 To assume that cause and effect are distinct phenomena might strike us as the most natural understanding of causation. Yet Nāgārjuna argues that cause and effect cannot be substantially distinct. This is because the effect depends existentially on the cause (if the cause did not exist the effect would not exist) and the cause depends at least notionally on the effect (if there was no effect the cause would not be called “cause”). The kind of independence demanded by substantial existence, by existence by svabhāva, is simply not available for things which are cause and effect. On the other hand if we had a set of objects that were distinct in the required sense it would be hard to see how we could make sense of any of these being either cause or effect since no pair of objects from the set would be connected by a dependence relation. If two objects are distinct by svabhāva there cannot be any dependence relation of any kind holding between them. For any two objects from this set that we label “cause” and “effect” we can similarly imagine reversing the assignment as the existence of any one does not influence the existence of any other. But this implies that it cannot be the causal relation we are talking about, since in general the roles of cause and effect cannot be switched.