Chapter 7: The Counter-Defense of Saṅghabhadra¶

[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 Nyāyānusāra, eighty fascicles, replies to the Kośa sentence by sentence; the Xianzong lun, forty fascicles, restates the school's position without the polemic. After a system has been arranged into a book and abandoned at the joints by one of its own, how its strongest defender comes back; what the school's restatement of the criterion of the real is; and this book's judgment on whether the defense succeeds.

Structure.

First, the division of labor between the two works. The sentence-by-sentence reply and the positive restatement; Saṅghabhadra's manner against the Vibhāṣā's — his density of argument is far higher.

Second, substance and function, another round. The old question of Part 15, Chapter 1 in its new form; Saṅghabhadra's positive answer to whether function is a dharma, cited there in one sentence, expanded here.

Third, the restated criterion of the real. Saṅghabhadra's new definition of the really existent (source to be verified), set against Vasubandhu's criterion item by item.

Fourth, the judgment. What the defense holds and at what price; orthodoxy takes its final shape in this defense.

Data and sources. The eighty fascicles of the Nyāyānusāra are in the library in classical Chinese and searchable; the Xianzong lun is not, and is flagged where it matters; Cox's monograph sits exactly on this ground.

To Chapter 8. Both sides have pleaded; verdict and handover.