Chapter 4: The Four Masters—Four Shapes of Time¶

Dharmatrāta says the difference is in mode, Ghoṣaka that it is in characteristic, Vasumitra that it is in position, Buddhadeva that it is in relative standing: one and the same dharma-substance moves through the three times, and each of the four masters answers in his own way the question of what it is that changes. The doctrinal shape of the four accounts, and the difficulty peculiar to each, were tested once already, as doctrine, in Chapter 3 of Part 15, and that ground is not walked again here. The question is put differently. This dispute is taken as the specimen scene of the present part: why the adjudicator took Vasumitra, of what kind are the reasons on which the elimination in reverse order rests, and where this one ruling bound the system that came after.

The four accounts in their original wording. Fascicle seventy-seven records that in the Sarvāstivāda there are four great masters, each establishing the three times in his own way: the Venerable Dharmatrāta says the difference is in mode, the Venerable Ghoṣaka says the difference is in characteristic, the Venerable Vasumitra says the difference is in position, the Venerable Buddhadeva says the difference is in relative standing.¹ Dharmatrāta takes for his simile a gold vessel recast into another object: the mode turns and the substance does not. Ghoṣaka takes for his simile a man in the act of being enamoured of one woman, who is not on that account called free of desire for the others: of the three characteristics one is in conjunction and two are not. Vasumitra takes for his simile the counting-rod: placed in the units column it is called one, in the tens column ten, in the hundreds column a hundred; it passes through different positions while the substance of the rod does not differ. Buddhadeva takes for his simile one woman who is called daughter relative to her mother and mother relative to her daughter: though there is no difference in her substance, difference of relation makes the difference. The order in which the four stand side by side is mode, characteristic, position, relative standing; the order of adjudication is the reverse—Buddhadeva is refuted first, then Ghoṣaka, then Dharmatrāta, and Vasumitra is established last.¹

The adjudicator's reasons, taken one by one for their type. Against Buddhadeva: a present dharma occupying a single moment, standing relative to what precedes and to what follows, would come to furnish three times, and the times would be confused. Against Ghoṣaka: he admits that every dharma in each of the times has all three temporal characteristics, so the three times he establishes are likewise confused. Against Dharmatrāta: apart from the intrinsic nature of the dharma, what is this mode of yours? And further, as a dharma goes from future to present the earlier mode must perish, and as it goes from present to past the later mode must arise, so that there is arising in the past and perishing in the future—how can this be right?¹ All three refutations are made with one and the same blade: confusion. The settled ruling is a single sentence—therefore only the third way of establishing the times is sound, since conditioned dharmas do have a time at which they exercise function; and the adjudicator supplies one further reason, that on this master's account the times are not confused, since the difference of the three times is established in terms of function.¹ Report the type of each of these passages and the result comes out very regular: three refutations and one establishment, and in not one place is a scripture cited, in not one place is lineage appealed to. The appeal throughout is to the consistency of the format—the scheme of the three times must not be allowed to fall into disorder. This is not a victory won by argument; it is a sifting under a standard of order, and the criteria of the sifting themselves, the two words orthodoxy and confusion, are nowhere argued for from first to last. There is one further piece of corroboration: the three refutations run to about four times the length of the single sentence of the settled ruling. The effort went into the elimination, and the account established is merely the one left over.¹

The price of taking the position account. Position is fixed by function: a dharma that does not yet have function is called future, one that is exercising function is called present, one whose function has ceased is called past. The adjudication chose this account because it is the most regular of the four; but the price of that regularity is paid elsewhere. Once the whole difference of the three times has been handed over to function, the questions of what function itself is, whether it counts as a dharma, and whether it has three times of its own become questions that must be answered and that the system cannot answer. Chapters 1 and 3 of Part 15 have already walked this predicament through as a matter of doctrine; what the present part has to add is its genealogy. The predicament is not one shared by all four accounts. It belongs to the position account alone, and it is a predicament that adjudication selected. The adjudicator picked the least troublesome of the four answers and thereby handed on the heaviest burden, undiminished, to those who came after; Saṅghabhadra's full counter-defence, in Chapter 7 of Part 17, is the taking up of precisely this bill.

The aftermath of the ruling. Once the position account had become the orthodoxy, the three that lost did not leave the stage. Mode, characteristic, position and relative standing went on being cited side by side exactly as before, and became a teaching template. More telling is a defence entered several centuries later. Saṅghabhadra, restating the four, clears Dharmatrāta of the charge against him: Dharmatrāta says only that when dharmas move through the times, though substance and characteristic are the same, the mode of their nature differs; this is in part the same as the Venerable Vasumitra's account, and how can it be judged the same as that of the Sāṃkhya outsiders?² A defender of the orthodoxy turns back to plead the case of a master whom his own school's adjudicator had eliminated, and moreover draws him over to the side of the master who won. The episode shows the actual force of the evaluation in a clear light: adjudication stopped the dispute from proceeding, but it did not abolish the positions that lost. Plurality within an orthodoxy survives in the mode of being cited without being adopted. And this is one more face of the difference between adjudication and argument: an argument that has been refuted is dead, whereas a position that has been ruled out is still alive.

To Chapter 5. The four masters are parallel presentation and adjudication inside the system; the next chapter looks at the roster along its edge (the Dārṣṭāntikas, the Bhadanta, the Vibhajyavādins, the Vātsīputrīyas, the Mahāsāṃghikas), and at how an orthodoxy draws its own boundary by means of its opponents.

References¶