Chapter 8: Eternity and Creation¶

The theorem goes abroad. Everything in the first seven chapters was forged inside a Buddhist context; this chapter takes the theorem out of doors and puts it to a test abroad. The topic is a combination of concepts: eternal; self-existent, that is, not brought about by another; immutable; omniscient; creating the world by free will. This chapter names no existing religion and quotes no scripture; it treats only the philosophical structure of the combination itself, and any form of faith that does not adopt the combination falls outside the scope. Every conclusion of this chapter is to be read conditionally, this being the application abroad of the conditional clause of Chapter 2: whoever claims this schema bears these results; whether a given historical configuration claims it is settled by that configuration's own declaration, and this chapter does not decide the matter on its behalf. The reason for choosing the combination as touchstone is structural: it writes the three conditions of D2 into its definition, and at the same time assigns to its bearer of intrinsic nature the heaviest load of relational duties to be found anywhere. If the theorem is sound, the point of greatest density of contradiction must lie here. Five routes, then the three doors of return, then the argument taken together.

Route one: the textbook instance, and a test of grammar. Self-existence, that is, being not brought about by another: a definitional statement of independence at the level of existence. Eternal and unchanging: the second condition. Uncreated: the third condition. In the earlier chapters, where the dharma-substance, the atom and the goer were handled, the conditions had to be dug out one by one from the opponents' own usage; here most of them stand written on the first line of the definition. But one point must be recorded precisely: what the first line states is independence at the level of existence, whereas the first condition of D2 in its full extent is non-dependence at the level of identity. How are the two levels joined? By either of two routes. The mature form of this combination has always carried a simplicity clause of its own: within it there is no distinction and no composition, and its nature and its existence are one. Once that clause is signed, independence is pushed up to the level of identity and is claimed in full extent. If some configuration does not sign it, and acknowledges independence at the level of existence only while allowing its nature to stand in relative dependence on something other, then it has already, under the conditional of Chapter 2, surrendered independence in the full extent and stands outside the scope, the price being that its self-existence does not answer to its name. E3 needs no arguing: no adherent of this combination will accept that its object is a mere designation. The applicability of the theorem thus turns on a single check, whether the configuration claims independence in the full extent; to claim it is to fall within the scope, and the mainstream forms have always claimed it. The climax is the signpost set up in Chapter 4, now redeemed. Let this self-existent one state itself: to say that it is thus and so is to sort into a class, and to sort is to contrast, and to contrast is to bring in what is excluded; and its self-existence is precisely what forbids its identity to hang upon any difference. Grammar therefore leaves it a single sentence-form: I am I. The direction of the explanation must be said outright: this chapter cites no sentence of any tradition as evidence; it writes out in advance one theorem of grammar, namely that the self-statement of a self-existent being, taken on any ontological reading, must and can only take the form of a tautology, since with content it violates self-existence and in keeping self-existence it is left with tautology alone. Which sentences in history answer to this form, and what their correct reading is, belongs to philology. Any self-statement of this form admits of two readings that can be told apart. On the relational reading, I will be with the one I address, the sentence lives throughout at the level of E2 (mutually dependent, altered as conditions change, doing work), and the theorem does not touch a word of it. On the ontological reading, the self-subsistent one, being itself, the sentence walks straight into the dilemma. The theorem accordingly supplies no more than a format for sorting the two readings; which reading is the right one for which sentence is left to philology and the history of reception to settle for themselves, and on that this chapter says nothing.

Route two: permanence and act. Creation is an act. An act has a before and an after: not yet done, being done, done. What is permanent and unchanging has no before and after: before creating and in the creating it must be in no respect different, or the second condition is lost. Put the two together. If on the agent's side there is no difference whatever between the creating and what went before, then the creation is not an act of the agent's at all, but at most an appearance of the world in which he took no part, and the word creation falls empty. If there is a difference on the agent's side, then the permanent has changed. When Part 15 handled the Sarvāstivāda's division of substance and function, this same machine had a run: the dharma-substance is permanent while function arises and ceases; if the arising and ceasing of function does not touch the dharma-substance then function has nothing to do with the dharma-substance, and if it does touch it then the dharma-substance is not permanent. Rerun abroad, not a word altered. Will does not escape the same question. If an eternal will eternally wills to create, creation should be as eternal as the will; and if creation has a beginning, then at that beginning the will has undergone one turn from not-yet to already, and a turn is an alteration. This route must be settled configuration by configuration. On the in-time configuration the foregoing applies directly. The non-temporal configuration is fitted with a further piece of doctrinal engineering: it declares that the relation of creating is real only on the side of the created, that on the agent's side there is no real relation, and that therefore no turn can be spoken of. This is the opponent's strongest form, and this chapter takes it up as it stands. It does escape the contradiction, and the price is entered on the spot: since there is no real difference of any kind on the agent's side, the title creator is carried entirely by the changes on the side of the created, and act and will have nowhere left to land on the agent's side. Under this configuration route two yields no contradiction; what it yields is the price of idling. The positive reckoning is handed on to route five.

Route three: one cause and all things. This route has a precedent inside Buddhism, the passage refuting Īśvara in fascicle seven of the Kośa, already cited in Chapter 5 of Part 15: if all dharmas arose from a single cause they ought to arise all at once; but all things are plainly seen to arise in succession, so that other conditions must be waited on; and once other conditions are waited on, the single cause no longer suffices as cause, and what use then is this Īśvara? Therefore the arising of dharmas from a single cause is definitively not the case.¹ First, clear the target: to create the world by free will is not the same as holding that all things have a single cause, since created secondary causes may perfectly well carry the succession within the world, and the sole-cause doctrine which the old treatise refutes cannot be laid over this case unaltered. The proper point of this route is the first moment. At the beginning of the whole series there is no condition on the world's side available to be deployed; the only thing available is the eternal one itself. So the timing and the manner of the beginning either have no reason at all, which conflicts with the rationality that omniscience and perfect goodness require; or their reason lies within the eternal one, and there the Kośa's difficulty of the differentiated desire applies just as it stands: if the differentiated desires are as permanent as that on which they depend, all should arise at one time; if the differentiated desires wait on further causes, then a single thing is not the cause of everything; for the desire of that Īśvara is no different in its earlier position from its later. Packing the whole succession into the content of one eternal decree does not escape this entry either: the content may narrate time as much as it likes, but the bearer does not move on account of what it narrates, and then the world's standing up at a given moment has nothing on the agent's side to answer to it, which is again the price of idling. Against the in-time configuration this route yields a contradiction; against the eternal-decree configuration it yields a price; the two are booked separately.

Route four: omniscience and freedom. The omniscient one knows eternally what it will do. Nothing here is staked on a misplacement of necessity (that what is known is true does not amount to: what is known is necessarily true), and only an exhaustive division into three branches is set out. First, that the knowledge changes in time with the choice: the knowledge undergoes alteration. Second, that the knowledge is first wrong and afterwards right: omniscience is lost. Third, the opponent's refined way out: the knowledge neither changes nor errs, but differs counterfactually with the choice, so that had he done otherwise that knowledge would from the first have had a different content. The third branch must be met head on. Counterfactual difference just is individuation by dependence: that this knowledge is the knowledge it is, the identity of its content, hangs on the deeds of what is known; and omniscience, in this combination, is an essential attribute and not an add-on. An essential attribute individuated by something external to its bearer means that not established in dependence on anything other than itself has been lost at the very heart. This branch does not press on temporality; it presses on the first condition itself, and it is harder than the first two. The way out is to move the knowing out of time: eternal knowledge is not before the choice and therefore does not lock the choice down. The price is settled against the second condition. How does knowledge that is not in time know things that have a temporal order? What is known changes, and the relation between knower and known changes with it; and if not one part of that change in the relation falls upon the knower, the relation of this knowledge to the world cannot be stated at all, while if it does fall upon him, that is alteration once more. Under the non-temporal retreat route four yields against temporality a dilemma only, the direct damage to the first condition being carried by the third branch, and the strength of each is recorded as it is. This family of problems likewise has a precedent of direct debate inside Buddhism: fascicle eleven of the Mahāvibhāṣā holds an instance of it, exhibited in Chapter 2 of Part 16 as a specimen of argument actually conducted.² This part takes one point from it: the difficulty of reconciling omniscience with freedom is no one confession's domestic business, and whoever puts knowing all things and acting at will into one and the same bearer of intrinsic nature has the difficulty on his doorstep.

Route five: creator and created under identity and difference. The formal skeleton of Chapter 3 is here in live use. If creator and created are identical, creating is self-emanation and the created is not a created thing at all; and this horn is in any case refused by the doctrine itself, since the distinction between making and being made is the bottom line of the combination. If they are different, then by the definition of the combination the creator's end is an independent difference, E3 and D2 together, and every old problem of the difference horn arrives: one end of the bridge of creation rests on something not established in dependence on anything other than itself, and the bridge cannot be laid; an operation must reach both ends, and to reach is to depend. There is a finer engagement as well, in which the retrospective conferral of conditionhood from Chapter 4 replays. The title creator is made what it is by the created, and with nothing created there is no name creator. A title that hangs on the work is a standard case of relational individuation; and the identity of this candidate is required to be fixed prior to every relation. Either it is creator by its nature, and then the created is as necessary as it is and freedom is lost; or creator is only a temporary title of it, and then its underlying identity needs a statement of its own, and that statement returns to the test of grammar of route one. The scope-lock fits exactly here: this dilemma burns those who hold E3 and no one else, and this combination has written E3 on its banner. The reckoning handed over from route two is completed at this point. The clause of no real relation amounts to a doctrinally formulated admission that one end of the bridge is not really in the relation. The created really depends on the creator; the creator is not really related to the created: a relation of dependence real at one end only — x stands really in R to y, while y is not in R at all. An item of this shape is a metaphysical novelty, and this chapter files its legitimacy as an open point of dispute and does not decide it, recording only the price: to save the first condition, creating has been made a one-sided thing suspended in mid-air, while the dynamic duties this combination assigns itself, creating the world and knowing the world, require without exception a real relation at both ends.

Three doors of return. The ways out left open by Chapter 2 cost most in a theological context, and are settled here side by side. Door one, give up logic. Withdraw the law of non-contradiction and a creed no longer excludes its own opposite, so that the most solemn affirmation is no longer distinguishable from a blasphemy against it; the division of orthodoxy from heresy, and the whole business of drawing consequences from doctrine, are written off at the same stroke; every proof ever set up for this candidate goes into the same fire; and mature theological traditions have in any case glossed omnipotence as not including the making of contradictions. What this door buys is not a verdict in one's favour but a withdrawal from the case. If the one who comes is not overturning the table but changing the rules, let him enter by door three, which is reckoned separately. Door two, give up content: do not give up logic, give up sayability, and say only what it is not. Under the twofold division of negation this route shows its shape at once, as the limit form of an affirming negation (paryudāsa), every predicate negated and one signified preserved. It is one step from a pure negation (prasajya), and that step is the whole point at issue, for the signified thus preserved is precisely a D3 assertion. This route is a room in which serious traditions really live; this chapter does not knock at the door, it only reads out what stands in the deed, and the deed has two pages. Manner of dwelling one: it still asserts that the signified really exists and has intrinsic nature. Then the assertion is a standard D3-type claim, refuted along with every claim of its kind, with no exemption, and booked to the strong version. Manner of dwelling two: sayability is genuinely given up, the negation is carried through and nothing is posited, and no assertion whatever is put forward. Then there is nothing in hand to refute; what cannot be refuted is this posture of no longer arguing a case, and not any proposition. This is the fourth of the four ways of closing in Chapter 4; it passes to T-middle and the domain of theses, and is booked under the middle version.

Door three, take in true contradictions as tenants: do not give up the normativity of logic, alter its internal rules, and declare the contradictions of this combination true without explosion. This door is not the overturning of the table; it stands within the bounds of reasoning, and Chapter 7 has already honoured it as an opponent. Three entries in the pricing. First, this door does not contest the derivations but only explosion, so that whoever enters it grants item for item every contradiction the five routes of this chapter have derived; the proof portion of the theorem is received in full, and the remaining dispute is only whether contradictions may be housed. Second, the business of doctrine must be rewritten entire: the division of orthodoxy from heresy has had consistency for its boundary, and now a further meta-rule must be set up to adjudicate where a contradiction is holy and where it is blasphemous, while that meta-rule may not itself be contradictory. Third, the textual reason with which Chapter 7 held dialetheism down cannot be carried abroad, and only the reason from cost is left here; but the reason from cost weighs more rather than less in a doctrinal context, because a system of doctrine depends on derivability more deeply than any treatise does. Ruling: among the ways out that stay within reasoning this door is the dearest, and between one who enters it and this chapter there is no longer any dispute about whether there are contradictions, but only about whether contradictions can be lived in.

Taken together. Each of the five routes occupies a doctrinal joint, and the engine in all of them comes from one source; seen together they show one thing, that this combination of concepts gathers into itself every feature the theorem strikes at. The three conditions written into the definition are the static half; creating, omniscience and will are the dynamic half; the static half cancels identity and difference, and the dynamic half needs identity and difference at every point. The lever receives here its shortest formulation abroad: this combination requires by definition the whole of the relational duties, and by definition cancels the qualification for relation. That the engine is a single one is no weakness but the shape of the argument: the lever shows itself once at each of five joints, the number of joints establishing coverage and the singleness of the engine establishing distillation. The difficulty issues from logical structure and not from faith, from the packaging and not from the object believed in. Two declarations close the chapter. First, nothing in this chapter has used a Buddhist premise: the two passages cited from the Kośa and the Vibhāṣā are exhibits of precedent, showing that the ancients made these arguments, and they carry not one ounce of the weight of this chapter's proof; the independence from Buddhism has here turned from a claim into a demonstration. Second, this chapter is not an argument for atheism: what the theorem rejects is the packaging of real existence plus intrinsic nature, and any form of faith that holds itself on the relational reading, and any practice that places itself at the level of E2, falls outside the scope. But there is a price to be stated, and this declaration will not hide behind its tone but says it plainly: to the believer who insists that the object of his belief must be really existent and possessed of intrinsic nature, and who further requires that this insistence hold up as argument, the theorem is not neutral, and the content of his creed is judged along with the packaging. Where the judgment falls must be seen exactly. It is not that one may not believe; it is that one may not both believe and insist that logic be made to persuade oneself and to persuade others on that belief's behalf. Belief as a thing held need argue no case; once a case is argued, and argued as a case for real existence plus intrinsic nature, it enters the scope and is dealt with by the rules. Such a believer is not without a road: the three doors of return stand open to him, with the price marked on each. What the theorem settles accounts with is the art of metaphysical packaging, and not the direction of the human heart.

[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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