Chapter 4: Striking formations unassociated with mind from the list¶

Chapter 4 of Essay 15 examined how these entities were made. Wherever a statement had to hold, a dharma was established. This chapter examines how the same things are struck from the list. The order of removal is unimportant. What matters is the criterion used. The Sarvāstivāda criterion of real existence was indispensability in a statement. What does Vasubandhu turn it into?

The list, item by item. Acquisition and nonacquisition have been dealt with in the preceding chapter. A replacement is available, and "these two are merely nominal, not real." For the life faculty, Vasubandhu treats lifespan as a period of power belonging to a commonality of sentient beings. A seed has its own course to maturity; an arrow has residual momentum after leaving the bowstring. No separate dharma is needed to keep the continuum alive. His strongest charge concerns the commonality of sentient beings. If a general commonality is really to be established to govern similarity, this amounts precisely to the Vaiśeṣika category of universality. Giving each thing its own commonality lets the Sarvāstivādins evade the Vaiśeṣika position, but the similarity between two commonalities still has no one to govern it. For the four characteristics, with their two-layer structure of subsidiary characteristics such as arising of arising and duration of duration, he restates the nine coarising dharmas and closes with one rhetorical question. For nonmanifest material form, each of the Sarvāstivādins' eight scriptural proofs is accounted for. The three kinds of material form and uncontaminated material form are assigned to material form produced by concentration. The growth of meritorious action and the completion of a course of action through instructing someone else are assigned to subtle distinctive transformations of the continuum perfumed by volition. Restraint and the embankment are assigned to the power of volition and resolve, together with repeated recollection afterward. No separate thing need be posited. Chapter 4 of Essay 15 has already set out the details of these five debates together with the Vibhāṣā's reasons for positing the entities. This chapter does not retrace them. It gathers the method on Vasubandhu's side.¹

The shared method, rewriting the criterion. In all five debates, Vasubandhu uses the same new criterion. The old Sarvāstivāda question was whether something could be omitted from a statement. If it could not, it was established as a real dharma. Vasubandhu asks whether the event can be described using what already exists. If it can, nothing further needs to be established. Whether defilements have been abandoned is described through differences in the supporting body's capacities. Being alive is described through power belonging to commonality. Similarity is described through the uniform outflow of action and birth. Arising, duration, alteration, and cessation are described through phases of the continuum. The old criterion measured what a sentence needs. The new one measures whether existing descriptions suffice. The boundary is redrawn accordingly. To enter the list of real existents, it is no longer enough for something to be indispensable in speech. One must also show that the existing terms cannot describe it. The burden of proof moves from the skeptic to the one positing the entity. This is the Kośa's most substantive methodological step.

Where Saṃghabhadra stands firm, a marker in advance. Among the entities struck from the list, Saṃghabhadra defends acquisition and several things connected with the three times most vigorously. His defense redefines real existence itself and establishes another criterion, rather than restoring the old arguments. That is the subject of Chapter 7. Here we place only a marker. The dispute over criteria does not end with Vasubandhu. There is another round.

Checking the division of labor with Essay 15. That chapter concluded that the introduction of these entities follows one form, and the danger of regress is written into that same form. This chapter's conclusion joins it. The entities are removed by changing the criterion so that they are no longer needed, not by discovering that they do not exist. Both positing and refuting rely on criteria rather than observation. Read together, the two chapters make this clearest. Lists of entities in the history of philosophy always rise and fall with criteria. What separates the Sarvāstivādins and Vasubandhu is a decision about explanation, not a body of evidence.

On to Chapter 5. The conditioned formal entities have been removed. Three unconditioned things remain on the list, cessation through discernment, cessation without discernment, and space. They cannot withstand the new criterion. But one of them is called nirvāṇa. Who bears the cost of canceling it? That is the next chapter's question.

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