Chapter 2. The business of fear of annihilation: the true and eternal on the demand side¶

The previous chapter examined supply; this chapter examines demand. Volume 2 has already analyzed this demand into two layers. Everyone shares the shallow layer. Impermanence itself is unsettling, and one seeks a destination that will not decay. This is shared with every religion promising eternity. The deeper layer is of Buddhism's own making. The extinguished lamp, what cannot be declared about the state after death, an endpoint beyond words: to those who have not realized it, everything sounds like annihilation. The more strictly silence is maintained, the less room there is to settle this fear.¹ Volume 2 also affirmed one point. Of the five traditions, only the true and eternal answered this fear directly. This volume proceeds to historical questions. How long has the demand existed? Why was it strongest in those centuries after the beginning of the common era? And what is the structure of a business devoted mainly to consolation?

The record of demand predates the scriptures of the true and eternal by several centuries. In the Buddha's own community, the monk Yamaka already held firmly that "an arhat whose taints have ended is annihilated and ceases to exist when the body breaks up at death." Sāriputta corrected him in person. Even a living tathāgata cannot be apprehended, much less said to exist or not exist after death.² The point of this record is not the correction but the person concerned. The one who heard nibbāna as annihilation was a fully ordained monk of the Buddha's own community. Passages about "foolish ordinary people who hear of non-self and become afraid" recur in the sūtra collections, effectively admitting that those who failed to understand this teaching were always many.

The institutional evidence is more definite still. The Vātsīputrīyas established the pudgala to answer "who undergoes rebirth and receives karmic results." Their continued existence should not be described here as surviving centuries of concerted attack: Essay 3 records only seventeen mentions in the two hundred fascicles of the Mahāvibhāṣā, against ninety for the Dārṣṭāntikas and one hundred and twenty-five for the "Analysts" (分别论者), and places the sustained critique in Vasubandhu's fourth- to fifth-century work. This distribution in one treatise does not establish an absence of disputes throughout the preceding history. Volume 1 recorded them as the largest minority in the age of the schools. Subtle mind, bhavaṅga consciousness, and ālaya responded, one generation after another, to the intuition that "there must be something that continues." Lay out the sequence: the pudgala is the first generation, the ālaya the second, and the tathāgatagarbha the third. Demand never ceased. What changed was only how boldly each generation responded. The first generation dared establish only an "inexpressible self"; the third wrote the word "self" directly back into a sūtra title. The previous chapter traced the third generation's source to theories of the Buddha's body. From the demand side, it has another connection. The engine of longing described in Essay 4, Chapter 3 created an undying Buddha; the womb installed that Buddha inside everyone. The further the external Buddha rose, the more precious the internal Buddha seemed.

Why was demand strongest precisely in the third to sixth centuries? First, give the ordinary account of external causes. Between the breakup of the Kuṣāṇa Empire and the founding of the Gupta dynasty, the northwest and northern India underwent a round of political turmoil. From the late fifth century, the Hephthalites moved south, and Gandhāran Buddhism was destroyed by war, as cited in Essay 5, Chapter 2. Across the same long period, cities declined, merchant associations contracted, and the old world of patronage disintegrated. Turmoil makes people need consolation more. This is almost a general rule of religious history, and China offers a ready comparison. The scriptures of the true and eternal were translated precisely during China's great age of disorder and became the most widely circulated scriptures there, the main subject of Essay 9.

Yet under the Introduction's rules, the weight of this line must be explicitly marked as conjecture. The correlation between the scriptures' window of composition and the disorder is loose. The Gupta age itself was, on the contrary, peaceful. This volume adopts only the weak form, "turmoil amplifies existing demand," not the strong form, "turmoil creates demand." If the curves of composition and transmission of these sūtras can be shown to be systematically out of alignment with areas and periods of turmoil, this line loses weight.³

The features of the teaching itself best show that it was framed for this demand. First, a direct answer: permanence, happiness, self, and purity against impermanence, suffering, non-self, and emptiness. Four terms answer four terms, each consolation matching one fear. Second, universal coverage: all sentient beings possess it, without exception. This carries the expansion of recruitment in Essay 4, Chapter 2 to its logical limit, amounting to a prediction of buddhahood for everyone and a guarantee for everyone. Third, immediate effect: there is no need to wait through a practice of three great incalculable eons. You are not going to become a buddha; you are a buddha from the outset. Practice is rewritten from building to wiping. Fourth, and most consequential, these functions were not guessed by later readers. The scriptures and treatises state them themselves.

The Ratnagotravibhāga asks itself: since everything has already been said to be empty, why teach Buddha-nature as well? It answers: to end five faults, faintheartedness, contempt for sentient beings, attachment to the false, slander of the true Dharma, and positing a self in the body.⁴ Taught to cure faintheartedness: this is a statement of function written down by the tradition itself. The Śrīmālādevī is more direct still. Without the tathāgatagarbha, sentient beings could not grow weary of suffering and delight in seeking nirvāṇa. It makes the tathāgatagarbha a premise of the motivation for liberation.⁵ Volume 2 judged the cost of this grammar from the side of liberation. This chapter adds only one point. When a teaching writes its own functions into its scriptures, its authors know very well what the listeners fear.

How much freedom did the authors of the scriptures have? The records on the supply side can show. By the centuries when the scriptures of the true and eternal appeared in batches, making sūtras was a mature craft, and writing a sūtra, expounding it, and guaranteeing it fell to the same people. Specialized studies of circles of Dharma teachers point out that Mahāyāna sūtras not only emerged from these people but also wrote their own standing into the scriptures. The sūtras established their own clauses. The Dharma teacher is the tathāgata's envoy; supporting the teacher is like supporting the Buddha; disparaging the teacher incurs grave guilt. The makers of scriptures wrote their own support and personal protection into the sacred words they made.

The side of testing, meanwhile, was entirely empty. The quantifiers of the four great standards had long since been reversed (Essay 4, Chapter 1). No institution in India any longer tried to close the open canon. The only remaining test was circulation; a sūtra no one copied simply disappeared. Thus "you can produce whatever you want to make" was a fact. "What you make will circulate" was the hard part. The most definite evidence comes from the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra itself. In the course of expansion, it revised a core doctrine on the spot. The earlier portion ruled that icchantikas would never become buddhas; the later continuation ruled that icchantikas too possessed Buddha-nature. One sūtra, one "spoken by the Buddha," two successive answers. That a rewriting could occur shows that the text remained in living hands. That the rewriting moved toward wider salvation shows that the listeners' needs set its direction. Daosheng, in China, read the earlier version that denied icchantikas a share, yet inferred that they too must become buddhas. He was expelled from the monastic community for this. When the continuation arrived in translation, his position was vindicated. This is the most famous instance of that rewriting's reception in China.⁶

The first generation’s “Person” is pudgala, described here by the author as an “inexpressible self”; the second is ālayavijñāna, and the third tathāgatagarbha. The Chinese image has an upward arrow beside the three generations. The English image replaces it with arrows across the columns. These do not pair the first generation with universal coverage or the second with being a Buddha already: all four items at the right describe the tathāgatagarbha teaching discussed in Chapter 2. They are permanence, bliss, self, and purity as the counteroffer; being originally a Buddha as an answer to possible failure in practice; possession by all sentient beings; and the Ratnagotravibhāga’s declaration that the teaching addresses faintheartedness and four other faults.

The three generations are the chapter’s comparison of successive responses to demand, not a decision about the earliest textual layers discussed in Chapter 1. The conclusion is expressly the author’s structural conjecture: comfort both relieves and maintains fear. Chapter 2 does not infer a deliberate scheme or anyone’s dishonesty. It also specifies a counterexample that would weaken the conjecture: central texts and institutions of the mainstream tradition that directly dismantle fear of death through contemplative practice and use no further need for consolation as their standard of success.

Who benefited? Believers received the first homegrown teaching in Buddhist history to answer "what happens to me after death" in positive terms. Dharma teachers benefited most tangibly. Before this, at the two scenes where life most needs religion, the sickbed and the funeral, this tradition had the least to say. Impermanence, non-self, and what cannot be declared: every sentence was true, and every sentence moved toward the cold. The true and eternal gave this tradition something to say at both scenes. The deceased do not enter annihilation but return to the Dharma body. The sick need not despair, for Buddha-nature cannot be destroyed. Essay 5 recorded four reasons for ineffectiveness in the arena of debate. Here is their opposite. The true and eternal never dominated debate, yet was fully effective in the scenes of life.

The community gained an answer to match its rival's. The rival taught "you are brahman"; Buddhism now had an answer of its own, on more equal terms. Transmission abroad benefited longest. This teaching remained a tributary in India. The mainstream of Indian academies was ultimately Madhyamaka and Yogācāra; the Ratnagotravibhāga line remained sparsely represented in the homeland's arena of argument for centuries. Yet in East Asia it became the common basis of the Mahāyāna schools. Tiantai, Huayan, Chan, and Pure Land all stood on it, as Volume 2's balanced assessment has recorded. A tributary at home became the mainstream elsewhere. Half of Essays 9 and 10 will be devoted to explaining this reversal.⁷

The rules require an explicit marker. The following is this volume's conjecture, and also sets the measure of the word "business" in this chapter's title. Measured by numbers of followers, competition between doctrines is fundamentally competition in consolation. The true and eternal prevailed because its consolation was more immediate, not because its argument was better. Corroboration lies in the divergence of the two measures. Madhyamaka and the tradition of epistemology held the honors in debate, while followers and transmission abroad went mostly to the true and eternal and Pure Land. On one side stood the doctrine best at winning; on the other, the most popular. The two sides scarcely overlapped.

To take the conjecture one step further is to touch the deepest structure of this business. Fear is demand here. Consolation relieves fear and also maintains it. Early teaching took a therapeutic route toward fear of annihilation: direct observation in the manner of the four establishments of mindfulness, taking fear of death itself as an object to be examined and dismantled. The true and eternal took a route of reassurance, giving those afraid of death something that would not die. Reassurance is immediate; treatment is long. A system devoted mainly to reassurance structurally ceases to have a motive to cure the fear at its root. The day the fear is gone, it loses its use. Under the Introduction's limits, this statement stops at structure. No one set a trap, and no one was insincere. The structure of incentives took this shape by itself over centuries. If central texts and institutions of the mainstream traditions of the true and eternal are found that directly dismantle fear of death through contemplative practice and take "no longer needing consolation" as their goal, this conjecture must be weakened accordingly.

Taken together, the costs are these. Non-self is demoted from the core of doctrine to one stage of instruction in the previous chapter; fear is transformed from an illness to be treated into a standing demand in this one. From then on, Buddhism and the rival it most resembles are separated only by a layer of terminology requiring permanent guardianship. Guarding it grows ever harder, while the doctrine of Viṣṇu's avatars remains open to the Buddha. Debate gave Buddhism its most precise minds; the true and eternal gave it its most reassuring promises. Believers still lacked one thing: efficacy. The next essay examines how ritual took over.

A closing note records the theoretical cross-section. The tradition of the true and eternal filled two gaps that the doctrine of non-self left for intuition: rebirth without a subject and Buddhahood without a basis. The tathāgatagarbha served two purposes at once. Buddha-nature supplied the basis, while store consciousness approached a subject. Both conflicts with intuition were eased in one stroke. New gaps were also written into the scriptures. How could the tathāgatagarbha be reconciled with non-self? The Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra's milk-medicine simile is the system's own record, already given in the main text. No one yet attended to a deeper question. If everything is originally complete, what is practice for?

It must first be explained that this question was not without a solution in China. On the side of legislation, Tiantai supplied a positive mechanism, the six identities, and the text states its reason for establishing them. The Mohe zhiguan says that without faith one places the realm of sages too high, beyond the reach of one's own wisdom, while without wisdom one develops overweening pride and claims to be equal to the Buddha. Both the beginning and the end go wrong, so one must understand the six identities. The character 即, "identity," secures sameness across the horizontal axis; the six stages secure progression along the vertical one. Both ends are closed off, self-abandonment and usurpation of full realization. The same work's ten objects also include overweening pride as an object of contemplation (Volume 1, Part II, Essay 21, Chapter 5).

On the Huayan side, the corresponding arrangement is the model of obscuration. The Tanxuan ji uses the simile of the great sūtra scroll: break the dust particle and bring out the great sūtra. Deluded thoughts have no substance and are minute as dust; the virtues of the nature are complete as the great scroll. That essay points out that breaking the dust does not write the sūtra, and bringing out the sūtra adds no scrolls (Essay 22, Chapter 5). It is therefore true that this question later became a persistent worry in Chinese classifications of the teachings. It is inaccurate to say it had no solution. In India it was only a footnote. Later we shall see it become a persistent worry in Chinese classifications of the teachings and the premise of an entire revolution of simplification in Japan (Essay 13). The cost of the consolation described in this essay became fully visible only in Japan.

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