Chapter 1: One Book, Two Identities¶

The Abhidharmakośa is two books at once: the best digest the Sarvāstivāda ever received, and the most exact criticism it ever received. The two identities interleave paragraph by paragraph, and nothing between them announces that the scene has changed. This chapter builds the basic skill of the whole part: how to tell which of the two identities the sentence in one's hand is serving. Only when the rules have been laid down do the seven chapters that follow have common ground to stand on.

Format and composition. Verse and prose alternate. The words "the verse says" stand five hundred twenty-seven times in the book and "the treatise says" five hundred twenty-two, one verse to one exposition, with a regularity that is almost mechanical.¹ The root verses are arranged in the main on Vaibhāṣika doctrine, gathering the whole stock of the Mahāvibhāṣā's two hundred fascicles into a frame of six hundred verses, the tally for each of the eight chapters printed beneath its own chapter title and adding up to exactly that; the prose expounds the verses one by one, and in the expounding sets up a view of its own again and again. The order of the eight chapters has a logic of its own. The chapters on the Elements and on the Faculties draw up the list of dharmas; the three on the World, on Action, and on the Latent Defilements treat the causes and effects of defilement; the three on the Noble Ones, on Knowledges, and on the Attainments treat the causes and effects of purity. The stock is laid out first, then the round of transmigration, then the return to cessation. That sequence is itself a Sarvāstivāda sequence, the frame taken over entire from the other side; and that is the first identity.

The verse of self-declaration at the end of the book. The second identity the book confesses itself, at the close. At the end of fascicle twenty-nine Vasubandhu puts a question to himself: this treatise takes up and summarizes the Abhidharma—on what principle, then, does it expound the Abhidharma? The verse answers: the deliberation of Kaśmīra has established the principle; I have for the most part followed them in expounding the Abhidharma; what little detraction there is, is my own fault; the judging of dharma by right principle rests with the Sage. His own prose note follows: the Vaibhāṣika masters of the land of Kaśmīra have well established the principle of the Abhidharma by their deliberation; I have for the most part followed them in expounding the doctrine of the Abhidharma; what little detraction there is, is my own fault; the judging of dharma by right principle rests with the Sage.¹ Three things are pressed into four lines. I have for the most part followed them concedes that the frame belongs to somebody else. What little detraction there is, is my own fault concedes that there is detraction in the book: the posture is lowered, and the pen is not withdrawn. The judging of dharma by right principle rests with the Sage places the final power of adjudication not with the adjudicator of Kaśmīra but with the Buddha. Later tradition compressed the position into four characters, the stronger argument governs. The four never stand together in either of the two Tang commentaries: Puguang's Record has "he takes principle as his tenet," Fabao's Commentary has "he takes the better principle as his tenet" and "here the stronger argument is what is right," and of the two halves it is Fabao who first supplies the words for stronger argument.² The compression is not wrong, only the verse is sharper than the compression, since it amounts to a declaration that the school's own rulings are not the last court.

The rules of discrimination: three markers. The two identities are told apart by markers the original carries in itself. First, "it is said." In Xuanzang's translation practice, wherever Vasubandhu restates a Vaibhāṣika doctrine while keeping a reservation of his own, the two characters for "it is said" are set upon it; they stand thirty-three times in the book. The verse line met in Part 16, Chapter 8 ("transmitted and granted, it is stated in terms of positions") belongs to the same family. One occurrence of "it is said" is one place where Vasubandhu declined to sign. Second, the signatures of the kind "the Vaibhāṣika masters say thus"; "the Vaibhāṣika masters" stands sixty-six times in the book. What is restated has an owner, and responsibility for the words is entered to a separate account. Third, the testimony from the other side. Saṅghabhadra's Nyāyānusāra calls Vasubandhu the sūtra-master throughout, two hundred fifty times;³ the greatest of his opponents takes sūtra for his surname as well, from which it appears that in the eyes of the opposition the book's second identity was the truer of the two. With the three markers used together the two identities can for the most part be read apart paragraph by paragraph. The stretches where the criticism runs densest are the passages on the dharmas dissociated from mind in the chapter on the Faculties and the debate over the three times in the chapter on the Latent Defilements, and the chapters that follow take their material by exactly this distribution.

The two Chinese translations. This part takes Xuanzang's thirty fascicles for its base text; the vernacular translation and the classical text are both in the library, and citations are claimed back against the original. Paramārtha's older translation, the Commentary on the Abhidharmakośa in twenty-two fascicles, is cited by way of comparison only where the doctrine diverges, and is not treated as a second base text; read side by side with Xuanzang, it diverges most at the verse of self-declaration at the end of the book.⁴ Differences of format between the two translations are handled in place, without a section of their own.

One Vasubandhu or two. Only the conclusion of the scholarly case is stated here. The old account makes the author of the Kośa one man with the Vasubandhu who turned to Yogācāra in later life; modern scholarship has argued for two Vasubandhus, and the question remains open to this day. This book takes the minimal commitment: the man who arranged the Kośa, who drew Saṅghabhadra's rebuttal, and who left this verse of self-declaration is one and the same treatise-master; his relation to the Yogācāra works is left to the part on Yogācāra to give an account of (a scholarly case; the present state of the scholarship to be tracked). Where this part says Vasubandhu, it means without exception the author of the Kośa.

To Chapter 2. The rules are laid down. The ground Vasubandhu stands on when he criticizes the Sarvāstivāda is called the Sautrāntika; what that ground is made of must be seen clearly first.

References¶