Chapter 2: What the Sautrāntika Is¶

[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 name itself is a problem: a school that takes the sūtras as its measure and has no treatise canon of its own; and the relation of the Dārṣṭāntikas to the Sautrāntika is unsettled. No history of the question here. The chapter builds a list of base positions for the rest of the part to draw on: the present exists and past and future lack substance; whether an object of cognition must be existent; action as volition, and the tendency to shrink the list of separate mental factors (the exact wording of each entry verified before writing). How far the list is built decides how far the later chapters can walk.

Structure.

First, name and identity. The self-description of taking the sūtras as measure; the several accounts of the Dārṣṭāntika and Sautrāntika relation; whether the Vibhāṣā's Dārṣṭāntikas and the Kośa's Sautrāntika are one line (to be verified, positions side by side).

Second, the list of positions. Each entry with its place in the Kośa; the entries that carry the most weight in the Refutation and in Latent Defilements marked as such.

Third, the internal coherence of the list. The criterion these denials share; against the Sarvāstivāda criterion of the real, where the boundary has moved.

Fourth, service to the later chapters. Chapters 3 through 5 draw on this list and do not rebuild it.

Data and sources. The scholarly accounts of the Sautrāntika question (to be verified); the textual place of each position claimed entry by entry; the Nyāyānusāra's reports from the opposing side as a control.

To Chapter 3. The most productive entry on the list is the seed theory; it gets a chapter of its own.