The verse and its meaning · Gaudapada's Karika · Gaudapada — The Firebrand and the Unborn

Son Begetting Father

Gaudapada Karika 4.14

हेतोरादिः फलं येषामादिर्हेतुः फलस्य च । हेतोः फलस्य चानादिः कथं तैरुपवर्ण्यते ॥ हेतोरादिः फलं येषामादिर्हेतुः फलस्य च । तथा जन्म भवेत्तेषां पुत्राज्जन्म पितुर्यथा

Meaning · English

Those for whom the cause is the start of the effect, and the effect is the start of the cause: how can they describe cause and effect as having no beginning? For them, birth would come about in this way, like a father being born from his son.

Two Sanskrit words carry the argument. Hetu means cause, from hi, to impel or set going. Phala means fruit, the result that ripens from it. Anadi means without beginning: an, not, plus adi, start. Gaudapada is speaking to an opponent who says cause and effect have no beginning, each leading to the next in an endless line. He points out a quarrel inside that claim. The opponent also says the cause begins the effect, and the effect begins the cause. If each is the start of the other, then neither can be beginningless, because each would owe its start to the other. He asks how such a person can describe the pair as beginningless at all. Then he draws the consequence. Birth would run both ways, and a father would be born from his son. That is plainly absurd, since the son exists only because the father came first. The reason he gives it here is that the schools asked how a world could arise if nothing is born. He answers by showing that their own account of birth cannot be stated without contradiction. Shankara reads the passage as an argument against those who accept cause and effect as real. Some of this reasoning resembles Nagarjuna's Buddhist critique of causation, though Gaudapada uses it to point toward the unborn. The listener is asked to test the idea of a beginning-giving cause and see where it breaks.

Picture two people each claiming to have introduced the other at a party, and neither having arrived first. Each needs the other to have been there already, so the story never gets started. Cause and effect, each said to begin the other, fall into that same knot.

1. Tonight, pick one ordinary thing, such as a habit or a mood, and ask what caused it. 2. Write down the cause, then ask what caused that. Go back four steps, taking about five minutes. 3. Notice whether the chain ends at a clear first cause or loops back to the thing you began with. 4. Sit with that for a minute without forcing an answer.

A man stands at the kitchen counter at midnight, certain that his bad temper comes from poor sleep, and equally certain that his poor sleep comes from his temper. He cannot say which started it. Gaudapada's argument names this snag: when each thing is called the start of the other, neither can be named as the start. Seeing it, the man can stop hunting for the one first culprit and look at the loop itself. He can notice both happen together, and change a small part of it, such as an earlier bedtime. Ordinary experience confirms that sleep and mood do feed each other, and that tracing blame backward rarely ends cleanly. The verse's own teaching goes further, toward the unborn, and that is the text's claim, not something a bedtime change tests. It does not settle his sleep, and if the sleeplessness lasts for weeks, a doctor is the right person to ask.

अर्थ · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: No Example, No End · Gaudapada Karika 4.13
• Next: Cause and Effect Together · Gaudapada Karika 4.16
• All of Gaudapada's Karika · Ask Krishna about it

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