Chapter 7: Saṃghabhadra's defense¶

Sarvāstivāda did not remain silent after the Kośa circulated. Saṃghabhadra wrote the eighty-fascicle Abhidharmanyāyānusāra, refuting it passage by passage. He also extracted the positive exposition into a separate forty-fascicle Exposition of the Doctrine. Eighty fascicles against thirty, the response is nearly three times the size of the original. Throughout it, he calls Vasubandhu Jingzhu (经主) 250 times. The appellation alone does not establish an affiliation defined by taking the sūtras as authority; the positions at issue must be examined passage by passage.¹ After a system has been organized into a book by one of its own adherents and then abandoned at crucial points, how does its strongest defender respond? This chapter examines three things, his manner of writing, his new criterion, and what he preserves.

The division of labor and manner of writing in the two books. The Abhidharmanyāyānusāra follows the Kośa's root verses, accepting them in full while rewriting and refuting the prose passage by passage. The Exposition of the Doctrine removes the disputes and states the school's doctrine positively. "Remove" and "retain" are Saṃghabhadra's own words. "I embellish and retain those verses as my guide, and remove the extensive deliberations in the Nyāyānusāra." The same introductory verses give another charter, this time for the Abhidharmanyāyānusāra's manner of writing. "With extensive words that accord with reasoning, I refute other schools and disclose the original position. Where Jingzhu's words accord with reasoning and teaching, I endorse and restate them without seeking faults." Whatever Vasubandhu says in accord with reasoning and teaching is endorsed as given, without further fault-finding.² The defender sets himself this fairness clause. His manner of writing takes an entirely different path from the Vibhāṣā. The Vibhāṣā sets four positions side by side and closes with "The evaluation states." Saṃghabhadra follows a single line of argument, reasoning throughout, at a density unprecedented in Sarvāstivāda literature. This change is itself an effect of the Kośa. Vasubandhu places the dispute on the ground of argument, and the defender can only follow him there. The tone of adjudication no longer works. Chapter 3 of Essay 16 called "The evaluation states" a brake. With Saṃghabhadra, the brake is gone. Only argument can answer argument.

Activity and the substance of dharmas, another round. Chapters 1 and 7 of Essay 15 recorded the doctrine in this debate. Vasubandhu asks whether activity is a dharma. Saṃghabhadra answers that activity is a distinctive characteristic of the dharma's substance and cannot be called different from it. He also offers the verse that a continuum has no different substance yet is allowed a distinct function, using a nominally existing continuum as a model for really existing activity. This chapter does not retrace the doctrine. It records the form of the defense. Saṃghabhadra does not retreat to the Vibhāṣā's refusal to make a definite statement. He directly answers the question of identity or difference and chooses nondifference. Refusal to answer becomes an answer. This is the defense's most creditable step. Chapter 7 of Essay 15 has already calculated its cost. The model is nominal, less real than what it models.

The new criterion, producing cognition as an object. The most substantive step in the defense is a redefinition of real existence. The Abhidharmanyāyānusāra states, "Producing cognition as an object is the characteristic of true existence. This has two kinds, real existence and nominal existence. Where cognition of it arises without depending on anything else, this is the characteristic of real existence, as with material form, feeling, and so forth. Where cognition of it arises dependent on something else, this is the characteristic of nominal existence, as with a jar, an army, and so forth."¹ What can give rise to cognition on its own is real. What needs other things alongside it to give rise to cognition is nominal. The two criteria address different questions. Vasubandhu asks whether something can be described using what already exists. Saṃghabhadra asks whether cognition can take it separately as an object. Past and future dharmas, acquisition, and the unconditioned are judged nominal by Vasubandhu's criterion. Saṃghabhadra's preserves them all, because they can all be objects and can all produce cognition as objects. Chapter 1 of Essay 15 said that the old Sarvāstivāda criterion asked whether something disintegrates under analysis. Saṃghabhadra replaces it entirely, moving from decomposition to taking an object. This amounts to admitting that the old criterion cannot hold and adopting one that preserves the whole list. The criterion serves the conclusion. This is the methodological reality of the defense.

What is preserved, and what is paid? What is preserved is the list. The three times, acquisition, and the unconditioned are all retained. Two costs are paid. First is the criterion's independence. Producing cognition as an object amounts to admitting that everything thinkable really exists. Tortoise hair and hare horns must be excluded by finer distinctions between dependence and nondependence. The procedures for making those distinctions increasingly resemble the very system they are meant to defend. Second is history's judgment. The Abhidharmanyāyānusāra is broad and exact, yet in the Chinese lineage it has always been read as a footnote to the Kośa. Among Xuanzang's disciples, the Kośa became a school and the Nyāyānusāra did not. The defense did not necessarily lose in reasoning. It did lose in transmission. Orthodoxy's final form is a vast work commenting on its critic. That ending itself belongs to the verdict.

On to Chapter 8. Both the attack and defense have been presented. What remains is to draw Vasubandhu's turn together as a philosophical event and hand the threads left by this essay to the later essays, one by one.

References¶