Chapter 8: Two rounds of cause and effect across three lives¶

In Essay 13, Chapter 4, this book reads the twelve-link framework of dependent arising across three lives while leaving the commentary tradition's precise allocation of the links open. Most of its analysis of present psychological dynamics concerns the subsidiary routes. In the Mahāvibhāṣā, the same twelve names are allocated to two sets of causes and results across three lives: two past links are causes with five present results, and three present links are causes with two future results. This chapter examines what this interpretation changes, why it makes those changes, and what they cost.

Four positions are presented, and the most orderly is chosen. Fascicle 23 sets out four kinds of dependent origination. In momentary dependent origination, all twelve links arise together in a single moment. In connected dependent origination, successive links adjoin without an interval. In dependent origination by phases, each link is a phase of the five aggregates. In dependent origination across a long succession, links can remain connected across lives.¹ The arrangement of four positions is exactly like that of the four great masters, and adjudication moves in the same direction. Orthodoxy settles on phases. The twelve links become twelve positions, each occupied by the five aggregates of a period. When the Kośa restates this reading, its verse attaches the two characters 傳許, "accepted according to tradition." Tradition says so, and it is provisionally allowed. This expression occurs only twice in the thirty fascicles, and this is one occurrence.² What the school treats as settled receives a label of reservation from one of its own later thinkers. Essay 17 will return to this detail.

The original text makes the rewriting clear. Fascicle 23 asks how many of one person's twelve links of dependent origination in this life are past, future, or present. It answers, "Two are past, ignorance and formations. Two are future, birth and aging-and-death. Eight are present, consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, and becoming."¹ The treatise also explains why they are distributed this way. "Those without the eye of wisdom infer future results from present causes and past causes from present results. They can know that these too exist; hence this account."¹ The twelve links change from a sequence of processes into a table of assignments across three lives, each link pinned to a period. The same fascicle explains the scope of 此生, "this life." "One commonality of sentient beings is called this life." Each link is thus a stage within a lifetime.¹ Chapter 4 of Essay 15 has already noted the purpose of this arrangement. Stating that there are two past links blocks the view that birth-and-death did not exist before but exists now. Stating that there are two future links blocks the view that birth-and-death exists and then returns to nonexistence. The account of two rounds of cause and effect across three lives is no incidental exercise in interpreting sūtras. It supports real existence across the three times.

The costs. There are three. First, in this reading, intermediate existence becomes a necessity: if passage between two lives is a real transition, something must exist during it. The two-character term 中有 occurs more than 1,200 times in the Mahāvibhāṣā; the supplementary section in Essay 15, Chapter 4, discussed this family of additions in detail.¹ Second, embryology is fixed into a developmental schedule: consciousness, name-and-form and the six sense bases are assigned to stages of development after conception. The early texts' references to conception were treated literally in Essay 13. The criticism here concerns turning those references into a predetermined sequence of life stages. Third, and most seriously, the universality of dependent arising is narrowed to the life history of sentient beings. Essay 13 accepts the framework across three lives without endorsing its precise allocation of links. The present psychological processes discussed there mostly belong to the subsidiary routes. The concern here is therefore the rigid allocation of links: when ignorance and formations are assigned to a past stage, this particular allocation cannot be verified by observing present mental processes. The change being criticized is the fixing of the links in these positions, not the framework across three lives itself. Its direction matches that traced throughout the Mahāvibhāṣā: processes become positions, and occurrences become placements.

Seen alongside this essay's central thread. Of the four positions, the phase account is the most orderly because it fits the grid of the three times exactly. Two links belong to the past, eight to the present, and two to the future, as symmetrical as a completed table. The evaluators choose it by the same move with which they choose Vasumitra's position theory. Whatever makes the arrangement orderly wins. First arrange the grid evenly, then deal with the problems. Problems that cannot be handled are assigned to a new entity such as intermediate existence or to a label such as "accepted according to tradition." Section 16 of Chapter 2 said ontology first, argument afterward. This chapter adds, the grid first, time afterward.

On to Chapter 9. Format, argument, adjudication, and doctrine have all been examined. What remains is to deliver a verdict. As a philosophical form, what does this book ultimately stand on, and what has it paid?

References¶