What This Concept Is Saying
One verb, three parties, no one in charge
A friend says, "I'm going." The sentence feels complete. There is an "I" (the goer), an "am going" (the action), and an implied destination (wherever they're headed). We never question the structure — it seems as natural as the air.
But in a text that would become one of the most influential works of philosophy in human history, a thinker named Nāgārjuna (龍樹, c. 2nd–3rd century CE) took this innocent sentence and performed a delicate operation on it. In the chapter called 觀去來品 (guān qù lái pǐn — "Investigation of Going and Coming") of his *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* (《中論》, *Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way*), he asks: when we say "going," what is going? Where is it? When does it happen? Is it the same as the person going, or different from them? His answer is that going cannot be found anywhere, even though we say "going" continuously.
This is the concept of 去法 (qù fǎ — the dharma, or phenomenon, of going). It is paired with 來法 (the phenomenon of coming) in the same chapter, and the whole chapter is the detailed unfolding of the famous last phrase in the 八不中道 (bā bù zhōng dào — "Middle Way of Eight Negations"), the opening verse of the *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā*:
不生亦不滅，不常亦不斷，不一亦不異，不來亦不去。 "No arising, no ceasing; no permanence, no disruption; no identity, no difference; no coming, no going."
If you have ever encountered the phrase "不來亦不去" and wondered what it was doing in a Buddhist philosophical text, the analysis of 去法 is exactly where the work happens.
去法 is defined as 身動 (bodily movement)
The classical text gives a remarkably compact definition: 「去法名身動」 — "the dharma of going is called bodily movement." This is the starting point. 去法 is not the person, not the destination, not the emotion, not the intention — it is the movement itself, the actual going-on of going.
In the same chapter, the text carefully distinguishes 去法 from two other terms that must accompany it:
- 去者 (qù zhě) — the goer, the one who is going - 所去處 (suǒ qù chù) — the place being gone to, the destination
All three — goer, going, destination — are needed for our word "going" to function at all. The text calls them 相因待 (xiāng yīn dài): mutually conditioning, mutually requiring each other. You cannot have one without the others. But — and this is the heart of the matter — none of them can be pinned down as a self-standing, independently real thing.
The three-time chase: where did the going go?
The text puts 去法 on trial across three time-frames: 已去 (yǐ qù — already gone), 未去 (wèi qù — not yet gone), and 去時 (qù shí — the moment of going itself). The verdict is delivered in a four-line verse that has become one of the most quoted passages in Madhyamaka:
「已去無有去，未去亦無去，離已去未去，去時亦無去。」 "In what has already gone, there is no going; in what has not yet gone, there is no going; apart from the already-gone and the not-yet-gone, there is also no going in the moment of going."
This is the famous 三時無去 (sān shí wú qù — "no going in any of the three times"). Unfold it slowly:
- Already gone (已去): Once a destination has been reached, the going is over. What we are looking at is arrival, not the act. The going has slipped into the past; nothing called "going" is present in what is already gone. - Not yet gone (未去): Before the going begins, it isn't there. There may be a plan, a desire, an intention — but the going itself is not yet occurring. - The moment of going (去時): This is the tricky one. We'd assume the going must be here, in the present. But the text argues: this present moment is not an independent container that exists before we examine it. It is itself always splitting into just-past and just-about-to-arrive. The instant you try to point at a "now" of going, it has already decomposed into 已去 and 未去.
The result is striking: the going we are so sure of cannot be located in any of the three times. Yet we keep saying "going" all the time, and we mean something by it.
Two goings: the absurdity of going-within-going
The opponents in the classical dialogue try to rescue the present: "But surely, at the moment of going, the going is happening!" The text replies by splitting this claim into two, and showing both halves fail.
Suppose you say "at the moment of going, going is happening." The text splits this into two sub-goings: 「一為去時去，二為去法去」 — "one is the going that constitutes the going-time, the other is the going that occurs within that going-time." This is the famous 二去之過 (èr qù zhī guò — the fault of two goings). If there is a going that makes the time-frame of going, and a separate going that goes inside that time-frame, then there are two goings. But two goings should also require two goers (since each going requires its own goer). One person cannot simultaneously be two goers using two goings. The hypothesis collapses under its own weight.
The text also offers a vivid image against the idea of "going tucked inside going-time": it is like putting a fruit into a container. If the container (the going-time) and the fruit (the going) were truly independent, then the container could exist without the fruit, and the fruit could exist without the container. But the going-time is itself constituted by the going. You cannot put the going into a frame that the going is busy making.
Neither one nor different: the goer and the going
The text then turns to the goer. Is the goer the same as the going, or different from it?
- If the goer is the same as the going: Then the "one who does" (能作者) and the "doing" (所作) collapse into one. There is no agent distinct from the action — every time you walk, you and the walking are interchangeable. That doesn't match how we actually use these words. - If the goer is different from the going: Then we should be able to find the going without the goer, or the goer without the going. We cannot. The goer has no meaning apart from the going; the going has no meaning apart from the goer.
The classical verse reads:
「去法即去者，是事則不然；去法異去者，是事亦不然。」 "That the going dharma is the goer is not the case; that the going dharma is different from the goer is also not the case."
The text explicitly refuses to posit a third alternative. "Neither one nor different" is not a cleverer position; it is the refusal to take any of these positions as finally establishing the matter in the way ordinary conceptual thought wants.
A subsidiary difficulty is often glossed over in casual summaries: the temporal circularity. If you say the goer first exists, then uses the going, you must establish the goer without the going. But the goer is defined by the going. If you say the going first exists, then the goer uses it, you must establish the going without the goer. But the going is defined by the goer. The classical verse states it cleanly:
「去者則不去，不去者不去，離去不去者，無第三去者。」 "The goer does not go; the non-goer does not go; apart from the goer and the non-goer, there is no third goer."
There is no escape into a hidden third position.
Like an illusion: mutually conditioning, nominally designated
After all these examinations, where does the text land? Not in denial. The text does not say "going does not exist." It says something more interesting and more useful: 去法, 去者, 所去處 are 相因待 (mutually conditioning).
「因去法有去者，因去者有去法，因二者有可去處。」 "Because of the going dharma, the goer exists; because of the goer, the going dharma exists; because of the two, the place that can be gone-to exists."
This formula is radically different from either "they are independent substances" or "they don't exist." It is the assertion that these three phenomena are relationally constituted — they get their meaning and function from each other, and they cannot be reduced to any one of them, nor to any combination of independent bits.
The text then concludes: the three are 假名 (jiǎ míng — "nominal designations") — names we use, terms we deploy, with real conventional force, but they do not point to any self-standing essence. They are 如幻如化 (rú huàn rú huà — like illusion, like magical transformation). This is not a put-down. It is a precise description of how phenomena function: they appear, they have effects, they operate — but they are not the kind of thing that can be isolated, frozen, and held up as the "real" thing behind the appearances.
Where this sits in the path to liberation
To understand why a chapter is spent on something as ordinary as "going," it helps to see where it lives in the larger Buddhist project.
The *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* is a systematic examination of how we construct things through concepts, and how that construction can be unconstructed. The 八不中道 at the opening is the headline; each subsequent chapter is a detailed examination of one of those negations as it applies to a particular kind of phenomenon. The 觀去來品 is the detailed examination of the last phrase, 「不來亦不去」.
So why motion? Because motion is one of the most stubbornly *obvious* phenomena in human experience. We see things move. We move. To question whether "going" is genuinely findable is to question something very basic. If even this — what looks like the most inescapable evidence of "things happening" — cannot be pinned down, then the entire way we construct objects-in-motion through time is opened up for re-examination.
This matters for liberation because our deepest suffering is tangled up with the construction of self and world. We feel that we are a self that travels through time, accumulating experiences, heading somewhere, judged by where we have arrived. The analysis of 去法 quietly dismantles the conceptual apparatus that supports that story. It does not deny experience; it shows that the units we use to describe experience cannot hold up under scrutiny.
The same dismantling, applied to other units (人, 我, 物, 法, 因, 果, 時, 動, 聞, 覺, 心, 涅槃, etc.), is the work of the rest of the *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā*. 去法 is one specimen under the same microscope.
Walking It Through in Contemporary Life
Now let us actually walk through this analysis using situations you recognize. The point is not to memorize the classical terms, but to see the structure of the analysis in places you already inhabit.
Situation 1: The Monday morning commute
You wake up on Monday. You need to be at the office by 9 a.m. You stand in the kitchen, looking at your bag, thinking "I have to go."
- The goer (去者): Can you find the "you" who is going? Not the body in the mirror, not the mind that is planning, not the career that is making attendance mandatory — but the bare goer, the one who will be doing the going, independent of the going itself. Try to pin it down. The moment you do, you've already added something to it — a name, a history, a destination. The bare goer without the going is not findable. - The going (去法, the bodily movement): Now look at the actual going. The packing of the bag, the locking of the door, the steps down the stairs, the turn onto the street. This is the 身動, the bodily movement. But where is it? Every step you take is already past. The next step is not yet here. The "going" is always somewhere between the step that was and the step that will be. The 三時無去 is not an abstract puzzle; it is what you experience every time you walk. - The destination (所去處): The office. But the office is not a fixed thing. By the time you arrive, the day has shifted — the meeting you forgot about, the email that came in overnight, the colleague whose mood has changed. The destination you were going to is not the destination you arrive at. This is partly the point of the 相因待 analysis: the destination is constituted by the going and the goer, not a pre-existing target.
Where the analysis lands: you spent the morning anxious about "going," but on closer inspection, no going can be found, no goer can be isolated, and the destination is not where you thought it was. The anxiety was built on a conceptual scaffolding that cannot hold up.
Situation 2: Moving out of your parents' home
A more emotionally loaded version. You are packing boxes. You are leaving the house you grew up in.
- The leaving (去法): The physical going is easy to imagine — carrying boxes to a truck, driving away. But that's just the surface. The actual leaving is the whole shift in identity that is happening: the person who was a "child living at home" is becoming "a person who has moved out." This inner leaving is also a 去法, and it has all the same problems. It cannot be found at any particular moment. The past version of you has already left ("already gone"). The future version of you has not yet arrived ("not yet gone"). The in-between is the moment of going, but it cannot be gripped. - The goer (去者): Are you the parent-child version, or the independent version? Neither one and neither both — Nāgārjuna's 非一非異 (neither one nor different) is exactly the dynamic. You are not the same as the leaving, but you are not separate from it. You are constituted by the leaving, and the leaving is constituted by you. - The destination (所去處): The new place. And here the 因待 (mutual conditioning) is most visible: the new place only exists as a "destination" because you are leaving somewhere. If you weren't moving out, this apartment would just be an apartment you saw online.
The classical analysis does not make the move less painful. It does something subtler: it dissolves the conceptual frame that makes the pain feel like a thing happening to a solid self. The pain is real. The "you" who is in pain is not the kind of thing you can pin down.
Situation 3: Leaving a relationship
Perhaps the most granular application. You decide to end a long relationship. You go to a café to tell the other person.
- The going (去法): The act of leaving is what hurts. Spoken aloud: "I think we should break up." Where is the going in this? Not in the words (those are past as soon as spoken). Not in the intention (that was the night before). Not in the moment of speaking (which is unreachable). The going is, experientially, what you cannot locate. - The goer (去者): You are the one leaving. But are you the person who initiated this decision, the person who is devastated by it, the person who will be relieved in a month, the person who will regret it in a year? All of these are you, but none of them is the "goer." The goer cannot be pinned down. This is the 去者 with 去法 and 離去不去者 problem: the goer of the leaving cannot be located independently of the leaving. - The destination (所去處): Singlehood, the next relationship, an undefined future. The destination is not yet fully real; it is constituted by the going. The mutual conditioning is most stark here: you cannot know what you are going toward until you have gone.
The Nāgārjunian analysis does not tell you to stay or to leave. It dissolves the false sharpness of "I am the one who is leaving, and this is the leaving I am doing." Both are conceptually constructed. What remains, after the dissolution, is the lived experience of the moment — which is often actually more bearable than the constructed story of "I am the leaver."
The spots where people most often mis-map the classical analysis
- Mapping "going" only to physical motion: A common contemporary reading reduces 去法 to "displacement through space." The classical definition is 身動 (bodily movement), and the rest of the analysis works on any activity that has the structure of "agent performing an action toward a result." Career transitions, identity shifts, even the slow drift of an opinion — all have the same structure. Don't map it only to legs moving. - Mapping "destination" only to a place: The 所去處 can be a state, a relationship, a feeling, a version of yourself. The analysis is about structure, not geography. - Treating the three-time analysis as a denial of time: It is not. The text is not saying "time doesn't exist." It is saying "the going cannot be located in any of the three time-slices taken as independent." Time itself is a different and more nuanced topic elsewhere in the *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā*. - Forgetting that the destination is also conditioned: Many readers focus only on the goer and the going. But the destination is part of the mutual conditioning. It is easy to over-fixate on a destination and forget that the destination is part of the conceptual construction, not a pre-existing target.
Why Contemporary People Need This
The arrival fallacy
There is a well-known finding in positive psychology, sometimes called the "arrival fallacy" (a term popularized by Tal Ben-Shahar): we tend to believe that once we arrive at a destination — the job, the relationship, the body, the salary — we will feel satisfied. And when we arrive, we often feel surprisingly empty, because the satisfaction was tied to the fantasy of arrival, not to the reality.
The classical analysis of 去法 shows exactly why. The destination is constituted by the going and the goer. Once we arrive, the going is over, and the destination is no longer a destination — it is just a place. The sense of arrival was always retrospectively attributed to the structure of going, not to the place itself. The arrival fallacy is, in a sense, a popular-psychology version of the 去法 analysis. The Buddhist philosophical work helps us see the structure more clearly and, in many traditions, actually feel less mysteriously disappointed when we arrive.
The split between who you are and who you are becoming
A very contemporary form of suffering is the sense that "the real me" is somewhere in the future — the version of me who has finished the degree, started the company, recovered from the loss, become who I really am. The "current me" feels like an instrument, a vehicle in transit. The future me is the real one, in this story.
This is exactly the 去法 structure run amok. The goer (today-you) is treated as a means, the going (the grind of becoming) is treated as a burden, and the destination (future-you) is treated as the only thing that matters. The mutual conditioning analysis dissolves this: today-you is constituted by the very going that is supposed to be transcending her. There is no "arrival" at a future self that is independent of the going. The future you is not a place you have not yet reached; it is a name we apply to the process of getting there.
Tracking technology deepens the illusion
GPS, fitness trackers, ride-sharing apps, productivity software — all of these externalize the structure of going. They show us our position, our speed, our trajectory, our estimated time of arrival. They give us a precise, quantified map of the 三時 (three times): where we were, where we are, where we are going.
There is something both wonderful and slightly dangerous in this. Wonderful, because it makes the structure visible. Dangerous, because the quantified map can reinforce the illusion that the going itself is a trackable, locally situated thing. The goer — shown as a dot. The going — shown as a line between dots. The destination — shown as a pin. The map is so clean that it can hide the fact that the dot, the line, and the pin are mutually constituting language constructs, not independent realities.
This is not a rejection of technology. It is an invitation to see the map as a map, not as the territory. The classical analysis helps: when you check your GPS at the start of a journey, you are looking at a representation of the mutual conditioning of goer, going, and destination. You are not looking at the going itself.
A careful note is warranted here. The parallel between Buddhist analysis and contemporary cognitive science is suggestive, not equivalent. Neuroscience has detailed models of how motion perception is constructed in the brain — the binding problem, the vestibular system, the body schema — and these models are sometimes loosely compared to Buddhist accounts of no-self and the constructed nature of motion. The comparison should be made with care: the Buddhist analysis is a philosophical and contemplative tool, not a scientific hypothesis; and neuroscience is not validating the Buddhist analysis. They are different kinds of inquiry with sometimes overlapping horizons. Whatever one thinks of the parallel, the 去法 analysis stands on its own terms.
Finding rest within fragmented movement
Perhaps the most practically useful application: contemporary life is exhausting partly because we are always in transit. Even when we are physically still, we are mentally going — scrolling, planning, regretting, anticipating. The classical analysis of 去法 can, when taken into contemplative practice, offer a kind of rest.
Not by denying the going. Not by pretending you are not moving. But by noticing the structure as it happens: the goer cannot be found, the going cannot be located, the destination is part of the same construction. When the structural pressure of "I am going, I must arrive, I must keep going" is loosened at the analytical level, the experience of the moment itself often becomes more spacious. Many meditators report that the 去法-style analysis, applied to the constant background hum of "going somewhere," opens up a quality of stillness that is not about physical stillness at all.
This is not a small benefit. It is, in many traditions, the entry point to the deeper insight that the entire self-world construction is held together by similar mutual conditioning.
Common Misreadings and Clarifications
"Nāgārjuna is denying motion"
This is the most common misreading, and it is the opposite of what the text says. Nāgārjuna is not denying that motion happens, that we travel, that we arrive. He is examining what we mean when we say "motion happens." The conclusion — that the going cannot be located in any of the three times — is not "motion is an illusion." It is "the idea that motion is a self-standing, locatable thing is conceptually incoherent." The motion-as-it-functions is not denied; only the motion-as-substance is analyzed.
A good analogy: the analysis of "the self" in Buddhist philosophy does not deny that there is a person who acts, speaks, and experiences. It denies that there is a self-standing, unchanging "self" behind the actions. In the same way, the analysis of 去法 does not deny that there is going; it denies that there is a self-standing, locatable "going" behind the going.
"Mutually conditioning is just 'interdependence'"
This is a half-truth. In contemporary usage, "interdependence" is often used loosely to mean "everything is connected." The Madhyamaka 因待 (mutual conditioning) is more precise. It is a specific claim about how particular phenomena are conceptually and functionally constituted by each other in ways that preclude either independence or simple causal dependence. "Interdependence" as a vague spiritual-sounding word misses the technical precision.
Also, mutual conditioning is not the same as "they are all one big thing." The three (goer, going, destination) do not collapse into a single substance. They are relational, but they remain distinct in their conventional functioning. The classical text is very careful about this: the going is not the goer, the goer is not the destination, but none of them is independently existing. This is a delicate balance, easier to lose than to hold.
"Nominal designation means 'fake' or 'unreal'"
The classical term 假名 (jiǎ míng, "nominal designation") is often translated as "merely nominal" or "merely named," which carries the connotation of "fake, not real." This is a serious mistranslation.
In the Madhyamaka framework, 假名 is a precise technical term. It means that the phenomenon in question is established by convention, by designation, by the way we name and use language and concepts, but it does not have an essence or self-nature (自性, zì xìng) that exists independent of that designation. The phenomenon is real at the conventional level (世俗諦, shìsú dì — "conventional truth") — it functions, it has effects, it is part of how the world works. It is not "ultimately" real in the sense of being a self-standing, unchanging essence.
So when the text says 去法 is 假名 like an illusion, it is not saying "going is fake." It is saying "going is established by convention, and does not have an essence behind the convention." This is a much more subtle and much more useful claim than "going is unreal."
"Going is just physical displacement"
As noted in the walkthrough, this is a common narrowing. The classical definition is 身動 (bodily movement), which extends beyond mere spatial displacement to any active engagement of the body in going-from-here-to-there. But the analysis itself, the 因待 structure, applies to any phenomenon that has the agent-action-result structure. If you take the analysis seriously only for physical motion, you will miss most of its applicability to psychological, social, and existential transitions.
"The three-time analysis means time doesn't exist"
The text does not say this. The three-time analysis is about the going, not about time per se. The argument is that within the three times, the going cannot be found as a self-standing thing. This is compatible with time existing; it is just incompatible with going being a discrete, locatable item on the timeline.
In fact, the *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* as a whole has a more elaborate discussion of time in other chapters, and the treatment is more nuanced than "time is unreal." The three-time analysis in 觀去來品 is a specific tool for a specific job: dismantling the conceit that going is a thing that occurs in time.
"This is just wordplay"
Some readers, especially those coming from a Western analytic philosophy background, dismiss the kind of analysis Nāgārjuna performs as "merely verbal" or "merely conceptual." This is a serious misreading. The analysis is conceptual, yes. But it is conceptual in the way that surgery is surgical: it works on the very tissue of how we construct experience. The fact that you can name the going (去法), the goer (去者), and the destination (所去處) is part of the problem, not the triviality. The conceptual apparatus is what creates the suffering of being a self that is going somewhere and not yet arrived. The analysis is a tool for unwinding that apparatus — not because it is wrong, but because we have not seen through it.
A Final Note
The classical analysis of 去法 is not a puzzle to be solved or a position to be memorized. It is a kind of philosophical practice. Once you have seen the structure — goer, going, destination, mutually conditioning, not findable in any of the three times, like an illusion not in the sense of being fake but in the sense of being conventionally established — you can begin to see it operating in every transition, every move, every "I'm going to..." that you utter or think.
The 八不中道 at the beginning of the *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* — 「不來亦不去」 — is not a metaphysical statement about the impossibility of travel. It is an invitation to notice the construction in motion, and to find a kind of freedom in seeing that it was never as solid as we thought.
That is what 去法 is pointing to. Not stillness as the opposite of motion, but a seeing-through of the conceptual scaffolding that makes motion feel like a problem to be solved.