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

The close of this part goes in three steps, each gathering one set of the evidence laid down in the earlier chapters; the three combine into a single verdict, and then the baton is passed.

First step: gathering the gap between bulk and complexity. The conclusion established in Chapter 1: the two hundred fascicles are what a small set of formats yields when multiplied over an enormous roster of dharmas. The ninefold and eighteenfold ratios of the equal-length comparison, the sixteen hundred occurrences of "likewise," the three hundred of "a tetralemma should be made," the inventory of formats — it is all there on the table. The book is long because it multiplied out everything there was to multiply; it is not complex because the multipliers are so few. What this step gathers is a phenomenon: bulk is not the same thing as a quantity of thought.

Second step: gathering the price of the method. The conclusion established in section sixteen of Chapter 2: substance first, argument after. This method requires every distinction to land upon an intrinsic nature, so that classification is drawn ever finer and entities are posited in ever greater number; and once symmetry has become a demand of ontology, even a lack must be made into an existent. Possessing and not possessing beget possession and non-possession, and possession and non-possession beget in turn the possession of possession: three stages of amplification. Across the whole book "intrinsic nature" stands at 1,536 places and "real existence" at 252, while "nominal existence," the term that relieves the pressure, stands at 5.¹ The relief valve was built and is essentially never used; this is the book-wide sample of what Chapter 2 called instruments built and never used. The method can supply no place of its own at which to stop, because neither of its two exits is an explanation. One exit is intrinsic nature, where the explanation terminates without having been given; the other is passing the matter on, where the explanation is carried forward by borrowing the next entity, so that it is deferred and again not given. A machine with no completed state cannot, of course, come to a halt.

Third step: gathering the function of adjudication. The conclusion established in Chapter 3: stopping can only be done by the evaluation, and what gets braked is for the most part growth the treatise has set going itself. The evaluation is not an ornament of this book; it is its brake. A philosophy that must fit itself with a brake has its predicament written into its design. With this the three steps close together: the formats explain its length, the method explains its additions, and adjudication explains how it can still be brought to a stop. The verdict in one sentence: commentary becomes a system by adjudication, because argument cannot manage it.

Two ways out, not one. Two roads have been walked out of this predicament in history. Vasubandhu's road is renovation: the same apparatus is turned upon the apparatus itself to ask whether it is wanted (whether possession is wanted, whether unmanifest matter is wanted, whether the three times are wanted), a reduction of weight from inside the system. Nāgārjuna's road is demolition: the whole apparatus, its procedure along with it, is judged conceptual proliferation, and no weight is taken off from inside. This part hands the baton to the former, and the whole of the next part is the site of that reduction; the joint for the latter was pinned already in Chapter 2, since what the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā's opening chapter, the examination of conditions, attacks is precisely the layer of the four conditions, the one layer the Vibhāṣā itself grants has scriptural warrant. Three boundaries govern this passage, and each is here recorded. First, it is not written that Nāgārjuna read this treatise, only that what he faced was the procedure of this line of Abhidharma. Second, it is not written that conceptual proliferation is the Vibhāṣā's own verdict upon itself: the word stands at twenty-six places in the Vibhāṣā, all of them catalogue entries, and at only two in the Abhidharmakośa; it is a word Nāgārjuna took back from the layer of the sūtras and turned around, and the gap itself is the material.¹ Third, rewriting and erasure are metaphors, usable as metaphors and not as judgments.

Two textual proofs to close. One is the solitary instance in fascicle thirty: because all dharmas are fixed in their intrinsic nature — the one time in the whole book that the axiom of the entire method is spoken aloud.¹ The other is the plain sentence of fascicle sixteen: yet these six causes are not stated in the sūtras; the sūtras state only that there are four conditions.¹ That the axiom is stated once shows that the rest of the time it is the air; that a new construction is admitted once shows that the book knows it is constructing. Put together, the two sentences give the actual state of this book's knowledge of itself: it knows what its foundation is, and it knows which beams it added, and it simply holds that adding them was the right thing to do. Two further places serve as boundary markers: the knowledge of all modes, which stands as the unanalyzable floor wherever the questioning comes up against it, and the passage of fascicle seventy-four in which Śāriputra answers that the twelve sense bases comprehend all dharmas, one of the rare occasions on which the book states its own method.

A pointer back to Chapter 7 of Part 13. That chapter dealt with how the Buddha's silence came to be filled in by those who followed; this part deals with how discourse multiplies itself. The two are two intake ports of one machine and not one channel: filling in produces new entities, multiplication produces new fascicles, and the two must not be run together into a single sentence. The leaves in the hand were, in that chapter, an image of restraint; at the end of this part a line may be added — once the leaves had left the hand, what grew was not foliage but pages.

To the next part. The road of reduction deserves a part of its own. A man took the Sarvāstivāda's own framework and compiled with it the best compendium the Sarvāstivāda ever had, and then, at every point that mattered, cast his vote against it. Why he did so, and what was left of the system once he had done it, is the subject of the next part.

References¶