Chapter 8: Two Layers of Cause and Effect Across the Three Times¶

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

What this chapter does. Of the four accounts of the stations of dependent origination — momentary, linked, positional, remote — the Vibhāṣā rules for the positional; and the twelve links read as two layers of cause and effect across three lives is a major metaphysical rewriting of dependent origination. What was rewritten, at what cost, and the confrontation with the dependent-origination chapter of Part 13: the same twelve links, there a psychological dynamics, here a map of three lives.

Structure.

First, the four accounts side by side, and the ruling with its ground.

Second, the content of the rewriting. The twelve links turned from a description of process into a three-life allocation table, each link pinned to a stretch of time (the allocation to be verified against the text).

Third, the cost. Intermediate existence becomes a necessity; embryology enters philosophy; the generality of dependent origination narrows to the life-history of a being. What the reading of Part 13, Chapter 4 loses here, item by item.

Fourth, the rewriting and the through-line of the part: once again the grid is laid out even first and the problems are handled after; the positional account is the tidiest, and that is why it was chosen.

Data and sources. The four accounts (around fascicle twenty-three, to be verified); the reading of the twelve links from Part 13, Chapter 4; the corresponding passage of the Kośa's chapter on the world.

To Chapter 9. The doctrine is in; the verdict can be given.