Chapter 1. Does transformation have a direction? The engine of the whole volume¶

Fourteen essays are complete, leaving one final question. Do these twenty-five hundred years of change have a shape? There are three possible answers. The first is directionless drift. Variation is random, survival is random, and history need only record them. The second is adaptation to the environment, with a different form in each place. Sri Lanka takes the shape of an island, China the shape of an empire. In the end, Buddhism becomes a footnote to geography and politics. The third answer is that there is an overall direction. This volume chooses the third, but the answer must be earned. First establish the mechanism, then test the direction, register counterexamples, and finally hand over the conditions under which the account can be overturned. This chapter does the first two and treats the counterexamples separately. Without conditions for overturning it, the verdict is only rhetoric.

The mechanism is an engine with three parts. First, pressure supplies the energy. The six lines of external causes in the Introduction, Chapter 2 exert disorderly pressures. Dynasties rise and fall, markets prosper and decline, competitors come and go, and warfare and calamity strike the religious community without regard to direction. Pressure alone reveals no orientation. Second, exchange transmits the power. Every joint this volume has traversed, once taken apart, is a transaction rational in its own time and place. The Buddha exchanges the absence of a final court of appeal for the longevity of the true Dharma (Essay 2, Chapter 1). The councils pay the cost of preservation with certification authority (Chapter 2). The Interlude's discourse of attainment changes its wording three times to resolve a crisis in the existing stock. Mahāyāna exchanges verification for an ideal exempt from inspection (Essay 4, Chapter 2). The monastic community exchanges a discourse of legitimacy for access to the empire (Essay 3, Chapter 2). Doctrinal scholarship exchanges shifting criteria for advancement and support (Essay 5). Doctrine accommodates native intuitions in exchange for the following of the true-and-eternal line (Essay 6). The establishment exchanges incorporation for believers seeking miraculous efficacy, then protects itself by barring celibate monks from the secret and wisdom initiations (Essay 7). Buddhism accepts the demands of filial piety and loyalty in exchange for permission to settle in China (Essay 9). Classification of the teachings writes "shallow" in place of "wrong" in exchange for keeping the premise that all of it was "spoken by the Buddha" intact (Essay 10). The religious community exchanges economic self-restraint for permanent residence (Essay 11). Schools exchange the arrangements of reincarnation and regency for institutional permanence (Essay 12). Monastic communities register households for the government in exchange for legally assigned parishioners (Essay 13). Traditions hand their criteria over to science in exchange for a place in modernity (Essay 14).

This list has one common property, repeatedly tested throughout the volume. No link in the chain requires a villain. Ordinary explanations suffice at every link; imputing motives has only the remainder left to it. Each transaction is reasonable, and precisely because it is reasonable, the mechanism is hard to notice and hard to stop. Third, the ratchet sets the direction. Transactions come in two kinds, reversible and irreversible. Every transaction that gives up verification and accountability is irreversible. As irreversible transactions multiply, disorderly pressure accumulates into a drift in one direction. Directionless forces acting on a ratchet that can turn only one way produce directional motion.

This volume has established four ratchets. They can now be set side by side. The verification ratchet means that once verification is surrendered, no one has authority to take it back. The founder appointed no successor, and the system has no final arbiter. This is the cost in Essay 2, Chapter 1, and the first cause of the whole volume. The corpus ratchet means that scriptures, once admitted to the canon, are never removed, so the canon only accumulates (Essay 4, Chapter 1). The ideal ratchet means that an ideal exempt from inspection dismantles the very mechanism for inspecting it again. A course of practice lasting three great eons means the promise never comes due (Essay 4, Chapter 2). The dependence ratchet means that dependence on kingship and estates deepens with every generation, and so does the cost of escaping it, until any change in state finances cuts off the community's support. Essay 3 raised the point; Essays 8 and 11 tested it.

All four ratchets point in the same direction. The volume's verdict can therefore be stated. As required, I explicitly mark what follows as this volume's last and largest conjecture. The overall direction of Buddhist transformation is to lower the cost of verification. Every successful variation makes faith easier to hold. Testable attainment becomes silence about attainment; realization for oneself in this life becomes testimony by others at death; a guide becomes a savior. Verification moves into the relationship between teacher and disciple, is postponed until after death, becomes an office, leaves the agenda, and finally the object tested is itself replaced (Essay 14, Chapter 3). The Interlude's curve of density is the earliest record this engine left. Volume 2's three trajectories, decreasing self-power, increasing guarantees, and retreating verification, are how it shows in doctrine. This chapter adds their genesis. Those three lines trace the direction shared by all irreversible transactions. They are no history of anyone's fall from grace. Lowering the cost of verification is a general tendency of religious organization. It needs no one to push it. It needs only every irreversible transaction to point the same way.¹

The pressure labelled “exchange” means contact and exchange among traditions; the central gear instead represents transactions. The Chinese image gives the incoming pressures mixed directions, including arrows pointing away from the engine. Direction is supplied by the ratchets. The English image arranges the four ratchets vertically, where the Chinese image places them along one shaft; the four labels remain verification, corpus, ideal, and dependency.

The counterexample window lists three possible conditions for partly reversing an irreversible transaction: a surviving lineage abroad, a new arbiter, or a new patron. Chapter 1 requires at least one of the three; it does not require all three together. The footer restates the chapter’s explicitly marked final conjecture; it does not claim to have established a law.

The Introduction, Chapter 1 said that rewriting is the solution and pressure the problem. With the whole volume traversed, the sentence can be completed. A solution becomes the next problem. Costs never disappear. They pass down the chapters. The costs left by Chapter N become the pressures faced in Chapter N+k. The main lines of transmission are listed below.

The table shows that the fourteen essays describe a single history continuing through fourteen junctures.²

Two further observations cut across the cases at the level of regularities. First, classification reproduces society. The three data points are now assembled. India's caste divisions and political fragmentation produce diversity through separate households and five distinct natures. Unified China, with its mobility, produces classifications of the one vehicle and universal Buddha-nature. Hereditary, feudal Japan produces schools of exclusive practice and bound membership. Unity produces perfect interfusion; fragmentation produces exclusive practice. The organization of knowledge reproduces the organization of society. Durkheim and Mauss's old proposition has acquired three samples from India, China, and Japan in Buddhist history, with the bureaucratization of the underworld and the plateau's map of schools as two supplementary pieces of evidence. The boundary remains unchanged. Three samples, a loose mechanism, a conjecture rather than a law.³ Second, whether an apologetic argument works depends on whether both sides accept the same standard of judgment. The equation of attainments fails when it goes north; evidence from survival and population fails when it goes south. The two failures run in opposite directions and have the same structure (Essay 4, Chapter 3; Essay 14, Chapter 1). Where there is no standard both sides accept, whether an argument works is unrelated to its logical quality. This regularity explains why so much of the volume's history of controversy is a history of parties talking past one another.

Last comes the register of counterexamples, on which this chapter's honesty depends. It records refused transactions and transactions partly reversed. The mechanism must not become an explanation for everything. The rule for the line of troubled times, why the same upheaval makes one decline and another flourish, applies to it too. Counterexamples must therefore be present. First, Theravāda closed its canon, and the corpus ratchet did not turn there. The island's congealing (Essay 3, Chapter 3) proves that irreversible transactions can be refused wholesale. The price is the cost of congealing repeatedly calculated in this volume. Ratchets result from accumulated choices, not destiny. Second, the modern meditation revival in Burma and Thailand declared that attainment was still possible in this life, overturning the timetable that said it no longer was, as the Interlude recorded. The ideal ratchet was partly reversed. The conditions were colonial shock destroying the old structures of certification and new participants appearing among lay believers. Third, the bhikṣuṇī ordinations of 1998 partly restored a broken ordination lineage. The conditions were a living lineage surviving abroad, the Chinese bhikṣuṇī lineage, and a new arbiter, the global saṅgha and scholarship. Fourth, Tsongkhapa's revival of discipline moved half of certification into public examination and debate (Essay 12, Chapter 3). The condition was patrons' demand for visible compliance.

Combined, the four cases allow the conditions of reversal to be summarized. At least one of three things must be present: a lineage surviving abroad, a new arbiter, or a new patron. Where none of the three is present, no irreversible transaction has been seen to reverse itself. Wherever a reversal has occurred, its conditions must be identifiable. An engine theory unable to specify conditions is unfalsifiable and violates this volume's own rule. This volume does not count Humanistic Buddhism as a reversal. Removing verification from the agenda goes around the problem; it does not take back the verification already given up. That judgment is disputable. Later writers are welcome to bring new cases and revise it.⁴

The engine is assembled, its direction marked, its counterexamples registered, and its conditions handed over. But the engine is cold, and the three volumes of this book have ultimately been about something other than machinery. The final chapter changes its voice and lays on the table the tools kept hidden throughout the volume.

References¶