Chapter 8: Verdict and Handoff¶

The general verdict goes item by item, and there is only one question in it: can the thing rest content in the status of a conventional posit?

Seeds: judged safe, and safe on their own testimony. Of the six articles, momentary cessation, awaiting the assemblage of conditions, and drawing forth its own fruit are three clauses against intrinsic nature set down in so many words, and the three conditions of D2 were barred at the door by the legislator's own hand. This verdict borrows no force from outside; the original text is all there.

The storehouse consciousness: judged safe, with the warning label entered in evidence beside it. Constantly turning like a torrent; to be perfumed, to be capable of turning, to admit of being given up — not one of these accords with intrinsic nature. And the verse on the appropriating consciousness guards of itself against a reading that grasps it as a self. Later ages have not lacked men who read the ālaya as a true and permanent mind; what such a reading contravenes is first the legislator's own text, and only after that the clauses of Part 18.

Self-cognition: judged safe within the boundary. It is granted to exist within names and conventions and is put to use as a component of the science of machinery; the boundary drawn in Chapter 3 of Part 19 has been checked over by this part and stands. Whoever crosses that boundary and erects it as an E3 item falls within the scope, by the rule.

The perfected nature, and the uncontaminated realm along with it: the opening is registered as it stands. The absence of grasper and grasped has been nominalized into a nature, and the five words inconceivable, good and constant hang between a reading as process and a reading as entity. Read as a notation and as a property of a process, it is the consciousness-only way of writing the Preservation Theorem, and it is safe; read as an E3 entity, it is a D3-type claim and must come within the scope to be tried. Each of the two readings has its warrant inside the text. This is an opening that the consciousness-only system carries with it, and this book registers it without adjudicating in its stead; when the full treatment is one day opened out, this is the first place to be thickened.

The ledger of contributions is handed over together with the verdict. That group of difficulties from Chapter 4 of Part 15 (the work done by possession, by unmanifest matter, by the life faculty, and by the homogeneous character of a group) reaches its final lodging in the doctrine of seeds: every registered item is discharged instead by seeds and habit energies, and the roster of entities goes to zero while not one function is lost. The list-science of Parts 14 and 15 attains here its completed form as machinery. The name science of conventional machinery was hung up as a question at the head of this part, and the question mark can now come off: what this school hands in is precisely the most complete body of E2-level theory in Buddhist philosophy, and its principal components carry clauses against intrinsic nature built into them.¹

Two signposts in China, set up and not walked. Paramārtha translated the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, and from that there came the line of the Shelun masters; Xuanzang and Kuiji founded the Faxiang school of dharma-characteristics. Both are the Chinese sequel to the story of this part, and this volume opens no part for them. The tathāgatagarbha thread is entered in evidence along with them: the dealings between the storehouse consciousness and the tathāgatagarbha, and the field of problems belonging to the Awakening of Faith, receive no part of their own in this volume; their Huayan form, nature-origination, comes on stage in Part 22.

The handoff. Two lines in the method of doctrinal classification are now in hand: the three turnings of the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, and Jizang's four tiers. Both lines are merged into Part 21. Tiantai's five periods and eight teachings are doctrinal classification in its fully constituted form, and the three truths and the three contemplations are Tiantai's solution to the debate over the two truths. Part 21, Tiantai in Brief, opens from here; the last part, Huayan in Brief, brings up the rear, and Part II ends at Part 22.

References¶