Chapter Eight: Verdict and Handoff¶

The question left open at the start of this essay was just one: can this machinery accept the status of a designation? After seven chapters, the answer can be more precise than at the opening: the text is safe; its readings need not be. This is the overall verdict. The items are addressed separately below.

One: The inventory of clauses against own-nature, this essay’s most important finding.

The usual procedure is to measure a classical system with this book’s theorem and see where it crosses the boundary. In this essay, the measuring instrument has mostly had no occasion for direct application, because the school supplies every key component with clauses against own-nature, written by the legislators themselves. The inventory follows, with every source traced back to the original wording.

The twelve clauses fall into three types of unequal weight.

The first type is definitional clauses: the six qualities of seeds and the abandonment stages of the storehouse and manas. They say that, by definition, the thing fails the conditions of own-nature. The second is clauses of wording: self-cognition’s neither identical nor separate, and transformation of the basis’s provisionally called newly pure. They say that this book does not intend to describe the matter as an entity. The third is self-limiting clauses: consciousness-only nature’s underlying reality is also absent, the rejection of absence in every respect, the gate at preparation, and buddhahood’s not receiving perfuming. These weigh most heavily because they constrain the school’s own thesis, its own highest stage, and its own practitioners.

A system willing to place gates where boasting would be easiest deserves a separate sentence. The Twenty Verses admits that knowledge of other minds ‘knows its object untruly’ (Chapter Five). The eight qualities of perfuming exclude buddhahood from the perfumer’s role because ‘if they could perfume, they would not be perfected’ (Chapter Three). The stages of the path judge ‘taking consciousness-only nature as something present and apprehensible’ to fall short of entry (Chapter Six). These are limits it writes for itself, not defenses this book finds on its behalf.

The table admits another reading that starts from the count: why does the school need twelve clauses? Every one targets its own components. Madhyamaka’s self-defense concentrates at one point: emptiness itself may not be grasped again, under the self-application clause in Chapter Five of Essay Eighteen. Consciousness-only’s self-defense is spread over every component. The reason is not mysterious. Whoever builds no components need guard only one gate; whoever builds them adds a label for each. The two-part package judged in Chapter Four—add a thing, declare it not a thing—acquired two further instances in the thesis’s name and the fruit-stage in Chapter Six, without once breaking the rhythm. The density of defensive clauses is thus itself evidence: where labels are densest, the shape most closely resembles the prohibited thing. Two readings of the table therefore coexist. Read as an achievement of awareness, it has no superior in a comprehensive examination of the schools. Read as an inventory of symptoms, each clause is pinned to a point where pressure toward entityhood is greatest. The readings do not conflict; the latter is the price of the former. The comparison of the level of claims with the functional level, the third case in Section Four, concerns precisely how that price is paid.

Two: Besieged on three sides. One line from the Vibhāṣā to Yogācāra.

From the Vibhāṣā through the Kośa to Yogācāra, one problem receives three answers. The problem: how deep must explanation go before it reaches bottom, without falling into infinite regress? Whoever answers is pressed on three sides. The obligation to explain pushes downward; regress must be guarded against; and the tool for sealing the system off is taken away midway. The first item in Section Six connects this line from the side of paperwork; this section connects it again from the side of pressure. The two describe one thing.

First side: the obligation to explain. The Vibhāṣā already carried this obligation, using the form ‘apart from this, it cannot be found’: a function needs a bearer, and if no one on the roster can serve, a separate dharma is established (Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen). The task sheet handed to Yogācāra is longer: karmic results must cross time, memory must have a place, rebirth-linking needs a vehicle, the attainment of cessation needs a mind that does not leave the body, and defiled and pure seeds need somewhere to follow along, five items (Chapter Three of this essay). Once the obligation moves downward, each layer explained raises the question of the next; after the storehouse is legislated, the question of where the storehouse comes from remains.

Second side: regress. The Sarvāstivādins run into regress three times and halt it three times, each halt harder than the last: acquisition of acquisition is folded into a ring; the characteristic of a characteristic changes the rule at the second level and is answered with ‘such is the nature of dharmas’; the activity of activity is refused an answer, closing with ‘this should not be asked’ (Chapter Seven of Essay Fifteen). The first two cut losses; the third seals the system, and the seal rests on declaring the question improper, not on argument. Yogācāra likewise runs into regress three times, with halts of a different shape: where the circuit of perfuming comes from is answered with ‘beginningless’ (Chapter Two of Essay Six in Part I); how cognition knows that it is cognizing is answered with the mutual cognition of the self-cognizing aspect and the aspect that cognizes it (Chapter Three of Essay Six in Part I); whom manas grasps and where habitual impressions are stored lead the chain downward, and it again stops at ‘beginningless’ (Chapter Two of Part II of the Yogācāra essay in Volume 2). The Sarvāstivāda halts end in real existence; the Yogācāra halt is a temporal assertion plus a closed loop. The Sarvāstivādins themselves used the shape of the loop once: the halt to the acquisition of acquisition has acquisition and acquisition-of-acquisition acquire each other, the first and second levels serving as each other’s condition of establishment (Chapter Seven of Essay Fifteen), the same shape as the mutual cognition of the self-cognizing aspect and the aspect that cognizes it; at this point the two schools are isomorphic. Whether the loop really stops the regress or only moves it from outside to inside was asked in Chapter Three of Essay Six in Part I; here only the shape is recorded.

Third side: the sealing tool is taken away. The Sarvāstivādins could seal with real existence because the term own-nature was still available to them; Yogācāra cannot, because Madhyamaka stands in between. After the argument of Essay Eighteen, whoever establishes a thing must bring paperwork to the construction, the operating rule already recorded in the first item of Section Six. Yogācāra builds more components than the Sarvāstivādins did, seeds, the storehouse, manas, the four aspects, the three natures, and adds a label for each; the twelve clauses against own-nature in Section One appear at exactly this position. Section One read the density of the clauses as a symptom; placed on this line, the symptom’s origin becomes clear. The need to build components was inherited from the Sarvāstivādins; the prohibition on sealing was laid down by Madhyamaka; with both in force, the clauses could only be dense.

The Kośa is the intermediate station on this line. There Vasubandhu dismantled the Sarvāstivāda seals: the real existence of acquisition, nonmanifest matter, and the four characteristics was replaced by seeds and the distinctive transformation of the continuum (Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen; Chapter Three of Essay Six in Part I). After the seals were removed, the question of the bearer did not disappear; it was only asked differently: in whom does the distinctive transformation take place (Chapter Three of this essay)? The storehouse is the answer to that question. The same man first removed the Sarvāstivāda seals and then built for his own system a bearer that may not be sealed. This is not a contradiction; it is the only course left under pressure from three sides.

Viewed together, the three sides fix the school’s shape: its explanation goes one layer deeper than the Sarvāstivādins’, its seal is one degree softer, and the regress is not halted but halted differently. One sentence in this must be marked as this book’s inference. To say that Yogācāra declines to posit real existence because Madhyamaka stands beside it is a claim no Yogācāra author makes about himself; no text says ‘because of Madhyamaka we do not posit real existence.’ The chronology holds, the clauses target precisely the own-nature that Madhyamaka refuted, and the consciousness-only side’s retreat across levels over the word ‘existence’ in the dispute over emptiness and existence points the same way (Chapter Seven). But this is the book reading a symptom as a motive, not the school’s own confession. What the school itself left behind is the density of its clauses.

Three: The overall verdict by item.

Seeds: safe at the level of claims, on their own evidence. Three of the six qualities are explicit clauses against own-nature; the legislators personally bar the three conditions of D2. This verdict borrows no outside support; the source is there. Its jurisdiction is also recorded accurately: the clauses work at the level of claims, and the functional comparison is a separate case, the third in Section Four. Add another note. In the three-way dispute over innate and newly perfumed seeds in Chapter Three, the author’s combined account of the innate and newly arisen is the least likely to cross the boundary. The all-innate reading lies only half a step from ‘standing without dependence on anything else.’ The author does not take that half-step, again for reasons of the mechanism’s consistency rather than scriptural testimony.

The storehouse: safe at the level of claims, with its warning label preserved in the record. Constantly transforming like a rushing stream, receiving perfuming, capable of transformation and abandonment: none of these fits own-nature. The ādāna verse also guards against reading it as a self. The label’s testimony is recorded on Chapter Three’s three sides: awareness of the risk in advance, a disclaimer posted beforehand, and boundary-drawing grammar that preclassifies objections as ordinary and foolish. Its admission that its appearance invites a self-reading supplies another piece of adverse testimony. There is no shortage of later readers who took the storehouse as a true and permanent mind. What this reading violates first is the legislators’ own text, and only then Essay Eighteen’s clauses.

Manas: safe, with a contribution attached. It can be abandoned in three states and is therefore not a permanent dharma. Another achievement enters the list of contributions: it recasts self-grasping from one mistake after another into a structure that is always operating (Chapter Four).

The inventories of mental factors and eight consciousnesses: a classificatory undertaking at level E2. The criterion is the same as in Essay Fourteen. The commentary defines each item through the two terms ‘nature’ and ‘function,’ saying what it does and obstructs, rather than what independently constituted thing it is. This book uniformly reads what is defined through function as designation.

The self-cognition aspect: safe within the boundary. Admit it within ordinary conventions and use it as a component of a mechanism. The boundary drawn in Chapter Three of Essay Nineteen survives Chapter Four’s reexamination, on the evidence of the two regress-stopping wordings ‘neither identical nor separate’ and ‘both classed as direct perception.’ Whoever crosses the boundary and establishes it as an E3 item enters the scope of application under the rules. Candrakīrti’s criticism in Chapter Five of Essay Five in Part I targets precisely that reading across the boundary; it does not reach the commentary’s wording.

The thesis of consciousness-only and no external objects: exclusion without affirmative establishment, with a further qualification concerning overstatement. The evidence has three sites: the opening line of the thesis, ‘“Only” excludes external objects without rejecting associated factors’; the section on hidden intent, ‘this very consciousness-only nature, as grasped by another consciousness, is also absent in its underlying reality’; and the same section’s ‘without denying existence in every respect.’ Read together, they place the Twenty Verses on the line between exclusion and preservation. It refutes the listed E3 forms and retains the mechanisms of level E2, while forbidding even their collective name from being elevated into an E3 item. The qualification follows Chapter Five’s accounting of what the arguments deliver: replies establish ‘it need not exist,’ and refutations defeat the listed forms of existence; together they do not reach ‘it does not exist.’ Reading the refutation of external objects as an affirmative ontological judgment is an overstatement; dispensability cannot prove existence or nonexistence, as in the third case of Section Four. The three self-limitations shrink the thesis to precisely the size its arguments support. The text is safe; the banner says one step more, and that extra step is the entry point for strong readings in reception history. The refutation of atoms breaks only the E3 status of the smallest material dharma; discourse about granularity is unharmed (Chapter Nine of Essay Eighteen).

Transformation of the basis: process vocabulary. The basis is the dependently arisen and does not move; transformation is abandonment and acquisition on the same basis; ‘provisionally called newly pure’ blocks the productive reading. After dismissing the case of nirvāṇa as an entity, Chapter Nine of Essay Eighteen said that discourse about path and fruit returns as an account of mechanisms. Chapter Six here fulfills that statement.

Four: Three open cases, registered without deciding on others’ behalf.

All three have the same form: after a negative fact is nominalized, is the noun notation or an entity?

The three cases each have support within the text. These are openings built into the consciousness-only system. Chapter Two’s neither different nor nondifferent and its table of three natures and two truths both support the notation reading. Chapter Four registers ‘can establish itself’ as a risky sentence, by the same method used for the Zhaolun’s ‘each nature abides in one time’ in Chapter Four of Essay Nineteen. Chapter Six’s ‘permanent’ shares the perfected nature’s case.

These three openings were not invented by this book. The Yogācāra theorist recorded in the second fascicle of the Treatise on the Jewel in the Palm says, ‘But to say that suchness is not really existent is unreasonable.’ Bhāviveka immediately counters with the objection concerning the non-Buddhists’ self: beyond speech yet really existent differs from their self only in name (Chapter Seven). Someone was already pointing to this spot and asking questions in the sixth century. This book’s registration continues that old record. The classical opponent’s criteria coincide here with this book’s; that coincidence is itself an external test of the criteria.

Three further cases are on record, differing from the preceding three in concerning argument forms rather than propositions. First, Chapter Three’s ‘apart from this, it cannot be found’ form for establishing existence. This is the same move by which the Sarvāstivādins create acquisition, nonmanifest matter, the life faculty, and group homogeneity in Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen. The form is the same and the quality need not be, but the form’s limit is identical: it can establish only the necessity of a functional position, not the real existence of its bearer. Second, Chapter Five’s refutation of the real unity of blue and other colors. Its target falls on commonsense objects, out of step with Madhyamaka’s preservation at the conventional level; this case is filed with Chapter Seven’s dispute over levels. Third, the comparison between the level of claims and the functional level, registered in Chapter Three. The six qualities and abandonment clauses work at the level of claims. At the functional level, the jobs for which the mechanism is hired—carrying karmic results across time, memory, rebirth-linking, and holding seeds—are precisely the old posts vacated by the dismissal of the pudgala. Among the clauses, receiving perfuming delivers functionally; abandonment at a stage is narrowed by the commentary itself to abandonment of the name, not the underlying consciousness (Chapter Four); and momentary cessation in relation to a continuum of one kind operates only in naming. Clauses cannot prove what jobs are performed, just as dispensability cannot prove existence or nonexistence: two directions of the same slippage (Chapters Three and Five). Like the preceding two, this is a case about form, but it weighs most heavily, because it qualifies the overall verdict itself.

Five: Closing the dispute over emptiness and existence.

The first fascicle’s dispute is judged a misidentification of levels, largely dissolving in the form of the theorem. The evidence is Bhāviveka’s own ‘for I too accept such own-nature’ and the Establishment of Consciousness-Only’s complete lack of resistance to E2 reformulation. By the criterion of resistance to reformulation, π is absent. What the consciousness-only side is actually defending is the functional position of a ‘place to put things,’ using the ‘apart from this, it cannot be found’ form. Bhāviveka’s answer pays exactly up to that form’s delivery ceiling (Chapter Seven). The refusal arises from fear that conventional ‘existence’ is not solid enough, but solidity is a question of levels.

The second fascicle’s dispute is judged a real point of disagreement, the essay’s only direct opposition between the sides at the same level. All remaining disagreement falls on the first of the three open cases. In terms of the two-part package, the second fascicle is also the essay’s only scene where the second part is absent, and the objection concerning the non-Buddhists’ self sounds at that absence.

The grading of transcription is retained. The first fascicle agrees with the wording of the Establishment of Consciousness-Only and serves as testimony accepted by both sides. The second is out of step with the Establishment of Consciousness-Only when it describes the relation between the perfected nature and the dependent nature as “neither different nor non-different” and “neither identical with nor separate from”¹ and is registered only as one position. This follows the handling of the Buddhapālita transcription in Chapter One of Essay Nineteen.

Six: The inventory of contributions.

First, clearing the inventory of formal entities. The difficulties in Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen—the functions carried by acquisition, nonmanifest matter, the life faculty, and group homogeneity—find their final place in the theory of seeds. All the registered items are taken over by seeds and habitual impressions: the inventory of entities is cleared, while every function remains. The inventories of Essays Fourteen and Fifteen here attain their completed form as mechanisms. This verdict must itself be reread at two levels: the clearing happens at the level of claims; the retention of every function is the actual situation at the functional level. The three essays can thus be connected in one line. The Vibhāṣā establishes components using the ‘apart from this, it cannot be found’ form: a function needs a bearer, and if no one on the roster can serve, a separate dharma is established (Chapter Four of Essay Fifteen). When pressed to the end, it halts the machine by adjudication, not argument (Chapters Three and Nine of Essay Sixteen). Between them lies Essay Eighteen’s legislation: the obligation to explain now becomes an operating rule, and anyone establishing components must bring paperwork to the construction. Consciousness-only takes over precisely this rule. The same argument form and the same set of posts, but every added component comes with clauses. The paperwork is real paperwork; the original text establishes compliance. The technique has really improved too: labels have become mechanisms, and seeds take over acquisition’s role. Yet the floor plan is unchanged; not one bearer’s post has been cut. Viewed together, the three phases are: the Vibhāṣā establishes components without paperwork, Madhyamaka legislates, and consciousness-only establishes components with paperwork. What is established belongs to the same class of component. The provenance of the paperwork requires a further test: does it arise internally, or is it attached from outside? The final chapter of Essay Twenty-Two establishes that test overall.

Second, refining the distinction between the two truths. The three natures divide the conventional side into three compartments: the provisionally established conventional, the conventional of formations, and the explicitly disclosed conventional. Tested one by one against the three criteria in Chapter Six of Essay Nineteen, the three-nature reading can be translated into Essay Eighteen’s notation without conflicting with that chapter’s ruling (Chapter Two).

Third, a mechanistic answer to the shared character of experience. ‘Through mutual predominating power, two consciousnesses become determined.’ Consciousnesses in different continuities serve as predominance conditions for one another; mutual constraint among continuities supports a stable public world without relying on external objects (Chapter Five).

Fourth, giving self-grasping a structure. Manas’s constant accompaniment by four afflictions recasts self-grasping from moral into structural language. The account of practice changes with it, from handling individual bad thoughts to transforming a machine (Chapter Four).

Fifth, a clause of cognition’s self-evidence. The regress-stopping circuit of four aspects supplies the clause that ‘an act of cognition opaque to itself would not count as cognition,’ not an internal observer (Chapter Four). The clause needs one qualification: it is a clause of epistemology. Neither of the two great Abhidharma traditions holds it; the Theravāda Kathāvatthu and the Mahāvibhāṣā both deny same-moment self-knowledge with the simile of the knife that cannot cut itself, and this school's own meditation manuals describe knowing one's own mind as a later act of alertness (Part I, Essay Eight, Chapter One, section five; Essay Six, Chapter Three). That cognition is transparent to itself is a rule laid down by Dignāga's line, not something observed.

Sixth, an account of mental factors that permits item-by-item comparison. The cell-by-cell comparison of fifty-one mental factors with the southern tradition’s fifty-two (Chapter Four) narrows the differences between traditions to three places: the boundary of the universal group, the affiliation of formal entities, and the stratification of compartments for moral nature. The cross-traditional study of inventories thus has a usable comparison text.

At the opening, ‘an account of conventional mechanisms’ carried a question mark. The question mark can now be removed: the school delivers Buddhist philosophy’s most complete theory at level E2, with its principal components carrying their own clauses against own-nature.

Seven: The overall verdict in one sentence, and why it takes this form.

The text is safe; its readings need not be.

The text is safe for the reasons in Section One’s table of twelve clauses. Readings that cross the boundary find no support in the school’s original wording. Whoever reads seeds, the storehouse, self-cognition, or suchness as standing without dependence on anything else first violates the clauses written by the legislators themselves. The three-character phrase 文本安 comes with a qualification: the table’s jurisdiction is at the level of claims, so the strict form of ‘the text is safe’ is ‘safe at the level of claims.’ The functional comparison—the overlap between the jobs of seeds and the pudgala’s old posts—has been registered separately in Section Four and is not included in this verdict. Its readings need not be safe, for the reasons in Section Four. The three openings are real: nominalizing language leaves an opening through which later readings of true permanence pass, and an opponent already identified it in the sixth century.

This book therefore makes no blanket judgment of the kind ‘Is consciousness-only idealism?’ The question to ask is: which sentence, used at which level, with which clauses attached? Asked sentence by sentence, the school’s answers are remarkably complete. Even complete answers leave openings, and those openings are accurately registered too. The verdict ends here.

Eight: Chinese signposts and unfinished lines, marked but not followed.

Paramārtha’s translation of the Compendium gave rise to the Compendium school; Xuanzang and Kuiji established the Faxiang school. Both are Chinese sequels to this essay’s story, not begun in this volume; Chapter Seven of Essay Ten in Part I gives a separate account. The unfinished line of tathāgatagarbha is also preserved in the record. The interaction of the storehouse with tathāgatagarbha and the problem-domain of the Awakening of Faith receive no independent essay in this volume. Their Huayan form, nature-arising, appears in Essay Twenty-Two, where Chapter Seven’s dispute over suchness will echo once more.

Nine: Handoff.

We now hold two lines in the method of classifying teachings: the three periods in the Sūtra Unraveling the Deep Intent (Chapter One), and Jizang’s four levels (Chapter Five of Essay Nineteen). Both enter Essay Twenty-One. Tiantai’s five periods and eight teachings are the fully organized form of doctrinal classification; its three truths and three contemplations are the Tiantai solution to the distinction between the two truths.

The line of mechanisms is handed over too. This essay supplies a mechanism with a storehouse: seeds are stored first and manifest when conditions are met; registration precedes delivery. Essay Twenty-One’s three thousand realms in a single thought offers another arrangement, without a storehouse. Everything is fully present in the current thought; there is no prior storage followed by manifestation. Chapter Three of Essay Twenty-One directly compares the two accounts of mechanisms.

Essay Twenty-One, Tiantai in Brief, begins here. The final essay, Huayan in Brief, comes last; Part II ends with Essay Twenty-Two.²

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