Chapter 7: The Counter-Defense of Saṅghabhadra¶

After the Kośa went into circulation the Sarvāstivāda did not fall silent. Saṅghabhadra wrote the Nyāyānusāra, eighty fascicles, refuting the book passage by passage, and then drew off its positive statements into a separate work, the Xianzong lun, in forty. Eighty fascicles against thirty: the bulk of the reply comes to nearly three times that of the book replied to. Throughout, Vasubandhu is called the sūtra-master, two hundred fifty times over, and the respectful title carries a classification inside it — you are a man who takes the sūtras for his measure, and not a man of this school.¹ After a system has been arranged into a book by one of its own and then abandoned by him at the decisive joints, the question is how its strongest defender comes back. This chapter looks at three things: his manner of writing, his new criterion, and what he managed to hold.

The division of labor between the two books, and the manner of writing. The Nyāyānusāra runs alongside the verses of the Kośa: the verses are taken over entire, and the prose commentary is rewritten and attacked section by section. The Xianzong lun strikes out the disputation and states the school's position frontally, and striking out and keeping are Saṅghabhadra's own words for it: I keep his verses adorned and entire and make them my resort, and cut away the long adjudications of the Nyāyānusāra. The same prefatory verses lay down a further programme, this one describing how the Nyāyānusāra was written. With words that accord with reason and are broad in compass, I refute the other schools and display the original meaning; if the sūtra-master's words accord with reason and with the teaching, then I follow and endorse them and do not seek to fault them. Wherever Vasubandhu says something that agrees with reason and the teaching, it is endorsed as it stands and no fault is hunted for.² The defender laid down a clause of fair dealing of that kind for himself, and his manner of writing parts from the Vibhāṣā's altogether. The Vibhāṣā sets four positions out side by side and closes with "the evaluation says"; Saṅghabhadra argues in a single line, reasoning the whole way, and the density of reasoning is without precedent in the literature of this school. The change is itself a result of the Kośa's campaign. Vasubandhu pitched the battle on the ground of argument, and the defender could only follow him down onto that ground, where the tone of adjudication is of no further help. Chapter 3 of Part 16 says that the evaluation is the brake; by the time the matter reaches Saṅghabhadra the brake is gone, and there is nothing left to do but meet an accelerator with an accelerator.

Function and the substance of a dharma, another round. Chapters 1 and 7 of Part 15 have recorded the doctrinal content of this controversy. Vasubandhu asks whether function is a dharma; Saṅghabhadra answers that function is the differentiated characteristic of the substance of a dharma and cannot be spoken of as different from it; and he sets up the verse that a continuum has no separate substance, yet a separate operation is granted to it — taking a nominally existent continuum for the model of a really existent function. This chapter does not walk the doctrine again; it registers only the shape of the defense. Saṅghabhadra did not fall back on the Vibhāṣā's refusal to determine the matter. He took the question of one or different frontally and chose not different. A refusal to answer became an answer, and that is the most creditable step in the whole defense. The price was reckoned in Part 15: to take the nominal for a model is to have a model flimsier than the thing modeled.

The new criterion: to give rise to a cognition as an object. The most substantial step of the defense is a redefinition of real existence. The Nyāyānusāra lays it down: to give rise to a cognition by being an object is the mark of what truly exists, and this is of two kinds in all, the really existent and the nominally existent; if a cognition arises with regard to a thing while waiting upon nothing else, that is the mark of the really existent, as with matter and feeling, and if a cognition arises with regard to it only in dependence on something else, that is the mark of the nominally existent, as with a pot or an army.¹ What can bring a cognition into being by itself is really existent; what needs other things to keep it company before a cognition will arise is nominally existent. This measuring rod and Vasubandhu's do not meet at any point. Vasubandhu asks whether a thing can be described with what is already on hand; Saṅghabhadra asks whether a thing can be taken singly as an object by cognition. Past and future dharmas, possession, the unconditioned: under Vasubandhu's rod they are put out, and under Saṅghabhadra's every one of them is recovered, since each of them can serve as an object and each gives rise to a cognition by being an object. Chapter 1 of Part 15 said that the Sarvāstivāda's criterion asks whether a thing scatters under analysis. Saṅghabhadra replaces the criterion entire, moving it from resolution to apprehension, which amounts to conceding that the old rod could not hold the line and fetching one that will hold the whole estate. A criterion made to serve a conclusion: that is the methodological state of affairs in this counter-defense.

What was held, and what was paid. What was held is the roster: the three times, possession, the unconditioned, not one item lost. Two payments were made for it. First, the independence of the criterion. To give rise to a cognition as an object throws the gate wide to the doctrine that whatever can be thought is really existent, and the hair of a tortoise and the horns of a hare can be kept outside it only by the subdivision into what waits upon something else and what waits upon nothing, while the procedure of subdivision comes to look more and more like the very system it exists to defend. Second, the judgment of history. The Nyāyānusāra is learned and exact, and yet in the Chinese line of transmission 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 need not have lost on the argument; on the transmission it certainly lost. The last form taken by the orthodoxy is a vast treatise written as a commentary upon its own critic, and that ending is itself a part of the verdict.

To Chapter 8. Both sides have now pleaded. What remains is to gather Vasubandhu's turn up as a philosophical event, and to hand on, one by one, the loose threads this part has left owing in this place and that to the parts that come after.

References¶