Chapter 6: The Refutation of the Self¶

The first eight chapters compile the Sarvāstivāda system and then criticize it, and the book might well have closed there; instead Vasubandhu opens another fascicle and goes straight at the thing the whole book has avoided calling by its name: the self. In point of format the Refutation of the Self is another kind of thing. Its title does not stand at the head of a fascicle; there is not a verse in it from beginning to end; and where the eight chapters alternate verse and commentary throughout, here nothing is left but prose. Whether it is an appendix or part of the main body is arranged differently by the two Chinese translators: Xuanzang lets it begin in the middle of fascicle twenty-nine and carry over into fascicle thirty as its second half, while Paramārtha gives it a fascicle of its own, the twenty-second, with the chapter title standing at the head. Fabao assigns it, together with the four verses at the end, to the concluding portion, calling it something added when the commentary was written and no part of the root verses.¹ That it is the place where the whole book comes to its close is something the style has already said for itself. Its weight is measured by position and not by bulk: it takes up a twentieth of the book, and it is the most complete statement the doctrine of no-self receives anywhere in Buddhist literature.

The opponent and the stake. The principal opponent is the Vātsīputrīyas. The four characters for "person" occur nearly seventy times across fascicles twenty-nine and thirty together, and the three for "ineffable" sixteen times.² The Vātsīputrīyas posit an ineffable person: neither identical with the five aggregates nor separate from them, neither permanent nor impermanent, and, pressed to the end, simply not to be spoken of. The position is trying to hold both ends at once — to keep a bearer for transmigration and for memory, and not to offend against the doctrine of no-self. It is the most honest struggle in sectarian Buddhism, because it takes the need that the other schools kept hidden inside possession, the continuum, and seeds, and sets it up openly as a thesis.

Vasubandhu's pressing, and the one place it always lands. The engagements are rich in detail, but the method is single almost to the point of coldness: the ineffable either says something or says nothing. If the person can be known, then say whether it is one with the aggregates or different from them. If one and different cannot be said, then say what the consciousness that knows it has for its object. If the object too cannot be said, then the phrase "knowing the person" has lost its content. The twofold division of the sense of truth and the threefold division of designation are tested cell by cell, and in every cell the Vātsīputrīyas must choose between saying and not saying, and lose whichever end they choose. Chapter 3 of Part 13 laid the ground of the five aggregates and of no-self, and Chapter 7 of Part 14 watched the Theravāda hold that line; the Refutation of the Self is the best-equipped engagement on the same front, and its new equipment is exactly the Sautrāntika kit erected in the preceding chapters: whatever work a bearer does, the differentiated capacity of a continuum can do, and so the bearer is left with nothing to do.

The two outsiders. The end of the chapter turns to the self of the Vaiśeṣika and the self of the Sāṃkhya. These two engagements are of a different character. The Vātsīputrīya person is a compromise internal to Buddhism; the Vaiśeṣika and Sāṃkhya self is a metaphysical entity asserted outright, an agent that acts and a subject that undergoes. Vasubandhu's refutation of the outsiders in fact costs him less effort, because their positions are definite: they hold to identity or to difference, to the eternal or to the annihilated, and it is enough to refute each thing held as it comes. What is troublesome throughout is that ineffable. Taken together, the three engagements bring out the complete shape of the doctrine of no-self: outward, the refutation of entities; inward, the refusal of a compromise; and then the whole business of bearing the dharmas handed over entire to a continuum that has no bearer.

The position of this chapter, and the question it leaves behind. To place the Refutation of the Self at the end of the whole book is to declare that all the reckonings of the first eight chapters lead here. Existence in the three times, possession, the unmanifest, the unconditioned are sent away one after another, and what is sent away last is the general request standing behind them all: give experience an owner. Vasubandhu's answer is that none will be given, and he argues the matter to the pitch at which none can be given. The question left behind lies here as well. A continuum with no bearer has to shoulder memory, responsibility, and liberation by itself, and the doctrine of seeds is pressed to its limit; how that limit pushed the Sautrāntika toward Yogācāra is the opening sentence of a later part.

To Chapter 7. Vasubandhu has had his say. The school's most powerful defender read the book through and wrote eighty fascicles in reply. The next chapter looks at that counter-defense.

References¶