Chapter 7: Verdict and Handoff¶

The verdict in three lines. What was added: self-awareness about the mode of warrant, the distinction between reductio and the setting up of an inference, together with two classical discoveries of the weak-rejection lemma — Candrakīrti stating it outright in India, and Sengzhao putting it independently to use in China in his verdict upon original nonbeing; the lawfulness clause for the conventional, where Candrakīrti runs in the same direction as direction (a) of the Preservation Theorem; and the ladder of doctrinal classification, in which Jizang made the emptiness of emptiness into a form that can be climbed. What was not touched: the body of the theorem. Along two lines and across several centuries, not one school overturned the derivation and not one set up a rival thesis to take its place; the whole dispute was over how it is to be held, how it is to be stated, and how it is to be taught. The list of distortions: those who set emptiness up as a domain, the line of the school of original nonbeing; those who set the two truths up as two domains, the several two-domains readings; those who read a rejection as a counter-assertion, the family that hears emptiness and grasps at nonbeing. Each of the three has its ruling under the clauses of Part 18, and the chapters of this part have set each of them down in its place.¹

The last ruling on the dispute over warrant is delivered out of Part 18's own holdings. Candrakīrti's worry is that what is commonly admitted has nowhere to stand; but the words commonly admitted ask what one is to set up a thesis with. If the basis of a thesis must be a dharma-substance admitted by both parties, then in the ultimate domain of discourse there is indeed nothing in stock. Yet the proof of Part 18 drew upon nothing but conceptual grammar and logic — the use of same and different, the procedure of individuation, the law of non-contradiction. These are the public instruments of convention inventoried under clause (b) of the hierarchy; the two parties have used them in common from the beginning, and the opponent's own history of argument is the receipt for his use of them. Take the public instruments for what is commonly admitted, and positive proof and the injunction that confines one to reductio no longer collide: what Candrakīrti forbids is taking a dharma-substance for the basis of a thesis, and what Bhāviveka wants is positive force, and the public instruments of conceptual grammar happen to give each end what it asks. This book's proof is in fact a road of exactly that kind: by Candrakīrti's measure it is an independent inference, and yet by the composition of its bases of thesis it lies wholly outside Candrakīrti's forbidden ground. Under the theorem-shaped review, the quarrel between the two schools accordingly gathers into a dispute over the inventory of resources. Whether that ruling will carry conviction is entered as a debatable point, and no ruling is forced.

This part closes its volume and hands on two lines. The line of machinery: the running of the conventional level has been given over to a theory of consciousness, and the baggage holds the Abhidharmakośa's seeds and Śāntarakṣita's self-cognition admitted at the conventional level; Part 20, Yogācāra in Brief, opens with the storehouse consciousness and tests head-on whether this machinery can rest content with the standing of what is nominally posited. The line of doctrinal classification: after Jizang's ladder, the method of classifying the teachings opens a fresh prospect in Tiantai, and Part 21, Tiantai in Brief, takes delivery of that line. Part II ends at Part 22.

References¶