Chapter 2: The Warrant for the Definitions¶

The previous chapter laid the definitions down; this chapter inspects where they were made. The third class of the boundary clause in Chapter 1 says that the warrant for a reductio lies in using the opponents' words in the opponents' own way; for a word that has already been given a definition, that sentence turns into a procedure — the definition must be carried back, word for word, to a text the opponents wrote for themselves. This chapter makes three redemptions and adds one modern control; it then states, as a formal conditional, the fallback that remains should an opponent refuse the definitions; and it closes by putting on record the price of the last fallback of all, rejecting logic outright.

Redemption one: the three conditions of intrinsic nature. MMK 15 opens with the opponent speaking first.¹ Dharmas each have a nature, since they have force and function, as a pot has the nature of a pot and cloth the nature of cloth; and this nature comes forth when the conditions assemble. The question carries two pieces of information with it: the opponent takes a nature to be identified by force and function, and he holds that a nature can issue from an assembly of conditions. Nāgārjuna's reply locks down the third condition at once — that a nature should be within the assembled conditions is not so; a nature issuing from assembled conditions is by that very fact a made thing. If a nature can be produced, it is not a nature. Piṅgala's commentary adds a discriminating simile and a set of contrasting cases: gold alloyed with copper is not true gold; and if a nature is determinate it ought not to come forth in dependence on another, unlike long and short, or this and that, which, having no determinate nature, exist in dependence on another. With this the provenance of the three conditions is complete. Not produced comes from a nature issuing from assembled conditions being by that very fact a made thing; not established in dependence on anything other than itself stands word for word in the verse; not altered as conditions change comes from the verse that if a dharma really had a nature, it should not afterward become other. One item deserves a separate entry: the contrasting cases. Properties established relatively (long and short, this and that) are placed by the commentator in the column of what, having no determinate nature, exists in dependence on another; and, as will be seen below, the opponents' own list gives them a column of their own as well. That relational properties do not enter the ranks of entities is one of the few things the two sides agree upon, and the relationality premise of Chapter 4 sets out from that agreement.

Redemption two: the criterion of real existence, the Sarvāstivāda test. The settled form of the criterion is in fascicle twenty-two of the Kośa:² where the idea of a thing ceases when the thing is broken, and ceases likewise when other elements are removed by analysis, as with pot and water, the thing is conventional; what differs from this is called ultimate. The two operations, breaking and analysis, and the way they are to be read, have been analysed at full length in Chapter 1 of Part 15; only the two points required for the warrant are taken here. First, this criterion is the opponents' own settled statement of their position, and not one drafted on their behalf by this book. Second, in the list of five kinds of existence in fascicle nine of the Mahāvibhāṣā, the definition entered under real existence reads: real existence, that is, all dharmas each abiding in its own intrinsic nature.³ Real existence is defined by intrinsic nature. That sentence is the most consequential instrument of warrant in this part. What binds E3 to D2 is not this book's D3 but the opponents' own dictionary; the combination D3 strikes at is the combination the opponents tied together with their own hands. The same list also gives relative existence a kind of its own (such as this shore and the far shore, long and short), which agrees with the column in Piṅgala's commentary noted above.

Redemption three: the criterion of real existence, Saṅghabhadra's test. In fascicle fifty of the Nyāyānusāra Saṅghabhadra sets up a mark of judgment of his own:⁴ to give rise to a cognition by being an object is the mark of what truly exists; where a cognition arises with regard to a thing while waiting upon nothing else, the thing is really existent, and where a cognition arises with regard to a thing in dependence upon something else, the thing is nominally existent. There are two points of warrant here. This mark comes from the last systematic self-defence mounted on the opponents' side, and it was set up in order to hold a particular roster (dharmas in the three times, possession, the unconditioned) whose provenance is given in Chapter 7 of Part 17. And its office is not the office of the test of surviving analysis, the two need not be coextensive in what they cover, which is precisely what Chapter 1 registered. The proof in this part needs one thing only to hold: that by whichever criterion the opponent has acknowledged as his own, he grants some x to be really existent.

The control: the modern characterization. Westerhoff's chapter on svabhāva sorts the modern readings into two dimensions, the ontological dimension (pages 20 to 45) and the cognitive dimension (pages 46 to 52).⁵ The three conditions of D2 belong wholly to the subject matter of the ontological dimension; Saṅghabhadra's mark of judgment, which takes cognition for its warrant, is adjacent to the cognitive one. Each definition used here has its own place in the modern classification, and the control serves a single purpose: to show that this set of definitions is no private stock of Buddhism's own, and that when modern scholarship characterizes the same concept it cuts at the same joints. The item-by-item control is left to the chapters that follow, each supplying the entry it has occasion to use.

The conditional demotion, formally stated. Should an opponent refuse to acknowledge the definitions above, this part will not argue with him about definitions; the proposition demotes as a whole to a conditional. For any pair of predicates R and N, provided that R discharges the office of real existence and that N satisfies the schema of the three conditions, the three versions of T take effect as before upon every claim of the form ∃x[R(x) ∧ N(x)]. One who refuses has two ways out and no more. He may offer a weaker N, one that permits dependence on another and permits alteration as conditions change: then it already falls outside the scope of D3, this part has no quarrel with it, and the price is that what he holds is no longer an entity in the traditional sense. Or he may offer an N of equal strength: then the schema applies as before and the proof takes effect as before. The dispute over definitions closes here. What this part aims at is the schema of the three conditions, and whoever claims that schema, under whatever new name, is within scope.

The last fallback: rejecting logic outright. One fallback remains: refuse the law of non-contradiction and the method of reductio together, and there is nothing left on the table that can be lost. With this route too the present part will not argue. To argue with a man who refuses argument is to use, at every step, what he does not grant; there is nothing that can be refuted, and this part only puts the price on record. First, one who rejects the law of non-contradiction can no longer say what it is that he maintains: if an assertion no longer excludes its own denial, an article of belief loses its content, and the most solemn affirmation becomes indistinguishable from a blasphemy against it. Second, every doctrinal system has the law of non-contradiction for its skeleton — the division of orthodoxy from heresy, the division of dogma from error, and the whole business of deriving consequences from doctrine, all draw their line at contradiction; withdraw the line and what fails first is not the theorem of this part but doctrinal theology itself. Third, whoever discards logic burns all his own proofs along with it: every argument ever mounted for an entity or for a deity trades in the currency of logic, and one cannot abolish that currency when under attack and reissue it when producing evidence. To put it in service by turns in that way, one needs a meta-rule adjudicating when logic is on duty — and that meta-rule discharges exactly the office logic held before. Fourth, the mature theological traditions refuse this route of their own accord: omnipotence has always been construed as not extending to the bringing about of a contradiction, on the ground that a contradiction is not a deed left undone. What this fallback buys, then, is not a verdict in one's favour but a withdrawal from the suit: it preserves the letter of the sentence at the price of the sentence's no longer being a claim. The route is not to be confused with the dialetheist reading to be discussed in Chapter 7; that is a logical proposal still bound by norms, and still within the business of giving reasons. Theology is the field most often expected to take this door, and Chapter 8, on eternity and creation, will come back and stand before it.

What this chapter hands in. Five instruments: the textual provenance of the three conditions; the opponents' dictionary, in which real existence and intrinsic nature define each other; the record that the two criteria divide the work between them and do not coincide; the conditional demotion in schematic form; and the schedule of costs for the fallback of discarding logic. From Chapter 3 the tools come on.

[The Chinese text closes with a restatement of this chapter in plain language — the same content in a different register, the academic half governing wherever the two diverge. That restatement is not yet translated; nothing in the argument is missing from what stands above.]

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