Chapter 0: Guide to This Part¶

[PLANNED] This chapter has not yet been written; what follows is a skeleton. Items may be added or removed, and the order may change.

The Mahāvibhāṣā is the great commentary of the Sarvāstivāda: two hundred fascicles that work through the Jñānaprasthāna clause by clause, set out rival positions side by side, and close them with the formula "the evaluation says," by which the orthodoxy of the Vaibhāṣikas was fixed. The five-layer table of texts in the guide to Part 15 calls this the layer of the great commentary. This part reads that layer on its own — not because the book is large, but because it is the site where an orthodoxy was adjudicated into being: positions are laid out in parallel, a ruling follows, and what the ruling rests on, where it stops, and who gets to make it can be watched nowhere else.

Why this part must exist. Part 15 is organized by doctrine and asks whether this metaphysics holds; this part is organized by text and asks how it was fixed in the first place. The second question has philosophical content of its own, for four reasons, and the four are faces of one predicament. First, adjudication and argument: the evaluation exercises a power, and its rulings rest not only on argument but on scripture, lineage and the consistency of the format; what kind of truth-claim belongs to a system fixed by ruling deserves a treatment of its own. Second, an orthodoxy that defines itself by its opponents: the positions of the Dārṣṭāntikas, the Bhadanta, the Vibhajyavādins, the Vātsīputrīyas and the Mahāsāṃghikas are catalogued entry by entry and refuted entry by entry; this is the most important documentary layer of sectarian thought, and a mode of self-establishment worth analyzing head-on. Third, commentary as a philosophical form: one root treatise expounded layer upon layer, and the form itself carries a claim — that the truth was already complete in the root text, and what remains is exposition. Fourth, the doctrine Part 15 had no room for: mental factors and association, latent defilements and their severing, the two layers of cause and effect across the three times.

Put together, the four faces give the through-line of the part. The school's method requires every distinction to land on an intrinsic nature, so classification grows ever finer and entities multiply; once symmetry is treated as a demand of reality, even absences must be made into existents. The method cannot say where to stop, so stopping is left to the ruling. The predicament of Part 15 was doctrinal: the thesis fails by its own criterion. The predicament here is methodological: the method compels the system to keep adding and cannot decide where to halt. The two sentences describe one machine, measured at different points.

How to read this part. Chapters 1 and 2 fix the way of reading: first what carries the bulk of the two hundred fascicles, then the actual state of the argumentation. Chapter 3 is the core: what the rulings rest on, and when adjudication coincides with argument and when it parts from it. Chapters 4 and 5 are two scenes of adjudication, one inside the system (the four masters) and one at its edge (the roster of opponents). Chapters 6 through 8 take up the doctrine Part 15 had no room for. Chapter 9 is the verdict and the handover. The way of reading set in the first two chapters is used throughout, so the order matters; a reader impatient for doctrine can enter at Chapter 6 and return for the first two later.

A survey of the format. For scale: the classical text runs to about one and a half million characters, the vernacular translation to well over two million. What carries the bulk is a small set of formulas. The counts below follow the classical text; the vernacular translation has not yet unified its renderings of these markers, so wherever this part uses a count, the classical text is the measure.

This table is the skeleton of Chapter 1: the book is long because it multiplied out everything there was to multiply, and it is not complex because the multipliers are few.

Terms. As in the two preceding parts, Chinese terms govern and Sanskrit is given in parentheses at first occurrence. One further layer is proper to this part: words like the evaluation, some say, further and this should not be pressed are terms and evidence at once; wherever they serve as evidence, the count and the source are given in the text.

The interface with Part 3. The course of the sectarian splits, the accounts of the councils and the legend of Kaniṣka belong to Part 3 and are not retold here. Where they come up, this part takes one thing only: how the structure of authority enters the format of a treatise.

To Chapter 1. The most basic question first: what kind of book are these two hundred fascicles.