Chapter 8: Verdict and Handover¶

[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. Vasubandhu's turn as a philosophical event: not a biography of conversion, but the scene of a criterion moving. The standing of the Kośa in East Asia (the Kośa school, and the byname that calls it the treatise of intelligence) is told briefly as history. The verdict answers the question Chapter 0 set — why a man left this system after arranging it — and joins the verdict of the preceding part: there, a method that could not stop; here, what the first real reduction of weight looks like.

Structure.

First, the verdict. The contents of the turn, gathered from Chapters 2 through 5; the reduction removes entities and leaves a list of problems, and the list passes almost intact to Yogācāra.

Second, the afterlife in East Asia. The Kośa school, the byname, the translation workshops and the commentators Puguang and Fabao; history, not argument.

Third, the handover. Seeds to the Yogācāra part; the tested hardness of intrinsic nature and real connection to the Madhyamaka parts; the open file on the unconditioned and the standing of nirvāṇa, each with its forwarding address.

Data and sources. The conclusions of the preceding seven chapters; the East Asian history to be verified (the Kośa-school lineage and the origin of the byname).

To the next part. After this part, the second half turns to Madhyamaka.