Chapter Seven: Judgments and Handoff¶

The judgments occupy three lines. What was added: awareness of the means of authorization, the distinction between reductio and establishing an inference, and the two classical discoveries of the weak-rejection lemma—Candrakīrti made it explicit in India; Sengzhao independently put it to work in China through his judgment on Original Nonbeing. The clause of adherence to ordinary conventions: Candrakīrti aligns with direction (a) of the preservation theorem. The staircase of doctrinal classification: Jizang turns the principle that emptiness, too, is empty into a structure that can be ascended. What remained unchanged: the theorem itself. Across several centuries and two lines of transmission, no school overturned the derivation or established a new thesis to replace it. All disputed how to uphold, state, and teach it. The inventory of distortions: making emptiness a domain, among the Original Nonbeing school's followers; making the two truths two domains, in the various readings that distinguish domains; reading rejection as a counterassertion, among those who hear emptiness and cling to nonbeing. Each of the three receives its judgment under Essay Eighteen's clauses; this essay's chapters have already recorded them individually.¹

The final ruling on the dispute over authorization uses Essay Eighteen's resources. Candrakīrti worries that common acceptance has no ground. Yet common acceptance asks what is used to establish a thesis. If the basis of the thesis must be a dharma-substance accepted by both sides, the ultimate domain indeed has none to offer. Essay Eighteen's proof, however, uses only conceptual grammar and logic: the uses of sameness and difference, the procedures of individuation, and the law of noncontradiction. These are the common conventional tools inventoried by level clause (b), always used by both sides. The opponent's history of argument is evidence of their use. Taking these common tools as the ground of shared acceptance, positive proof does not conflict with the prohibition imposed by the reductio approach. Candrakīrti prohibits taking dharma-substances as the basis of a thesis; Bhāviveka demands positive force. The common tools of conceptual grammar supply both. This book's proof in fact follows just such a route. By Candrakīrti's criteria, it is an autonomous inference; the resources on which its thesis rests, however, lie wholly outside what he prohibits. In theorem form, the dispute between the two camps thus resolves into a debate over the inventory of resources. Whether this ruling convinces others is registered as a point of dispute; it is not imposed.

At its close, this essay hands over two lines. The line of mechanisms: the conventional level's operation has been entrusted to a theory of consciousness, with the Kośa's seeds and Śāntarakṣita's conventional aspect of self-cognition in its baggage. Essay Twenty, Yogācāra in Brief, opens with ālayavijñāna and directly tests whether this set of mechanisms can remain content with the status of designation. The line of doctrinal classification: after Jizang's staircase, Tiantai gives the method of classifying teachings a new form. Essay Twenty-One, Tiantai in Brief, takes up this line. Part II ends with Essay Twenty-Two.

References¶