Chapter 1: All exists and the distinctions between substance and activity, real and nominal¶

Chapter 0 said that reading Essay 13 means supplying what was left unsaid, while reading this essay means checking what was said. Checking has to begin somewhere. Sarvāstivāda compresses its position into three Chinese characters: "all exists" (一切有). These characters give the school its name and sum up all its claims. Everything to be examined in the next six chapters follows from them. This chapter first asks what the words literally say, then what supports them.

The claim rests on a distinction and a criterion. The distinction separates substance from activity; the criterion separates the real from the nominal. Both apply throughout this essay, and every chapter from Chapter 2 onward will use them to take its measurements. This chapter must therefore do more than explain a claim. It must hand over these two tools, specifying what each can measure and where it ceases to work.

The word "all" was borrowed from the sūtras and given a different job. In Sūtra 319 of the Saṃyukta Āgama, the brahmin Shengwen asks what "all" means. The Buddha answers with the twelve sense bases: eye and visible form, ear and sound, nose and smell, tongue and taste, body and tangible objects, mind and dharmas. The twelve bases are called "all." The next statement matters more than the first. If someone says that this is not all and proposes another all, it is mere talk. When questioned, he cannot answer and only deepens his confusion, because it lies outside his domain. The Pāli parallel is SN 35.23, entitled the Sabba Sutta, the "Discourse on All."¹

Here "all" is a seal. It marks a limit, confining discussion to the twelve bases accessible to experience and allowing no further domain to be established outside them. The sūtra is asking about scope, not existence. The Buddha does not say that things outside the twelve bases do not exist. He says that this way of asking yields nothing, and explains why. It is "outside his domain," beyond what you can verify. The statement is methodological, not ontological.

In the hands of the schools, the same word was given another job. The "all" of "all exists" no longer denotes the twelve bases; it is a collective name for the dharmas of the three times. "Exists" no longer means that something can be included within the twelve bases; it means that it has a substance of its own. The word is the same, but the question has changed. Sarvāstivāda therefore clashes with Sūtra 319 at more than one point. Chapter 1 of Essay 3 in Part I identified the conflict over "exists"; this chapter adds the conflict over "all." The sūtra uses the word to mark a stopping point; the treatise uses it to mark a starting point.

Sarvāstivāda did not evade this sūtra; it dealt with it itself. Fascicle 74 of the Mahāvibhāṣā quotes a sūtra passage in which Śāriputra tells the Buddha that the establishment of the bases is unsurpassed, for "the twelve bases encompass all dharmas." The four Chinese characters "encompass all dharmas" (摄一切法) recast the sūtra's sense of a limit as one of exhaustive coverage. The twelve bases cease to be merely a boundary not to be crossed and become a net that can gather in every dharma. The commentator immediately asks how Śāriputra knows that the twelve bases encompass all dharmas. The answer has two levels. On one, he knows through the teaching. Having attained the four kinds of verified confidence, he firmly trusts the Buddha's words and has heard the Buddha say this. On the other, he also has realizational knowledge, but can directly know only the common characteristics one by one. Only the Buddha can directly know each intrinsic characteristic as it really is. The same passage also offers an inference. There are only six classes of consciousness, and consciousness necessarily has a support and an object. The supports and objects together must number twelve. Hence the twelve bases are neither more nor fewer.²

First, the sūtra's "outside his domain" has become "known through the teaching." Where direct verification is unavailable, tradition now provides the guarantee. Second, once exhaustive coverage is established, "all" changes from a seal to a list, and a list can be enlarged. Third, the inference that consciousness necessarily has a support and an object supplies the basis for the next section.

The shift need not count as a fault of Sarvāstivāda. It is the stance from which Abhidharma begins as a discipline. The treatises take up as their business what the sūtras refuse to answer; a word the sūtras use to close a discussion becomes a means of opening out a system. Essay 13 showed that the early teaching deliberately left certain places blank. There was something to say in those places; the judgment was simply that it need not be said there. All the work of Abhidharma can be seen as filling these blanks, and its first step is to tear off the seal and use it as a starting point. We must see the shift clearly, or many later disputes will seem inexplicable. Opponents challenge Sarvāstivāda's "all" with the "all" of the sūtras, though the two sides are speaking of different things.

Which groups of problems does this claim address? Chapter 1 of Essay 3 in Part I set out three difficulties. Karma bears fruit long afterward; what holds it in place meanwhile? What serves as the object of cognition directed toward the past and future? Where does a continuum reconnect after being interrupted? That arrangement followed Sarvāstivāda's own questions and is one the school itself would recognize.

This essay arranges them differently, following the three groups of gaps listed in Chapter 7 of Essay 14. The essays need common coordinates if they are to be read against each other. Reading Sarvāstivāda by its own list of questions tells us only how well it answers, not why it must answer at these particular points. The three groups concern how dharmas relate to one another; how dharmas exist in time; and how to distinguish dharmas from what are not dharmas.

Real existence in the three times directly answers the second group. It gives a plain answer to the question of what status a dharma that has passed away has now. Its substance remains throughout; it simply has no activity. The Southern tradition offers no positive claim in this compartment. It discusses moments and continuity, but says nothing about the present existential status of a past dharma. Essay 14 identified the compartment as thoroughly empty. Not even a negative statement was left there. Sarvāstivāda fills the empty compartment, and does so unequivocally.

Real existence in the three times also takes care of the half of the first group that crosses time. For causality to hold, the cause-dharma and the fruit-dharma must both be accessible at the same time. If the past cause is wholly gone, it has nowhere to stand. Here the Southern tradition uses a relational account of conditions. Several of its twenty-four conditions specifically address things occurring at different times, yet the existential status of the conditions themselves is never explained. This was precisely the first group in Chapter 7 of Essay 14. Sarvāstivāda's answer is much more direct. Let the cause-dharma remain throughout, and no other attachment need be found. Faced with the same difficulty, one side goes around it by way of relation; the other closes it off by way of existence.

The remaining half of the first group takes another route. What is the object of cognition directed toward the past and future? Recollection is consciousness, anticipation is consciousness, and consciousness necessarily has a support and an object. We have just met this premise in the previous section. Fascicle 74 used it to infer that there are neither more nor fewer than twelve bases. Applied here, it becomes the proposition that consciousness cannot arise if its object has no substance. When a past event is recalled, that event must have some status now by which it can be taken as an object. A fact about the world is thus inferred from a fact about the mind. The move is deft, and the most crucial step in the entire claim. Chapter 3 will examine separately whether it works and where Vasubandhu later attacked it.

The Southern tradition already has an answer here. Objects are not limited to things that have substance at this moment. Concepts can serve as objects of the mind door, and recalling a past dhamma does not require it still to exist. Sarvāstivāda rejects this route because of its stricter premise that what has no substance cannot serve as an object. The disagreement is not at the level of psychological description. It concerns whether something without substance may occupy the position of an object.³

The judgment of real and nominal existence answers the third group. Sarvāstivāda offers an explicit procedure for deciding what counts as a dharma and what is merely a name. The Southern tradition's four methods of discrimination answer what a dhamma presents itself as, not what entitles it to count as a dhamma. The entries in the table rest on the agreement of tradition and contemplative observation, rather than on a criterion that can be checked.³

This chapter leaves aside the first and third difficulties listed in Part I, concerning the attachment between karma and its fruit and the point at which an interrupted continuum reconnects. They must be held together by formations dissociated from mind, such as acquisition, nonacquisition, the life faculty, and group homogeneity. Those belong to Chapter 4. We need only observe here that none of the three difficulties is purely a problem about time. In every case, something first has to be made intelligible, and a claim is then established for that purpose. Sarvāstivāda's real existence in the three times does not originate in speculation about time. It is simply what these things that must be made intelligible require. To criticize it as a metaphysical conception of time is to begin in the wrong place.

The essay's two distinctions thus each address a group of gaps. A system has good reason to fix its view of time and the boundaries of its list first. Without these, nothing else can be discussed. Precisely because they are fixed first, they later become the hardest to change. The collapses examined in Chapters 3 and 7 begin here.

First, what it does not claim. Opponents often take the following positions as targets, but most of them were never established by Sarvāstivāda.

First, Sarvāstivāda does not claim that past things can still be seen and touched now. The existence of a dharma-substance and the manifest presence of an event are different things; the former does not imply the latter. To say that a past dharma exists is to say that it still occupies a place on the list, not that it is now before you.

Second, it does not claim that future karmic fruits have already ripened. Future dharmas have substance but no activity; activity arises only when they enter the present. If a future fruit had already ripened, there would be no room for practice. Sarvāstivāda places great weight on the stages of the path and cannot take this route.

Third, it does not claim that time is an illusion. Quite the reverse. For Sarvāstivāda, the differences among the three times are real. They are simply marked by activity rather than by dharma-substance. The school needs an account that can say both that dharmas exist in all three times and that the three times differ. Both statements must hold, or it cannot even preserve its own name.

Fourth, it does not claim that conditioned dharmas are permanent. What always exists is substance; conditioned dharmas remain subject to the four characteristics of arising, abiding, alteration, and cessation. The constant existence of dharma-substance does not turn conditioned dharmas into unconditioned ones. This is the easiest point to misread and the hardest to explain clearly. Chapter 3 will examine it in detail.

The four points, alongside the sources of their misreading:

Chapter 1 of Essay 3 in Part I already set out a table contrasting eternalism and presentism. We can add that identifying the target correctly does not amount to defending Sarvāstivāda. If the target is mistaken, the criticism misses and the real difficulty escapes. This essay seeks those difficulties, which makes it all the more necessary to eliminate false ones first. None of the points attacked in the following chapters belongs to the four just listed.

The separation of substance and activity is the hinge of this essay. Sarvāstivāda's solution is that dharma-substance (svabhāva) always exists in the three times, while activity (kāritra) belongs only to the present. Fascicle 76 of the Mahāvibhāṣā states it most plainly: "The distinction among the three times is established through activity." What has not yet had activity is called future; what has activity now is called present; what has ceased to have activity is called past.² Chapter 1 of Essay 3 in Part I already explained this distinction. Rather than repeat it, this chapter presses one step further.

First consider the weight this word carries in the treatise. "Activity" (作用) occurs more than 300 times in the Mahāvibhāṣā, alongside more than 100 instances of "efficacy" (势用) and nearly forty of "function" (功能). The three are largely used to gloss one another, without being distinguished. The frequency alone shows that "activity" is a word doing work. What is striking is that the word doing the most work is also the least defined. The treatise repeatedly uses it to distinguish the three times, explain causality, and arrange the six causes and four conditions, yet never gives it a place of its own.

The next step is therefore to ask what status activity itself has.

If activity is a dharma, it must itself have three times. In the future it has no activity; in the present it has activity. Yet it is itself activity, so we are now asking about the activity of activity. One step brings us back to where we began, and the questioning can continue without end. If activity is not a dharma, the three times are distinguished by something that is not a dharma. The entire legitimacy of this system depends on the proposition that whatever really exists is a dharma. To use something that is not a dharma to arrange dharmas' places in time is to appoint an operator outside the list. By the system's own rules, that operator should not exist at all.

Sarvāstivāda takes the second route: activity is a function of dharma-substance, not a separately established dharma. There is no entry for activity among the seventy-five dharmas. Chapter 2 will go through the list, when this can be checked.

The dilemma was not devised for Sarvāstivāda by later thinkers. The Mahāvibhāṣā itself raises it. A discussion in fascicle 76 asks whether a conditioned dharma about to arise in the future arises because it already exists or because it does not yet exist. If it arises because it already exists, what need is there for arising when its own substance is already there? If it arises because it does not yet exist, all dharmas were previously nonexistent and now exist, and "all exists" cannot stand. The commentator answers that we should say it already exists and arises. The question is pressed again. If its own substance already exists, what further purpose does arising serve? The answer is that its substance already exists but has no activity; now, on meeting causes and conditions, activity arises. The discussion reaches its crucial question. Are activity and substance identical or different? The answer is that they cannot definitely be said to be either identical or different. An analogy supplies the reason. Each contaminated dharma-substance has many aspects of meaning, such as impermanence, which likewise cannot definitely be said to be identical or different. The final sentence is "Therefore this should not be challenged."²

We must identify where the questioning stops. Every preceding step gives reasons. Pressed to this point, the reasons give way to an analogy, and the analogy to a statement that no further questions need be asked. Yet the entire distinction depends on this very step. If substance and activity are identical, the differences among the three times fall back on substance, and dharma-substance no longer always exists. If they are different, activity becomes something outside substance, for which the list has no room. The commentator sees the fork and chooses neither path. Essay 16 will show that such an ending is far from unique in the Mahāvibhāṣā. Where it encounters something it truly cannot get past, the treatise often closes with an analogy followed by "this should not be challenged." Only the weight borne here is different. It supports the school's very name.

The same fascicle contains another patch. Someone asks whether a present eye in the inactive corresponding state, not seeing visible form, would have no activity and yet still be called present. The reply is that although it lacks the activity of seeing and the like, it certainly still has the activity of projecting a fruit.² When the first level of activity proves insufficient, a second is added. The move itself tells us more than its content. Once activity takes on the job of distinguishing the three times, it must be open to supplementation at any moment, in a direction set by the difficulty, not by its own definition. In the same fascicle, the Venerable Pārśva asks another question: if past and future dharmas have no activity, on what basis are increases and decreases in dharmas posited? The answer is that substance truly always exists, neither increasing nor decreasing; existence and nonexistence are spoken of only in terms of activity. Activity thus receives the further assignment of expressing even changes in the number of dharmas. A word never defined is loaded up in this way, layer upon layer.

Reading this alongside Essay 14, we find the same shape. The first item in the third group of Chapter 7 there asked who draws the boundary between ultimate dhammas and concepts, and on which side of the boundary the act of drawing it falls. The Southern tradition did not answer. Sarvāstivāda meets the same difficulty one compartment over. Something used to establish a distinction cannot at the same time be one of the items distinguished. The Southern tradition stumbles over the agent making the distinction; Sarvāstivāda stumbles over its basis. They stumble over different things, but in the same way. This book does not regard the resemblance as accidental. The same method exposes the same foundation in two places. Any system that divides the world into a finite set of entries needs means that do not belong among those entries, yet it refuses to admit anything outside them.

Saṅghabhadra later answered this question directly. Activity is a distinguishing characteristic of dharma-substance, with no separate substance of its own. His answer and Vasubandhu's challenge will be treated together in Chapter 3, because they belong to the defense of the position, not its establishment.⁴

Figure terminology. Here “function” means activity (作用), “power of activity” means efficacy (势用), and “capacity” means function (功能), as these terms are used in this essay. “Critics” refers to the treatise’s adjudicators (评家), and “Part” in the navigation refers to this essay. The third Chinese count is “nearly forty.”

Real and nominal existence. The settled formulation of the criterion appears in "Distinguishing the Noble Persons," fascicle 22 of the Kośa: "When a thing is broken, cognition of it is gone; so too when the rest is removed by intellectual analysis. A pot and water are conventional; what differs from these is called ultimate."⁵ The criterion provides two procedures. The first is breaking. If breaking a thing destroys cognition of it, it exists conventionally. A pot is such a case. Once it is broken into shards, the cognition of a pot disappears. The second is intellectual analysis. The thing need not be broken; if mentally removing the other constituents destroys cognition of it, it too exists conventionally. Water is such a case. Remove visible form, smell, taste, and tangibility, and the cognition of water disappears. If cognition of a thing survives both procedures, that thing exists ultimately. Chinese Buddhist treatises call the two categories nominal existence (prajñapti-sat) and real existence (dravya-sat). Chapter 1 of Essay 3 in Part I has already listed the terms. This chapter does not list them again; it asks about the nature of the criterion itself.

We must first clear up the misunderstanding that nominal existence means falsehood. Each category in the Kośa has a corresponding truth. The conventional side is called conventional truth. It is called truth, not delusion. In conventional language, "there is a pot" is a true statement; saying there is no pot would be wrong. The criterion distinguishes two ways in which something is established, not true statements from false ones. Calling a pot nominal means that its establishment depends on other things, not that the person seeing it has blurred vision. This distinction is easily lost later, especially when readers of Madhyamaka take nominal existence to mean illusion outright.⁵

First, the criterion is an operational procedure. It does not describe the properties of what really exists. It prescribes breaking or analyzing a thing to see whether cognition of it disappears with it. The action contains the whole criterion; nothing else is explained. The strength of the procedure is that it can be checked. The Southern tradition's table has no such procedure that can be checked.

Second, the procedure presupposes that decomposition has an endpoint, but the criterion does not say who sets it. Atoms and moments are these two lower limits. Material dharmas are analyzed down to atoms, time down to moments. Yet "stop here" is a stipulation, not a result of the analysis. If we truly followed the procedure all the way, no step would tell us where to stop. Chapter 6 will pursue this point to the end in the case of atoms, to see whether the lower limit is proved or posited.

Third, a step has been skipped between surviving analysis and really existing. Surviving analysis is an epistemological matter. I perform this operation and the cognition does not disappear. Real existence is an ontological matter. The thing stands in its own right. The former does not imply the latter. Sarvāstivāda answers by invoking intrinsic nature. The thing survives analysis because it has intrinsic nature. But intrinsic nature is defined as each thing's "abiding in its own intrinsic nature," which means the same as what has to be proved. The answer circles back to the beginning.⁶

This book has not drawn the circle on Sarvāstivāda's behalf. The Mahāvibhāṣā is more candid still. Fascicle 76 asks what constitutes the intrinsic nature of the three times and answers: all conditioned dharmas. It then adds: "What is said of intrinsic nature applies likewise to self, entity, own-substance, characteristic, part, and inherent nature." The seven terms (自性、我、物、自体、相、分、本性) are declared interchangeable. If a word used as the final explanatory term can be freely exchanged for six others, it has no independent content. It marks not the endpoint of explanation, but the place where explanation stops. The chain Chapter 7 will examine ends at precisely this word.

Both traditions use "intrinsic nature," but their readings diverge. Chapter 1 of Essay 14 separated the two readings. One is descriptive: intrinsic nature is the mark that makes this dharma this dharma, close in meaning to "characteristic." The other is existential: intrinsic nature is the warrant for this dharma's standing in its own right. The Southern tradition generally stays with the first reading. The first column of its four methods of discrimination is characteristic; there, intrinsic nature is almost another name for characteristic. The fourth column's backward reference makes it still harder for the word to move toward the second reading. Sarvāstivāda uses it directly in the second sense. "Each abides in its own intrinsic nature" means that each possesses its own substance. The seven interchangeable terms above confirm this. Self, entity, own-substance, and inherent nature are all existential, not descriptive terms. One tradition uses the same word to register an entry, the other to warrant existence. Whenever both speak of intrinsic nature in what follows, we must first distinguish the readings, or the two sides will not match up.

A further point about the layers of the texts needs explanation, because it affects how this essay uses its evidence. The neat division above is not what we find in the Mahāvibhāṣā itself. Fascicle 9 places three different lists side by side. Some posit two kinds: existence as a real entity, such as the aggregates and elements; and existence by designation, such as men and women. Some posit three: existence through relativity, through aggregation, and through temporal division. Some posit five: existence in name, such as tortoise hairs, hare horns, and garlands of sky flowers; real existence, meaning that all dharmas abide in their own intrinsic natures; nominal existence, such as pots, clothing, vehicles, armies, forests, and houses; existence through aggregation, meaning the designation of a person upon the aggregation of the aggregates; and existence through relativity, such as this shore and the other shore, long and short. The three lists stand together, with no ruling from the commentator.²

First, the fivefold list defines real existence as all dharmas' abiding in their own intrinsic natures: precisely the circle described above, written down by the Vibhāṣā itself. Second, the pot already stands in the column for nominal existence. The example remains unchanged from the Vibhāṣā to the Kośa: the criterion can be revised while the example remains stable. Third, existence through aggregation and through relativity in the fivefold list must both be absorbed into nominal existence under the Kośa's division. The binary scheme has no separate place for things established relatively, such as this shore and the other shore, or long and short. Moving from five categories to two is a choice as well as a simplification. The categories absorbed are precisely those hardest to handle by breaking and intellectual analysis. Fourth, the fivefold list's entire category of existence in name is abolished. Tortoise hairs and hare horns have names but no corresponding things, yet the Vibhāṣā still counts them as a kind of existence. Under the binary scheme, they cannot enter at all, because neither procedure applies: there is nothing to break and nothing to analyze. Having a name without a corresponding thing no longer counts as a mode of existence; it goes straight into nonexistence. What looks like mere tidying is actually the criterion delimiting its own scope. It is a procedure for distinguishing kinds of existence, not for distinguishing existence from nonexistence. This boundary will reappear in Chapter 4, when we consider acquisition, nonacquisition, and similar items.

The Vibhāṣā's three parallel lists, with the place of each entry under the later division:

In the last column, the entries absorbed or abolished make up half.

Figure terminology. “Function” in the legend means activity (作用). “Part” in the navigation refers to this essay.

This book's judgment is that the division used here as a criterion is what the Kośa selected and refined from the Vibhāṣā's parallel lists, with several centuries and an adjudication between them. Chapter 0 set out its five layers of texts precisely to make such differences visible. How the adjudication occurred belongs to the next essay. Here we need only remember that "Sarvāstivāda's criterion" means the criterion after it was refined, not everything the Vibhāṣā had at its disposal. The Vibhāṣā also leaves a more fundamental statement in the same passage: "Aggregated things are nominally designated as existing in dependence on really existing entities." The nominal must depend on the real to be established. Both agree on this; the disagreement has always been at the real end, not the nominal one.

Comparison with the Southern tradition's criterion allows the two essays to be read against one another. The Southern tradition's four methods of discrimination have columns for characteristic, function, manifestation, and proximate cause. They ask how a dhamma presents itself, forming a phenomenological register. Sarvāstivāda's criterion of the real and the nominal asks whether a dharma dissolves under breaking or analysis. It is an ontological test. The former asks you to look; the latter asks you to break something open and look.

The real asymmetry lies in the fourth column. Proximate cause (padaṭṭhāna) asks what a dhamma's immediate cause is, or what allows it to appear here. This column ties every dhamma back to dependent arising. A dhamma can be established because it has a proximate cause, not because it stands securely on its own. Chapter 1 of Essay 14 described this column as a constraint imposed by the Southern tradition. It makes "intrinsic nature" difficult to read as an independent substance, because whenever intrinsic nature is written down, the fourth column reminds us of its dependence on something else.

Sarvāstivāda's criterion has no corresponding fourth column. Surviving analysis is surviving analysis; the reasoning stops there and does not refer back to conditions. This book regards that as an exchange, not an oversight. To handle causality across time, Sarvāstivāda must allow a cause-dharma to retain its status in the past. Once a dharma's existential status can be discussed apart from its present conditions, the fourth column's backward reference no longer has a use. The constraint was deliberately removed. Chapter 3 will calculate what was obtained in return.

An easy reading must be resisted here. Seeing that the Southern tradition has a fourth column and Sarvāstivāda does not, one might readily conclude that the former is more cautious and the latter more rash. But the Southern tradition's caution has its own cost. It says nothing about the group of problems concerning time and leaves them where they are. Sarvāstivāda takes them up and answers directly. It answers badly, but at least its answers can be tested. Chapter 7's judgment will not pronounce the Southern tradition clever and Sarvāstivāda foolish. They leave differently shaped gaps in different places, determined by what each seeks to accomplish. This comparison is the fundamental reason this essay and Essay 14 can be read against one another, and the first ground for Chapter 7's judgment.

What each criterion governs, compared item by item:

How to use the two distinctions. Whenever Sarvāstivāda establishes a dharma in the following chapters, this essay asks three questions. First, by what criterion is it established as really existing? Is it survival under analysis, or something else? Second, what would be lost without it? Which gap was it introduced to fill? Third, what does establishing it cost? What new problems does it bring, and what further things must those problems call forth?

The first question most often produces surprises. Many entries on Sarvāstivāda's list are not established by surviving analysis. Acquisition, nonacquisition, the life faculty, and group homogeneity are not things that can be broken or intellectually analyzed. They are established as real by another line of argument: without this dharma, something would become unintelligible. That is an entirely different criterion, which Chapter 4 will isolate for examination.

The third question is the essay's main thread. Chapter 7 of Essay 14 identified three sources of Abhidharma entries: things seen in contemplative observation, things added to explain something, and things added so that the system of notation itself can stand. On Sarvāstivāda's list, the third kind is the most numerous. Acquisition, nonacquisition, the life faculty, group homogeneity, and the four characteristics of arising, abiding, alteration, and cessation all belong to it. Linking the three questions gives a chain. B is established to fill a gap in A, but once established, B needs C. Chapter 7 will draw the whole chain and explain why it cannot stop.

A small example: a pot and material groups. Both traditions regard a pot as nominal, for different reasons.

Sarvāstivāda says: break the pot and the cognition of a pot disappears, so the pot is nominal; the remaining visible form, smell, taste, and tangibility survive analysis, so they are real. This is an analytical reason, concerned with the result of decomposition. The Southern tradition says: a pot does not enter the table of ultimate dhammas, because it cannot be registered through the four methods of discrimination. What actually exists is a number of material groups, each with eight dhammas arising and ceasing together. The group itself is not a dhamma either, only a name.³ This is a reason drawn from practice, concerned with whether something appears on the list for contemplative observation.

The difference is that Sarvāstivāda's nominal is what decomposition reveals to be nominal; the Southern tradition's nominal is what cannot be registered. The opposite of the former is an indivisible constituent; the opposite of the latter is an item that direct contemplation can catch. The same word is used, but the two uses cannot be conflated. More crucially, the two reasons presuppose different activities. Decomposition is a speculative act that can be completed in a study; registration is an act of practice to be completed on the meditation seat. The two systems' different centers of gravity are already visible in this small example. Chapter 7's judgment begins with this difference.

To Chapter 2. The two distinctions have now been handed over. The next step is to apply them to a list. The next chapter examines why the list contains precisely seventy-five dharmas, why they are divided into five categories, and what the boundaries between those categories rest on. Chapter 2 of Essay 3 in Part I already listed the names. Chapter 2 here will not repeat them. It asks only how the table came about and whether it can support itself.

References¶