Chapter 4: Persistence, acquisition, nonmanifest material form, and formal entities¶

The preceding chapter gave dharmas their place in time. This chapter must explain how dharmas are hooked to people. Real existence in the three times ensures that a dharma does not cease to exist merely because it is past. It cannot ensure that the dharma remains attached to a particular continuum. Sarvāstivāda handles the two jobs separately. The dharmas that do the second are this chapter's subject.

First list the sentences that need support. This person has attained the first fruit. This precept remains with him even while he sleeps. This karma has been performed, but its fruit has not yet arrived. This group of sentient beings all belongs to the human destiny. All four describe something that holds throughout a stretch of time, not something occurring at a particular moment. Dharmas that arise and cease moment by moment cannot support such sentences. The persisting bearer they require cannot be found on the list of the five aggregates.

Here the routes diverge. Chapter 7 of Essay 14 described the Southern tradition's method: wherever a persisting bearer is needed, it establishes a condition instead, using the twenty-four conditions to connect karma and fruit, precepts and person, earlier and later births.¹ Sarvāstivāda does the reverse: wherever a persisting bearer is needed, it establishes a dharma. This chapter examines those dharmas one by one, the gaps they fill, and what this route encounters further on.

It has a ready-made license. Fascicle 16 asks why mind and mental factors are associated causes of one another. The answer lists a series of mutual relations: they are causes of one another, arise through one another's power, draw one another forth, nourish one another, increase one another, and depend on one another. Three analogies follow: two bundles of reeds standing against each other, several ropes together pulling a large log, and many people joining hands to cross a great river. A general statement closes the account: "Conditioned dharmas are weak by nature; only by depending on one another can they accomplish their work."² The statement applies widely. A dharma need not accomplish a job on its own. Several dharmas doing it together is normal for Sarvāstivāda. Adding another dharma for a job that cannot be done therefore breaks no rule of its procedure. Chapters 1 and 2 each encountered this ending once; this is the third time. Chapter 7 will bring them together for comparison.

Acquisition: hear the opponents first. Fascicle 157 opens the subsection on acquisition in the section on concentration, recording the opposition first. The Dārṣṭāntikas say that for someone to possess a dharma means only that this kind of sentient being is not separated from it. This has no real substance, but is a statement nominally established through relational discrimination. It is like five fingers closed together being called a fist: when opened, they are no fist, showing that the fist is not real.² The analogy matters because it places possession on the side of relation. The relation is real, and so are the things related, but the relation is not itself another thing.

The treatise then gives Sarvāstivāda's five positive reasons, all beginning with sūtras. A sūtra says that a trainee possesses eight factors and an arhat whose contaminants are exhausted possesses ten. A sūtra says that a person can possess wholesome and unwholesome dharmas at the same time. A sūtra says that a monk possesses seven excellent dharmas. A sūtra says that the Tathāgata possesses ten powers. The last reason argues in reverse: without acquisition and nonacquisition, ordinary beings should be called free from defilement in the three realms, and arhats should be called ordinary beings.² Together, the five establish just one thing: without acquisition, none of these sentences makes sense.

The five scriptural proofs and the sentences each supports:

The five proofs cite different sūtras, but the missing thing is the same: not an event that has failed to occur, but a sentence with nowhere to rest.

Two proofs have the greatest force. The seven excellent dharmas and the ten powers all have wisdom as their intrinsic nature, yet two instances of wisdom cannot arise at once. When a person is said to possess seven excellent dharmas, all seven cannot possibly be manifest in the person's mind together. The same holds for the Tathāgata's ten powers. "Possession" therefore cannot refer to dharmas presently manifest. Sarvāstivāda concludes that another dharma exists specifically to attach a set of unmanifest dharmas to a continuum. What acquisition does, ultimately, is convert statements such as "has the capacity" or "has the qualification" into statements such as "there is a thing existing now." To say that a person is now at the first fruit originally concerns that person's rank. Sarvāstivāda makes it mean that a real dharma now exists in the person.

Vasubandhu first removes the scriptural proof. How, Sarvāstivāda asks, do we know that a separate entity called acquisition exists? Because a sūtra speaks of a noble one in relation to the ten dharmas of one beyond training, "through arising, through acquisition, and through possession." Vasubandhu fastens on this sentence and counters with another sūtra: "Monks, you should know that a wheel-turning king possesses seven treasures." The treasures are insentient things. Must a further acquisition of them be established on the king's continuum? Here possession means mastery: the king has power over the seven treasures, which follow his wishes, and nothing more.³ If the same possession means only mastery in one sūtra, why must it establish another entity in the other? Only after removing the scriptural proof does he make the shortest challenge: the alleged acquisition has no discernible substance, unlike visible form or sound, or greed and hatred. It has no discernible activity, unlike eye and ear. With neither substance nor activity, there is no reason to accept it.³

The next five questions all concern activity. Someone answers for Sarvāstivāda that acquisition is the productive cause of the dharmas acquired. Vasubandhu lists five objections in one breath. First, unconditioned dharmas never arise, yet Sarvāstivāda admits that sentient beings possess cessation through discernment. On the productive-cause account, unconditioned dharmas should have no acquisition. Second, a dharma has been acquired and then relinquished, through a change of realm or plane or freedom from defilement. If it now has no acquisition, how will it arise later? Third, if acquisition arising with the dharma is its productive cause, what work remains for arising and the arising of arising? Fourth, insentient things have no acquisition, so plants should never grow. Fifth, a person fully bound by afflictions could have no distinction in the arising of lower, middling, and higher afflictions, since acquisition does not differ. He blocks any retreat: if some other cause produces the difference, dharmas should arise from that cause. What further use is acquisition?³ All five arrive at one demand: identify what this dharma accomplishes and when.

Sarvāstivāda's answer is a change of position, not a defense. Who said acquisition was a productive cause? That is the treatise's retort. What activity does acquisition have, then? It is a cause for establishing distinctions. The reason follows immediately, and this admission is the chapter's most crucial point: without acquisition, when an ordinary and a noble being each have a conventional mind arise, the difference between ordinary and noble could not be established. Pause over the scene. Its two people are ordinary and noble; its moment is one when neither has the noble path manifest and each has only an ordinary mind. Both details are chosen. Their manifest dharmas at this moment can be exactly alike, yet their statuses must differ. Nothing but acquisition can bear the difference. Acquisition's task is thus to keep statements about people valid when no manifest dharma supports them, not to make dharmas arise. It is established for sentences, not events. Vasubandhu's alternative route will come later. For now, note how far Sarvāstivāda retreats in changing its account: from productive cause to a cause of establishment, no longer saying what acquisition makes happen, only what it makes distinguishable. (Earlier scholarship has supplied detailed annotated translations and accounts of how acquisition and formations dissociated from mind were gradually established as real dharmas in the debates among the schools.⁴)

The three most familiar names are all absent from the Vibhāṣā. A dharma and its acquisition need not occur together. Acquisition before it is called acquisition preceding the dharma; simultaneous acquisition is acquisition accompanying the dharma; acquisition after the dharma has passed is acquisition following the dharma. The three terms scarcely exist in the Mahāvibhāṣā's 200 fascicles: 法前得, "acquisition preceding the dharma," and 法俱得, "acquisition accompanying the dharma," never occur; 法后得, "acquisition following the dharma," occurs once, in fascicle 158.² It is the Kośa that makes all three into terms. The Vibhāṣā does not lack the idea. The same fascicle says that no dharma can have only an acquisition following it, because it must already have acquisition when present. It simply does not turn the idea into entries. Chapter 2 noted that the table of seventy-five dharmas in five categories is absent from the Vibhāṣā; Chapter 3 noted the absence of the four Chinese characters 三世实有, "real existence in the three times." This is the third example. Much of Sarvāstivāda's best-known vocabulary was organized for it by its critic. Chapter 7 will bring the three examples together.

Nonacquisition is established alongside it by a rule of symmetry. The treatise says that precisely because possession is spoken of in relation to nonpossession, both sides really exist. Just as day is established in relation to night and light in relation to darkness, day and light both have real substance.² This book records the rule separately because it is the main basis for adding entities in the later sections of this chapter. Of two terms established in relation to each other, once one is judged real, the other follows as real. The rule establishes a pair at once, not a single item. Nonacquisition does more work than it first appears to. In Sarvāstivāda's definition, someone is an ordinary being because nonacquisition of the noble path exists in that person. The state of being ordinary is, ultimately, an absence established as a real entity.³ The step must be seen clearly. The person is not called ordinary because they have not yet acquired the noble path. They are ordinary because a dharma called "nonacquisition of the noble path" now exists in them. A negative sentence has been translated into a present thing. Once nonacquisition is established, cutting off afflictions must also be rewritten. Fascicle 157 says that cutting off afflictions is not like removing things by cutting them with a knife or grinding them with a stone. One only cuts off the acquisition of bondage and realizes acquisition of disconnection, so that afflictions no longer manifest as possessed. That is what is called cutting them off.² The preceding chapter's real existence in the three times permits no dharma-substance to be destroyed: past greed remains, future greed remains. The path can therefore do only one thing: replace one relation of belonging with another. This step is beyond the scope of the essay. Here we note only its origin: ontology has fixed the shape of the account of practice.

The first appearance of regress. If acquisition is a real dharma, it too must be possessed. Does acquisition then have acquisition? Fascicle 158 directly takes up the question. Its first answer is that acquisition should be said to have further acquisition. Someone immediately asks whether this is infinite. The reply: "Infinity involves no fault either; this is why saṃsāra is difficult to cut off and cross."² The statement looks less like evasion than like using infinity as a resource: precisely because the layers of possession have no bottom, saṃsāra is so difficult to cut off and cross. Yet a different answer is adopted. In one moment there are only three dharmas: the dharma in question, acquisition, and the acquisition of acquisition. Through acquisition, the dharma and the acquisition of acquisition are possessed; through the acquisition of acquisition, acquisition is possessed. Each acquires the other, so there is no infinity.² The chain is folded back into a loop. The second level no longer generates a third above it but turns back to govern the first. This book records the move as Sarvāstivāda's standard way of handling regress, because we will meet it again in the next section. Note that adopting one view does not mean judging the earlier view wrong. Both remain in the treatise; the latter is simply marked "those who say it thus." Sarvāstivāda is choosing here, not refuting.

The same move applied a second time. Conditioned dharmas have four characteristics: arising, abiding, alteration, and cessation. If the four are real dharmas, they too are conditioned and should each have four characteristics. Hence four secondary characteristics: arising of arising, abiding of abiding, alteration of alteration, and cessation of cessation. Fascicle 39 asks whether the characteristic of arising has another characteristic of arising. The answer: arising has further arising. Then would the characteristics of arising not be infinite? The answer recorded first is: "Allowing this infinity involves no fault; the three times are vast. Could there be no place for them?"² The wording mirrors the passage on acquisition, and the added half-sentence is more direct still. Infinity need not be feared because real existence in the three times supplies room to store it. One claim provides warehouse space for another claim's difficulty. This is common within a system; what deserves recording is how openly it appears.

The final ruling in the same fascicle is that when formations arise, nine dharmas arise together: the dharma, arising, arising of arising, abiding, abiding of abiding, alteration, alteration of alteration, cessation, and cessation of cessation. Their division of labor is that arising produces the other eight, while arising of arising produces just one, the primary arising.² The next question is inevitable: both are called arising, so why can one produce eight and the other only one? The treatise answers: "Because the nature of dharmas is so; this should not be made an objection." Some chickens and dogs produce eight offspring at a birth, and some produce one. Must that too be challenged? This answer is not newly devised. The earlier discussion of three dharmas arising together used the same sentence. Here only the analogy changes, from a woman bearing a child to chickens and dogs. The number rises from three to nine; the reason stays unchanged. What is upgraded is the number, not the reason behind it. The same nonanswer later enters the Kośa. When Vasubandhu restates the nine dharmas arising together, the analogy is reduced to a hen that may produce many offspring or only one.³

Figure terminology. “Possession” here translates acquisition (得); it does not name possession (成就) as distinguished in the text. “Function” means activity (作用), and “critics” refers to the treatise’s adjudicators (评家).

Vasubandhu attacks from the side of activity. His challenge asks not whether the four characteristics are real dharmas but to which time their activities belong. If the characteristic of arising is already active in the future, what makes it future? Once the dharma has reached the present and the activity of arising is already past, what makes it present? Further, while abiding holds the dharma in place, alteration and cessation are simultaneously making it decay and perish. Should this moment be called abiding, alteration, or cessation?³ This is the same line of questioning as the preceding chapter's three questions. The whole distinction among the three times rests on activity. Any added dharma that must be active must answer which time its activity belongs to. The preceding chapter found this breach open at the center of the system; this chapter sees it leaking down through each new dharma. The Sautrāntika side is less polite still: why analyze things as nonexistent as empty space, when no conclusive means of proof establishes them?³ Vasubandhu mocks the characteristic of cessation more bluntly. To say that cessation must meet causes and conditions of cessation to destroy its object is like saying that, when a laxative is taken, a deity descends to make it work.³ Once the conditions arrive, the dharma ceases by itself. Why establish a characteristic of cessation between them to take the credit?

The two sides also use the same analogy in opposite directions. Fascicle 39 describes the relation between the four characteristics and what they characterize as like the marks of a great man in relation to the great man. They are called neither intrinsic nor common characteristics, only an identifying seal.² Vasubandhu uses a cow for the same matter: horns, hump, dewlap, hooves, and tail, the marks of a cow, are not apart from the cow.³ The Vibhāṣā uses appearance to give characteristics a place: a characteristic has a status of its own and need not be classified as intrinsic or common. Vasubandhu uses appearance to remove that place: characteristics are not outside what they characterize at all. The analogy cannot decide the contest, but it shows what the sides are disputing: whether a set of marks needs an existence of its own.

Vasubandhu's side offers another route. He does not establish acquisition, speaking instead of a transformation in the supporting body. Performing karma, taking precepts, or giving rise to an affliction leaves a function in the continuum of body and mind, like a seed. A seed burned by fire differs from before: it no longer has the power to grow. From seed to function, from function to a distinctive transformation of the continuum, everything is nominally established; nothing here is a real entity.³ The route's shape should be seen clearly. It entrusts persistence to processes and relations, going in the same direction as the Southern tradition's twenty-four conditions. The fork described at the chapter's opening now reveals a third leg. The Southern tradition is not alone in opposing Sarvāstivāda, and the routes taken by its opponents share a shape.

Why nonmanifest material form belongs to matter. "Substance of the precepts" (戒体) occurs only once in the Mahāvibhāṣā's 200 fascicles, in fascicle 140, precisely in answer to this section's question. Why is the substance of the precepts exclusively matter? Because it prevents evil matter from arising; also because it is bodily and verbal karma, both of which have matter as their substance. Why is mental karma not a precept? Because it cannot directly prevent bad conduct; also because the world agrees in calling the restraint of body and speech precepts. A final sentence adds that mental karma is the cause that produces precepts and cannot itself be called a precept, lest cause and fruit be confused.² Notice the answer's nature: it is functional, not ontological. The evil that precepts block occurs through body and speech, so what blocks it must be of the same kind. Ordinary usage, too, speaks of precepts as restraining body and speech. Nothing here addresses what makes this thing really exist.

There is a harder reason why it must be matter: the precepts must remain when mind is absent. A person sleeps deeply or enters the attainment of nonperception or of cessation. The mental continuum is entirely interrupted, but the precepts must not be. Something attached to mind cannot get across this interval; something attached to matter can. Vasubandhu restates this as a question: how can the substance of the precepts be produced in a mindless state?³ Discussing the great elements that produce nonmanifest material form, the Vibhāṣā also leaves room by saying that the nonmanifest produced by bodily and verbal manifestation can be made from past great elements.² Together, the passages show the real reason nonmanifest form is placed among material dharmas: it must cross an interruption of mind. Chapter 2 said it enters matter because without it something cannot be explained. We can now be more specific: the sentence is "a sleeping person is still a keeper of the precepts." Another limit follows the same thought. The nonmanifest can be wholesome or unwholesome, but not indeterminate, because indeterminate mind is too weak to produce anything capable of remaining.³ In Sarvāstivāda, persistence has to be earned by exerting power.

One proof Sarvāstivāda offers for the nonmanifest looks particularly drawn from life: "Further, one does not do it oneself, but sends another to do it." Someone hires a killer without committing the deed personally. The instigator is not wholly without manifest karma; the command is manifest karma. But the command cannot be included in the course of action, since the deed is not accomplished when it is spoken, and its nature does not change when the deed is accomplished. Without the nonmanifest, the instigator's course of action could not become complete.³ The proof's force lies in an ordinary judgment everyone accepts: the instigator is culpable. Vasubandhu does not deny the judgment, only the need for a real dharma to bear it. He says that after the initial preparatory act, a distinctive transformation naturally arises in the instigator's continuum when the agent completes the instruction. This can produce many future fruits. This subtle transformation of the continuum is called the course of action. The name of the cause is nominally applied to its fruit. Both sides can account for the event. They differ only on whether the interval between is a thing or a process.

The cost falls on the definition of matter. The preceding chapter quoted fascicle 76's admission that some dharmas are matter without alteration and resistance: past and future matter, and present atoms and nonmanifest material form. Discussing the nonmanifest, Vasubandhu repeats that it is not appropriated because it lacks alteration and resistance.³ The two passages are decades apart and come from opposing sides, but say the same thing: matter is named by alteration and resistance, while nonmanifest material form has neither. The explanation of "matter" in the Kośa's first fascicle is already stuck here. Someone argues for Sarvāstivāda that manifest matter has alteration and resistance, so the nonmanifest follows it in being called matter, as a shadow follows a moving tree. Vasubandhu refutes this in two sentences. First, a shadow has no alteration and resistance of its own. Second, on the analogy, when the tree ceases the shadow must cease too. When manifestation ceases, the nonmanifest should therefore cease, yet Sarvāstivāda insists that it does not cease with the supporting great elements. Another answer shifts to the supporting great elements having alteration and resistance. Vasubandhu asks why the five consciousnesses, eye-consciousness and the rest, are not then called matter, since they too proceed in dependence on eye and the other faculties.³ Three attempts at rescue each support a stretch and are each knocked down. Who is entitled to the name remains unsettled in the work's first fascicle. An item admitted because otherwise something could not be explained pushes the doorframe wider once inside. "Matter" thereafter has both a broad and a narrow use in Sarvāstivāda.

Two counterquestions from the Dārṣṭāntikas. Fascicle 122 records a distinctly impolite passage from the opposition. First: if manifestation and the nonmanifest are really matter, are they blue, yellow, red, or white? Second: how do they become wholesome or unwholesome? If bodily movement makes something wholesome or unwholesome, flowers and swords move too. Why are they not wholesome or unwholesome?² The first question is shortest and hardest to answer. Material dharmas have always been named under color and shape, and the nonmanifest fits neither. The same fascicle records a cruel analogy. The Dārṣṭāntikas call the Abhidharma masters' words fraudulent, like a man coaxing a beautiful woman to take off her human clothes and put on heavenly garments. When she asks where the heavenly garments are, he replies that they are so subtle only he can see them, not she. There are no heavenly garments to begin with, much less any to put on someone. The Vibhāṣā records the whole passage in its own book, then refutes it item by item. The preceding chapter said Sarvāstivāda was not gentle with insiders. Here we can add that it is not evasive in its records either: the opponents' words are recorded quite fully.

Glance also at manifest karma, where the same move has been made. Sarvāstivāda says the substance of bodily manifest karma is shape, not motion. Dharmas arise and cease moment by moment, so a dharma has no time to move from here to there. Raising a hand or taking a step is only successive adjacent shapes arising and ceasing. Only the shape can be seen and called wholesome or unwholesome. Both sides accept momentariness; they differ on whether cessation needs a cause. The argument Vasubandhu uses here is that cessation requires no cause: cessation is a non-existence, a non-existence cannot be an effect, and so a thing ceases as soon as it arises. Sarvāstivāda instead makes the characteristic of impermanence, one of the four characteristics, the cause of cessation; Saṅghabhadra, refuting Vasubandhu, says expressly that it is not the case that cessation requires no cause, and allows only that it requires no external cause. Vasubandhu supplies an analogy for momentariness: fire burning grass looks like a line moving along, but in fact flames arise separately in adjacent places, and seeing this produces an overconfident belief in motion.³ The Sautrāntikas will not even concede the real existence of shape. We can leave aside which side is right. What matters here is that Sarvāstivāda's way of handling problems shows its form again: when a process cannot be accounted for, it is replaced with a thing. Motion is replaced with shape, persistence with nonmanifest material form. Both exchanges go in exactly the same direction.

The life faculty and group homogeneity. Fascicle 27 asks what supports the mental continuum of a sentient being in the formless realm, who has no body. The answer is the life faculty (jīvitendriya), group homogeneity (nikāya-sabhāga), and other formations dissociated from mind of this kind. Ordinarily only bodily support is mentioned because the body is coarse and apparent, while the life faculty and the rest are subtle and hard to point out.² The life faculty is lifespan, sustaining warmth and consciousness; group homogeneity makes it possible to speak of a kind of sentient being as a kind. They fill two halves of the same gap: what allows a continuum to remain alive, and what allows it to remain human. Vasubandhu dissolves the life faculty away: lifespan is only a power belonging to group homogeneity, like a seed having a course to maturity or an arrow having remaining momentum after leaving the bowstring. No separate dharma is needed. The Vaibhāṣika reply is a single sentence: it is better to say that a separate real thing sustains warmth and consciousness and is called the substance of lifespan.³

Group homogeneity is the farthest step along this route. It must account for similarity: humans resemble humans, gods resemble gods. If this resemblance is only a description, every sentence resting on it has nowhere to stand, so it must be a dharma. Once similarity becomes a dharma, however, the question follows: one instance of group homogeneity resembles another; must another group homogeneity govern that resemblance? The treatise already distinguishes homogeneity of sentient beings from homogeneity of dharmas, and undifferentiated from differentiated homogeneity. Its divisions grow finer rather than turn toward this question. Vasubandhu makes a heavy charge here: establishing a general homogeneity would precisely validate the Vaiśeṣika position. That school establishes a category of general commonality producing what is common to all dharmas, and a category of commonality and difference producing statements of similarity and difference among kinds. The Vaibhāṣikas answer that the two doctrines are not of the same kind, because the other school speaks of one entity operating in many places.³ The distinction holds: Vaiśeṣika's general commonality is one entity extending over many things, whereas Sarvāstivāda's group homogeneity is separately possessed, one instance for each thing. But preserving this distinction leaves the earlier question less room to hide. Something must still bear the similarity between two separately possessed instances of group homogeneity. The Southern tradition leaves this place empty: it establishes the life faculty, not group homogeneity. A kind of sentient being is explained through patterns of karma and cognitive processes, without a dharma assigned specifically to similarity. Chapter 2's comparison table listed this compartment; here we add the reason.

Supplementary section: intermediate existence. Chapters 4 and 6 of Essay 14 both referred the discussion of the transition between lives to this section. Sarvāstivāda establishes intermediate existence (antarābhava); the Southern tradition does not. Both sides' reasons survive. Fascicle 69 records the Vibhajyavādins' scriptural objection: someone who commits an act with immediate retribution must be born straight into hell, leaving no room between. They also quote a verse about seeking a place in between and finding nowhere to stay. A rational objection follows: just as no gap lies between shadow and light, none should lie between two lives. The reply of those who uphold correct reasoning has two portions. The first also cites sūtras: gandharvas, those who attain nirvāṇa in between, and mind-made beings are all scriptural terms. The second gives the real reason. Without intermediate existence, once this body has ceased and the other has not yet arisen, the interval would be broken. That would mean the other body did not exist before and now exists, while this body existed before and no longer exists. Dharmas should then be treated likewise: previously nonexistent and now existent, having existed and nonexistent again. This fault must not occur; therefore intermediate existence exists.²

Intermediate existence is thus not, in the first instance, a claim about what follows death. The preceding chapter showed that "did not exist before, now exists" and "having existed, no longer exists" are two wrong views the Mahāvibhāṣā must block. In discussing the twelve links of dependent arising, fascicle 23 uses the two past and two future links for precisely that purpose. If the transition between lives left a gap, the two statements would become true at the most crucial point. Something must therefore occupy the interval, and once that thing must exist, it must be a span of existence with mind and matter. One distinction is needed: intermediate existence is not another dharma added to the list. It is a period of existence composed of the five aggregates, at a different level from the preceding items. Yet the act of establishing it is exactly the same: a gap cannot be left empty, so an existent is put there, only this time the gap filled lies between two lives. Another asymmetry in the debate deserves notice. The Vibhajyavādins' scriptural citations are reconciled one by one, said to be nondefinitive, nominal designations, or statements with another intention. Their reasoning is disposed of thus: "The objection they raise need not be answered. Why? Because it is not in the Tripiṭaka."² Scripture must be reconciled; reasoning need not. The implications for judging teachings exceed this essay's scope. Essay 16 will collect such sentences for examination; here we record only one source.

Once a dharma is established, it grows content of its own. The two Chinese characters 中有 ("intermediate existence") occur more than 1,200 times in the Mahāvibhāṣā, the great majority in fascicles 68–70. The discussion already moves beyond whether it exists to its body size, faculties, food, duration, and ability to change destiny.² Its food shows this autonomy especially well. The treatise first calculates: intermediate beings are as dense as rice poured into a granary. If they ate coarse food, all the world's food and drink would be insufficient even for those belonging to the canine kind. Moreover, their bodies are exceptionally light and subtle; coarse food should break them apart. It therefore determines that intermediate beings feed on scents, not coarse substances. Those with merit enjoy the pure scents of flowers and fruits; those without enjoy the subtle odors of excrement, filth, stench, and decay.² The old name gandharva is rendered in Chinese precisely as "scent-eater," meaning that scent nourishes the being as it goes to its place of birth. "Scent-seeker" is a later mistaken transmission, probably arising from another name in the same passage: an intermediate being is also called a "birth-seeker," explained as constantly delighting in seeking out where it will be born.³ This book records the scale of this discussion because it shows the other side of adding entities. Once a dharma established to plug a particular gap stands, it has topics of its own, no longer constrained by the original gap. Chapter 2 asked why the list has precisely seventy-five entries. Here we can add that a list's length is not wholly designed. Part of it is extended by the topics it generates for itself.

The Southern objection is powerful, and also an objection to the Southern tradition itself. Chapter 6 of Essay 14 recorded the refutation in Book 8, Chapter 2 of the Kathāvatthu: if intermediate existence is a period of existence with mind and matter, it is already a life in its own right. It is then not between two lives but makes three lives, shifting the problem one place further.¹ The blow lands. Yet once intermediate existence is removed, the transition between lives has no buffer at all. The last mind of the earlier life and the first of the later one must fit together without a seam, relying on a clock shared by both sides that this system does not provide. Compressing a problem to zero thickness does not answer it. That is the judgment of this book.

An agreement lies beneath the dispute. What both sides refuse is the same thing: a gap in phenomenal continuity between two lives. Sarvāstivāda puts a span of existence into the gap, filling the interval; the Southern tradition declares that rebirth-linking consciousness arises just where death consciousness ceases, reducing the interval to zero. Filling and compressing are two methods that reject the same gap. The accounts of intermediate existence and of death consciousness followed by rebirth-linking consciousness are therefore much closer metaphysically than the force of the debate suggests. Both insist that phenomenal continuity cannot be interrupted. They disagree only about what preserves it.

This book sees a further distinction neither side makes: for whom is the gap a gap? To say that the transition between lives is broken uses a third-person measure, standing outside the continuum and measuring the distance between earlier and later minds with a clock shared by the world. From within the stream of consciousness, however, the only question is whether one moment connects to the next. If the moments are phenomenally connected, the length of the interval on a clock does not appear within the stream at all and cannot constitute an interruption. The break treated as a disaster is a third-person break. Once third-person and first-person continuity are distinguished and each reckoned separately, the gap becomes much less threatening. The Southern tradition's own resources may well be able to supply this answer; it simply does not take the step. Its procedure here is assertive: "no intermediate existence," "no interval between death and birth." It stops a metaphysical question where no further digging is allowed. Chapter 7 of Essay 14 described its restraint. This is the same restraint, except that here what it restrains is precisely the question it has itself raised against Sarvāstivāda.

One case goes beyond the person. Fascicle 116 asks what constitutes the intrinsic nature of a schism in the saṅgha. The answer is disharmony, unobscured and indeterminate, a formation dissociated from mind. It falls within the dissociated formations in the formations aggregate, the category elsewhere described as "other formations dissociated from mind of this kind."² A community splits: something happens in time and a group's relations fall apart. Here this too is assigned a dharma, entering through the residual category at the end of the list. The distinctions that follow are exceptionally fine. A schism in the saṅgha and the offense of causing a schism differ. Schism is disharmony, unobscured and indeterminate, belonging among the dissociated formations within the formations aggregate; the offense is false speech, unwholesome verbal karma, belonging to the material aggregate. Thus the saṅgha possesses the schism, while the person who causes it possesses the offense. The attribution is clear, and its clarity makes it harder to explain: possession always requires a continuum to bear it, but a saṅgha is not one continuum.

Almost all these dharmas are established for sentient beings. Acquisition and nonacquisition (aprāpti) govern whether a dharma is attached to someone; the life faculty governs whether a continuum is alive; group homogeneity governs the kind to which a sentient being belongs; nonmanifest material form governs whether someone remains a keeper of the precepts after taking them; intermediate existence governs the passage from one life to the next. Of the six gaps filled in this chapter, only the four characteristics concern dharmas alone. The other five point to people, and the schism just examined points to a group of people. Sarvāstivāda firmly refuses to acknowledge a really existing person. Yet to keep statements about persons intelligible, it establishes five kinds of real dharmas along the way, then goes further and establishes an instance even for the disintegration of a group. This book will not call that inviting the self back in. That would be unfair: none of these dharmas is a permanent, unitary, governing substance, and they too arise and cease moment by moment. What Sarvāstivāda preserves and relinquishes along the line of not-self will be answered directly in Chapter 7. This chapter first hands over the list.

The six additions examined in this chapter, laid out individually:

The reasons in the middle column all differ; most troubles in the last have the same shape. The newly established dharma itself becomes something requiring a place. Schism in the saṅgha goes further: what is being accommodated is no longer a dharma but the relations of a group of people.

The second criterion can now be weighed. All six additions use the same move: where a sentence cannot be made intelligible, establish a dharma. Chapter 1 said that Sarvāstivāda's criterion of real existence is whether something dissolves under breaking or analysis. Chapter 2 pointed out that this criterion is not really used for formations dissociated from mind or nonmanifest material form. It bars nineteen items from matter and admits fourteen among formations dissociated from mind, but the reasons on the two sides are not the same. After examining them individually, we can state the second reason clearly: if an item cannot be omitted from a sentence that must hold true, it is established as a really existing dharma. Acquisition cannot be omitted, or the two Chinese characters 成就 ("possession") in the sūtras have nowhere to rest; group homogeneity cannot be omitted, or a kind of being cannot count as a kind; nonmanifest material form cannot be omitted, or a sleeping person is no keeper of the precepts; intermediate existence cannot be omitted, or the connection between lives is broken. Sarvāstivāda never writes this criterion down as a criterion. It is read out of the school's practice. Its strength is that every sentence has a bearer; its weakness is that there can be as many dharmas as sentences.

It has no internal stopping condition. Stopping depends on stipulation. Neither regress needs an outsider to uncover it: the commentator raises both in the successive questions and answers. Sarvāstivāda therefore knows that the move can roll onward. Every stop depends on a stipulation: acquisition and acquisition of acquisition acquire each other, so there is no infinity; arising of arising produces only one dharma, because the nature of dharmas is so and should not be challenged; the substance of the precepts is exclusively matter, because the world agrees that only restraint of body and speech is called a precept. Each has its reason, but none is inferred from elsewhere. Each draws a boundary where further questions cannot be answered. A stipulation is not an error: a treatise has the right to delimit its own words. Nor is a stipulation an argument: it declares only that inquiry stops here, not why it may stop here.

Three regress problems side by side: two answered, one not.

The first two rows both stop the regress at the second level, but in different ways: in the case of acquisition, the chain folds back into a loop; in the case of the four characteristics, the rule changes at the second level. In the third row, the loop remains open.

Three more statements deserve to stand together. At the end of his discussion of acquisition, Vasubandhu writes that the Vaibhāṣikas hold acquisition and nonacquisition each to have a separate real substance, rather than being nominally established. Both explanatory routes are well stated, because they do not conflict with reasoning and because they are "our school's position." The two reasons are given side by side, neither leading the other. The first is a public criterion, the second a rule of the house, but they are given the same weight. Discussing the two mindless attainments and the state of nonperception, Vasubandhu records the Vaibhāṣika statement that the account is not good because it conflicts with the school. Discussing the life faculty, he records that it is better to say a separate real thing sustains warmth and consciousness.³ The three answers have the same shape: the reason is the doctrine itself. This book will not read the statements as Sarvāstivāda having nothing to say. A school's stopping at its own tradition is consistent with what it is. The point is only that all three stops fall precisely where this chapter asks when additions will end. Whether this is an effect Vasubandhu deliberately arranges remains hard to decide even after checking the classical Chinese text; this book makes no ruling.

To Chapter 5. Once the entities are established, one job remains: how they relate to one another. Fascicle 157 has already made a distinction. A characteristic and what it characterizes necessarily obtain the same fruit; the characteristic follows its object, is inseparable from it, and neither precedes nor follows it in time. Acquisition and what is acquired do not share one fruit, need not follow each other, are not inseparable, and can precede or follow each other.² Both are relations of belonging, but they are not equally close. Explaining this distinction requires a whole account of causes and conditions, which is the subject of the next chapter.

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