Chapter 3: Santaraksita and Kamalasila — The Yogacara-Madhyamaka Synthesis¶

In the eighth century the last great form Madhyamaka took in India was a confluence: Śāntarakṣita laid the track and Kamalaśīla carried it on, the ultimate assigned to Madhyamaka and the conventional taken over from consciousness-only. Neither of their principal works, the Madhyamakālaṃkāra and the Bhāvanākrama, has an ancient Chinese translation; this chapter restates their skeleton from the critical editions and the modern translations, and gives no quotations.¹

The structure of the confluence can be stated in a sentence. At the ultimate level all dharmas are without intrinsic nature, and the theorem of Madhyamaka stands untouched; at the conventional level no external object is posited, whatever appears is an appearance of consciousness, and self-cognition (svasaṃvedana) is admitted within names and conventions. Which is to say that what moves is not the theorem but the theoretical equipment of the very level that direction (a) of the Preservation Theorem holds up: the E2 level is refitted from commonsense realism to a theory of consciousness.

Whether this refitting is legitimate on the side of the theorem is to be tested against the clauses of Part 18. The range clause does not specify which body of science or philosophy is to occupy the E2 level; it requires only that assertions at that level carry no E3 oath. A theory of consciousness taking up residence there as the conventional theory is, in point of form, entirely in order, exactly as commonsense and physics are in order when they take up residence. There is one boundary line and no more: self-cognition posited only within names and conventions gives no trouble whatever, but let anyone posit it as an E3 item that does not break up under analysis and is not established in dependence on anything other than itself, and that proposition enters the scope and is dealt with under the rule. Śāntarakṣita lodges self-cognition expressly within names and conventions, and so comes to rest just on the safe side of the line; the disputes of later ages arise for the most part out of readings that tread that line into vagueness.

The historical significance of the confluence lies at the interface. It turned Madhyamaka and consciousness-only from opponents into colleagues working on separate levels: one in charge of the rejecting face at the ultimate, the other in charge of the mechanism face at the conventional. Whether the arrangement is stable depends entirely on whether the consciousness-only side can rest content with the standing of names and conventions. If mechanism-items such as the seeds and the storehouse consciousness go on working throughout in the standing of what is nominally posited, the division of labour holds; let any one of them be raised into an E3 item, and the machinery of Part 18 will sound. This is precisely the main business of the next part.

This wave never reached China. Śāntarakṣita travelled east into Tibet and not into China, and the fruits of the confluence settled into the transmission of Tibet; China's own digestion had begun independently three hundred years earlier, and it went by another road. The next chapter returns to Chang'an.

References¶