Chapter 9: The Verdict—How Commentary Becomes a System¶

[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. The close of the part, in three steps. First, the gap between bulk and complexity: two hundred fascicles are a small set of formats multiplied out. Second, the price of the method: substance first, argument after; every distinction must be made an entity, symmetry becomes an ontological demand, power and its lack beget possession and non-possession, and these beget the possession of possession — three stages of amplification, and the method cannot say where to stop. Third, the function of ruling: stopping is done by the evaluation; the evaluation is the brake of this book, and what it brakes is mostly growth the treatise itself has set going. The three together: a philosophy that must fit itself with a brake has its predicament written into its design.

Structure.

First, the three steps, each drawing its evidence from the earlier chapters; no new examples.

Second, two ways out, not one. Vasubandhu's way is renovation: the same apparatus turned on the question whether the apparatus is needed, a reduction of weight from inside. Nāgārjuna's way is demolition: the whole apparatus, procedure and all, judged conceptual proliferation, with no reduction from inside. This part hands over to the former; the joint for the latter is already pinned in Chapter 5 (the Madhyamaka attack on conditions strikes the one layer the Vibhāṣā itself admits has scriptural warrant). Three boundaries hold: do not write that Nāgārjuna read this treatise; do not write that proliferation is the Vibhāṣā's own word for itself (twenty-six occurrences, all as catalogue entries — the word is one Nāgārjuna took back from the sūtra layer and turned around, and the gap itself is the material); rewriting and erasure are metaphors, usable as metaphors, not as judgments.

Third, two textual proofs to close: the solitary axiom of fascicle thirty that all dharmas are fixed in intrinsic nature, and the plain sentence of fascicle sixteen that the six causes are not the sūtra's teaching; with omniscience as the unanalyzable boundary-marker, and the Śāriputra passage of fascicle seventy-four as the book's own account of its method.

Fourth, the pointer back to Part 13, Chapter 7. There, how silence gets filled; here, how discourse multiplies itself. Two intakes of one machine, not one channel; they must not be run together into a single sentence.

Data and sources. Everything from the preceding eight chapters and the reading notes; no new passages; the two-sided count of proliferation is verified (twenty-six in the Vibhāṣā, two in the Kośa).

To the next part. The way of renovation deserves a part of its own: why a man left this system after arranging it.