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

In the early teaching the twelve links of dependent origination are a sequence of psychological process, and Chapter 4 of Part 13 walked through them once on that reading. In the hands of the Vibhāṣā the same list of names is read as two layers of cause and effect spanning three lives: the two past links are causes and five links in the present are their fruits; three links in the present are causes and two future links are their fruits. This chapter looks at that rewriting — what was rewritten, on what warrant, and where the cost falls.

Four accounts side by side, and the one taken is the tidiest. Fascicle twenty-three sets four kinds of dependent origination in parallel. Momentary dependent origination: the twelve links arise together in a single moment. Linked dependent origination: each link stands next to the one before it without interval. Positional dependent origination: each link is one position of the five aggregates. Remote dependent origination: link may be tied to link at a distance across lives.¹ The layout of four accounts side by side is exactly that of the four great masters, and the adjudication runs the same way: the orthodoxy falls to the positional, the twelve links are read as twelve positions, and at each position stand the five aggregates of one span of life. When the Abhidharmakośa restates the reading, its verse hangs two words upon it, "transmitted and granted" — so it has been handed down, and so it is allowed for the present. "Transmitted and granted" occurs at only two places in the thirty fascicles, and this is one of them.² Something the school treated as settled has had a tag of doubt hung on it by a later member of its own house, and Part 17 will have further use for the detail.

What was rewritten the text states plainly enough itself. Fascicle twenty-three answers a question: for one person, of the twelve links of dependent origination in this life, how many are past, how many future, how many present? Answer: two are past, namely ignorance and formations; two are future, namely birth and aging-and-death; eight are present, namely consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense bases, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, and existence.¹ Why the spread should be made this way the treatise also explains: those without the eye of wisdom infer the future fruit from the present cause and the past cause from the present fruit, and so may know that these too exist; therefore it is stated thus.¹ The twelve links have gone from a string of process to a table of allocation across three lives, each link pinned into one stretch of time; and what "this life" is to mean the same fascicle makes explicit — one homogeneous character is what is called this life, so that a link is one stage within a single span of life.¹ The purpose of the allocation was recorded in Chapter 4 of Part 15: asserting the two past links blocks the view that birth-and-death has not been and comes to be, and asserting the two future links blocks the view that birth-and-death, having been, ceases to be. The two layers of cause and effect across the three times are no pastime of scriptural exposition; they are a fortification built for the real existence in the three times.

The cost. Three items. First, the intermediate existence becomes a necessity: once the junction of two lives is a transition in earnest, something must exist within the transition, and the two words "intermediate existence" occur more than twelve hundred times in the whole book, this family of additions having been set out in detail in the appended section of Chapter 4 of Part 15.¹ Second, embryology enters philosophy: the succession of consciousness, name-and-form, and the six sense bases is read as a timetable of development following entry into the womb, so that a list of names which of itself covered everything arising in dependence is pinned to the single occasion of taking birth. Third, and this is the heaviest of the three, the generality of dependent origination narrows into the life-history of a sentient being. On the reading of Part 13, formations conditioned by ignorance is the microstructure of every impulse, observable here and now; the positional reading pushes it back into a former life and exchanges an observable process for an unobservable allocation. The direction of the rewriting agrees with this book at every turn: process is exchanged for position, and occurrence for placement.

Read together with the through-line of this part. Of the four accounts the positional is the tidiest, and its tidiness lies in how exactly it fits the grid of the three lives: two links to the past, eight to the present, two to the future, symmetrical as a table already drawn up. The adjudicator's taking it is the same act as its taking Vasumitra's account by position: whatever makes the scheme tidy prevails. The grid is squared away first and the problems handled afterwards; what cannot be handled is passed to a new entity such as the intermediate existence, or to a label such as "transmitted and granted." Section sixteen of Chapter 2 said that substance comes first and argument after; this chapter adds a line — the grid comes first and time after.

To Chapter 9. Format, argument, adjudication, doctrine: everything that could be looked at has been looked at. What remains is to give the verdict, and to say what this book, as a form of philosophy, stands upon and what it has paid.

References¶