Chapter 10. Investigation of Fire and Fuel

If fuel is the very same as fire, then agent and action are one; if fire is other than fuel, it would exist even without fuel.

It would burn eternally, without a cause of its kindling; to start it again would be pointless, and in this way it would be without action.

Being independent of anything else, it would be without a cause of its kindling; to start it again would be pointless, and it would follow that it burns eternally.

nāgārjuna wrote:

if fire is other than fuel, it would exist even without fuel

Here it may be said: that which burns is precisely the fuel. But then by what is the fuel kindled, when it is nothing more than just this?

pūrvapakṣin wrote:

that which burns is precisely the fuel

As other, it will not reach; not having reached, it will not burn; and not burning, it will not go out; and not going out, it will remain possessing its own mark.

nāgārjuna wrote:

As other, it will not reach; not having reached, it will not burn

If fire, being other than fuel, were to reach the fuel — it would be as a woman reaches a man and a man a woman.

pūrvapakṣin wrote:

it would be as a woman reaches a man and a man a woman

Let fire, other than fuel, reach the fuel — that would hold if fire and fuel excluded one another.

If fire depends on fuel and fuel depends on fire — which of the two came about first, in relation to which there is fire or fuel?

If fire depends on fuel, that would be the establishing of a fire already established; and this being so, fuel too would exist without fire.

If an existent that is established in dependence on something is established in dependence on the very thing that itself has yet to be established — then what is established in dependence on what?

An existent that is established in dependence on something — how, being not yet established, can it depend? And if it depends when it is already established, then dependence makes no sense for it.

Fire is neither such as to depend on fuel nor such as not to depend on it; fuel is neither such as to depend on fire nor such as not to depend on it.

Fire does not come from somewhere else, and fire is not found in fuel; as for fuel, the rest has been said by means of “what is being traversed”, “the traversed” and “the untraversed”.

Fuel is not fire, and fire is not anywhere else, apart from fuel; fire does not possess fuel, fuel is not in fire, and fire is not in the fuels.

Through fire and fuel the whole sequence of the “self” and what it appropriates has been explained, without remainder, together with pot, cloth and the rest.

Those who declare the own nature of the “self” and of existents, each of them separately — I do not consider them knowers of the meaning of the teaching.