Chapter 5: The three unconditioned dharmas are not real¶

At the end of clearing the list, three unconditioned things remain, space, cessation through discernment, and cessation without discernment. They cannot withstand the preceding chapter's new criterion. They are not in the continuum, have no activity, and cannot be described as capacities. Yet one of the three has another name, nirvāṇa. This chapter examines how Vasubandhu judges all three unreal and how that judgment rewrites nirvāṇa's ontological status.

The functions of the three unconditioned dharmas in the Sarvāstivāda system. Essay 15 has detailed the reasons for establishing each. Only their functions need be stated here. Space governs nonobstruction. Cessation through discernment is disjunction attained through discriminating wisdom, with one acquisition for each bond. Cessation without discernment governs nonarising through missing conditions. Chapter 7 of Essay 15 noted their predicament. The Sarvāstivādins mainly rely on two grounds for judging something real, surviving analysis intact and having activity. The unconditioned survives analysis intact, but the activity criterion does not apply at all. The evaluators therefore support it through a series of statements about the dominant condition, such as "Without space, the sequence of cause and effect could not be established." That is a defense through adjudication.

Vasubandhu's denial. "The Sautrāntika masters say that nothing unconditioned really exists. It is not a separate real entity like material form, feeling, and so forth."¹ Each of the three receives its own refutation. For space, nonobstruction is merely the name for not encountering an obstacle. Not encountering an obstacle does not require a thing to make it so. For cessation without discernment, things do not arise because conditions are missing. The absence itself fully explains the nonarising. Cessation through discernment is the crucial case. Fascicle 6 of the Kośa preserves the famous circle. "What is cessation through discernment?" "Disjunction." "What dharma is called disjunction?" "Cessation through discernment." "These two answers depend on each other and never disclose its intrinsic nature."¹ Two names define each other, complete a circle, and say nothing. There is also an internal discord on the Sarvāstivāda side. The verse explicitly says, "Results are the conditioned and disjunction; the unconditioned has neither causes nor results." If the unconditioned has neither cause nor result, how can it occupy a place among the five results as the result of disjunction? The relation between the path and cessation must receive another designation. The path has the capacity to realize cessation. Though it is not a cause of cessation, cessation through discernment can be called a result of the path.¹ It can realize but cannot produce. The seam recorded in Chapter 5 of Essay 15 opens here.

Is nirvāṇa an existent or an absence? The cost of judging the unconditioned unreal falls entirely on nirvāṇa. Vasubandhu's position is that cessation through discernment is no separate real thing. Nirvāṇa is the nonrecurrence of defilements and birth. Like a lamp flame going out, it is only the flame's ending, not another thing deposited in its place. This Sautrāntika reading rewrites nirvāṇa from an existent into an event of cessation. The Sarvāstivāda counterquestion is equally direct. If nirvāṇa is only an absence, what does the noble path realize, and in what does one take refuge? Saṃghabhadra later develops this question into a direct attack. If there is nothing to realize, cultivation of the path has no result. That is Chapter 7's subject. The disagreement is now a fundamental question of liberation, beyond the list of entities. One side requires a reality that can be realized. The other holds that making cessation into an entity imports the grammar of birth-and-death into nirvāṇa. This book considers the dispute to have no loser. It exposes the limits of the criterion itself. Demonstrable activity is an effective criterion for worldly dharmas. Applied to the supramundane, the criterion itself fails first.

A three-way comparison. The Southern tradition has one unconditioned dharma, nirvāṇa; Sarvāstivāda has three; Sautrāntika has none, names without substances. Each arrangement has a cost. The Southern tradition sets nirvāṇa apart, leaving on its list one member unlike the other eighty-one dharmas. Sarvāstivāda has all three, but the result of disjunction cannot be attached to a cause. Sautrāntika clears the count to zero, but leaves its account of liberation unsupported. The last row of the summary table in Chapter 7 of Essay 15, the section on the unconditioned in Essay 14, and this chapter form a three-way comparison. Each gives ground at the same point. None escapes a cost.

On to Chapter 6. The boundary between real and nominal has now been redrawn. One thing remains: the self, which both sides have denied throughout but which someone always wants to preserve. The work's only direct treatment of it is in the chapter refuting self, outside the regular format.

References¶