Chapter 5: The Three Unconditioned Are Not Real¶

The list runs out and three unconditioned items are left: space, cessation through discernment, and cessation not through discernment. They do not survive the new measuring rod of the last chapter, since they stand in no continuum, exercise no function, and can be described in terms of no capacity; but one of the three goes by a second name, nirvāṇa. This chapter watches Vasubandhu rule all three unreal together, and asks what that one ruling rewrote the ontological standing of nirvāṇa into.

The posts the three unconditioned hold in the school's system. The grounds on which each was established have been given in full in Part 15, and only the job description is kept here: space is charged with non-obstruction; cessation through discernment is the disjunction obtained by the discriminating selection of wisdom, one disjunction to each thing bound; cessation not through discernment is charged with the failure to arise when conditions are deficient. Chapter 7 of Part 15 recorded the awkwardness of their position. The warrants on which the school judges a thing really existent come mainly to two, that it cannot be broken up under analysis and that it performs a function; the unconditioned cannot be broken up, but the second warrant does not apply to it at all, and so the adjudicator propped it up with a string of dominant-condition talk closing on the sentence that if there were no space this whole graded succession of cause and fruit would fail to be established. That is a prop of the adjudicating kind.

Vasubandhu's denials. 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.¹ Each of the three then gets its own refutation. Space: non-obstruction is only the name of the fact that nothing obstructive is met with, and meeting no obstacle does not require a thing to be there making one meet none. Cessation not through discernment: when the conditions are deficient the thing does not arise, and the deficiency is itself the whole of the account of its not arising. Cessation through discernment is the crux, and fascicle six of the Abhidharmakośa left the famous circle standing: asked what cessation through discernment is, the answer is that it is disjunction; asked what dharma is named disjunction, the answer is that it is cessation through discernment. Two answers of this kind lean each on the other, and the intrinsic nature in question is in the end not displayed at all.¹ Two names define one another, the circuit is made, and nothing has been said. There is a further self-inflicted wound on the school's side here. The verse states plainly that a fruit is either conditioned or disjunction and that the unconditioned has neither cause nor fruit; and if the unconditioned has neither cause nor fruit, on what does it hold a place among the five fruits under the heading of the fruit of disjunction? The relation of the path to cessation has then to be given a heading of its own: the path has with respect to cessation the capacity of realizing it, and though it is not the cause of the cessation, cessation through discernment may still be said to be the fruit of the path.¹ To realize is not to produce; the seam recorded in Chapter 5 of Part 15 opens from exactly this point.

Is nirvāṇa a kind of existence or a kind of absence. Once the unconditioned is ruled unreal the whole cost falls on nirvāṇa. Vasubandhu's position is that cessation through discernment is no separate real thing, and that nirvāṇa is the not arising again of the defilements and of birth — as when the flame of a lamp goes out, where the flame simply fails and there is not some further thing deposited in that place. This Sautrāntika reading rewrites nirvāṇa from an existent thing into an event of termination. The school's counter-question is just as direct: if nirvāṇa is nothing but an absence, what is it that the noble path realizes, and what is it that one takes refuge in? Saṅghabhadra afterward expanded this question into a frontal attack, arguing that where there is no thing to be realized the cultivation of the path has no fruit; that is the business of Chapter 7. By this point the difference between the two sides is no longer a question about a list; it is a question about the foundations of the doctrine of liberation. One side requires a reality that can be attained; the other holds that to make an entity out of a termination is precisely to carry the grammar of birth-and-death into nirvāṇa. This book takes the dispute to have no loser. What it exposes is the limit of the criterion itself: the rod that measures by ascertainable function measures the dharmas of this world well enough, and when it is carried to what lies beyond the world the rod fails before the thing does.

A three-way comparison. The Theravāda has one unconditioned, nibbāna; the Sarvāstivāda has three; the Sautrāntika has none, the names existing and no substance answering to them. Each of the three arrangements has its price. The Theravāda enshrines nibbāna by itself, and the price is a member of the list heterogeneous to the other eighty-one dharmas. The Sarvāstivāda has all three in place, and the price is a fruit of disjunction that will not hang on any cause. The Sautrāntika clears the column to zero, and the price is a doctrine of liberation left suspended in the air. The last row of the master table in Chapter 7 of Part 15 and the section on the unconditioned in Part 14 make up, together with this chapter, a reading in three columns: at one and the same place all three schools have given something up, and not one of them has come away whole.

To Chapter 6. The redrawing of the real and the nominal is complete. One thing is left that both sides have denied from beginning to end and that someone is always trying to save: the self. The one place in the whole book that treats it head-on is the Refutation of the Self, the fascicle that stands outside the format.

References¶