Chapter 8: Verdict and Handover¶

A man used the Sarvāstivāda's own frame to compile the best digest the school ever had, cast his vote against it at every point that mattered, and left at the end a verse saying that the judging of dharma by right principle rests with the Sage.¹ This chapter gathers the thing up as a philosophical event: not a biography of conversion, but the scene of a criterion moving.

The verdict. Read across the seven chapters of this part, the content of the turn can be set down as a short list. Real existence in the three times: not accepted. Possession and non-possession: nominally posited. Unmanifest matter: not granted reality. The three unconditioned: not real. The person: refuted to the last. Every entry on the list is made with one and the same measuring rod, whether the thing can be described by a continuum already on hand; the name of the rod is Sautrāntika, and its substance is the shifting of the burden of explanation from entities to functions. The reduction of weight is a real reduction, as Chapter 3 verified: the debts stay owed, only they no longer breed new debts of their own. Cleared they cannot be. The seeds have to carry the fruit of action, the continuum has to carry memory and liberation, and bearing without a bearer presses ever more heavily. Vasubandhu himself had already, in fascicle four, taken the seed as far as a transformation of the body that serves as basis; one step beyond that point, and a deeper foundation must be found for the continuum. That step he did not take in the Kośa; to walk out along it is to be in Yogācāra. The verdict of this part is therefore this: the Abhidharmakośa is the closing scene of sectarian philosophy and the threshold of Mahāyāna philosophy, one book with two identities, which to its last page never became one.

The afterlife in the Chinese tradition, set down as a piece of history. The treatment this book received in China matches its double identity. Paramārtha translated it first and Xuanzang translated it again, in the Yonghui period at the Great Ci'en Monastery; commentators sprang up among the disciples, Puguang's Record of the Abhidharmakośa and Fabao's Commentary on the Abhidharmakośa, thirty fascicles each, circulated side by side, and there came in time to be such a heading as the Kośa school. The byname the treatise of intelligence has a source as well: Huikai's preface at the head of Paramārtha's translation already says that all India called it the treatise of intelligence, and fascicle one of Puguang's Record takes the phrase up, saying that the students of India gave it that name.² Both places apply the name to the acuteness of the treatise itself, and neither says anything of the people who read it. What is interesting is that the Chinese tradition enshrined it and read it as a Sarvāstivāda digest, and by doing so used its first identity to cover its second; what Part 17 sets out to do is, in a sense, to read the second identity back on the Chinese tradition's behalf. The history stops here, and nothing is argued from it.

The handover: three lines, each with its own destination. First, seeds and the transformation and differentiation of the continuum are handed to the part on Yogācāra. The storehouse consciousness is the storehouse found for the seeds; the transformation of the basis is the grown form of making the body that serves as basis be transformed and become other than it was; and the lineage was laid out in Chapter 3. Second, intrinsic nature and real connection are handed to the two Madhyamaka parts. Having passed the tests of this part, the Sarvāstivāda's intrinsic nature has come through the best criticism its own house could produce, and its footings are loose; what Nāgārjuna faced was exactly a system that had already been lightened by one of its own. The last chapter of Part 16 said that Vasubandhu's road is the road of renovation and Nāgārjuna's is the road that does not renovate. Third, the ontological standing of nirvāṇa and the open file of the three unconditioned. Chapter 5 recorded that each of the three schools gave up a step there, and the deadlock receives no new statement until Madhyamaka takes in hand the pair of categories, existence and non-existence, themselves. With a destination marked against each of the three lines, this part closes.

In closing. The verdict of Part 16 says that the Vibhāṣā is a philosophy that had to fit itself with a brake. The verdict of this part answers to it: the Kośa is the book that replaced the brake with a steering wheel. It did not bring this tradition to a stop; it gave this tradition, for the first time, the power to turn. Where the turn leads is what the remaining parts of Part II map out.

References¶