Chapter 3: Seeds and the Transformation of the Continuum¶

How the fruit of action reaches across time is a question no Buddhist metaphysics can walk around. The Sarvāstivāda hands it to two entities, possession and unmanifest matter; Vasubandhu hands it to one phrase, seeds and the transformation and differentiation of the continuum. This chapter erects that phrase into a complete doctrine, and then tests the verdict left standing by Part 15: with the economy achieved, the problems did not disappear, they were merely handed over to a single item called the seed. Whether that verdict holds depends on whether the seed is one more formal entity or a road genuinely different.

The division of labour among the original words. The six-character formula "the transformation and differentiation of the continuum" stands fifteen times in the thirty fascicles, and it is a strict set of terms. The continuum is the flow of mind and mental factors arising moment upon moment without interval. Transformation is that flow differing before and after. Differentiation is the transformation, having run as far as some one moment, coming to possess the superior capacity to produce a fruit.¹ Seed is the name given to that capacity: when a dharma has within its own continuum the capacity to produce a fruit, that is called a seed. The point to hold from the outset is the crucial one: this whole group of words is nominally posited. The continuum is not a dharma, transformation is not a dharma, differentiation is not a dharma; they are ways of describing a series of moments. What the Sarvāstivāda posits is entities and what Vasubandhu posits is a description, and that asymmetry is the ground the whole chapter stands on.

The mechanism of replacement. The passage in fascicle four is the pivot. The Sarvāstivāda asks: with possession not posited, by what is a defilement's having been abandoned distinguished from its not having been abandoned? Vasubandhu answers: it is by a difference in the basis that the sense of a defilement's having been abandoned or not abandoned is established. By the force of the paths of seeing and of cultivation the noble ones make the body that serves as their basis be transformed and become other than it was, so that among the defilements abandoned by those two paths there is no longer any capacity to make them occur; as a seed burnt by fire is transformed and has no power of production as before, so in the body that serves as the noble one's basis there is no capacity to produce the defilements, and this is called the abandoning of the defilements. The conclusion follows at once: those not yet abandoned are said to be possessed, those already abandoned are said to be not possessed, and these two are merely nominal and not real.¹ Three steps are taken in a single passage. Change is drawn back from possession, which lay outside the substance of the dharma, into a capacity of the basis itself. Abandoning stops being the exchange of one attachment for another and becomes the burning away of a capacity. And then the two names, possession and non-possession, are declared to be no more than terms for those two states. The moment the replacement is erected, what it replaces is out of a post. Part 15, Chapter 4 said that of all Vasubandhu's demolitions the demolition of possession is the most thorough, and here is the reason: it is not that he finds possession superfluous, it is that he already has something in hand to fill the post.

The weight of this passage: the germ of the transformation of the basis. When the Mahāvibhāṣā line speaks of severance, the wording of fascicle one hundred fifty-seven is that severance is not a cutting with a knife or a grinding with a stone, but only the severing of the possession that binds and the obtaining of the possession of release: the substance of the defilement goes on existing always, and what is exchanged is that attachment.² Vasubandhu's wording is that the body which serves as basis is transformed and becomes other than it was: the change falls upon a capacity of the continuum itself. The difference between the two roads is not in the conclusion but in what bears the change. The Sarvāstivāda places the change upon a formal entity, because its ontology does not permit the substance of a dharma to alter; Vasubandhu returns the change to the continuum, and then that entity is not needed. These seven characters, "the body which serves as basis is transformed and becomes other than it was," are the germ of the later Yogācāra term the transformation of the basis; this passage is the pivot on which the whole book turns away from the Sarvāstivāda, and the first plank of the bridge to the next great system. The word "seed" stands twenty-six times in the thirty fascicles, and in every place it carries this use.¹

Testing the verdict. Now look back at the sentence from Part 15: the problems did not disappear, they were merely handed over to the seed. The test comes out half right and half wrong. The half that is right: the whole burden of reaching across time has indeed been loaded onto the seed. Why an action is not lost between one life and another is answered no longer by the possession that follows a dharma perpetually but by a capacity handed on through a continuum from one moment to the next; the further question has been postponed, not terminated. Part 15, Chapter 7 said that the two sides owe the same thing, and that judgment stands. The half that is wrong: the two sides owe it in different ways. Possession is a real dharma, and what it owes comes out as a new entity, and an entity will generate fresh problems of its own—the possession of possession is the proof. The seed is nominally posited, and what it owes comes out as a stretch of description not yet fully given, and a description can go on being given without anything further being manufactured. Both owe; but on the one side the debt grows the longer it is owed, and on the other it is owed without increase. The reduction in weight is a real reduction. What is owed is still owed, but it no longer breeds new debts of its own.

To Chapter 4. The replacement now stands. The next chapter watches the row of things it replaced (possession, non-possession, the life faculty, the homogeneous character, unmanifest matter) sent away one by one, and asks what the new measuring rod is by which they were sent.

References¶