Chapter 0: Guide to this essay¶

Sarvāstivāda philosophy has the advantage of stating its claims clearly. "All exists" means that whatever is recognized as a dharma exists in the past, present, and future. The statement itself is easy enough to understand. The difficulty lies in what supports it. What keeps a dharma-substance always in existence? What distinguishes the three times? What attaches karma and afflictions to a continuum? This essay examines those supports.

This guide explains why the essay is needed before identifying who is speaking to whom in the library before us. It then sets out a table that runs through the essay.

Why this essay is needed.

We can begin with a difference from Essay 14. That essay had to make some effort to justify its existence. Viewed from a distance, the Abhidhamma of the Southern tradition is an enormous taxonomy, densely packed with entries and directed chiefly toward insight meditation. Its metaphysical outline is buried in the procedures of classification and becomes visible only when the compartments are opened one by one. With Sarvāstivāda, the situation is the reverse. Real existence in the three times and the constant existence of dharma-substance stand in plain view. Anyone who has read about the Buddhist schools knows these claims. The school has never concealed what it professes to be or what it seeks to accomplish. The two essays therefore have different tasks. Essay 14 draws out an outline that lies buried; this essay asks whether an outline already drawn in full view can support itself.

First, half the opponents of the essays to come are here. The intrinsic nature that Madhyamaka seeks to refute, the seeds and continuity that Yogācāra seeks to establish, and the part of the account that tathāgatagarbha thought seeks to supply became problems only after the Sarvāstivāda account was in place. To read only the essay on the Southern tradition is to see only half the underlying map. Together, the two essays give the opponents of the later essays a recognizable face.

Second, the judgment in the final chapter of Essay 14 can stand only when set against this essay. That chapter says that the Southern tradition leaves three gaps in its list. Whether these are omissions peculiar to that tradition or limits of the Abhidharma method of analysis itself cannot be decided by looking at one school alone. Sarvāstivāda fills those same places. Its solutions and their consequences are there to be examined; only comparison will tell us whose problems the three gaps really are.

Third, readers know this vocabulary too well, and familiarity itself can obstruct examination. The scholastic foundations of Chinese and East Asian Buddhism come from the Kośa tradition. Terms such as dharma, substance, activity, cause, condition, the nonmanifest, and seed entered ordinary Buddhist Chinese long ago. They come so readily to hand that few stop to ask what each presupposes. This essay returns these familiar words to the disputes in which they were made.

How to read this essay. Essay 14 offered three ways of reading, because four of its chapters were lists for reference whose conclusions could be read on their own. This essay has no such division. The details of some entries among the seventy-five dharmas may be skipped. Chapter 2 of Essay 3 in Part I already lists all the names, and this essay does not set them out again. Apart from that, each chapter develops a continuous argument. One section's conclusion is often the premise of the next; skipping breaks the thread.

The arguments here differ considerably in character from those in Essay 13, and readers may wish to be prepared. Essay 13 dealt with texts that refuse to say everything, so the work lay in silences and analogies. Where the Buddha did not answer, the metaphysical outline had to be inferred from what was left unsaid, and the writing stayed close to the wording and circumstances of the sūtras. This essay deals with texts that have said everything. Claims, reasons, objections, and rejoinders are all on record as written arguments. The work therefore lies in testing them one by one. We must see who concedes what, which statement reports another's view and which states the speaker's own, and what a concession here unsettles elsewhere. Reading Essay 13 means supplying what was not said; reading this essay means checking what was said.

The layers of the texts.

Sarvāstivāda is not a book but a library, and its rooms do not all speak in one voice. Before reading any Sarvāstivāda statement, we need to know which layer it comes from.

What the Chinese tradition calls the Kośa is often treated as Sarvāstivāda's representative work, though it was written by a critic. Whenever this essay quotes it, we must distinguish statements that describe the Vaibhāṣika position from Vasubandhu's own words. The latter often strike precisely where Sarvāstivāda is vulnerable, and Saṅghabhadra's reply addresses the same point. The extended commentary and the turn in the table will be treated after this essay. We will ask first how an orthodoxy was adjudicated into being, then why a man left the system after putting it in order. This essay does not undertake a study of the texts as texts. It draws on those two layers only when it needs a claim.

Handling the terminology. This essay takes the Chinese technical terms as primary, adding Sanskrit in parentheses at their first appearance and using only the Chinese thereafter. Modern terms have only the task of showing the way; once they bring the reader to the door, they should withdraw. Saying that dharma-substance is like a substance, or that acquisition is like a certificate of ownership, can help with the first step. Two steps further, they begin to import assumptions that do not belong to this system. The guide to Part II issued a warning on this point, and this essay must be especially careful to heed it.

A table for the whole essay.

Chapter 7 of Essay 14 set out three groups of gaps in the Southern tradition's list. The left column copies those groups; the right shows what Sarvāstivāda puts in the same places. The table is the essay's map. Each chapter follows one or more of its rows in turn.

The table still needs a column for the problems each addition itself produces. That column will be completed in Chapter 7, because only after all seven chapters can we see whether these additions are mutually compatible.

Data and evidence. For the numbers and names of dharmas and the classification of causes, conditions, and fruits, this essay follows the Kośa and the Mahāvibhāṣā, noting their differences as they arise. Its principal secondary sources are Collett Cox and K. L. Dhammajoti. Cox specializes in formations dissociated from mind and the judgment of real existence; Dhammajoti provides the fullest account of the Sarvāstivāda system as a whole. Items not yet verified in this essay are marked as awaiting verification in the footnotes. Conjecture is not used to fill the gaps.

The connection with Part I. Essay 3 in Part I discussed Sarvāstivāda's historical place, textual lineages, and the names of the seventy-five dharmas. Those matters are not repeated here. This essay's sole task is to treat the items already listed as claims to be tested, asking of each what establishes it and what it costs. For the history of the schisms, the background to the compilation of the Mahāvibhāṣā, or the personal relations between Sarvāstivādins and Dārṣṭāntikas, return to Essay 3 in Part I.

To Chapter 1. Chapter 1 begins by defining the limits of the claim "all exists" (一切有, three Chinese characters). This slogan has long been read in several ways, many of which are not what Sarvāstivāda intended. Unless we first establish what it does and does not claim, the next six chapters will have no ground beneath them. Chapter 1 then sets up the two distinctions used throughout the essay: how substance and activity are distinguished, and how the real is distinguished from the nominal. Once these are in place, we can ask why the seventy-five dharmas are these particular seventy-five.