired the frontiers of mathematical logic in the 21st century
This is not Eastern mysticism.
It's hardcore, logical innovation.
There's a deeper connection.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem proved that
Any sufficiently complex formal system
There are propositions within the system that cannot be proven to be true or false
In other words
Logic cannot fully describe itself with its own rules
You frame the world with logic.
There is always a corner you can't frame
And what Nagarjuna said two thousand years ago
Translated into modern language is
No conceptual framework can fully capture reality
No matter how sophisticated your frame is
Reality always leaks through the gaps in concepts
Gödel proved this mathematically.
Nagarjuna experienced this in four negative sentences
Two thousand years apart
One starts with mathematics
One begins with meditation.
Finally hit the same wall
That wall is
Thought can never completely surround what is beyond thought
You fish for water with a net.
No matter how dense the network is
The water always runs out of the mesh
But please note
Nagarjuna is not an anti-logicist
This is so important
He's not saying that logic is useless.
He wrote his own arguments using rigorous logical reasoning
Every argument is interconnected
He is using logic to prove the boundaries of logic
He uses concepts to point out the limitations of concepts
It's like a fire.
Burn everything that can be burned
Finally, I burned myself
This fire is not destruction
It's clearance.
After clearing all occlusions
You can see what's always behind the fire.
Do you know what Wittgenstein said at the end of his theory of logical philosophy?
So he says.
Anything unspeakable
We must be silent
Nagarjuna predates him by 1,700 years
And Nagarjuna goes even further.
Wittgenstein stopped talking about silence
Nagarjuna won't even let you stop being silent
Because once you take silence as a position
As a high-level gesture
You are already in the fourth sentence
Then some people will say
You blocked all the roads
Is there a way out?
What's the point of practicing?
There is a way
But that road is not in the concept
The function of four negatives is not to make you despair
But after you've cornered your mind
Where there is no way out
You suddenly find
The wall itself is an illusion
No, you need an exit.
It's the fact that you think you're stuck.
The greatest illusion
What's holding you back is never reality
It's your judgment about reality
Like you're not trapped in a room
You are trapped by what you think is only one door
When you stop looking for the door
You just noticed
This room has no walls.
In the last issue, when I talked about the eight no middle ways, I said
Empty is not a thing
Empty is a clear
Four negatives are the ultimate in clearing
It takes all your conceptual crutches away.
Not to make you fall
But for you to find
You were actually standing the whole time.
Cutches are not for supporting you
A cane is something that makes you think you need support.
Buddhism calls this
Speech break
Heart death
Language is Broken
The movement of the mind also stops
You didn't stop it on your own initiative.
The road is over.
Naturally stopped
And at that moment of stopping
What you are looking for
It's actually been there all along.
It doesn't need to be found.
Because it has never been lost.
I often see friends in the comment area asking
You say don't be persistent
But isn't non-attachment itself a kind of attachment?
That's the four negatives in everyday life.
Here's the answer.
Right.
You deliberately don't cling to it.
It's a more refined kind of obsession.
But when you really see through that attachment and non-attachment are concept games
You don't need to cling
You don't have to be clingy.
You are just alive
What to do
This state has no name
Once you name it enlightenment
It becomes the word there in the first sentence
And that's where the four negatives end up.
Not nothingness
It's not rocket science.
But a very ordinary freedom
Like the morning you stopped losing sleep
You have no idea how you fell asleep.
You only know
You stop trying to fall asleep
We finished the middle theory of Nagarjuna in two phases
The last issue talked about the eight not middle way
This issue talks about four negatives
A dismantling shell
A demerger
If the eight non-middle path is to dismantle the inherent properties of things
Those four negations even called into question the legitimacy of the act of dismantling itself
He was more than just a philosopher.
He's the ultimate hacker of logic.
In the system's own language
Breaking through the system's own defenses
You think four negatives are the end of logic?
Or the starting point for the awakening of the logical self
In your life
Was there ever a moment when nothing was the answer?
And you suddenly breathe a sigh of relief in confusion
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.