Chapter 5: Consciousness-Only, The Core Argument¶

The Viṃśatikā is this school's brief for the defence before outsiders, and it states its thesis in the opening line: "the Mahāyāna is established thus, that the three realms are consciousness-only." The sentence that comes immediately after matters more than the thesis does: "it negates the external object only; it does not dismiss the associated."¹ The word negate carries a type mark with it. What is negated is the external object; what is left standing are the mental factors and the machinery. That half-sentence is the steering wheel of the whole chapter. From the first line of its thesis, consciousness-only, no external object, declares itself a proposition of negation and not a proposition that erects a new substratum.

Four objections come from outside, and every one of them asks after an acceptance test at the level of E2. If consciousness has no real object, why is a village seen in one place and open ground not seen in its stead — spatial determinacy? Why is a thing seen at this time and not seen at that one — temporal determinacy? Why do many people see one and the same thing — the objection from the non-determinacy of the continua? And why does a knife in a dream not wound, while a real knife wounds a man — causal efficacy? The verse of objection: "if consciousness had no real object, then determinacy of place and of time, non-determinacy of the continuum, and efficacy of action would none of them hold." Vasubandhu's verse in answer: "place and time are determinate as in a dream; bodies are indeterminate as with ghosts, who see a river of pus alike; and there is efficacy, as there is loss in a dream."¹ In a dream there is no object, and yet the village and the garden have their place and their time. Hungry ghosts, by action they hold in common, see one and the same river of pus. A nocturnal emission has its effect and waits upon no real object. The four acceptance tests are run through again, one by one, on the premise that there is no external object. Reading: what this exchange of attack and defence really turns on is whether publicity and regularity require an external object to stand surety for them, and Vasubandhu's answer is that they do not — shared action and the regularity of the continuum are enough to carry the charge by themselves. The guarantor is changed and the notes are honoured as before, which is precisely a redistribution of labour inside the E2 level, and runs in the same direction as the Preservation Theorem.

The refutation of the atom is the second cut, the second engagement on the battlefield of Chapter 6 of Part 15. The verse: "if an atom joins with six, one atom should come to have six parts; if it occupies one place together with the six, the mass should be no more than an atom."² If the atom has six directions it has six parts, and it is then no longer minimal; if it has no spatial parts, six atoms stand at a single point and aggregated matter ought to be as invisible as one atom is. What Part 15 saw was the Sarvāstivāda breeding rulings out of rulings; here Vasubandhu goes straight through the floor with a dilemma of spatial parts. No stacking of rulings is needed, for the spatial character of the atom is by itself the handle of the reductio. Talk of the fine-grained is undamaged, as Chapter 9 of Part 18 has already judged; what is broken through is only the E3 status of the minimal material dharma.

A review on the side of the theorem closes the chapter. The thesis consciousness-only, no external object, carries two readings at once. Read as a general assertion at the level of E3 (in truth there is consciousness alone), it becomes itself a D3-type claim and falls within the scope, by the rule, under Part 18. Read as the charter of a science of conventional machinery (outside consciousness no further guarantor is set up at the E2 level), it runs alongside the theorem without conflict. As to which of the two sides Vasubandhu's own usage stops at, that half-sentence of the opening line is the best witness there is: it negates the external object only and does not dismiss the associated; it negates and does not erect. The adjudication between the two readings is summed up in Chapter 8.

References¶