Chapter 4: Dismantling the Dissociated Factors¶

Chapter 4 of Part 15 watched this set of entities being manufactured: wherever there was a sentence that had to be allowed to stand, there a dharma was posited. This chapter watches the same set being sent away. The order in which they go does not matter; what matters is the criterion by which they are sent. The Sarvāstivāda's threshold for real existence was that an item cannot be dispensed with in a statement, and the question is what Vasubandhu rewrote that threshold into.

The list, item by item. Possession and non-possession were dealt with in the previous chapter, the replacement being already in hand: the two are merely nominal and not real. The life faculty: Vasubandhu takes the vital force to be no more than a stretch of power residing in the homogeneous character of a group (as a seed has a course of its own to run before it ripens, as an arrow once off the string carries its own residual momentum), so that no further dharma need be posited to keep a continuum alive. The homogeneous character: here the charge he brings is the heaviest. If one really must posit a single general homogeneous character to take charge of resemblance, that is to display outright the category of generality the Vaiśeṣikas hold; the school's own device of one instance of the character to each individual does dodge the Vaiśeṣika, but the resemblance between one instance of the character and another is still left with nobody to take charge of it. The four characteristics: on the two-storey structure of the secondary characteristics, the arising of arising and the abiding of abiding, he restates the nine dharmas arising together and then closes with a single rhetorical question. Unmanifest matter: the scriptural warrants are reconciled one by one, and what ground is left he rules to be a case of a sūtra in another place speaking with reference to sovereignty, so that no separate thing need be posited. The details of these five engagements, together with the grounds the Vibhāṣā side gave for legislating each item, are laid out in Chapter 4 of Part 15 and are not walked through again here; this chapter gathers only the moves made on Vasubandhu's side.¹

What the five have in common: the rewriting of the criterion. In all five engagements Vasubandhu uses one and the same new measuring rod. The school's old rod asked whether an item can be dispensed with in a given sentence; if it cannot, it is established as a real dharma. Vasubandhu's new rod asks whether the state of affairs can be described with what is already on hand; if it can be described, nothing need be posited. Whether a defilement has been severed or not is described by a differentiated capacity in the body that serves as its basis; being alive is described by a power residing in the homogeneous character; resemblance is described by the outflow of action and of birth; arising, abiding, alteration, and ceasing are described by the phases of a continuum. The old rod measured what a sentence requires; the new rod measures whether the stock already in the house is sufficient. The boundary is redrawn accordingly: for a thing to be entered on the list of the really existent it is no longer enough that speech cannot do without it — it must further be shown that the goods already held really cannot describe it. The burden of proof has been carried back from the doubter to the legislator, and in point of method this is the most substantial step the Abhidharmakośa takes.

Saṅghabhadra's line of resistance: a marker only. Of the entities sent away here, the ones Saṅghabhadra defends with the most force are possession and the several items bound up with the three times; and his way of defending them is not to restore the old arguments but to redefine real existence itself and so carry the threshold back to where it stood. That is the proper business of Chapter 7, and only a marker is set here: the dispute over the criterion did not end with Vasubandhu, and there is one more round to come.

Checking the division of labor with Part 15. The conclusion of that chapter was that the introduction of these entities follows one and the same form, and that the danger of a regress is written into that same form. The conclusion of this chapter meshes with it: these entities were sent away not because anyone found that they do not exist, but because a different measuring rod was taken up, one on which they are no longer necessary. Neither the positing nor the demolishing rests on observation; both rest on a criterion, and that is seen most clearly when the two chapters are read together. Lists of entities in the history of philosophy have always risen and fallen with criteria. What stands between the Sarvāstivāda and Vasubandhu is not a body of evidence but a decision about what an explanation is to be.

To Chapter 5. The conditioned formal entities have now all been sent off. Three unconditioned ones are left on the list: cessation through discernment, cessation not through discernment, and space. They do not survive the new rod either; but one of the three has nirvāṇa for its other name, and who is to pay the price of sending that one away is the subject of the next chapter.

References¶