Chapter 3: Seeds and the Transformation of the Continuum¶

[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. How action reaches across time: the school hands the task to possession and unmanifest matter, Vasubandhu to seeds and the distinctive transformation of the continuum. The chapter erects the seed theory in full and then tests the verdict of Part 15: the problems did not disappear with the economy, they were handed to a single item called the seed. Whether that sentence stands depends on whether the seed is one more formal entity or a genuinely different road.

Structure.

First, the division of labor among the words. Seed, continuum, transformation, distinction (actual usage to be verified); why it matters that the whole line is nominal designation.

Second, the mechanism of replacement. Action is the largest block of the book, and only what bears on the seed theory is taken here, the rest returning to Part 15 by topic; how the seed takes over the posts of possession and unmanifest matter.

Third, the germ of the transformation of the basis. The passage of fascicle four where severance stands in a difference of the basis: the noble one's basis, turned by the paths of seeing and cultivation, no longer has the capacity to bring those defilements forth, as a seed burnt by fire is not as it was. The school placed change in possession and non-possession because the substance may not change; Vasubandhu returns change to the capacity of the continuum itself, and the formal entity is out of a post at once. This passage is the pivot on which the book turns away from the school, and the first plank of the bridge to Yogācāra.

Fourth, testing the verdict. What the seed carries, what it avoids, what it postpones; the direct joint with the closing of Part 15, Chapter 4.

Data and sources. The fascicle-four passage is recorded in the planning file; the Vibhāṣā's fascicle one hundred fifty-eight — severance is not cutting or grinding, only the exchange of ties — as the facing text; the seed vocabulary claimed usage by usage.

To Chapter 4. With the replacement standing, the row of the replaced, denied one by one.