Chapter 2: What the Sautrāntika Is¶

When Vasubandhu argues against the Sarvāstivāda there is other ground under his feet, and it is called the Sautrāntika. The name carries a problem from birth: the school describes itself as taking the sūtras for its measure and refuses the Abhidharma the standing of a measure, and yet a school that composed no treatise canon of its own can have its positions only scattered through other people's books. This chapter writes no history of the scholarly question. It does one thing: it erects the Sautrāntika's base positions as a list, and the three chapters that follow draw on the list entry by entry.

Name and identity: two sets of figures laid out first. The standing opponent in the Mahāvibhāṣā is called the Dārṣṭāntikas, ninety occurrences. In the Abhidharmakośa the Dārṣṭāntikas appear twice only, and their place is taken by the Sautrāntika, twenty occurrences, and the Sautrāntika masters, eleven.¹² From the Vibhāṣā to the Kośa the name has changed its face. Whether the Dārṣṭāntikas and the Sautrāntika are the earlier and later stretches of one line, or two houses that later hands have read together, is unsettled among scholars and is entered here as a scholarly case; this book uses only the part that can be confirmed. The positions Vasubandhu adopts at the decisive places run in the same direction as the Dārṣṭāntika positions recorded in the Vibhāṣā, and the question of lineage does not affect whether the doctrinal list can stand.

The list of positions. They are erected one by one, each with its place given. First, the present is really existent and past and future have no substance: this is the whole of the negative side in the debate over the three times, already walked through by doctrine in Part 15, Chapter 3, with fascicle twenty for its main field of battle. Second, the unconditioned is not real: the Sautrāntika masters say that no unconditioned dharma is really existent, that there is no separate real thing there as there is with matter and feeling and the rest.² Third, possession is not real: that a defilement has been abandoned or has not been abandoned is established by a difference in the body that serves as basis, and being possessed and not being possessed, these two, are merely nominal and not real—the express words of fascicle four.² Fourth, unmanifest matter is not real: the shape in which manifest action consists is not granted real existence in the first place, so that the unmanifest needs no saying; Part 15, Chapter 4 recorded that exchange. Fifth, action has volition for its substance: pressed by the Sarvāstivādin to say what they put in place of bodily action, the Sautrāntika answer names volition outright, the volition that sets the body moving in this way and that, which is called bodily action because it operates by way of the door of the body—the express words of fascicle thirteen.² Read together, the five run one way: every item posited solely in order to explain persistence and connection is withdrawn, and what can be kept is only the continuum that functions in the present.

The internal coherence of the list. These denials share a single criterion, and under it the boundary of the real has moved from what cannot be broken up under analysis to what can be shown to be functioning. The Sarvāstivāda asks of a thing whether it survives being taken apart, and if it survives it is really existent; on which past and future, possession, the unmanifest, and the unconditioned all come out really existent. The Sautrāntika asks of a thing whether it is functioning at this moment, and if it is not, it is only a name. The boundary once moved, the greater part of the Sarvāstivāda roster is put out, and the vacancies the ejected leave behind are filled throughout by a single thing: the differentiated capacity of a continuum, which is to say the seed. The most productive entry on the list deserves a chapter to itself.

Supplying the base for the chapters that follow. Chapter 3, on the seed theory, takes the positive form of the third entry; Chapter 4, which sends the dharmas dissociated from mind away one by one, takes the third and the fourth; Chapter 5, on the three unconditioned, takes the second. None of those chapters builds the list again; each refers back to this place and cites it.

To Chapter 3. How the fruit of action reaches across time: the Sarvāstivāda hands the task to possession and to unmanifest matter, the Sautrāntika to seeds and to the transformation and differentiation of the continuum. The replacement must be erected first, before it can be seen clearly how the row of things it replaced went off the stage.

References¶