百論 義疏通講

Readers often turn past a preface placed at the head of a treatise and think nothing of it. This preface cannot be passed over. Its author is Sengzhao, not a later narrator but a participant in the translation atelier. The Deva, adept Vasu, Kumārajīva, and Yao Song he records are the four acts through which the treatise took its present form. One sentence in the preface exhausts the character of the Hundred Treatise: “It speaks without landing and refutes without clinging.” Everything the preface says turns around this sentence.

One matter must first be distinguished. The speaker in this preface is Sengzhao. The Deva he describes is Deva as he understood him; the purport of the treatise he reports is his judgment after reading. The preface belongs to the treatise but is not its root text. Every passage cited below from the preface speaks in Sengzhao’s voice and cannot be presented as Deva’s verse or Vasu’s commentary.

1. The Opening First Gives a Road

Sengzhao does not begin with a biography but with a position. The Hundred Treatise is a “ford and road leading to the sage’s mind” and “an essential treatise opening the true meaning.” A ford crosses water; a road leads somewhere. He uses an image of travel. A treatise known for refutation opens as a ford and road. The arrangement itself speaks: refutation does not tear up the water; it enables a crossing.

Only then does he return to the person and the time. “More than eight hundred years after the Buddha entered nirvāṇa,” a great renunciant named Deva appeared, whose “profound mind awakened alone and whose outstanding spirit was lofty and bright,” able to “open the layered barriers of the Tripiṭaka and level the profound roads of the twelvefold teaching.” Opening barriers and leveling roads continue the same image. The barrier blocks and the road is difficult; Deva opens and levels rather than constructing another edifice.

2. Why This Treatise Had to Be Written

Sengzhao writes the conditions directly: “At that time outsiders arose in profusion, heterodox positions competed, and erroneous arguments approached the semblance of truth, nearly confusing the right path.” The crucial four words are “error approached truth.” This does not mean it was true, but that it looked true. The hardest things to handle are never obvious falsehoods, but statements that sound so plausible and reasonable that they lead people elsewhere. The right path was “nearly confused” not because it had been overthrown, but because likeness crowded it until it could no longer be recognized.

Deva’s response has two levels: he “looked upward and lamented the decline of the sacred teaching; bending downward, he grieved over the many deluded people abandoning themselves to deception.” One level looks upward at the teaching’s decline; the other downward at people under deception. Compassion and vision present together led him to “compose this treatise to rescue those long sunk and lost.” The treatise was not composed to win an argument but to rescue. Nor should the word “long” be passed lightly: he intended to save more than those in one debate before him.

Sengzhao gathers the treatise’s function into two clauses: “protect the correct and guard against error,” and “magnificently illuminate the ultimate of the tenet.” Protecting holds safe; guarding checks and blocks. One hand guards, the other discloses. The result is that “through it the correct transformation flourished, and through it erroneous paths declined.” We should see clearly how the erroneous path declines: it is illuminated, not suppressed. Sengzhao immediately praises: “Who but one who comprehends all subtleties could do this?” The one who does so relies upon insight gathering all subtle meanings, not upon aggressive eloquence.

3. “Refuting without Clinging”: One Defining Judgment

When the preface describes the treatise’s character, it uses four clauses: “It speaks without landing and refutes without clinging; freely without any ground, events do not lose their truth; quietly without lodging, principle naturally meets the profound.”

In “speaks without landing,” landing means settling or striking against a fixed place. To speak without settling anywhere means that each statement in the treatise arises in response; it is not used to establish a new foothold. “Refutes without clinging” closes the matter: the refuting side leaves behind nothing of its own to grasp. This is the most important distinction between the Hundred Treatise and ordinary disputation. Ordinary refutation destroys another’s position and then stands upon it; this treatise refutes and does not stand.

The next two clauses answer an inevitable doubt: if nothing is relied upon, do events not dissolve? Sengzhao answers decisively: “Freely without any ground, events do not lose their truth.” Precisely without a foothold, events do not lose their truth. “Quietly without lodging, principle naturally meets the profound.” Without anything in which to lodge, principle subtly comes into accord by itself. The need to grasp something for reassurance is a habit of mind, not a condition of events or principle. Once the grasp is withdrawn, each rests in its original place.

He therefore dares conclude: “The path of returning to the root is manifest here.” Where is the path manifest? In this “without clinging.” Only refutation that leaves not even itself is a return to the root. To establish a new root after refutation is still to go outward, not to return.

This sentence is the key to reading the ten chapters. The first chapter, “Relinquishing Demerit and Merit,” relinquishes appropriation; the final chapter, “Refuting Emptiness,” leaves neither emptiness nor refutation behind. The way the ten chapters move is already stated as a rule in Sengzhao’s preface.

4. One Hundred Verses, and One Person Who Speaks for Them

The origin of the name is plain: “The treatise contains one hundred verses and therefore takes Hundred as its name.” Two clauses then judge its principles and language: “Its principles and purport are deep and profound, gathering the essentials of many scriptures; its wording and intent are subtle and concise, exhausting the excellence of composition.” Verse is already compact; compressed to the utmost, it becomes difficult to enter. “Yet its ultimate destination is subtle and spare, and few find its gate.” This is honest: without someone to unfold one hundred verses, most readers cannot even find the door.

Thus came the adept Vasu. Sengzhao describes him as “lucid in wisdom and inwardly integrated, marvelous in thought and outstanding,” whose work was to “accord from afar with the profound traces and compose an instructional commentary.” He first accords with Deva’s way, then writes the explanation; he does not impose his own scheme. The effect has three parts. “Meanings sunk and hidden appear in elegant writing”: what lay below rises into words. “Its flavor circulates and spreads to later generations”: the treatise’s flavor reaches posterity. “The literary brilliance shines and the road of the tenet is easy to understand”: the path becomes recognizable.

The reader-facing edition therefore distinguishes Deva’s root statement from Vasu’s commentary. The basis is here. The preface itself clearly records two levels: one is the bone; the other the flesh that unfolds it. Blend them, and the reader no longer knows which sentence is established and which clarifies it.

5. The Reality of the Translation Atelier: An Unintegrated First Translation, Recollated in Hongshi Six

The most precious passage in the preface is that it does not conceal the translation’s blemish.

Kumārajīva possessed “profound and expansive capacity, inspired thought outstanding and far-reaching,” and “studied and revered it for many years, finding it increasingly unfathomable; he constantly savored and recited this treatise as the heart-essence.” Notice “increasingly unfathomable”: the longer he read, the less he thought he could reach its bottom. This is how one should read a treatise and a warning against quick judgments.

Yet Sengzhao immediately writes: “Although he had translated it personally before, the language of this land had not yet been integrated.” Kumārajīva himself translated it, yet its Chinese had not come into full accord. Sengzhao records the consequence too: “Those seeking its meaning hesitated before erroneous wording, and those marking its position contradicted its destination.” Those who sought deeply stalled at flawed phrases; those trying to establish its doctrinal position could move against its purport. However high a treatise’s meaning, readers can go astray when it falls into unintegrated language.

The work of repair belonged to Yao Song. Sengzhao describes him as “lucid and relaxed in bearing, tranquil in mind and excelling in concision,” “widely read in inner and outer canons, penetrating principle and thought,” and one who “though bodily bound by affairs of the age never ceased discourse on Dharma.” He remained in government yet did not stop speaking Dharma; this grounded his capacity for the task. “Whenever he handled this text, his reflections were many.” To handle means to return to it repeatedly; reflection means he read the problems.

Thus, “in the sixth year of Hongshi, year of Shouxing, he gathered śramaṇas versed in principle and together with Kumārajīva collated the correct text.” All three elements are definite: the time, people deeply versed in principle, and the task of establishing a correct text together with Kumārajīva. The method was “refining, tempering, reviewing, and clarifying, striving to preserve the treatise’s intent.” The words could change; the intent could not.

The standard for the result is also given: “plain without being crude, concise yet certain to arrive.” Plain but not coarse; brief but always reaching the meaning. These eight words still express the measure of Chinese translation of treatises: speech may be reduced, meaning may not. The final sentence—“its tenet and purport are exhausted here, with nothing to fault”—is Sengzhao’s account of the established text.

The Hundred Treatise now in readers’ hands is this recollated text, not the earlier translation whose “language had not yet been integrated.”

6. Twenty Chapters, Ten Transmitted: The Gap Stated by the Preface Itself

The preface’s end records the scale: “The treatise originally had twenty chapters, each with five verses.” Then comes the undisguised sentence: “The people responsible considered the latter ten of no benefit to this land, so they were omitted and not transmitted.”

Sengzhao does not round the matter into completeness. He neither conceals that the original contained twenty chapters nor defends the omission. He records only the transmitters’ reason—“of no benefit to this land”—and the result: omitted and not transmitted. This is the honesty proper to a translation-atelier record. The boundary is therefore clear to the reader: the ten extant chapters can be read; the ten lost chapters are not in hand and should not be supplied from imagination.

The preface’s final sentence is an entrustment: “May discerning and knowledgeable gentlemen examine and gather it in detail.” May expresses hope; detail means careful examination; gather means to take it up. He hands the book over to those willing to look closely.

Carried Forward

This preface is not an appendix but part of the transmitted Hundred Treatise. It settles three matters for the ten chapters that follow: the treatise refutes without clinging; its text has the two layers of root and commentary; and its Chinese version is the ten-chapter text after the recollation of Hongshi Six.

The preface’s sentence “The path of returning to the root is manifest here” must be fulfilled in every following chapter. The first begins with stopping evil and practicing good but closes through “relinquishing.” The middle chapters examine self, one and different, faculties and objects, cause and fruit, permanence, and emptiness. The final chapter permits neither refutation nor emptiness to remain. If a reader finds in any chapter a conclusion on which to stand, comparing it with this sentence in the preface shows that the reading is not finished.

Another intra-lineage mirror can be read beside it. In his “Preface to the Treatise on the Middle,” Sengrui assigns functions to four treatises and says: “The Hundred Treatise treats the external to guard against error.” One treats the external, another removes the internal. The two prefaces emerged from the same translation atelier and agree in their understanding of this treatise. Jizang later composed a separate preface commentary explaining Sengzhao’s preface sentence by sentence. That is a mirror from the Tang period held up for Chinese readers. However bright the mirror, the transmission and translation events recorded by the preface itself remain the standard.

The Hundred Treatise opens with four lines of homage: reverence to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha of the eight classes of noble persons. The homage has barely ended when another voice breaks in.

The form of this treatise differs from the Treatise on the Middle. That work largely consists of verses followed by Qingmu’s extended explanation. The Hundred Treatise is a face-to-face exchange: one side marked “the outsider says,” the other “the insider says,” across thirty-three rounds. Whenever Deva’s root statement appears, the received text inserts a small note, “sūtra,” beneath it. This is the bone Deva established; the following prose is the flesh with which the adept Vasu unfolds it.

Two things must be known before reading this chapter. First, one must distinguish bone from flesh. Second, the outsider is no fool: every time he speaks, he offers a reason and supplies a simile. The treatise author does not prevail by force of tone. Only after dismantling each position does he speak his own final line: “The signless is supreme.” The chapter travels from its opening word “evil” to that signless conclusion.

1. What Kind of Person Counts as a World-Honored One?

The homage contains the words “taught by the buddhas, the World-Honored Ones.” The outsider seizes on that title and asks: who is a World-Honored One? Some apply the title to Viṣṇu, others to Maheśvara, and others to such seers as Kapila, Ulūka, and Ṛṣabha. “Why do you alone call the Buddha the World-Honored One?” At the time, “World-Honored One” was a title used by many schools. The outsider wants a criterion.

The treatise author gives only two: “The Buddha knows the true mark of all dharmas clearly and without obstruction and can also teach profound, pure Dharma. Therefore the Buddha alone is called the World-Honored One.” One is knowing, the other teaching. Everything disputed afterward must be tested by asking whether what is known accords with reality and whether what is taught is profound and pure.

The outsider counters on the basis of that criterion. Other teachers too can “understand the marks of all dharmas” and “teach profound, pure Dharma.” He presents evidence school by school. Sāṃkhya calls the purified-awareness portion among its twenty-five principles good Dharma. Vaiśeṣika calls the portion of self produced among its six principles, in the principle of qualities, through bathing three times a day, making offerings, and the conjunction of fire and other elements good Dharma. The Nirgranthas call “scorching the body with five fires, plucking out the hair, and other painful practices” good Dharma. Others starve themselves, leap into chasms, enter fire, cast themselves from high cliffs, keep silence, stand for long periods, or observe the discipline of cattle. These are acts people paid for with their own bodies. He asks: “All these are profound, pure Dharma. Why say that only the Buddha can teach it?” The treatise author gives one sentence in answer: “All these are wrong views. Because they obscure right view, they cannot teach profound, pure Dharma.”

He does not rebut each austerity one by one but points to a level prior to them. Their failure to be profound and pure does not lie in insufficient severity; it lies in view being obscured. Once right view is covered, the more violently one practices, the farther away one goes. The passage closes with a promise: “This matter will be explained in detail later.”

2. Stopping Evil and Practicing Good: The First Bone

The outsider changes the question: “What are the marks of the good Dharma taught by the Buddha?” The treatise author answers with the first root statement: “The Dharma consists in stopping evil and practicing good.”

Vasu opens this into a paragraph. First he gives the two marks: “Bringing all evil to rest is called the mark of stopping; cultivating all good is called the mark of practice.” Then he makes them concrete. Evil is the three kinds of wrong conduct of body, speech, and mind; it is not limited to the ten unwholesome courses but includes “flogging, beating, binding, imprisonment, and the rest not included among the ten,” together with the wrongs preceding and following them. Good likewise consists of three forms of right conduct: speech such as “truthful speech, harmonious speech, gentle speech, beneficial speech,” and mind such as loving-kindness, compassion, and right view. The definition of “stopping” deserves to be read slowly: “Whether the resolve arises in the mind, is spoken aloud, or is undertaken as a precept—from this day until the end of life one does not perform it again. This is called stopping.” Stopping is not merely happening not to act. A resolve is formed inwardly, stated aloud, or formally undertaken, and a boundary is drawn from this day to one’s last breath. Stopping is a decision that is made and then sustained, not an empty interval.

3. The Dispute over a Scripture’s Opening: Does “Auspicious” Have Intrinsic Nature?

The second attack looks petty: “Your scripture is faulty because its beginning is inauspicious.” The reason is the convention of the day. If a text opens with an auspicious phrase, “its meaning and flavor are easily understood and the sound of its Dharma circulates,” and “because the beginning is auspicious, the middle and end are auspicious too.” Your text instead begins with evil.

To dismiss this as superstition would miss the argument. The outsider’s actual claim is that auspiciousness is a quality that can flow from one place into another. Whether such a quality exists is the core of the exchange. The treatise author answers on three levels. First he addresses the particular case: “This scripture is taught to eliminate wrong view.” What eliminates wrong view is auspicious. Judging the mention of evil inauspicious is itself “the residue of wrong view.”

The second level removes the root: “Because no auspiciousness exists.” The reason is that “the same thing is taken as auspicious here, inauspicious there, and elsewhere as neither auspicious nor inauspicious. Because it is unfixed, no auspiciousness exists.” Since judgments shift with the people judging, there is no auspiciousness independent of them. Vasu adds a severe line: “You foolish person lack skillful means. Forcing the pursuit of happiness, you produce imagined distinctions at random.” Beneath the labels placed on events is the desire for happiness without knowledge of the way to it.

Only on the third level does the proper Dharma eye appear: “Because it cannot be obtained from self, other, or both.” Auspiciousness does not arise from itself, for no dharma arises from itself, and a self-arising account places “what is produced” and “what produces” as two marks within one dharma. It does not arise from another, for “when the mark of self does not exist, the mark of other does not exist either.” Nor can it arise without end, “because an arising would need another arising.” It does not arise from both, for it would bear both faults together. “Arising dharmas have three possibilities: self, other, and both. Sought among these three, auspiciousness cannot be obtained. Therefore no auspicious thing exists.”

What the treatise author refutes is not the use of an auspicious word. It is an auspiciousness assumed to possess intrinsic nature and radiate by its own power. Once this refutation stands, every later simile offered by the outsider becomes a borrowed leg for that assumption.

4. Salt and Lamp: Two Borrowed Legs

The first leg is salt: “Auspiciousness arises from itself, like salt.” Salt is salty by intrinsic nature and makes other things salty; auspiciousness works the same way.

The treatise author answers in two movements. First, “it was already refuted.” Second, he returns the outsider’s own words: “I do not accept your account; I will now return your words and use them to refute what you say.” If you admit salt comes from causes and conditions, it is not salty by intrinsic nature. The direct reason is that “the mark of salt abides in salt.” Though salt combines with another thing, that thing does not become salt, “just as the mark of a cow does not become the mark of a horse.” What can be transmitted is not an intrinsic nature.

The second leg is the lamp: “Like a lamp,” which illuminates itself and another. First self-illumination is refuted: “There is no darkness either in the lamp itself or in the other.” There is no darkness in the lamp, because “light and darkness do not coexist.” Without darkness to break, no act of illumination occurs. Insisting on self-illumination creates two marks within one lamp: “first what illuminates, second what is illuminated.” Then illumination of another is refuted. There is no darkness in the illuminated place either. “It is called illumination because it breaks darkness; when there is no darkness to break, it is not illumination.” The name illumination is borrowed from the breaking of darkness and has nowhere to rest when darkness is absent.

The outsider retreats: “At the moment it first arises, it illuminates both.” The treatise author answers: “A single dharma possessing both existent and nonexistent marks cannot be obtained.” First arising is said to be “half arisen, half unarisen.” The arisen half cannot illuminate, for the reason already given; still less can the unarisen half illuminate. Besides, “how can one dharma possess both an existent and a nonexistent mark?” He presses again: “Because it does not reach the darkness.” Whether arisen or unarisen, the lamp cannot reach darkness because “their natures and marks are opposed.” If it cannot reach it, how can it break it?

The outsider introduces another example: “Like a spell or a star.” A spell spoken at a distance can trouble someone far away, and a change among the stars can cause misfortune. Contact is therefore unnecessary. The treatise author answers: “Because the consequence would extend much too far.” “If a lamp had the power to break darkness without reaching it, why would lighting a lamp in India not break the darkness in China?” A simile cannot borrow only the side that resembles the claim; it must withstand being followed to its end.

5. The Elephant’s Hand: Can One Small Part Govern the Whole?

The treatise author returns to proportion: “If the beginning is auspicious, the remainder is inauspicious.” If the opening is auspicious, the rest ought to be inauspicious. If the rest is auspicious too, singling out the opening as auspicious becomes false speech. The outsider replies, “Because the beginning is auspicious, the remainder is also auspicious.” The author turns the outsider’s weapon around: “Because the inauspicious is greater, the auspicious becomes inauspicious.”

The outsider now offers the chapter’s best simile: “Like an elephant’s hand.” An elephant is called “having a hand” because its trunk resembles a hand, yet it is not called “having eyes,” “having ears,” or “having a head” simply because it has those parts. Ordinary speech already lets one part supply a name for the whole.

The treatise author forces elephant and hand into only two alternatives. If they differ, then head, foot, and each other part also differ from elephant, and “there is thus no separate elephant.” Moreover, “if the whole is fully present within a part, why are the feet not present in the head?” This path is “as explained in the refutation of difference.” If elephant and hand do not differ, again “there is no separate elephant.” And “if whole and part do not differ, the head should be the feet,” because neither differs from the elephant. This is “as explained in the refutation of unity.”

When both identity and difference are exhausted, the “whole” supposedly represented by the part was never established. “Thus auspiciousness cannot be obtained when sought through various causes and conditions. How can you say the middle and end are auspicious because the beginning is auspicious?” Nearly half the chapter is spent dismantling one word.

6. Sequence: Evil First, Washing Before Dyeing

The outsider changes to a question of composition: “Stopping evil is excellent; why is stopping not placed first?” The treatise author answers with extreme economy: “Practitioners must first know evil and only afterward can stop it; therefore evil comes first and stopping afterward.” Someone who does not know what evil is has nothing to stop. The disturbing word “evil” stands exactly where it belongs.

The outsider tries again: “Practicing good should come first because it has excellent results.” The author answers: “Because Dharma follows a sequence, coarse stains are removed first and subtle stains afterward. If practitioners do not stop evil, they cannot cultivate good. Coarse stains are therefore removed first, and only afterward are they dyed with good Dharma. It is like washing a garment: first remove the stain, and then it can be dyed.”

The point of the simile is not that washing is more important than dyeing, but that taking dye requires a condition. If the stain remains, the color will not take.

7. Stopping and Practicing Cannot Swallow One Another

The outsider attacks three times, each time trying to merge stopping and practicing. First: once stopping evil has been taught, there is no need to teach practicing good. The author gives a counterexample: “Giving is good practice, not stopping evil.” He also points to great bodhisattvas who “have already stopped evil, practice the four immeasurable states, feel compassion for sentient beings, and protect the lives of others.” The outsider replies that giving stops miserliness. The author answers on three levels: “If not giving were evil, all who do not give would be guilty”; “those whose contaminants are exhausted have already extinguished greed and miserliness—what evil are they stopping when they give?”; and “some people give without their miserly mind stopping.” Even where it does stop, “good practice remains the basis.”

Second: once practicing good has been taught, stopping evil need not be taught, because stopping evil is good practice. The author answers: “Stopping has rest as its mark; practice has action as its mark. Their natures and marks oppose one another.” One cannot swallow the other.

Third, the outsider retreats to a finer claim. The two do not have the same mark, but stopping evil is a good dharma. The author responds with the chapter’s most skillful example. If only the merit of good practice were taught and not stopping evil, then when “someone undertakes precepts and stops evil while the mind is unwholesome or indeterminate, that person is not practicing good at that moment and should possess no merit; yet because evil is being stopped, there is still merit.” On an account counting only good practices, no merit should exist; in fact the continuing stop still has merit. Good practices are individually performed; stopping evil is established once and then sustained over time.

8. Giving, Precepts, and Wisdom: Three Classes and Three Purities

“The Buddha distinguishes this Dharma of stopping evil and practicing good in three ways according to the intentions of sentient beings.” The root statement reads: “Giving, precepts, and wisdom for lesser, middling, and higher persons.” Those of lesser wisdom are taught giving, those of middling wisdom precepts, and those of higher wisdom wisdom, because “their benefits differ in degree” and because “the result of giving is lesser, the result of precepts middling, and the result of wisdom higher.” If one stops here, the conclusion is crude. The outsider reads it precisely that way: “Are all who give persons of lesser wisdom?” The author says no and cuts through all three categories again.

Giving is twofold. Impure giving is “giving for recompense, impure like trade in a marketplace.” Present recompense is fame, respect, and affection; future recompense is wealth and rank in a later life. The root of the trouble lies in one line: “because one still wishes to obtain.” The simile is a traveling merchant who, “though carrying many goods and benefiting many people, does so not from compassion for sentient beings but to seek profit for himself; therefore his business is impure.” The impurity lies only in the motive. Pure giving is performed “out of love, respect, and a wish to benefit others, without seeking recompense in this life or the next.”

Precepts are twofold. Impure keeping of precepts is “keeping precepts for pleasant recompense, for the sake of sexual desire, like a disguised appearance.” One seeks birth in heaven or wealth among humans. “A disguised appearance” means “inwardly desiring another’s body and outwardly pretending affection and friendliness.” Here the text cites Ānanda’s words to Nanda:

　　“Like rams butting one another, they draw back before surging forward;
　　you keep precepts for the sake of desire, and your action is just the same.
　　Though the body can keep precepts, the mind is pulled by desire;
　　this karma is not pure—what use are such precepts?”

A ram preparing to strike first draws back. Its retreat is for the sake of the blow. For someone keeping precepts for the sake of desire, the more impressive the observance, the more fully desire is being stored. The verse therefore presses to the end: the body holds the precepts, the mind is led by desire—what are those precepts for?

Pure precepts form a long chain: “All good dharmas have precepts as their root. One who keeps precepts has no remorse; without remorse there is joy; with joy the mind is happy; with happiness the mind becomes unified; from unification arises true wisdom; with true wisdom comes disenchantment; with disenchantment, dispassion; with dispassion, liberation; with liberation, nirvāṇa.” Each link naturally gives rise to the next, and the starting point is simply “no remorse.” The difference between purity and impurity lies not in the rule but in where the rule leads.

Wisdom is likewise twofold. The outsider names people publicly recognized as lofty: “If the wise are highest, Udraka and the others are highest.” The author answers, “Wisdom too is of two kinds: impure and pure.” Impure wisdom is “impure because it binds one to the world, like an enemy who comes as a friend,” for “this wisdom turns back and binds.” An enemy “first pretends intimacy and attachment, then after a long time forms the wish to harm.”

It is never giving, precepts, or wisdom themselves that determine lesser, middling, and higher. It is the direction in which the mind practicing them moves.

9. The Dharma of Continued Course and the Dharma of No Continued Course

The outsider asks whether only wisdom increases birth and death, or whether giving and precepts do so as well. The author’s root statement answers: “Grasping merit and relinquishing evil is a dharma of continued course.” Vasu glosses the wording: “merit means meritorious recompense.” When the outsider asks why the root sūtra has only one word, merit, the author explains: “Merit names the cause and meritorious recompense the effect. Sometimes the cause is spoken of as the effect, and sometimes the effect as the cause; here the cause is spoken of as the effect.” He supplies two ordinary expressions: “He ate a thousand ounces of gold”—gold itself is not eaten, but food is obtained through it; and, on seeing a painting, “Those are good hands”—the painting was obtained through the hands. He then explains the other words: “grasping means attachment,” and “course means carrying a person constantly through birth and death.” The dharma of continued course is now complete in meaning. Merit is grasped, evil relinquished; good remains good, but the person continues walking among the five destinies.

Asked for the dharma of no continued course, the author answers: “Relinquishing both.” The explanation reads: “‘Both’ means meritorious and demeritorious recompense; ‘relinquishing’ means the mind does not cling. When the mind does not cling to merit, it no longer goes back and forth among the five destinies. This is a dharma of no continued course.” Only here does the chapter title “Relinquishing Demerit and Merit” fully land. The mode of relinquishment is “the mind does not cling.” Merit is not destroyed; it is no longer taken as something one can own.

10. Why Merit Must Be Relinquished

The outsider defends merit in four successive rounds. First: “Merit should not be relinquished because its recompense is excellent, and no reason has been given.” He cites the Buddha: “Bhikṣus, do not fear merit.” The author answers: “When merit ceases, there is suffering.” “When meritorious recompense decays, separation from what is enjoyed produces great grief and suffering.” The Buddha also taught that “pleasant feeling is pleasant when it arises and while it abides, but suffering when it ceases.” As for not fearing merit, the author accepts the citation directly: merit “assists the path and should be practiced,” while another saying states, “Even merit should be relinquished, how much more demerit.” This is the chapter’s pivot. The same merit should be practiced while assisting the path and relinquished when appropriated as one’s possession.

Second, the outsider invokes symmetry: if the cessation of merit is suffering, the arising and abiding of demerit should be pleasure. The author answers, “While demerit abides, there is suffering.” Demeritorious recompense is “suffering when it arises, how much more while it abides.” The Buddha taught, “Painful feeling is suffering when it arises, suffering while it abides, and pleasure when it ceases.” The author returns the symmetry: “Why not say that because merit and demerit oppose one another, the cessation of demerit is pleasure while its arising and abiding are suffering?”

Third, the outsider produces permanent merit: “Permanent merit has no condition for relinquishment and therefore should not be relinquished.” He offers horse sacrifice as proof: “One who can perform the horse sacrifice crosses aging and death; the meritorious recompense and place of birth are permanent.” The author answers: “Merit should be relinquished because it has two marks.” First come the two marks. Merit “can give pleasure and can give suffering.” It is “like food mixed with poison, delicious when eaten and painful when digestion begins.” The poison is already within the delicious bite. Or it is “like drawing near a fire: stopping the cold is pleasure, moving still closer until the body burns is suffering.” The fire has not changed; only the distance has. The same thing can give pleasure and suffering. That is called two marks; because it has two marks, it is impermanent; because impermanent, it should be relinquished. Permanent recompense from horse sacrifice is then refuted. It “consists only of words and has no reason.” “The causes and conditions of the sacrificial action have a measure. When a worldly cause has a measure, the effect also has a measure. A small lump of clay makes a small jar.” A finite cause cannot produce an infinite effect. Two points are added: your gods still become angry, struggle, and distress one another, so they are not permanent; and sacrificial action “arises from causes and conditions and is therefore wholly impermanent.” The passage finally widens: “Since even pure contaminated merit is impermanent and should be relinquished, how much more merit mixed with demerit”—especially sacrifice containing killing. It also records that the Sāṃkhya scripture itself calls sacrificial practice “impure, impermanent, and marked by victory and defeat.”

Fourth, the outsider retreats to the final defense and asks an excellent question: “If merit is to be relinquished, it should not be produced.” “What wise person would perform painful labor for nothing? It is like a potter making a vessel and then breaking it.” The real question is whether practice has any meaning.

The author returns to the soiled garment: “The path of birth follows a sequence, like washing and dyeing a soiled garment.” “A soiled garment is washed first and dyed only after it is clean; its cleaning was not wasted,” because “dyeing has a sequence and a dirty garment cannot take dye.” The three movements then align: “first remove the stain of demerit, next perfume the mind with merit, and only afterward receive the dye of the path to nirvāṇa.” The potter’s simile mistakes production and destruction for two ends of the same act. Washing and dyeing show instead that the earlier step conditions the later. The merit later relinquished must first have perfumed the mind so the dye of the path to nirvāṇa can take.

11. The Signless Is Supreme

The final question is exact: “On what does the relinquishment of merit rely?” “One relies on merit to relinquish evil; on what does one rely to relinquish merit?” The outsider has finally grasped the shape of the path. Relinquishing evil has a ladder; where does the foot stand when relinquishing merit? The treatise author gives his final root statement: “The signless is supreme.”

The explanation has three movements. First it orders the destinations: “Those who grasp merit are born among humans and gods; those who grasp demerit are born in the three bad destinies; therefore signless wisdom is supreme.” Grasping either still remains within birth. Next it defines the signless: “The signless means not recollecting any mark, leaving every appropriation behind, and clinging in mind to no dharma of past, future, or present.” Finally it explains how the signless can serve as reliance: “Because all dharmas lack intrinsic nature, there is no place upon which to rely. This is called the signless. Through this skillful means, merit can be relinquished.”

The outsider asks for firmer footing, but the author gives nonreliance. If one must still rely on something else in order to relinquish merit, one has merely exchanged merit for another object of grasping.

The chapter closes with the Buddha’s words: “Apart from the three gateways to liberation, the highest benefit cannot be obtained.” It then cites the Buddha addressing the bhikṣus: “If someone says, ‘Without using emptiness, the signless, or the wishless, I wish to know and see and yet be free of overweening pride,’ that person speaks empty words without reality.”

The chapter begins with homage, passes through the long dispute over auspicious and inauspicious, distinguishes stopping from practicing, cuts giving, precepts, and wisdom into pure and impure, and follows four defenses of merit before landing here. The outsider first wanted an ‘auspiciousness’ that established itself and spread outward. The author gives him a ‘signless’ that appropriates nothing at all.

12. What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Chapter?

First, distinguish stopping from practicing: “Stopping has rest as its mark; practice has action as its mark. Their natures and marks oppose one another.” Refraining from harm cannot replace doing good, and much good cannot cover harm that has never stopped.

Second, see where your own mind is headed. “Like trade in a marketplace,” “like a disguised appearance,” and “like an enemy who comes as a friend” each pose the same question: does the wisdom being learned loosen bonds, or does it “turn back and bind”?

Carried Forward

This is the first of the Hundred Treatise’s ten chapters, and three places within it point beyond the chapter itself. When judging non-Buddhist austerities, the text says “this matter will be explained in detail later,” establishing a judgment without closing the case. While refuting the elephant’s hand, it twice says “as explained in the refutation of difference” and “as explained in the refutation of unity.” Those refutations do not occur in this chapter; only their conclusions are used here. This chapter is not an isolated debate but the entrance to the whole treatise.

The chapter is titled “Relinquishing Demerit and Merit,” yet more than half teaches stopping evil, practicing good, and purifying giving, precepts, and wisdom. There is no contradiction. What is relinquished is grasping, not practice: “relinquishing means the mind does not cling.” The soiled garment must still be washed, and merit must still perfume the mind. “The cleaning was not wasted.” But when the time comes to receive the dye of the path to nirvāṇa, one cannot keep clutching the achievement of having washed the garment.

The previous chapter took apart the single word “auspicious.” What this chapter takes apart is far larger. The outsider opens by pushing back the whole teaching of emptiness: “One should not say that all dharmas are empty and markless, because self and the other dharmas exist.” You say that all dharmas are empty and markless, but there is self, and there are all those dharmas.

The treatise author does not begin by explaining emptiness. He first asks in reply: “If it is absent and one says it is absent, what fault is there?” If self truly exists and one says it does not, that is a wrong and harmful view; but if it is originally absent and one says it is absent, where is the fault? Then he gives only one sentence as the method of the chapter: “Examine it truly: in fact, there is no self.” The conclusion is not pronounced before the inquiry; it is stated after the inquiry.

The outsider therefore presents the self his schools establish, and the treatise author questions it all the way to the final sentence: “Therefore, do not cling to language.”

1. What Are They Establishing?

First see clearly what is being posited, lest the treatise author be mistaken for denying that people see and know.

Kapila’s path first lays out the twenty-five principles: “From primordial obscurity arises awareness; from awareness arises ego-mind; from ego-mind arise the five subtle elements; from the five subtle elements arise the five great elements; from the five great elements arise the eleven faculties.” Above this sequence it installs something else: “Self is the lord—permanent, having awareness as its mark, centered, ever abiding, neither broken nor undone, and gathering all dharmas.” It is lord and permanent, has awareness as its mark, pervades without destruction, and gathers every dharma. Knowing these twenty-five principles brings liberation; “one who does not know them does not leave birth and death.”

Ulūka’s path takes another route. Rather than establishing self through a sequence of production, it infers it from present phenomena: “From such marks as inhalation, exhalation, blinking, and life, one knows that self exists”; further, “Because self is the locus upon which desire, anger, pain, pleasure, wisdom, and the rest depend, one knows that self exists.” Breathing, blinking, being alive, joy and anger, pain and pleasure—all must have some substrate. Thus he says: “Therefore self truly exists; how can one say it is absent?”

Both schools want the same thing: behind all dharmas, a permanent and unchanging lord that knows. They differ only over its relation to knowing—Sāṃkhya says, “Awareness is the self”; Vaiśeṣika says, “Cognition differs from self.” The entire chapter follows these two routes.

2. To Say They Are One: What Is Permanent Cannot Keep Impermanent Awareness

The treatise author first closes off every evasion with a question: “Are self and awareness one, or are they different?” The outsider answers that they are one.

The first root sentence immediately falls: “If awareness is self’s mark, self is impermanent.” The reason is already at hand. Heat is the mark of fire: “As heat is the mark of fire, since heat is impermanent, fire too is impermanent.” If the mark is impermanent, what it marks is likewise impermanent. As for whether awareness is impermanent, the treatise author gives four grounds: “because its marks differ, because it belongs to causes and conditions, because formerly absent it now exists, and because, having existed, it returns to absence.” Painful and pleasant awareness have different appearances; awareness awaits causes and conditions; it was absent before and exists now; after existing, it returns to absence. None of these four requires evidence from elsewhere. Each can be seen in awareness itself.

The outsider retreats one step: self is “permanent because unarisen”—only what bears the mark of arising is impermanent, and self does not bear that mark. The treatise author makes the retreat binding: “If so, awareness is not self’s mark.” You say that self is permanent, while awareness is impermanent, so the two must differ. Refuse their difference, and self becomes impermanent along with awareness.

Next he forces out the claim of pervasion. Self is said to pervade, but awareness does not—“because awareness operates in one place.” In your teaching self pervades everywhere, so awareness ought to “operate throughout the five destinies at one time”; yet awareness operates only in one place. If one insists that awareness is the mark of self, “self is equal to awareness” and becomes nonpervasive with it. Fire does not have a mark that is both hot and not hot, and self likewise “should not possess the marks of both pervading and not pervading.” If it must still pervade, two marks have to be admitted: “If one takes it to pervade, it then has the marks of awareness and nonawareness”—“where self falls in a place of awareness, it is aware; where it falls in a place without awareness, it is unaware.”

The outsider brings out “Because its power pervades, there is no fault”: even where awareness has no function, its power remains. The treatise author answers, “Because power and that which has power are not different.” Where the power of awareness exists, awareness should function, yet it does not. As for saying that a power remains where no function occurs, “there is only this statement”—a sentence with no corresponding fact. The outsider adds that “the power of awareness functions when causes and conditions conjoin,” but this addition hands over the self: “because it falls under the mark of arising.” What functions only when conditions meet belongs to conditions; what belongs to conditions falls under arising; and if awareness and self are not different, self too bears the mark of arising. Permanence is worn away by its own explanations.

3. Lamp and Color: Two Analogies That Cannot Rescue the Claim

The outsider tries a lamp: a lamp illuminates an object but does not make it, so conditions can make awareness function without producing awareness. The treatise author’s answer is concrete: “Although a lamp does not illuminate jars and the rest, the jars can still be obtained and put to use.” When unlit, a jar remains there, touchable and usable; but “when causes and conditions do not conjoin, awareness cannot be obtained,” and self cannot experience pain or pleasure. The two sides of the analogy do not correspond: on one side the unilluminated object remains, while on the other the unconditioned awareness is absent.

The outsider substitutes color: color exists beforehand but is not manifest without a lamp; awareness exists beforehand but is not manifest before conditions conjoin. The treatise author answers, “Because its own mark is not clear.” Before illumination a person may not apprehend the color, but “the mark of color is itself clear”—the color’s own mark is not missing because the person does not see it. Yet “the mark of your awareness is itself unclear.” The next step is tighter: “The mark of color is not a mark of color because a person knows it; therefore, when unseen, color is continually present.” Color does not become color by being known. Your self, however, takes cognition as its mark, so “one should not take a place without cognition to be cognition.” Moreover, in your teaching “cognition and awareness have one meaning.” To say awareness is unclear yet still remains awareness is to say that not knowing itself counts as knowing.

4. To Say They Differ: Conjunction Does Not Change a Name

When the Sāṃkhya route cannot continue, Vaiśeṣika takes its turn: “Cognition differs from self,” so self is neither impermanent nor unaware, because self conjoins with cognition. The analogy is “as with one who owns a cow”: a person conjoined with a cow is called a cow owner; self conjoined with faculty, mind, and object is called one who possesses cognition.

The treatise author gives the most economical answer in the chapter: “The mark of a cow abides in the cow, not in the cow’s owner.” The mark of cow remains in the cow and does not abide in the person who owns it. A person may spend a lifetime conjoined with a cow without becoming a cow; “only the cow is a cow.” In the same way, the mark of cognition abides in cognition, and self does not become cognition through conjunction. Therefore, “cognition alone can cognize; self does not cognize.” He adds: “For example, fire can burn, not the person who possesses fire.” The person holding a torch does not burn things; the fire burns.

The outsider recasts self as a user: a person possesses sight but uses a lamp to see; self possesses the capacity to know but uses cognition to know. The treatise author answers, “because cognition itself can cognize.” When faculty, mind, and object conjoin, cognition arises and cognizes the objects of color and the rest. Cognition itself is the cognizer, not an implement for someone else to use. If so, “if cognition itself can cognize, what further use is self?” The lamp does not fit either, “because a lamp does not cognize color and the rest.” A lamp is not a cognitive dharma and has never known color; only cognition cognizes color.

5. Four Borrowed Legs

Since conjunction does not change identity, the outsider offers four analogies in succession, each seeking an instance where conjunction changes a name.

First comes the horse: self conjoins with a horse’s body and is therefore called a horse. The treatise author answers, “The self in the body is not the horse”—“the horse’s body itself is the horse.” The horse’s body already is the horse; it needs no further self to be the horse. Moreover, you hold body and self to differ, so self also differs from the horse. “To use self as an analogy for self is to fall into defeat”: the very thing to be proved is being used as its evidence.

Second comes black cloth: blackness differs from cloth, but through conjunction the cloth is called black cloth. The treatise author first asks, on the analogy’s own terms: if conjunction warrants taking the other thing’s name, why, when cognition conjoins with self, “is cognition not called self”? Why should the name change in only one direction? He then shows the analogy violating its own scripture: “In your scripture blackness is a quality, and cloth is a substance. A substance does not become a quality, and a quality does not become a substance.” In your own classification, substance and quality never turn into each other.

Third comes the staff: a person conjoined with a staff is called a staff holder, while the staff is not called a person holder. The outsider uses this to claim that naming has a direction: self conjoined with cognition is called a knower, while cognition is not called self. The treatise author follows that direction and answers, “The staff holder is not the staff.” The direction is as you say, but the staff holder never becomes a staff. “The mark of cognition is in cognition, not in self; therefore self is not a knower.”

Fourth, the argument returns to Sāṃkhya. Its proponents say that if cognition and self differed, the faults above would follow, but they take “awareness as self’s mark,” so self is “continually aware, never unaware.” The treatise author answers, “If awareness is the mark of self, self is not one.” Awareness includes many states such as painful and pleasant awareness, so self too should be many. The outsider offers a crystal: “The one has many marks, as does crystal.” One crystal becomes blue, yellow, red, or white according to color; one awareness differentiates according to objects and becomes awareness of pain or pleasure. The answer is, “If so, demerit and merit have one mark.” Awareness that benefits others is merit, while awareness that harms them is demerit. If these two are one, demerit and merit have one mark, and “giving and stealing should likewise be one.” Then the crystal analogy itself is dismantled: crystal exists first and changes with color, but awareness “arises together with conditions”; further, “because the crystal arises and ceases anew at every moment, its marks are not one.” The very crystal offered to prove unity is not one.

The outsider substitutes the potter: one maker can produce many effects. The treatise author answers, “The potter has no difference.” The potter’s body indeed has one mark without difference, but he “differs from the jar, basin, and the rest.” The one in the analogy is an agent and the many are effects; the two sides remain separable. Yet awareness that benefits and awareness that harms “truly possess different marks,” while benefit and harm “do not differ from awareness.” The multiplicity lies in awareness itself.

6. Establishing Self through Inference—and the Interval without Cognition

The outsider changes routes and invokes inference: “Self truly exists, because there is an inferential mark of knowing.” This is a formidable move, supported with apt examples. One sees a person depart and later arrive elsewhere; sun and moon rise in the east and set in the west. Though their passage was not seen, “because they arrived there, one knows there was going.” In the same way, seeing qualities depend on substance, one can infer a self.

The treatise author does not circle around the point: “What does not cognize is not self.” Your self is “all-pervading and vast, while cognition is slight,” yet “in some places and at some times it does not cognize”—“place means outside the body; time means within the body: in sleep, fainting, and the like, at that time there is no cognition.” During sleep and unconsciousness, cognition is interrupted. On what basis does something defined by cognition still count as present through the interval in which cognition is absent?

The outsider answers with smoke and fire: when wood has become charcoal, smoke is absent but fire remains; so even if cognition is the mark of self, whether cognition is present or absent, self should always remain. The treatise author answers, “Because self can cognize.” If self is still to exist when cognition is absent, then it “cannot cognize and lacks the mark of cognition.” You have preserved its existence by surrendering its definition. Verification matters even more: when smoke is absent, one still “directly sees that fire is present,” and on that basis says fire remains; but as for self, “whether cognition is present or absent, no one is able to see it.” There is no second route by which it can be observed.

He next returns to the inference itself: “Because one sees a goer arrive there through the dharma of going.” That analogy works because goer and going appear in dependence, and one side is seen: “Apart from the goer there is no going; apart from going there is no goer who arrives there.” But “apart from self there is no cognition” has never been established—its second side has never been seen. Thus the treatise author closes forcefully: “One must not see a turtle and conceive hair; one must not see a barren woman and conceive a child; likewise, one must not see cognition and conceive a self.”

The outsider’s last analogy in this movement is a grasping hand: a hand sometimes grasps and sometimes does not, but it remains a hand when it does not grasp. The treatise author answers, “Grasping is not the hand’s mark”—“grasping is the hand’s activity, not its mark.” It is not known as a hand because it grasps. You, however, make cognition the very mark of self. Mark and activity belong to different levels, so the analogy does not connect.

7. When the Knife Comes Down

A different route begins: “Self certainly exists, because it experiences pain and pleasure.” A corpse has a body without experiencing either, so what experiences pain and pleasure must be something else.

The treatise author answers, “If distressed, it is also severed.” When a knife harms the body, distress arises. If the knife also reaches self and self shares the distress, it should be severable as well. The outsider answers, “Because it has no contact, it is like space.” When a house burns, the space inside is untouchable and cannot burn, but “only has heat.” When the body is cut, self within is untouchable and cannot be severed, but “only has distress.”

The treatise author presses out a harder consequence: “If so, there is no going.” If self is without contact, a person cannot move. “Going arises from thought and from the body’s movement,” but “the body has no thought, because it is not a cognitive dharma; self has no power of movement, because it is not a bodily dharma.” You have assigned the two necessities to two unrelated things, so going has nowhere to occur.

The outsider invokes the blind and the lame supporting one another and thereby moving. The treatise author answers, “Because their marks differ.” The blind and lame are two people, and “because there are two contacts and two thoughts, according to principle they can go.” Body and self “lack these two things”: self has no contact, body has no awareness, and their conjunction cannot supply the pair. The discussion also clarifies heat in space: space has no contact; “the body touches and experiences heat—it is not space that is hot.” To call space hot is only borrowed speech.

The outsider then offers the owner of a house: when a house burns, its owner is distressed but not burned. The treatise author answers, “It burns because it is impermanent.” The grass and wood in the house are “impermanent, and therefore both burn and become hot,” while space is “permanent, and therefore neither burns nor becomes hot.” The analogy draws its own boundary: what burns is impermanent, while what is permanent is not even heated. Thus the impermanent body is “both distressed and severed,” while permanent self is “neither distressed nor severed”; even distress cannot belong to it. Moreover, the owner of the house escapes burning because he is far from the fire, but “your scripture says self is all-pervading, so it too should be severed and destroyed.” What pervades has no distant place in which to stand.

8. If It Is the User, Why Are Some Doors Unusable?

Another proposal follows: “Self must exist, because it apprehends color and the rest.” The five faculties are not cognitive dharmas, so it is self that knows. Self uses the eye and the rest to know their objects, “as a person uses a sickle to harvest the five grains.”

The treatise author answers, “Why not see with the ear?” If the power to see belongs to self, it should function everywhere: “As fire can burn, it burns everywhere”; without a sickle, “the hand can also cut”; a house has six windows, and a person within “can see wherever he is.” Yet this user can see color through only one door. The outsider responds with the potter: an instrument has a fixed use; without clay one cannot make a jar, and without the eye one cannot see color. The treatise author answers, “If so, it is blind.” If self uses the eye, self differs from the eye; if different, “self has no eye.” How could the eyeless see? As for the potter, “apart from clay there is no further jar—clay itself is the jar; but eye and color differ.” Clay and jar are one thing at successive stages, while eye and color are two things. The analogy does not meet the claim.

The outsider cites two small events as evidence. Seeing another eat fruit makes saliva arise in one’s own mouth, so knowledge of flavor cannot come through the eye; and in darkness, without using the eye, bodily touch recognizes a jar previously recognized by sight. The treatise author’s answer is brief: the challenge concerning blindness has already refuted this. Moreover, “if the eye sees another eating fruit and saliva arises in the mouth, why do the other faculties not move?” If one knower gathers everything together, why does only one place respond?

The outsider next borrows the analogy of a person burning something: the person can burn but cannot do so apart from fire; self can see but cannot do so apart from the eye. The treatise author rejects the analogy’s premise: “A person has no mark of burning; fire itself can burn.” Wind rubs wood together, fire arises and burns mountain and marsh, yet “there is no agent.” The agent borrowed for the analogy was never present even within that analogy.

9. If Mind Can Know, Where Is Self?

Because a corpse has eyes yet does not see without mind, the outsider says that self must use the eye. The treatise author points directly to mind: “If with mind there is cognition and without mind there is no cognition, then mind need only operate through the doors of the eye and the rest to know. What further use is self?”

The outsider gives a reason to preserve self: mind cannot know itself; if one mind knew another mind, the sequence would have no end. But “my self is one,” so self knows mind and ends the regress. The treatise author answers, “Self also requires a self”: then who knows self? If self knows self, the regress is the same. His own position needs no such stopping point: “Present mind cognizes past mind; because mind-dharmas are impermanent, there is no fault.” Precisely because mind is impermanent and proceeds in continuity, a later thought knows an earlier thought; the chain connects and also comes to rest.

The outsider asks, “How can self be removed?” The treatise author answers, “As heat is the mark of fire.” Fire’s heat has no maker: “Fire’s nature is itself hot, and there is no fire that is not hot.” So too mind “has cognition as its mark” and knows by its own nature apart from self. Moreover, “because self and cognition differ, self should not cognize.” Once you separate cognition from self, the work of knowing no longer belongs to self.

The outsider invokes an infant’s inborn joy and distress as a continuity of remembered past habit and therefore evidence of a permanent self. The treatise author answers, “If it pervades, how can it recollect?” If self permanently pervades every object, there can be no time when it does not remember; from where, then, could recollection arise? If recollection arises everywhere, everything should be recalled simultaneously. If “recollection arises part by part,” self has parts, and what has parts is impermanent. The outsider says, “Because of conjunction, recollection arises”: when self and mind conjoin and their force activates, recollection arises. The answer is that if self has cognition as its mark, recollection should not need to arise; if it does not have cognition as its mark, recollection should not arise in it. Further, “if recollection cognizes”—if there is cognition when recollection arises and no cognition when it does not—then “recollection itself should be cognition. What further use is self?” Recollection has already done the work.

The outsider also cites recognition with the right eye of what the left eye saw. Under “a common answer concerning both eyes,” the treatise author brings back the earlier challenges in one sweep: partial cognition is not called cognition; if so, there is no cognition; if self pervades, how can it recollect; if recollection cognizes; why not see with the ear; if so, it is blind. Then he identifies the difficulty in this very example: just as “what the left eye sees should not be recognized by the right eye,” self likewise should not “see in this part and recognize in that part.”

10. The Final Sentence: Do Not Cling to Language

The final exchange concerns “part.” The outsider says that recollection is a dharma belonging to self, so self uses recollection to know. The treatise author answers, “Partial cognition is not called cognition.” If cognition arises in only one part of self, it is partial cognition, and partial cognition is insufficient to call self a knower.

The outsider protects the claim through bodily action: when a hand acts, the body is said to act; likewise, though self knows in part, self is called a knower. The treatise author answers, “If so, there is no cognition.” Your self pervades while mind is limited; cognition arises when self and mind conjoin, and so cognition is “as limited as mind.” If cognition in a small part warrants calling self a knower, “why do you not say that because the greater part does not cognize, self is called a nonknower?” The rule for naming cannot be used only in the favorable direction. As for bodily action, “because identity and difference between part and whole possessing parts cannot be obtained,” whether hand and body are one or different does not itself stand.

The outsider’s last analogy is a garment: when one part burns, it is called a burned garment. The treatise author answers, “Burning is likewise so.” A garment burned in one part should be called partially burned. If one burned part gives the whole garment the name “burned,” then because its greater part is unburned it should also be called unburned. The reason is concrete: “Most of this garment is unburned and remains genuinely usable.” The garment can still be worn, so the phrase “burned garment” has not exhausted what the garment is.

The entire chapter closes here: “Therefore, do not cling to language.”

Following the sequence from beginning to end, each name the outsider gives self is formed in this way—owner of a cow, black cloth, staff holder, burned garment: each is a common designation established from one part. Such designations work in the world. But when a designation is taken as something established by intrinsic nature, it must at once be permanent and impermanent, pervasive and nonpervasive, knowing and unknowing. From beginning to end, the treatise author never denies that people see, know, remember, or suffer. What he denies is an additional permanent knower standing outside these events.

Carried Forward

This is the first of the Hundred Treatise chapters directed toward non-Buddhist positions, and its mode of questioning runs through those that follow. “Refutation of Unity” and “Refutation of Difference” directly unfold the two routes of identity and difference repeatedly used here; “Refutation of the Faculties” and “Refutation of Atoms” take up faculty and object; “Refutation of Permanence” pursues the word “permanent.” Having already released hand and body through “because identity and difference between part and whole possessing parts cannot be obtained,” the present chapter leaves the full examination of identity and difference to the chapters devoted to them.

The title “Refutation of a Self” names what is refuted: the lord installed behind all dharmas. After reading the chapter, there is no need to seek another thing to occupy that seat—“Present mind cognizes past mind; because mind-dharmas are impermanent, there is no fault.” This sentence has already removed the seat itself.

The “Refutation of a Self” carried its examination into language, but the outsider has not left. He changes his route. No longer proving self from sensation or knowledge, he now proves it from possession: “A self must exist. Existence, unity, a jar, and the rest belong to self.” The reason is clean and brisk: “If self exists, what belongs to self exists; if self is absent, what belongs to self is absent.” Existence, unity, and jars now stand before the eyes. To whom do they belong? If there is possession, there must be an owner who possesses.

The treatise author’s answer has two parts. The first is one sentence: “Because self has already been found unobtainable.” The account from the prior chapter is not reopened. The real work lies in the second part: “Let us now consider existence, unity, a jar, and the rest. Do they exist as one, or as different? Both entail faults.”

This question moves the field. The outsider intended to use the three words “existence, unity, a jar” as ready-made ground. The treatise author first opens the ground itself. Your “existence,” your “unity,” and your “jar”—are these one thing or three? This chapter walks the path of “one”; the next walks “different.” Across fourteen exchanges, every time the outsider retreats, he raises another analogy—Indra’s three names; father and son; head and feet with body; color and the rest with jar; pines and cypresses with forest; elephants, horses, chariots, and infantry with army; lump of clay with jar and earth; long and short. Each time, the treatise author places that analogy on the same scale.

1. Indra, Śakra, and Kauśika

The outsider asks directly: “If existence, unity, jar, and the rest exist as one, what fault is there?” The treatise author gives the first root statement: “If existence, unity, and jar are one, then, as with one, all is established, or nothing is established, or everything is inverted.”

The adept Vasu first uses a ready example to explain “one”: “As with Indra, Śakra, and Kauśika: wherever Indra is, there are Śakra and Kauśika.” Three names stand over the same lord of the devas, so the names and their loci can be interchanged. If “existence,” “unity,” and “jar” are likewise three names, they must likewise substitute: “Wherever existence is, unity and jar are; wherever unity is, existence and jar are; wherever a jar is, existence and unity are.”

Once substitution opens, the faults walk out by themselves.

All is established. A garment exists, so it should be a jar—“because existence, unity, and jar are one.” Therefore “every existent object should be a jar; jars, garments, and all other objects should now all be one.” The adept Vasu then gives five successive “furthers,” pouring all properties of “existence” and “unity” into the jar, and all properties of the jar back into them. “Existence” is permanent, so unity and jar should be permanent. Saying “existence” already says unity and jar. Unity is number, so “existence” and jar should be numbers. The jar has a five-part body of color, sound, smell, taste, and touch, so “existence” and unity should have one too. The jar has form, offers resistance, and is impermanent; “existence” and unity must accept all of it. This path is called “as with one, all is established.” Everything can be established precisely because nothing can stop it.

Nothing is established. The same nondifference runs just as well in reverse: “If existence is everywhere and no jar is present there, then wherever the jar is present there should likewise be no jar, because existence and jar are not different.” Every particular thing has “existence” but is not a jar, so “the jar is now a nonjar.” If saying the single word “existence” does not include unity and jar, then saying “unity and jar” cannot include unity and jar. “If existence is not a jar, the jar too is not a jar.” From beginning to end the reason has only four words: “because existence is not different.”

Everything is inverted. “If one wishes to speak of a jar, one must speak of existence; if one wishes to speak of existence, one must speak of a jar.” Moreover, when jar is established, existence and unity are established, while when existence and unity are established, the jar is established—“because they are one.” First and last lose their footing. This is called “as with one, everything is inverted.”

The three paths are three ways of running one assumption. Once nondifference is established, establishment, nonestablishment, and inversion can all be inferred in the same way. A premise capable of yielding contrary conclusions at once cannot itself stand.

Here the received text inserts a note: “Four folios of argument about names cannot be translated.” The translation workshop plainly records four folios of argument about names that could not be rendered into Chinese. The lacuna remains a lacuna and is not filled by imagination.

2. Why Can Existence Be Present Where No Jar Is?

The outsider immediately supplements the thesis with an asymmetry: “There is no fault because an object both exists and is one.” “An object exists and is one; therefore, wherever a jar exists, existence and unity necessarily exist, but it is not the case that wherever existence and unity exist there is a jar.” Substitution is made one-way: speaking jar includes existence and unity; speaking existence and unity need not include jar.

The treatise author answers: “The jar and existence are two. Why two? Because there can be no jar.” Since existence and unity can be present where no jar exists, jar and existence are already two. Between a thing and itself, “it is here” and “it is absent there” cannot occur.

The outsider makes a finer distinction: “Because the jar-existence within the jar is determinate.” The “jar-existence” inside the jar is not different from the jar, but differs from the existence of garments and other objects. Jar and jar-existence therefore pervade each other, while universal “existence” need not be jar everywhere. This step has in fact already cut the original common “existence” into separate portions.

The treatise author therefore lays out universal and particular: “Existence is a universal character. Why? If one says ‘existent,’ people trust that jars and other objects are included. If one says ‘jar,’ they do not trust that garments and other objects are included. Therefore, jar is a particular character and existence a universal character. How could they be one?” The criterion falls upon trust—how many things the listener admits when a word is spoken. Say “existent,” and jars and garments enter together; say “jar,” and garments remain outside the door. What gathers broadly and what gathers narrowly cannot be one thing.

3. One Is Called Father Only After There Is a Son

The outsider offers the chapter’s most elegant analogy: “Like father and son.” “The same person is both a son and a father; in the same way, the universal character is also particular and the particular character also universal.” Two roles proceed together in one person without contradiction; why not universal and particular?

The treatise author’s answer has three words: “Because of the son, father.” “Before a son is born, one is not called a father; a son is born and only then does one become a father.” The name “father” was not originally present in that person’s own substance; it is attached only when a son exists. The adept Vasu adds: “This analogy agrees with me, while contradicting you.” Your analogy states precisely my principle: the two roles proceed together because each is established in dependence on another; no role supports itself.

The outsider wants it to prove one substance bearing two characters. What it actually proves is both characters depending on another.

4. People Plainly See a Jar—Does That Count as a Reason?

The outsider retreats to the most ordinary ground: “A jar should exist, because everyone trusts it.” “People in the world plainly see and trust that a jar has a use; therefore, a jar should exist.”

The treatise author does not dispute plain sight. He follows the outsider’s own nondifference through: “Because it is not different from existence, all is absent.” If jar is not different from existence, jar becomes universal rather than particular. “When the particular character is absent, the universal character too is absent. Only because particular characters exist is there a universal character; without particulars there is no universal. Since both are absent, all is absent.”

We must see this move clearly. It is the outsider, not the treatise author, who raises jar into “existence” and makes it universal. The jar the outsider wants to preserve is devoured by his own nondifference. The universal was supported by particular after particular. Once particulars are annexed, the universal also falls empty; in the end even the jar’s use that he wanted to prove cannot be preserved.

5. Why Is the Foot Not the Head?

The outsider moves to the body: “As parts such as the feet are called a body.” “Although parts such as the head and feet are not different from the body, the foot alone is not taken as the body. Likewise, although jar and existence are not different, jar is not universal.” Everyday life appears full of nondifference without equivalence.

The treatise author brings back the earlier names of the lord of the devas: “If the foot is not different from the body, why is the foot not the head?” “Because both are not different from the body. Just as Indra and Śakra are not different, and therefore Indra is Śakra.” If two things are both not different from a third, they must be not different from one another. Head and foot are both not different from body; foot should therefore be head.

The outsider makes a finer distinction: “Because the parts differ, there is no fault.” “Part and the whole possessing parts are not different; it is not the case that part and part are not different.” Part and whole may be nondifferent while parts differ from one another; therefore, head and feet are not one.

The treatise author answers: “If so, there is no body.” “If feet differ from head, and head differs from feet and the other parts, then only the various parts exist; no whole possessing parts remains to be called body.” Once the parts differ from one another, only a collection of mutually different things remains. Ask once more, “Where is the body?”—nothing can be pointed out. The previous step preserved the distinction between head and feet; this step loses the body.

6. Color and Jar, Pine and Forest, Elephants, Horses, Chariots, and Infantry with Army

The outsider offers another formulation: “Because many causes manifest one fruit, as color and the rest are the jar.” “Color alone is not the jar, nor is a jar separate from color; therefore, color and the other parts do not become one.” Neither identical nor separate sounds like a stable middle path.

The treatise author answers, “Like color and the rest, the jar too is not one.” “If the jar is not different from its five parts of color, sound, smell, taste, and touch, one should not speak of one jar. If one speaks of one jar, the parts such as color should likewise be one, because they are not different from the jar.” You yourself said nondifferent. The “one” in the one jar must therefore turn all five parts into one as well. If the five parts are not allowed to become one, neither can that “one jar” be spoken.

The outsider invokes army and forest: “A pine alone is not the forest, nor is a forest separate from pine; an army is the same.” The treatise author answers, “A collection is like the jar,” sending the same sentence back unchanged: “If pines, cypresses, and the rest are not different from the forest, one should not speak of one forest. If one speaks of one forest, pines, cypresses, and the rest should likewise be one, because they are not different from the forest.” Nor does he refute only once: “The roots, stalk, branches, nodes, flowers, and leaves of a pine should be refuted in the same way. Every object, including an army, should be refuted in this way.” Forest is divided into trees, tree into roots, stalk, branches, nodes, flowers, and leaves; the army of elephants, horses, chariots, and infantry follows likewise.

What is truly pursued here is neither jar nor forest, but the source of one’s right to “say one.” Each time the outsider changes analogy, he changes only the scale. The pivot of nondifference does not move, so the same scale weighs them all.

7. Does Refuting One Instead Fall into Many?

The outsider seizes an apparently forceful counterattack: “Because you accept many jars.” He adds: “You say that color and the other parts are many.” Since color and the other parts are many, jars become many; “therefore, wishing to refute one jar, you accept many jars.”

The treatise author answers: “It is not because color and the rest are many that jars are many.” “I state the fault in your position; I do not accept many jars. You yourself say the parts such as color are many, while apart from color and the rest no separate jar-dharma exists as their fruit.” Stating the consequence of another’s thesis does not mean accepting that consequence oneself. Moreover, “many” belongs to the outsider’s own statement; apart from color and the rest there is no other jar-dharma that could serve as their fruit.

8. If the Cause Remains, Does the Fruit Remain?

The outsider retreats from fruit to cause: “Fruit exists because the cause has not been refuted. Because a cause exists, fruit is established.” “You refute the jar as fruit but do not refute color and the rest as its causes. If a cause exists, fruit necessarily exists; there is no cause that produces no fruit.” He adds another layer: color and the rest are causes of the jar yet fruits of atoms. Since you accept color and the rest, cause and fruit are established together.

The treatise author answers, “If fruit is absent, cause too is absent.” First he applies the arithmetic of nondifference symmetrically. The jar is not different from its many parts and therefore should not be one; conversely, the many parts are not different from the jar and therefore should not be many. Both one and many lose their basis. Then he takes up the outsider’s own words: “Now that fruit is refuted, cause refutes itself, because in your doctrine cause and fruit are one.” You are the one who says cause and fruit are one; when half of that unity collapses, the other has nowhere to stand.

The treatise author next draws the chapter’s final great fault, giving another root statement: “The three times become one.” “The lump of clay is present, the jar future, and earth past. If cause and fruit are one, the lump should contain jar and earth; therefore, the three times become one.” If cause and fruit are nondifferent, the future jar already exists in the present lump and the past earth exists there too; three times are crushed into one. The last sentence weighs most: “The language of done, doing, and to be done is destroyed.” Not only a doctrine is destroyed, but speech. If done, doing, and to be done cannot be distinguished, no event can be discussed.

9. Mutual Dependence Cannot Rescue Unity

The outsider makes a final move: “Because cause and fruit are established in mutual dependence, like long and short.” “Short is seen by reason of long and long by reason of short. Likewise, the lump of clay is a cause when viewed in relation to the jar and a fruit when viewed in relation to earth.” He wants to say cause and fruit are relative roles rather than substances, so he need not accept the fault of making the three times one.

The treatise author’s answer searches three places for the character of long: “Because it depends upon another, is contrary, and bears both faults, the character of long exists neither in long, nor in short, nor in their conjunction.” Long does not contain long, “because it depends on another; by reason of short it is called long.” Short does not contain long, “because their natures and characters conflict”; “if short contained long, it would not be called short.” Their conjunction does not contain long, because “it bears both faults.” “The character of short is the same.”

The final sentence closes lightly and heavily at once: “If neither long nor short exists, how could they be mutually dependent?” Mutual dependence requires two ends before they can depend on one another. Once each end is sought and found unobtainable, the line of dependence hangs in empty space. The outsider brought mutual dependence to rescue the intrinsic characters of long, short, cause, and fruit that he had already established. Once mutual dependence is examined, the rescuer instead proves that the one to be rescued was never there.

10. What a Reader Can Carry Away from This Chapter

First, watch nondifference. The outsider changes analogy eight times, but the treatise author uses almost one scale only: “because existence is not different.” Whenever two things are said to be nondifferent, all their properties must be allowed to pass between them. If that cannot be accepted, nondifference must be withdrawn.

Second, once substitution opens, nothing can stop it. Indra and Śakra can exchange loci because beneath them there truly is only one lord of the devas. If the three words “existence, unity, jar” work the same way, a garment must be a jar and a jar must be a nonjar.

Third, from where comes the right to say one? The treatise author removes neither jar, body, forest, nor army from the world. He removes the “one” treated as nondifferent from the object while also standing by itself.

Carried Forward

This chapter joins its neighbors. In refuting the elephant’s trunk, the “Relinquishing Demerit and Merit” twice points outside itself, saying that refutations of unity and difference appear elsewhere and only borrowing their results there. One of those places is this chapter; the other is the following “Refutation of Difference.” Once this chapter has walked the path of unity, the outsider’s remaining path is difference.

The opening statement, “A self must exist, because existence, unity, a jar, and the rest belong to self,” also reminds us that this long argument about jars is not a study of vessels. From beginning to end, the outsider wants an owner capable of possession. When the treatise author opens the “existence, unity, jar” beneath “what belongs” all the way down to “how could they be mutually dependent,” that owner has nothing left to claim as its own.

In the preceding chapter, the treatise author pressed “unity” until it had nowhere to stand. The outsider therefore moves to the other side. If existence, unity, and jar cannot be said to be one, then let them differ. This chapter begins with the outsider’s question: “You said before that if existence, unity, and jar differ, this too entails faults. What sort of faults?” He wants the reason.

First set out the three terms on the field. A jar sits on the table. We say it “exists,” that it is “one,” and that it is a “jar.” The outsider maintains that these three names each refer to a real thing: jar belongs to the category dravya, one to the category guṇa, and existence is a universal character pervading all objects. Each is real in itself, each differs from the others, and afterward they conjoin into the jar before our eyes.

Throughout the chapter, the treatise author asks only one question: since they differ, by what can you join them again?

1. The First Price of Difference: All Three Fall Empty Together

Deva’s root statement has only five characters: “If existence and the rest differ, each is absent.” The adept Vasu unfolds it into an extremely orderly calculation.

“Since the jar differs from existence and unity, this jar neither exists nor is one.” Since the jar differs from existence, existence is absent from the jar; since it differs from unity, unity is absent from the jar. Likewise, “existence differing from unity and jar is neither jar nor one,” and “unity differing from existence and jar is neither jar nor existent.” The three names each stand apart and do not touch the others—“thus each is lost.”

Then comes a second level, sharper than the first: “If the jar is destroyed, existence and unity should not be destroyed. If existence is destroyed, unity and jar should not be destroyed. If unity is destroyed, existence and jar should not be destroyed.” The reason has only three words: “because they differ.” The analogy could not be more ordinary: “When this person dies, that person should not die.”

This sentence deserves a slow reading. Difference has a price: the fates of two truly different affairs do not implicate one another. Since you say jar and existence differ, when the jar shatters on the ground that “existence” should remain entirely unharmed; the jar is gone, but its “one” should remain. Yet no one in the world sees it this way. When the jar breaks, the existence of that jar is gone, and the unity of that jar is gone. One affair has broken. The jar before us refuses the difference the outsider wants.

2. Can the Move of Conjunction Rescue It?

The outsider’s rescue is conjunction: “Because existence and unity conjoin, an existent one jar is established.” Although the three differ, they can conjoin. “Because jar conjoins with existence, it is called existent; because jar conjoins with unity, it is called one.” As for their linked fates, he establishes a scheme: “Difference is of three kinds: conjoined difference, separate difference, and transformative difference.” Conjoined difference is like dravya and guṇa; separate difference like this person and that; transformative difference “like a lump of cow dung becoming a lump of ash.” His point is that only the difference between this person and that is unrelated. He means conjoined difference, and what is conjoined arises and ceases together: “When the jar is destroyed, unity is destroyed too; when unity is destroyed, the jar is destroyed too. Existence is not destroyed because it is permanent.”

The treatise author’s answer has two sections.

First comes arithmetic: “If so, there are many jars.” Jar conjoins with existence into one existent jar; jar conjoins with unity into one one-jar; “and the jar itself is a jar.” Three jars now stand on the table. You wished to rescue one jar and rescued three.

The second section reaches the heart: “I wish to refute your difference; how can you use difference to prove difference?” The very matter under question is whether “difference” can be established, yet you bring forward a difference called “conjoined difference” as your reason. This does not answer; it treats what awaits proof as already proven. The treatise author says only: “You should state another reason.”

The outsider indeed gives another: “Because existence is a universal character and unity a guṇa, existence and unity are not the jar.” Existence is not jar because it is universal; unity is not jar because it is a guṇa; jar is dravya. He has separated the three still more cleanly. The treatise author’s answer is shorter still: “If so, there is no jar.” Existence is not jar; unity is not jar; and jar, because it is dravya, “is neither existence nor unity.” The object on the table neither exists nor is one—what is it? The cleaner the separation, the less remains.

The outsider seizes the earlier line and counterattacks: “You accept many jars.” You first said “many jars” to refute my one jar, so have you not now accepted many jars? The treatise author answers: “Because one is absent, many too is absent.” Those three jars were produced by your arithmetic, not established by me. The world “speaks of one jar, while you calculate it as many.” Once one becomes many, there is no one jar. “Because one jar is absent, many too is absent, since one comes before many.” He adds a cut straight to the root: “One is first among dharmas of number. If unity differs from the jar, the jar does not become one; because one is absent, many too is absent.” Many is counted beginning with one. Once you judge one an external thing, where can many begin?

3. Before Conjunction, Where Is the Jar?

The outsider retreats and narrows his claim. The jar is called existent because it conjoins with existence, but it is “not all existence.” He does not claim the jar is the whole of existence. The treatise author does not take up this softening and instead pushes one step back: “The jar should be a nonjar.” You say that existence itself is not the jar. “If the jar conjoins with a nonjar, why does the jar not become a nonjar?” If conjunction can give the jar existence’s properties, then since existence is “nonjar,” why does that property not pass over too?

The outsider answers cleverly: “Because absence cannot conjoin, it is not a nonjar.” A nonjar is an absent jar, and what is absent has nothing that can conjoin. Existence, however, really exists, so only existence can conjoin.

The treatise author follows this rule backward: “Because existence now conjoins with the jar.” Since absence cannot conjoin, before existence arrives to conjoin, is the jar existent or absent? If absent, “because an absent dharma cannot conjoin, it should not conjoin with existence.” It cannot even enter the conjunction and will never receive that existence. If already existent then, “What use is the later existence?” It already exists and needs no giver. The very rule established by the outsider—absence cannot conjoin—blocks the jar he wishes to save outside the door.

4. The Lamp: Does It Illuminate or Produce?

The outsider changes routes. Existence is not only the jar’s cause but discloses the jar: “as a lamp illuminates various objects.” Because existence illuminates it, we know there is a jar.

The treatise author answers through the lamp itself: “If existence can disclose like a lamp, the jar should already exist.” The sequence of lighting a lamp is obvious: “Objects exist first, and only then are illuminated by the lamp.” If you take a lamp as analogy, you must accept this sequence. Before existence conjoins with the jar, the jar should already stand there. Since it already does, “What use is the later existence?” Conversely, if before conjunction there truly is no jar and the jar exists only afterward, then “existence is a productive cause, not a disclosing cause.” It is not an illuminator but a maker, and the lamp analogy collapses by itself. An analogy cannot be borrowed by halves.

Then comes a short question that sees to the bottom: “If mark and marked establish one another, why does one not become two?” You take existence as the jar’s mark and know jar through that mark. But “an object is not established apart from mark and marked.” Mark and marked form a pair; apart from the other, neither is established. Existence itself therefore needs another mark through which it can be known; that mark requires another without end. If you say existence can be known without another mark, do not make things difficult for the jar: “jars and the rest should be the same,” requiring no borrowed existence. The treatise author finally retrieves the lamp: “As a lamp illuminates itself and does not borrow an external illumination, the jar too exists by itself and does not await an external existence.” The lamp you raised proves precisely that the jar does not need your “existence.”

5. Body and Feet: Is a Whole Hidden within the Part?

The outsider offers another analogy, one that directly presses the core of the chapter’s second half: “Like the mark of a body.” “From the foot as a part, one knows there is a whole possessing parts called body; the foot need not seek another mark.” Likewise, seeing existence lets one know there is a jar.

The treatise author asks one question: “If the whole possessing parts is complete within a part, why are the feet not in the head?” You say the whole body resides in the foot as a part. Does it reside there wholly complete, or as one divided portion? If wholly complete, “feet should exist in the head, because the body-dharma is one.” The body is one; if that one whole exists entirely in the foot, it exists entirely in the head, and feet naturally should exist in the head. If divided portion by portion, Deva’s root statement continues: “The whole possessing parts is like a part.” The portion of body in the foot equals the foot as a part, and so for all remaining parts. Then “whole and parts become one, and no whole possessing parts remains that can be called body.” The alleged whole is only these parts themselves; no separate thing called body remains.

The last sentence weighs most: “Because the whole possessing parts is absent, the parts too are absent.” The name “part” is established in relation to a “whole possessing parts.” Apart from a whole, of what is it a part? Once the whole is dismantled, those things styling themselves “parts” are no longer parts; they are simply themselves.

6. Atoms, Threads, and Barren Women

The outsider retreats to the smallest ground: “Because atoms exist.” “Atoms have no parts and do not reside within parts. Because atoms aggregate, they can produce such fruits as jars.” Since aggregation can produce fruit, a fruit—a whole possessing parts—must exist.

The treatise author first establishes a dilemma: “If all gather into the jar, all are the jar.” When atoms aggregate into a jar, “if all gather into the jar, every atom should wholly be the jar. If not all gather into the jar, all are nonjars.” If the whole participates, all atoms in the world must become this jar; if not the whole, then the participating atoms cannot separately count as jar.

The outsider offers his strongest analogy: “Like the gathered power of threads and drops.” “Individual threads cannot bind an elephant; individual drops cannot fill a jar. Many gathered can.” Everyone has seen this: one thread cannot bind an elephant; a bundle can.

The treatise author’s answer is also familiar to everyone: “Because it is indeterminate.” “Each barren woman cannot bear a child, each blind person cannot see form, and each grain of sand cannot produce oil; many gathered together likewise cannot.” Quantity itself does not produce power. Whether aggregation can generate a function is not decided by number. If “many gathered can” is your general rule, barren women, blind people, and grains of sand stand in its way.

The outsider quickly sees the difference and adds: “Because each part has power, it is not indeterminate.” Each thread and drop already contains a portion of the power to bind an elephant or fill a jar. Barren women, blind people, and sand lack power in every portion; therefore, they cannot serve as analogies.

It is a good repair, but one sentence returns it to the original place: “Because parts and the whole possessing parts entail the faults of identity and difference.” You say each part already contains that portion of power. Does the power belong to the part, or to the whole possessing parts? “Whether one or different, these faults have already been refuted.” Then time is calculated again: “If before the whole possessing parts exists, the parts are unobtainable, how could they have active power? If the whole already exists, what use is the power of the parts?” Before the whole exists, these things are not yet anyone’s “parts,” and that portion of power has no owner. Once the whole exists, the power has no work to do. You have written the not-yet-established whole in advance into the name “part.”

7. Who, Ultimately, Is Dismantling the World?

At the argument’s end, the outsider changes his tone. No longer discussing reasons, he attacks character: “You are one who destroys dharmas.” “People in the world all see jars and other objects, yet you refute them through many causes and conditions.”

The treatise author answers in two steps. First he settles the account: I have refuted nothing; I merely followed you. “You say existence differs from jar. I say that if existence differs from jar, there is no jar.” You first established difference. The jar was discarded by your difference.

Second, the treatise author turns the accusation around: “You see absence as existence and existence as absence, and so forth.” “You resemble one who destroys dharmas and are even worse.” The reason can be tested before the eyes: “Parts such as head and feet conjoined are visibly the body, yet you say this is not the body and that apart from these exists another whole possessing parts called body.” This head, hands, feet, and torso plainly are what we call body; you insist this is not body and posit another unseen body. “Wheels, axle, and the rest conjoined are visibly a chariot, yet you say another chariot exists apart from them.” Wheels and axle gather together and everyone says it is a chariot; you say the chariot is elsewhere, apart from these.

What is visible before the eyes, you say is not; what cannot be seen, you say exists. Who is dismantling what the world sees? The treatise author’s judgment is four words: “Therefore, you are the liar.”

8. What This Chapter Lets One Carry Away

First, difference too has a price. People call two things different because they want distinction, yet do not want their fates separated. True difference, however, means true nonimplication: “When this person dies, that person should not die.” When a jar breaks, its “existence” disappears with it. This present fact proves that independently real existence cannot stand.

Second, using what must be proven as the reason is no answer. “I wish to refute your difference; how can you use difference to prove difference?” The outsider’s conjoined difference, disclosing cause, and power in each part commit the same fault three times: the reason cited already conceals the conclusion it was meant to prove.

Third, emptiness does not dismantle what is before the eyes; it dismantles the shadow behind it. Wheels and axle conjoined are called chariot; head and feet conjoined are called body; conditions conjoined are called jar. The treatise author moves none of these. What he moves is the “other chariot existing apart from these.”

Carried Forward

This chapter and the preceding use the same materials and walk opposite extremes. The preceding chapter stops determinate unity; this chapter stops determinate difference. Only together does their full meaning appear. One is not asked to choose a stable point between identity and difference, but to release both paths at once. Here the treatise meets the refutations of identity and difference in the Treatise on the Middle and the challenges concerning parts and whole in the Twelve Gate Treatise.

Twice the chapter itself points beyond its boundaries. When refuting partless atoms it says “they will be refuted later,” speaking only briefly and not concluding the matter. Of the faults concerning part and whole it says “already refuted,” using the result of the preceding chapter. Thus the “Refutation of Difference” is not an isolated debate; the two chapters on unity and difference complete one task together.

The “faculties” in “Refutation of the Faculties” are not emotions but the five powers of eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body that apprehend objects. This chapter asks one question only. I plainly see now—does that fact prove that a thing called “eye,” a thing called “color,” and a thing called “mind” each really stand there and then gather, causing seeing to occur?

The outsider’s thesis is exceptionally stable, so stable that it remains what most people inwardly assume today: “Dharmas belonging to self determinately exist, because they are present before us.” The adept Vasu unfolds it: “Because faculties, objects, and mind conjoin, awareness arises. This awareness is present awareness. Because this awareness really exists, faculties, objects, and mind exist.” He does not begin with doctrine but with what seems most undeniable. You are seeing right now and cannot evade it. Since awareness is present and real, the three conditions producing that awareness must of course be real. The outsider uses the reality of the result to infer backward to the reality of its conditions. From beginning to end, the chapter refutes this backward inference.

Does Seeing Come First, or Knowing?

The treatise author’s first root statement has only six Chinese characters: “Once color has been seen, what use is arising awareness?”

The eye seeing color and awareness arising in mind—which do you place first? If seeing comes first, “suppose the eye first sees color and awareness arises afterward; what further use is awareness?” The affair of seeing is complete; the later awareness has no work. If awareness comes first, that does not work either: “Without seeing color, the causes and conditions are absent, and arising too is absent.” You yourself say awareness arises only when faculty, object, and mind conjoin. Before color is seen, the three have not conjoined. How can what is unconjoined produce awareness? The adept Vasu states this impasse plainly: “Because they have not conjoined, awareness should not arise.”

Notice that the treatise author measures the outsider by the outsider’s own rule. The outsider established that conditions precede results, yet requires a result to precede its conditions.

The question conceals a still subtler layer. The outsider establishes a separate knowing beyond seeing because inwardly he wants an experiencer. The eye merely illuminates; knowing is where “I” receive it. But once divided into two affairs, temporal order must be explained. If seeing is finished and knowing follows, knowing repeats an already completed affair. If knowing precedes seeing, it arises without support. Every account that installs a separate experiencer within one event encounters this difficulty of before and after. The treatise author has not imposed it; the account incurs the debt as soon as it speaks.

Simultaneity Is No Exit Either

The outsider naturally thinks of it: “What fault if they arise simultaneously?” Let them happen at once.

The root text answers: “Arising and nonarising do not arise simultaneously together, because existent, because nonexistent, and because already refuted.” Simultaneous arising still requires asking what the situation was before this instant. If seeing and awareness already existed, they need not arise again: “If seeing and awareness already existed, they should not further arise, because they exist.” If previously absent, they cannot arise: “If previously absent, they likewise should not arise, because absent.” Moreover, absence has no mutual dependence: “If absent, there is no mutual dependence and no arising.” If half existent and half absent, the preceding two root statements have each already refuted it. Besides, “How could one dharma be both existent and nonexistent?”

Then comes a closer cut: “If they arise simultaneously, awareness does not await seeing and seeing does not await awareness.” What the outsider wanted was “arising because of conjunction.” Conjunction means mutual dependence. Once he says each is simultaneously established, mutual dependence is gone and his own thesis collapses first. Neither before and after nor simultaneity stands; beneath the word “conjunction,” nothing really conjoining can be found.

Does the Eye Travel Outward?

The treatise author turns to something more concrete: “Does the eye reach color and see, or see without reaching color?” Does your conjunction mean the eye runs outward and meets color, or does not run outward?

If it runs: “If the eye travels, what is distant is seen later.” This is the chapter’s most memorable passage. Travel takes time. “Distant color should be seen later and near color sooner. Why? Such is the nature of traveling.” Yet raise your eyes now: “The near jar and distant moon are seen at the same time; therefore one knows the eye does not travel. If it does not travel, there is no conjunction.” The jar on the table and moon at the edge of the sky enter the eye in one instant. If the eye truly goes out to apprehend them, they should not arrive together.

If it does not run, the difficulty reverses at once: “Why can it see what is near but not what is far? The distant and near should be seen simultaneously.” If it can apprehend without contact, why should distance count? If eye-power truly is an intrinsic power not awaiting contact, far and near are indistinguishable to it. Yet everyone knows distant writing cannot be read. Reaching and not reaching attack from two sides of the same facts. Admit distance has a function, and the eye must travel; admit the eye does not travel, and one must explain how distance still limits it. The outsider answers neither, because the eye he needs can apprehend objects by itself without depending on other conditions.

Even Granting Travel, It Still Cannot Travel

Even if the eye is allowed to travel, the treatise author asks another layer: “Does it go after seeing, or without seeing?”

If it goes after seeing, “Once seen, what further use is going?” “If the eye has already seen color, the affair is complete; what further use is going?” If it goes without seeing, “In going without seeing, it fails to apprehend the intended.” Because “the eye lacks awareness, intending east, it goes west.” The eye itself does not know; how does it recognize the road? It wants what is east yet walks west.

Now look at which end holds the eye: “Nor can it apprehend where the eye is absent.” If the eye travels to the color, “the body has no eye. Because the body has no eye, nothing is apprehended here.” If the eye remains in the body while apprehending color, no eye exists where the color is, and nothing is apprehended there. Moreover, if the eye can apprehend without traveling, it “should see color in the heavens and color beyond obstructions.” Everything beyond walls and in the heavens should be visible. It is not. Neither traveling nor not traveling works. The point is not to choose one, but that the image of an eye-substance traveling by itself to apprehend an object cannot stand.

Can the Eye See the Eye?

The outsider changes routes and speaks of intrinsic nature: “Because seeing is the eye’s character.” “Seeing is the eye’s character; among its referents it has the power to apprehend, such is its intrinsic nature.” Seeing is the eye’s own nature; no external explanation is needed.

The treatise author follows the rule of intrinsic character through: “If seeing is the eye’s character, the eye sees itself.” “As fire has heat as its character, heats itself, and can heat another.” Because fire has heat as its character, fire is itself hot and heats other things. This is what “character” means. If the eye has seeing as its character, it should first see itself. “Yet it does not see; therefore, seeing is not the eye’s character.”

The outsider brings an analogy to rescue it: “Like a finger.” “A fingertip cannot touch itself.” A function can exist without reaching itself; therefore, the eye can have seeing as its character without seeing itself. One sentence separates them: “Touching is the finger’s activity, not the finger’s character.” Touch is something a finger does, not its intrinsic nature. You speak of the eye’s character. An analogy counts only if it matches the level, and therefore “the finger analogy is incorrect.”

This section deserves a slow reading. The outsider retreats to intrinsic nature to escape every previous difficulty. If seeing is an inborn power of the eye, there is no need to ask whether the eye travels or reaches. The treatise author does not dispute the fact that eyes do not see themselves. He reminds the outsider that “character” was the outsider’s own word, and character has its rule: fire’s heat does not await another, so fire is first hot in itself. Once seeing is established as the eye’s character, seeing must be completed within the eye without waiting for color. Yet the eye never sees itself. The outsider uses intrinsic nature to dispense with conditions; the treatise author lets intrinsic nature proceed once according to its own rules. At the end, that intrinsic nature disappears by itself. The finger analogy fails not because it is crude but because it exchanges activity and intrinsic character. A finger does not touch itself precisely because touch occurs only when the finger meets an object. If the eye likewise sees only upon meeting color, one has admitted that seeing is not the eye’s own character.

If Mind Truly Travels, This Body Is a Corpse

Another route: “Because light and mind travel, color is seen.” Not the eye, but eye-light and mind travel together.

The treatise author answers: “If mind travels and reaches color, there is no awareness here.” If mind reaches color, mind is there. “If mind is there, the body has no mind and is like a corpse.” When you look at the moon, your body is not emptied. Further, “mind in fact does not travel, because it apprehends far and near simultaneously.” The same measure as “near jar and distant moon” returns. The adept Vasu adds recollection: people think of past and future, yet “thought does not reside in past or future, because it does not travel when arising.” Mind’s ability to take a distant object does not mean mind moved there.

The outsider retreats: “Mind remains in the body.” “Although mind remains in the body, it can know what is distant.” The treatise author returns the outsider’s own condition: “If so, there is no conjunction.” Mind remains in the body while color is there. “Because color is there, there is no conjunction; without conjunction, color cannot be apprehended.” Either mind goes and the body is empty, or it does not go and no conjunction occurs. Both ends are bound by the outsider’s thesis.

Conjunction Remains, but the Seer Disappears

The outsider’s final synthesis is ingenious: “Because mind, light, and color conjoin, there is seeing.” Eye and mind conjoin in the body, then “through mind’s power, eye-light is made to conjoin with color.” Thus color is seen and conjunction preserved.

The treatise author’s answer is the chapter’s landing point: “If seeing arises because of conjunction, there is no seer.” You may have conjunction. But what you originally wanted was not merely conjunction; it was the apprehender hidden behind conjunction who could act as master. Thus “if one says the eye alone sees color or mind alone apprehends color, this is incorrect.” No single item can be pointed out. The outsider still tries to recover: “Because you accept conjunction, apprehension of color is established.” Since you recognize conjunction, apprehension of color should exist.

The treatise author’s final root statement names all three: “Mind is not seeing, eye is not knowing, color is neither seeing nor knowing—how is there seeing?” Since mind differs from eye, “mind is not the character of seeing”; lacking that character, it cannot see the eye. The eye is “produced by the four great elements and therefore not the character of knowing”; without knowing, it cannot know color. Color is neither. When three things lacking both capacities gather, “even conjoined, how can they apprehend color?” The final line is: “Ear, nose, tongue, and body are refuted in the same way.” One faculty is fully refuted; the remainder follow the same method.

The wording must be exact here. The treatise author answers “there is no seer,” not “there is no seeing.” From beginning to end he accepts conjunction and even completes the outsider’s account—eye and mind within the body, the force of mind drawing eye-light into contact with color. He refuses only an apprehender standing outside conjunction yet collecting its fruit. The outsider’s proposal is ingenious precisely because it preserves conjunction but still expects a “who” to see within it. The treatise author therefore asks which item this “who” is. Mind? Mind is not seeing. Eye? Produced by the four great elements, it is not knowing. Color? It is neither. When none of three things can produce seeing and knowing, gathering them does not produce a master able to see and know. Conjunction explains only the occurrence of this event of seeing; it cannot explain a person who experiences it.

This does not say there is no seeing. The chapter never denies that near jar and distant moon are seen at the same time. What it denies is another master within that event who can see by itself without waiting for conditions. The outsider began with present awareness as evidence. The treatise author leaves the awareness and removes only the “intrinsic nature” inferred backward from it.

Carried Forward

This chapter specifically refutes the faculties that apprehend. The following “Refutation of Objects” turns to what is apprehended. Agent and object each receive a chapter; such is the treatise’s sequence. The final sentence, “Ear, nose, tongue, and body are refuted in the same way,” also shows that the base text does not repeat the argument faculty by faculty but completes the method with the eye alone.

Jizang’s Commentary on the Hundred Treatise explains phrase by phrase the chapter’s three movements: the order of seeing and knowing, whether the eye travels, and conjunction without a seer. The “Refutation of a Self” refuted a permanently abiding self that knows; this chapter refutes the mechanism of apprehension serving it. Once self does not stand, neither does its path of apprehension.

The preceding chapter refuted the apprehending faculties; this chapter turns to the objects they apprehend. The outsider begins with something to which everyone would assent: a jar is sitting right there and can be apprehended. “At present one directly sees that jars and other things can be apprehended. If the faculties cannot apprehend objects, by what could those objects be apprehended?” Since an object can be apprehended, both the apprehending faculties and their apprehended objects must exist.

From beginning to end, the treatise author never denies that people see a jar. He asks something else: how much is actually contained in the event called “direct seeing”? Through more than twenty exchanges, every sentence peels those two words back another layer.

To read this chapter, one must first distinguish bone from flesh. A short interlinear note reading “sūtra” marks Deva’s root statement, often only five or six characters long; the extended prose that follows is the adept Vasu’s unfolding explanation. The root statements in this chapter are especially abrupt because the dispute concerns not an entire doctrine but a single expression. Each time the outsider retreats one step, the treatise author strips one more layer from that expression: from jar to form, from form to atoms, from atoms to the four great elements, and finally from object to time. Only when retreat is no longer possible does the chapter give its sole affirmative phrase: “One attains lasting release.”

1. If Odor Cannot Be Seen, the Jar Is Not Directly Seen

The first root statement is exceedingly short: “Form alone is not the jar; therefore the jar is not directly seen.” The reason immediately follows: “The form in a jar can be directly seen, but its odor and the rest cannot. Form alone is not the jar; odor and the rest combine to constitute the jar.” A jar is not merely a mass of form; it is constituted by form together with odor and the rest. Yet what the eye obtains is only the aspect of form. Since “if the jar were directly visible, odor and the rest should also be directly visible; but they are not,” what is called seeing a jar is not seeing the jar.

The outsider at once concedes that only one part is seen, but maintains that one part is enough: “Because a part is apprehended, the whole is apprehended; this is known through belief”—“one part of the jar is visible, so the jar is called directly seen. Why? After seeing the jar, a person believes and knows, ‘What I see is a jar.’” He invokes the most ordinary experience: who glances at it yet dares not say that he sees a jar?

The author answers, “If a part is apprehended, not everything is apprehended.” The hinge is this: “At present, a part does not constitute the possessor of parts.” A part is a part, and the possessor of parts is the possessor of parts. If one part could genuinely stand for the whole, then “the parts consisting of odor and the rest should also be visible.” What remains visible is form alone, and “therefore the jar is not visible in its entirety.” The passage points outside the chapter at the end: “This matter is as explained in the refutations of unity and difference.” Whether part and whole are one or different has already been refuted earlier in the treatise; this chapter simply uses that result.

When the outsider says, “I believe and know that what I see is a jar,” he has in fact already revealed the point. His own word is believe, not see. What is seen is form; what is spoken is jar. The interval between them is filled from prior encounters with odor, taste, and touch and from knowing that this thing can hold water. The treatise author does not stop anyone from speaking this way. He merely exposes what has been supplied in that interval and teaches us not to enter it in the eye’s account.

2. Even Form Is Not Entirely before the Eyes

The outsider takes one step back: perhaps the jar is not fully seen, but form at least must be fully seen—“A jar exists and can be seen, because you accept that form is directly visible.”

The author answers, “If this part is directly seen, that part is not directly seen,” for one reason of only four characters: “because form has shape.” Shape entails this side and that side: “The part on that side is not directly seen because it is obstructed by this part; the other side is the same.” The front of the jar before the eye blocks its back, while its back in turn excludes the front; neither side is ever present at the same time. The author adds, “Furthermore, as said before, if a part is apprehended, not everything is apprehended; that earlier passage should answer this one.” The same blade just used on the jar works equally well on form.

The outsider therefore searches below for something with no parts: “Because an atom has no parts, the refutation is not exhaustive.” The author answers, “An atom is not directly seen,” and does so not in his own words but through the outsider’s scripture: “Your scripture says that an atom is not directly seen; therefore it cannot establish a dharma of direct visibility.” The partless thing you posit is, according to your own scripture, invisible. “If an atom too were directly visible, it would be refuted together with form.” Either it is invisible and cannot support direct seeing, or it is visible and so possesses shape and parts and falls together with form. Under this pressure the outsider has nowhere smaller to retreat.

This move deserves slow reading. The treatise author establishes no alternative account of atoms and says neither that atoms exist nor that they do not. He simply takes the scripture the outsider accepts and places it beside the outsider’s own claim. You wish to ground direct seeing in atoms, but your scripture expressly says that they are “not directly seen.” Something not directly seen cannot support the event of direct seeing. If you reverse yourself and call it directly seen, it will have shape and parts just like form, and the preceding two blades will fall unchanged. Both roads open to the outsider were paved by the outsider himself.

3. Everyone Believes It, and the Eye Has Not Yet Met It

The outsider turns to common belief: “A jar should be directly visible because people believe it”—“everyone believes that a jar is directly seen because it has a use.” The treatise author answers, “Direct visibility is absent; the jar is not thereby absent.” You have bound direct seeing and the jar into one thing and suppose that if it is not directly visible at this moment, no jar exists. “Although the jar is not manifest, it is not the case that no jar exists; therefore the jar is not directly visible.” Whether the jar exists and whether it is now seen are originally two different matters. Precisely because they can be separated, direct visibility is not a mark the jar carries intrinsically.

The outsider finds a plausible explanation: “Because it conjoins with the eye, there is no fault”—“although the jar has the mark of direct visibility, when the eye has not yet met it, a person naturally does not see the jar; it is not that the jar lacks the mark of direct visibility.” The jar always bears the mark of being directly seen; the eye simply has not yet met it.

The author’s answer is the chapter’s finest move: “Since the arising of direct visibility is absent, existence too is unreal.” He places the outsider’s claim within time and measures it. If the jar already possessed the mark of direct visibility before meeting the eye, then nothing should be added at the moment of seeing. If something genuinely is added at that moment, then “this jar’s mark of direct visibility has arisen.” Yet “in fact no different mark arises, and therefore the mark of direct visibility does not arise.” Since no newly arisen mark is found, direct visibility never was something given from the jar’s side; “since the arising of the mark of direct visibility is absent, the jar’s existence too is absent.”

This objection seeks a home for direct visibility that does not shift with the eye: the mark permanently resides upon the jar; when the eye meets it, the eye sees, and when it does not, the eye fails to see, while nothing is lost on the jar’s side. The author does not dispute whether eye and jar conjoin. He asks only whether that supposedly permanent mark differs before and after conjunction. If there is no difference, no event called seeing has occurred; if there is a difference, the mark is produced by conjunction and was not something the jar always bore. “Directly seen” is a name that arises only when two things come together; it cannot be installed on the jar alone.

4. The Five Bodies: How Can What Does Not Contact Conjoin with What Contacts?

The outsider changes his footing: “One part of the five bodies has been refuted, but the remaining parts exist”—“the five bodies constitute the jar. You have refuted form alone, but not odor and the rest. Since odor and the rest have not been refuted, objects must exist.” You have worked only upon what can be seen; touch and the rest remain intact.

The author answers, “If not all of them contact, how can form and the rest conjoin?” “One part among form and the rest is contact, while the remaining parts are not contact. How can what is contact conjoin with what is not contact?” It was the outsider who divided the five bodies into contact and noncontact; on what basis, then, could they combine into one jar? The outsider moves the site of combination to the jar: “the parts consisting of form and the rest do not conjoin with one another, but those parts conjoin with the jar.” The treatise author pursues jar and contact through identity and difference: “If the jar differs from contact, the jar is not contact; how can what is not contact conjoin with contact? If apart from form and the rest there is no further jar-dharma, then if no jar-dharma exists, how could contact conjoin with the jar?” If different, they cannot conjoin; if identical, there is no further jar with which to conjoin—“once difference is eliminated, how can the jar conjoin with contact?”

5. Since the Four Great Elements Cannot Be Seen by the Eye

The outsider invokes scripture: “Form should be directly visible because scripture is trusted”—“your scripture says that form is the four great elements and what the four great elements produce,” and “within the part consisting of produced form, the portion included within the form-entrance is directly visible.” The author follows this road to its end: “Earth has hardness as its mark, water moisture, fire heat, and wind motion. Since these four great elements are not seen by the eye, the form they produce should not be directly visible.” If what produces is not seen by the eye, by what route could what it produces be directly visible?

The outsider says the four great elements are apprehended by the bodily faculty and therefore exist, then infers that “fire and other various things are produced by the four great elements and must also exist.” The author answers, “Because everything in fire is hot”: “among the four great elements, fire alone has heat as its mark, while the others do not. Yet within fire all four great elements have the mark of heat, and therefore fire does not constitute four bodies.” If four mutually distinct things truly stood together within fire, some nonhot portion should be felt. Yet wherever the hand reaches there is heat; no nonhot portion can be found. If one were found, then “if the others are not hot, they are not called fire”—that portion would already not count as fire. The same method applies to earth and water and wind: “The same applies to earth’s mark of hardness, water’s mark of moisture, and wind’s mark of motion.”

The outsider wished to place the four great elements beneath visible form as a foundation. The foundation itself cannot stand: sought by the eye, the four great elements are not eye-visible; sought by the body, they do not assemble as four. If the lower layer too is borrowed, the layer above has nowhere to rest.

6. The Trace of Oldness on a Clog That Cannot Yet Be Seen

The final exchange turns from object to time. The outsider says that because the eye-faculty and the rest apprehend objects in present time, present time exists; “present time does in fact exist, and therefore form is visible.” An object needs a place in which it can be apprehended, and apprehension needs a time in which it can stand.

The author answers, “If a dharma is old afterward, it is old at the beginning too,” and offers a simile belonging to the treatise itself: “It is like a person wearing clogs: from the beginning they already carry a subtle oldness that accompanies them; it is neither noticed nor known, and after a long time the mark becomes manifest.” At the first step in a new pair of clogs, that trace of oldness is already moving with them. Only because it is “subtle and unnoticed” do people call them old only once it becomes visible. The reverse inference is even clearer: “If there were no oldness at first, there should be no oldness afterward; they should always remain new.” The conclusion then falls directly: “Now because dharmas do not abide, there is no abiding time; if there is no abiding time, there is no place in which an object is apprehended.” To apprehend an object requires a present that can hold still, but no such present exists.

The outsider seizes the two words new and old and turns back: precisely because present time exists, “the marks of newness and oldness can be apprehended.” The author answers, “It is new because it arises and old because it alters”: “If a dharma arose long ago, its mark of newness has passed. When this mark of newness alters, it is called old; but if the mark of oldness arises, then oldness itself is new.” New and old are only names obtained in relation to one another: “Whether new or old, these are merely spoken words; in the ultimate meaning there is no new, no middle, and no old.”

The outsider asks the final question: “If this is so, what benefit is attained?” What does one gain by speaking this way? The author gives the chapter’s destination: “One attains lasting release.” “If the new does not make the middle and the middle does not make the old, then seed, sprout, stalk, decaying node, flower, fruit, and the rest do not conjoin with one another. Because they do not conjoin with one another, dharmas do not abide; because they do not abide, they become distant; because they become distant, they cannot be apprehended.” Seed is not sprout, sprout is not stalk, and a decaying node is not flower or fruit. Seen as one continuous thing, it appears to grow old; in fact, each stage fails to conjoin with the others.

This simile and the clog form a pair. The clog shows that oldness does not suddenly arrive later; it is there from the first step. Seed, sprout, and stalk show that because change never stops, there is no segment that truly stands still to be grasped. People imagine they hold one jar by joining its successive marks into a single thing and then grasping that thing. However tightly joined, the stages still fail to meet. Once their nonconjunction is seen, the hand naturally opens—this is lasting release. It is not that the jar has been removed; it is knowing that no jar ever stood there waiting to be taken.

7. What Can a Reader Carry Away from This Chapter?

First, the words “directly seen” must be heard as divisible: what the eye obtains is one part of form, but what the mouth pronounces is a jar. What lies between is belief, not sight.

Second, the apprehended object is no more secure than the faculty that apprehends it. Because form has shape, one side obstructs another; according to the outsider’s own scripture, atoms are not directly seen; and if the four great elements are not seen by the eye, what they produce is not directly seen either. When one searches downward for something that can provide support, not a single layer is found.

Third: “Because they do not abide, they become distant; because they become distant, they cannot be apprehended.” Lasting release does not mean pushing the jar away. It means that the present one might grasp never existed in the first place.

Carried Forward

The chapter points once outside itself: “This matter is as explained in the refutations of unity and difference.” Unity and difference were refuted earlier, and this chapter uses that result without establishing it anew. The preceding chapter refuted the apprehending faculties, and this chapter refutes their apprehended objects; only once apprehender and apprehended are exhausted can the later chapters enter disputes over cause and effect, permanence, and emptiness.

Another thread also opens forward. The final section turns from object to time, saying, “because dharmas do not abide, there is no abiding time,” and again, “in the ultimate meaning there is no new, no middle, and no old.” Although it refutes the two marks of newness and oldness, it already comes to rest at permanence and impermanence. The later chapter refuting permanence continues precisely this thread. This chapter goes only as far as nonabiding and establishes no separate account of time.

The chapter is called “Refutation of Atoms,” but it does not refute the jar. The jar still holds water, form is still visible, and people continue as usual to say, “I see a jar.” What this chapter dismantles is the object imagined to be wholly present before the eyes and available for grasping all at once. What remains are the words “it cannot be apprehended.”

In “Relinquishing Demerit and Merit,” the outsider wanted something “auspicious” that could establish itself and then pass outward. In this chapter, what he wants is an “existent” able to preserve itself. His words sound perfectly steady: “Dharmas do not fail to abide, because what exists is not lost and what is absent does not arise.” What already exists cannot disappear, and what was originally absent cannot arise. Thus what the world calls change is only the same existent taking a different shape.

The claim sounds almost like common sense. The adept Vasu gives its analogy in full: take a lump of clay and proceed “from lump to base, from base to belly, from belly to neck, from neck to mouth,” each stage following another, the former as cause and the latter as effect. Moreover, “when the various effects arise, the various causes are not lost.” Conversely, “if the effect were absent from the cause, the effect would not arise.” If the jar were not already in the clay, on what basis could clay produce a jar? The conclusion is: “The cause merely changes into the effect; therefore dharmas exist.”

The chapter’s twenty-five root statements press this single “not lost” all the way to its limit.

1. One Who Says “Not Lost” Has Already Lost the Cause

The treatise author’s first root statement gathers both sides: “If, because the effect arises, what exists is not lost, then because the cause is lost, what exists is lost.”

The sentence first follows the outsider: “You say that when the effect, the jar, arises, the lump of clay is not lost; then the jar is the lump of clay.” If the lump has lost nothing, the jar in your hand must wholly be that lump. But when the jar arises, the lump’s rounded shape is no longer there. “At that time the cause, the lump of clay, has been lost, and so there is no cause.” To preserve nonloss, one must say that no difference can be drawn between lump and jar; yet “if the lump of clay were not lost, one should not distinguish a difference between the lump and the jar.”

The treatise author therefore points to the thing before one’s eyes: “Now in fact one sees differences of shape, time, capacity, cognition, name, and the rest; therefore what exists must be lost.” The shape differs, the time differs, what it can do differs, how people recognize it differs, and its name differs—difference appears in five places. The outsider’s nonloss can hold only where nothing changes, yet the very evidence he offers is an event of change.

2. Bent Finger, Youth, Maturity, and Old Age: Two Borrowed Legs

The outsider immediately finds an analogy to support the claim. First comes the finger: “As with a finger bent and straightened”—“although the finger’s bent and straightened shapes differ, in fact it is one finger.” The shapes of bending and straightening indeed differ, yet there is only one finger; are lump and jar not the same?

The treatise author answers, “Because activity and agent differ.” He separates the two things within the analogy: “Bending and straightening are the finger’s activities; the finger is the agent.” Bending and straightening are activities performed by the finger; the finger is what performs them. The analogy works precisely because activity and agent are two things: the finger remains when it bends. But your claim is different—“According to your scripture, the lump of clay itself is the jar.” You require cause and effect to be one. If activity and agent were truly merged, “if activity itself were the agent, the finger should be lost when it bends”; further, “bending and straightening should be one,” and no difference between them would remain. The analogy can rescue itself, but not the claim for which it was borrowed.

The second analogy is a human life: “As with youth, maturity, and old age”—the same body is youthful, mature, and old. The treatise author replies with only “Because they are not one,” then explains: “Youth does not make maturity; maturity does not make old age.” Youth does not set to work making itself mature, nor maturity making itself old. People speak of one person on the basis of continuity; the outsider requires one unchanging entity to pass through all three stages exactly as it was.

3. If Nothing Is Truly Lost, a Person of Demerit Is Forever a Person of Demerit

The treatise author next lets “not lost” run within the outsider’s own words: “If what exists is not lost, there is no loss.” This has two levels. First, “if what exists were not lost, the lump of clay should not change into a jar, and then there would be no jar.” Preserve nonloss to the end, and clay remains clay forever; no jar can emerge. Second, if there is no nonexistence, there can be nothing called loss: “It would follow that there is no loss at all.”

The outsider simply accepts this: “What fault is there if nothing is lost?” Because things are permanent they are not lost; what fault is there in having no impermanence?

The treatise author turns from clay and jar to the person, giving the chapter’s weightiest reply: “If there is no impermanence, there is no demerit, merit, or the rest.” Why? “A person of demerit would always remain a person of demerit and should not become meritorious. A meritorious person would always remain meritorious and should not become a person of demerit.” He makes “demerit, merit, and the rest” concrete: “giving and stealing, observing precepts and violating precepts—all such things would be absent.”

An existent that can never be lost may sound like a support for cause and effect, but in fact it abolishes cause and effect. A harmful person can turn back, and a good person can fall away, only because of the very impermanence that unsettles the outsider. Preserve the unchanging, and practice cannot be preserved.

4. If the Effect Exists in the Cause, When the Effect Breaks the Cause Should Have No Effect

The outsider returns to the main thesis and states it directly: “The effect exists in the cause beforehand, because the cause exists”—“if a jar did not exist beforehand in clay, clay should not be the jar’s cause.”

The treatise author answers, “If, because the effect exists beforehand in the cause, an effect exists, then because the effect is absent, the cause has no effect.” He uses the outsider’s own calculation: “If the lump of clay is made into a jar and, because the clay is not lost, the effect exists in the cause, then when this jar breaks one should say there is no effect in the cause.” If the jar’s presence proves its presence in the cause, the jar’s absence makes the same clay prove its absence in the cause. A rule that judges what exists in the cause by whether the effect is now present runs in both directions and therefore can rest in neither.

The outsider recasts the claim: “Because cause and effect are one.” Earth is cause and clay is effect; clay is cause and jar is effect; “the cause changes into the effect, and there is no different dharma.” The treatise author answers, “If cause and effect are one, there is no future.” “The lump of clay is present, while the jar is future.” If cause and effect are one, the future jar is already here; without future there is no contrasting present, and without present no past—“the three times are thus disordered.” Merging cause and effect saves their difference only by forfeiting time.

5. Only the Name Is Changing

The outsider finds another route: the dharma has not moved; only its designation has. “There is no new dharma, and the old dharma is not lost; only the name differs according to the time.” One lump is made into a jar; “the jar breaks and becomes a basin; the basin breaks and returns to clay.” There is no coming or going, so where are jar and basin? “Things merely receive names according to the time; in fact, there is no difference.”

The treatise author answers swiftly, “If so, the cause has no effect”: “This name was formerly absent and later exists; therefore the effect is absent from the cause.” You yourself say that names are lost and arise. The name “jar” was absent before and present afterward—is this not precisely an effect absent from its cause? “If the name existed beforehand, the clay itself would be the jar.” Moving change into the name does not make change disappear; it only relocates it, and in its new location it is still formerly absent and later present.

The outsider retreats once more: “Because it is not fixed”—“which vessel will emerge from the lump of clay is not fixed,” and therefore the name in the clay is not fixed. The treatise author gathers the concession: “If clay is indeterminate, the effect too is indeterminate.” If you require clay to be indeterminate, your original statement that the effect already exists in the cause becomes indeterminate with it.

6. Subtle Form—and Eight Ways Something Goes Unseen

Here the outsider makes his strongest move: “Because a subtle form exists.” The jar is not absent from the clay; it is too small to see—“the jar’s shape in the lump of clay is subtle and therefore difficult to know; through the potter’s power it becomes clear at that time.” He even supplies a full classification of what is unseen. Imperceptibility has two kinds: “unknown because it is absent, or truly present but unknown because of conditions.” There are eight conditions for what exists but is not known: “unknown because distant, as with a distant land”; “unknown because too near, as with one’s own eyelashes”; a damaged faculty, as in deafness or blindness; an unsettled mind, as when thoughts scatter; subtlety, as with a fine particle; obstruction, as with something beyond a wall; “unknown because overpowered, as with a small amount of salt in a great body of water”; and “unknown because similar, as with one grain of rice cast into a great heap.” All eight examples are true: eyelashes are too near to see, salt disappears in a great body of water, and one grain cannot be recovered from the heap. His closing line is equally firm. Though the eye does not see the jar in clay, “in the end it does not emerge from rushes; therefore the subtle jar certainly exists in the clay.”

The treatise author does not dispute the eight examples. He takes up the word “subtle” that the outsider himself added: “If a subtle form exists beforehand, the cause has no effect.” You say a subtle form exists first in clay and only later becomes coarse and knowable—“because the coarse character was originally absent and later arose, the effect is absent from the cause.” To explain why the jar is unseen, the outsider shrinks the effect into a subtle form; once shrunk, the complete preexistent effect he sought to prove has disappeared. Only the subtle existed before; the coarse character still arises later, and what arises later was not in the cause.

7. Selecting Clay Rather Than Rushes

The outsider’s last question is the most practical: “The effect should exist in the cause, because each effect selects its cause”—“one who makes a jar selects clay, not rushes.” If the effect were absent from the cause, rushes should also make a jar. Yet everyone knows that clay can produce a jar: “sticky earth is kneaded into a vessel able to withstand firing.”

〔T30 0178a03〕The treatise author answers, “If what is to exist exists, then what is to be absent is absent.” You say that because “a jar is to emerge from clay,” the effect exists beforehand. Then, “now that the jar has broken, the effect should be what is to be absent.” If “is to exist” proves existence, “is to be absent” proves absence; the word “to be” works in both directions. Used to prove a preexistent effect, it simultaneously proves no effect.

The outsider has one move left: “Because arising, abiding, and destruction exist in sequence, there is no fault.” Although the jar contains a character of destruction, it must first arise, then abide, and only afterward be destroyed, “because before arising there is no destruction.” The treatise author answers, “If arising is first and not later, the same follows for the absence of the effect.” He first asks: “Why must it first arise and later be destroyed, rather than first be destroyed and later arise?” If everything already exists, whence comes sequence? Then he gathers the outsider’s own words: you say that before arising there is no destruction; likewise before the jar arises there is no abiding and no destruction. “These two were formerly absent and later present; therefore the effect is absent from the cause.” The sequence you arrange for arising, abiding, and destruction is precisely a sequence of former absence and later presence.

8. Because It Continues, It Is Not Annihilated; Because It Is Destroyed, It Is Not Permanent

The outsider’s final question is one every teaching of refutation encounters: “Because you refute the effect’s existence, you incur the fault of annihilation.” If you refute the effect in the cause, you must say it is absent; “if the effect is absent from the cause, one falls into annihilation.”

The treatise author’s answer is where the entire chapter comes to rest: “Because it continues, it is not annihilated; because it is destroyed, it is not permanent.”

“Do you not know?” He points to something in the field: “From grain to sprout and the rest, continuity means it is not annihilated; because grain and the other causes are destroyed, it is not permanent.” A grain enters the earth, the grain is destroyed, and a sprout emerges. To see only destruction and declare before and after unrelated is annihilation; to see only continuity and imagine an unchanged grain passing intact into the sprout is permanence. Destruction and continuity are two faces of one event. If the grain is not destroyed, the sprout does not arise; if there is no continuity, this sprout does not come from this grain. What the treatise author has always refuted is not cause and effect, but cause and effect installed upon something unchanging.

The final sentence joins the chapter back to the whole treatise: “In this way, the Buddhas teach dharmas arising through the twelvefold dependent origination. Free from an effect existing or not existing in the cause, they cling neither to annihilation nor to permanence; they travel the middle way and enter nirvāṇa.”

9. What a Reader Can Carry Away from This Chapter

First, observe where every retreat by the outsider comes to rest. He retreats from “what exists is not lost” to the finger, to youth, maturity, and old age, to names differing with time, to indeterminacy, to subtle form, to choosing clay rather than rushes, and to the sequence of arising, abiding, and destruction. Every retreat is reasoned, and every one leaves within its own words something “formerly absent and later present.”

Second, remember the sentence, “If there is no impermanence, there is no demerit, merit, or the rest.” People tend to regard impermanence as bad news. This chapter shows that precisely because things can perish and change, giving differs from stealing, observing precepts differs from violating them, and practice can move.

Carried Forward

This chapter refutes “the effect existing beforehand in the cause,” and hence is titled “Refutation of the Effect Existing in the Cause.” In its final sentence the treatise author states his position in advance: “Free from an effect existing or not existing in the cause, they cling neither to annihilation nor to permanence”—both sides are left together. Refuting an existent effect therefore does not establish a nonexistent effect. The following “Refutation of the Effect Not Existing in the Cause” walks the other side to its end; only when neither side remains does the middle way avoid becoming a new place to stand.

The analogy of grain and sprout appears only once, yet it carries the entire chapter: To explain how before and after are related, one need not first hide the later within the earlier.

The preceding chapter refuted “the effect existing beforehand in the cause.” Hearing this, the outsider readily takes up the other side: if prior existence fails, then the effect must have been absent; after all, the jar unquestionably arises. The opening sentence of this chapter is precisely that move—“Since arising exists, one of the two must be established.”

The treatise author does not take the side offered to him. He reaches further back. Your two schools dispute whether the effect existed or did not exist in the cause, but can you first establish the word “arising”? “If arising exists, did it exist beforehand in the cause, or was it absent beforehand? Sought through such reflection, it cannot be obtained—how much less an arising that does not exist.” One sentence moves the entire dispute to an earlier position. The outsider thinks he stands at a fork between two roads; the treatise author tells him that the road has not yet begun.

The chapter proceeds as a continuous pursuit. At every retreat the outsider changes his foothold—temporal position, name, sequence, mutual dependence, destruction of the cause, analogy—and the treatise author follows him there. What must be seen is the route of retreat; that route itself is the teaching.

1. Seeking Arising in Three Temporal Positions

The first exchange takes up the jar: “If you posit the arising of a jar, does it exist when the jar first becomes a jar, or after the lump of clay and before the jar exists?”

If arising exists when the jar has become a jar, “the jar already exists.” Moreover, the jar’s beginning cannot stand alone: “Beginning, middle, and end exist in mutual dependence. Without middle and end there is no beginning. If the jar has a beginning, it necessarily has a middle and end.” Since beginning, middle, and end are all there, the entire jar already exists: “What further use is arising?” If arising exists after the lump but before the jar, the jar is “not yet present.” It has no beginning, middle, or end: “If there is no jar, how could there be the jar’s arising?” Arising must find something to arise, but that thing either already exists or is not yet there.

The outsider immediately supplies a third place: “Because it arises at the time of arising, there is no fault.” It lies neither in what has arisen nor in what has not yet arisen, but in the very instant of arising. His statement is explicit: “I do not say the jar’s arising exists when it has already arisen or when it has not yet arisen.” He establishes another place. The treatise author answers, “The time of arising is likewise so,” for a simple reason: “If it has arisen, arising is finished; if it has not yet arisen, how could arising exist?” If the function of arising is already present at that instant, arising is complete; if the function is absent, the jar remains unarisen. To open a separate ground between them, one must say it is “half arisen and half not yet arisen”—and it “incurs both faults.” Joining half of each untenable place does not make a tenable one.

The treatise author runs the temporal question once more in reverse: “If the jar’s arising exists, should it exist after the lump, when there is a jar, or at the jar’s beginning, when there is still a lump?” The same two answers return—“because it already exists” and “because it does not yet exist.” Asked forward or backward, the point of arrival is the same.

2. Changing the Name: Taking Completion as Arising

The outsider changes terms: “The jar now becomes complete in immediate presence; this itself is the jar’s arising.” No separate arising need be sought; the jar’s completion is arising.

The treatise author answers, “If so, arising comes afterward,” first opening up the word: “Completion means already arisen.” Completion is a name given after arising has finished. Yet “if there is no arising, there is no beginning and no middle. Without a beginning, there is no middle and no completion.” If arising itself has no place, whence comes completion? Use completion to stand in for arising, and arising is pushed behind completion. The name changes, but the difficulty has not moved a step.

3. Sequence and Simultaneity

The outsider retreats to process: “The lump of clay produces in sequence the jar’s base, belly, neck, mouth, and the rest.” Beginning, middle, and end arise section by section; surely this is something one directly sees.

The treatise author first explains the three words: “Beginning means absent before and present afterward; middle means present before and present afterward; end means present before and absent afterward.” Each name includes the other two in its own content—“Thus beginning, middle, and end exist in mutual dependence; apart from one another, how could they exist?” Names that stand only by leaning on one another cannot arise one by one with individual intrinsic natures. What if one says they arise simultaneously? “If they arise at one time, one should not say this is beginning, this is middle, and this is end; nor do they depend upon one another.” Neither sequence nor simultaneity works.

4. The Three Conditioned Marks—and the Question without End

The outsider introduces a general rule: “As with the conditioned marks, arising, abiding, and destruction exist in sequence.”

This is an intelligent retreat. Beginning, middle, and end may be his own division, which the treatise author can reject. But arising, abiding, and destruction are a general account of conditioned dharmas accepted by both sides; borrowed as support, they look much firmer.

The treatise author asks the same question of this general rule: “Do they exist in sequence, or at one time? Neither is right.” First, he presses each mark with the others: “Without abiding there is no arising. If arising could exist without abiding, abiding should likewise exist without arising”—the three names lean upon one another in the same way. Remove abiding, and arising has nothing against which to stand. If arising without abiding is allowed, abiding without arising must also be allowed; “destruction is likewise so.” If all three are simultaneous, “one should not distinguish this as arising, this as abiding, and this as destruction.” Second, he follows the account to its end—“In every place there is everything.” If arising is itself a conditioned dharma, arising must contain arising, abiding, and destruction. Each of those three is conditioned and must contain three more, “and then there is no end.” If arising, abiding, and destruction contain no further three marks, they “are not called conditioned marks,” and the borrowed example fails on the spot.

The outsider tries father and son as an escape: primary arising and secondary arising produce each other, as father produces son and son makes the man a father. The treatise author answers concretely: “The father exists first and afterward produces a son, and this father has yet another father; therefore this analogy is wrong.” Father and son belong to successive generations, not two things simultaneously manufacturing one another. Moreover, the claim that primary and secondary arising produce together was already examined case by case in “Refutation of the Faculties”: “Did their mutual dependence previously exist in the cause, was it previously absent, or was it partly present and partly absent?”

5. Arising and What Can Arise: Two Names, One Event

The outsider changes direction and establishes arising from the effect: “Dharmas such as jars that can arise now exist in immediate presence; therefore arising must exist.”

The treatise author answers, “If arising exists, there is nothing that can arise”: “If the jar has arising, the jar has already arisen and is not called what can arise.” Once arising is said already to exist, what can arise disappears; conversely, “if there is no jar, there is likewise no arising of a jar.” The two names are two ends of one event. Grasp one tightly, and the other is empty.

The outsider says instead that the two are established together at one time. The treatise author answers, “Arising and what can arise cannot produce”—“If what can arise could establish arising, arising would become what can arise and would not be called what produces arising.” Let what can arise establish arising, and the distinction between producer and produced collapses. A further cut follows: “It is not right for existence and nonexistence to depend upon each other.” “What can arise does not yet exist and is therefore nonexistent; arising is existent. How can existence and nonexistence depend upon each other?” One side is not yet there and the other already is; how could the two lean upon each other?

Mutual dependence is ordinarily a sound expression. The outsider uses it to let two things unable to stand alone hold each other up—A is established by B and B by A, so neither must stand by itself. The treatise author points out that for dependence to work, both sides first require their respective positions. If what can arise already exists, it is no longer what can arise; if arising already exists, what can arise is superfluous. Two things that are both absent cannot support each other.

The outsider finally generalizes mutual dependence: not only arising and what can arise, but the jar and every other thing are established by this dependence. The treatise author asks, “If it is produced from two, why is there no third?”—“If the effect is produced from two, why is there not a third dharma, as when father and mother produce a child? Apart from arising and what can arise, there is now no third dharma such as a jar.” Father and mother are two actual things, and the child they produce is a third. Arising and what can arise produce no separate third jar. They are therefore not two things, but two names for one event.

6. Since the Cause Is Destroyed, Does Arising Exist?

The outsider finds visible evidence: “Now one sees the jar’s cause destroyed; therefore arising should exist.” The lump’s shape is destroyed. If no effect arose, why would the cause need to be destroyed?

The treatise author divides the time in two: “Does it exist while the cause is being destroyed, or after it has been destroyed?” If it exists during destruction, it “does not differ from destruction, and therefore arising too is cessation.” If afterward, “because the cause has already been destroyed, there is no cause; because there is no cause, the effect should not arise.”

The treatise author then returns to this chapter’s central question and asks both sides together. “If the effect is absent from the cause, why is a jar found only in clay and cloth only in thread? If they are all absent, clay should contain cloth, and thread should contain a jar.” This is the difficulty for the nonexistent-effect side: if there is nothing at all in the cause, why does clay specifically yield a jar rather than cloth? The existent-effect side fares no better: “This cause itself is this effect, because in your teaching cause and effect do not differ.” Once prior existence is accepted, “milk contains curd, ghee, and the rest, while ghee also contains curd, milk, and the rest.” There follows “many effects in one cause” and “many causes in one effect,” compressing every earlier and later into one place. The treatise author releases both sides in his closing sentence: “Therefore, whether the effect exists or does not exist in the cause, in either case there is no arising.”

The chapter is titled “Refutation of the Effect Not Existing in the Cause,” and this movement best shows the title’s weight. What is refuted is not merely one school; it is the form of the question, “Does the effect exist or not exist in the cause?”

7. Four Alternatives: Thing and Nonthing

In the last round, the outsider says that many causes and many effects are merely faults; cause and effect themselves have not been denied. The treatise author exhausts “arising” through four alternatives: “Thing does not produce thing; nonthing does not produce nonthing; thing does not produce nonthing; and nonthing does not produce thing.”

For thing producing thing, the outsider offers four examples, and the treatise author returns each. Mother produces child—“the mother does not in fact produce the child; the child existed beforehand and emerged from the mother.” Production from the mother’s blood constituent—“apart from the blood constituent and the rest, the mother cannot be obtained.” Production through transformation—“maturity itself changes into old age; maturity does not produce old age.” Production like a mirror image—“the image in the mirror comes from nowhere,” and “just as a mirror image resembles the face, all other effects should resemble their causes; yet they do not.” Emergence, transformation, and appearance are three different events, all called arising by the outsider; examined individually, none is one intrinsically established thing manufacturing another.

The remaining three alternatives receive one sentence and one example each: “A hare’s horn does not produce a hare’s horn”; “a barren woman does not produce a child”; “turtle hair does not produce rushes.” What is absent does not produce what is absent; what exists does not produce what is absent; what is absent does not produce what exists. The four alternatives are exhausted: “Therefore, there is no dharma of arising.”

The treatise author ends by returning to the lump of clay: “If the jar did not differ from the lump, the lump should not cease when the jar arises, and the lump should not be the jar’s cause.” Nondifference leaves no cause and effect; difference means the effect is absent from the cause and the cause cannot produce it. “Therefore, whether the effect exists or does not exist in the cause, thing does not produce thing.”

8. What a Reader Can Carry Away from This Chapter

First, see whether the word itself can stand. The outsider wants to choose between an existent and a nonexistent effect; the treatise author asks only about the word “arising.” Every dispute contains such a word, tacitly accepted by both sides and never examined.

Second, do not stop at the resemblance offered by an analogy. Mother and child, blood constituent, maturity and old age, and mirror image all look to the outsider like ready evidence of thing producing thing. The treatise author follows each: emergence is not production, transformation is not production, and appearance is not production. An analogy can offer a clue; it cannot replace inquiry.

Third, watch the route of retreat. From arisen and unarisen to the time of arising, from arising to completion, from sequence to simultaneity, from arising to what can arise, from reasoning to analogy—each step is a reasonable retreat, and each is followed. What truly teaches is this route, not any single conclusion.

Carried Forward

This chapter is not an isolated passage in the treatise. Twice it points back to earlier chapters. When refuting primary and secondary arising producing each other, it says, “These three were already discussed in ‘Refutation of the Faculties’”; when refuting arising from self, other, or both, it says, “This was already discussed in ‘Relinquishing Demerit and Merit.’” The statement in the first chapter—“Every dharma of arising has three kinds: from self, another, or both. Sought among these three, it cannot be obtained”—becomes a tool used directly here. The preceding chapter refutes the effect existing in the cause; this one refutes the effect not existing in the cause. They must be read together: refuting one side does not establish the other. The final passage places the two together in its conclusion—“Therefore, whether the effect exists or does not exist in the cause, thing does not produce thing.”

What the treatise author removes at each point is an “arising” able to stand by itself at some temporal position, under some name, or within some dependence. The lump of clay still turns in the potter’s hands, and base, belly, neck, and mouth still appear in sequence. Along that whole route, however, there is no place one can point to and say, “Arising is here.”

Across the preceding chapters, dharmas have been taken apart one by one: self, unity, difference, the faculties, atoms, the effect existing in the cause, and the effect not existing in the cause. In this chapter the outsider changes tactics. He no longer defends a particular dharma, but retreats behind a line: everything you have refuted is produced by causes; another class of dharma has no cause at all and lies beyond your refutation. He names five—“space, time, direction, fine particles, and nirvāṇa are uncaused dharmas.”

These five share an appearance: they cannot be seen or touched, do not arise or cease, are either everywhere or too small to divide. The outsider’s thought is this: whatever can be made will of course perish, but some things must be unmade, or making would not even have a place in which to occur. The defense lies deep and feels much like common sense. The whole “Refutation of Permanence” presses this line all the way through nirvāṇa.

The argumentative form remains “the outsider says, the insider answers.” Beneath the root text, an interlinear “sūtra” note identifies the bones laid down by Deva; the long prose that follows is the flesh unfolded by the adept Vasu.

1. You Call It Permanent—Because It Has a Cause or Because It Has None?

The treatise author’s first sentence touches neither space nor time and direction. It asks only for the criterion: “If one forcibly takes them as permanent, the same applies to impermanence.”

Opened out, the sentence presents a dilemma: “Do you say it is permanent because it has a cause, or because it has no cause?” If the permanent dharma has a cause, it falls into the class already refuted: “If a permanent dharma has a cause, what has a cause is impermanent.” If it is called permanent because it lacks a cause, then “if you call it permanent because it has no cause, one may equally call it impermanent.” Once no cause is required, no one is answerable to any criterion; I may just as readily call it impermanent.

This question deserves to be remembered. The outsider wants something whose origin need not be explained. But if its origin need not be explained, it need not answer to anyone’s standard. Without a cause, there is also no reason.

2. Revealing Cause: An Apparently Safe Retreat

The outsider immediately adds a distinction: “Causes are of two kinds: first, productive cause; second, revealing cause.” A productive cause brings something into being, and what it produces is of course impermanent. A revealing cause merely manifests what was already present; it does not make the thing. Thus, “I call space and the other permanent dharmas permanent because of a revealing cause.” This is not an arbitrary assertion, but one supported by a basis.

This is a fine move. Yet the treatise author’s root answer is only one sentence: “This cause is not right.” The reason has two parts. Self was already refuted: “Self was refuted before, and the remaining permanent dharmas will be refuted afterward.” In other words, the container called revealing cause cannot support anything by itself; what the container holds must still be opened and inspected one item at a time. The chapter’s subsequent movements through space, time, direction, fine particles, and nirvāṇa open those containers one by one.

3. Must Whatever Is Unmade Be Permanent?

The outsider changes to an easier route: “Because constructed dharmas are impermanent, unconstructed dharmas are permanent.” The eye sees jars and the rest as impermanent; whatever stands opposite them must surely be permanent. The dharma is established by contrast—one need not say what it is, only what it is not.

The treatise author answers, “Absence too is shared by both,” returning precisely to this point. If you name it only by “opposition to constructed dharmas,” you must see whether the opposition holds everywhere. “Because it does not oppose constructed dharmas at this point, it should be impermanent. Why? Unconstructed and constructed dharmas are alike in lacking contact; therefore, the unconstructed should be impermanent.” With respect to lack of contact the two do not oppose one another. Once the opposition fails, the basis for the name collapses.

Something established by negating something else moves whenever that other thing moves. At this point, all-pervading and nonpervading permanence have been refuted in general. The treatise author therefore says, “They should now be refuted separately.” The five movements below inspect them one by one.

4. Space, First: Is What Lies within the Jar the Whole or One Part?

The outsider establishes space: “Because people believe it exists in every place and at every time.” It exists everywhere and therefore pervades; it exists in all three times and therefore is permanent. Moreover, it is “both all-pervading and partless.”

The treatise author answers, “Because parts conjoin within parts, part is not different,” using a jar. Is the space within a jar or a window opening the whole of space, or one part? “If the whole is present, space does not pervade. If this counts as pervading, the jar too should pervade.” If all of space is compressed into the jar, nothing remains elsewhere. If that still counts as pervasion, the jar should also spread everywhere. If only one part is present, you have admitted that space has parts—and “the whole possessing parts is what is called space,” so beneath the name space there remains only a heap of parts.

Partlessness and pervasion are both wanted by the outsider, yet each cancels the other.

5. Space, Second: Where Does It Itself Abide?

The outsider establishes it through function: “because actions occur.” Without space there would be “no lifting, no lowering, no coming, no going, and the rest,” for “there would be no place to receive.” Raising and lowering a hand require room into which it can move.

The treatise author answers, “Space abides in space.” If space is a dharma, it should have an abiding place. Does it abide in an opening? The opening itself is the receptive place, so this makes space abide in space. Does it abide in a solid? “Because a solid contains no space”—a solid is not called empty, and therefore provides no abiding place. Space is said to receive every dharma, but when its own turn comes, no place can receive it. Anything that must rely upon a place in order to stand cannot itself be every place.

The treatise author adds another route, examining its character: “Every dharma has its own character, and through possessing a character each dharma is known to exist: earth has hardness as its character, water wetness, fire heat, wind movement, and consciousness knowing.” Earth, water, fire, wind, and consciousness each possess a character by which they are known. Space can present none, “and therefore it does not exist.”

6. Space, Third: Formlessness Is Not a Character

The outsider therefore produces a character: “Formlessness is the character of space.”

The treatise author answers quickly: “Formlessness means the negation of form, not a further dharma. It is like cutting through a tree: there is no further dharma.” Once a tree is cut, the severed place is not a newly added thing. Likewise, to say “formless” only negates form; it does not thereby produce an additional dharma.

There is another temporal question. If formlessness is the character, then “before form arises, space at that time lacks its character.” Before form exists, whence comes formlessness? Yet in the outsider’s account form is impermanent while space is permanent; space should already exist before form. At that time it lacks a character, and “if it lacks a character, the dharma is absent.” Thus space “has only a name and no substance,” and every all-pervading permanent dharma is refuted in general by the same route.

7. Time: The Future Is Not within the Past

Time is the hardest of these to remove. The outsider’s establishment is elegant. Although time cannot be seen, it can be inferred: “Through seasons, blossoms, fruit, and the rest, one knows time; this is seeing the effect and knowing the cause.” It can further be known from long and short intervals, simultaneity and nonsimultaneity.

The treatise author answers, “The future does not exist within the past; therefore, there is no future.” He follows the outsider’s own two premises: first, time is permanent; second, “your scripture says that time is one dharma.” Since it is permanent and one, “past time never becomes future time and does not become present time”—otherwise confusion follows. Because the past does not become the future, the future in the sequence “the lump of clay is present, earth is past, and the jar is future” is not contained in the past. From where does the future come?

The outsider says that once I accept the past I must accept the future. The treatise author answers, “The past is not the character of the future.” Once something enters the future character, it is future: “How could it be called past?”

8. Each of the Three Times Enacts Its Own Character

The outsider’s final defense is that each of the three times has its own character: “The present has the present character, the past has the past character, and the future has the future character.” Each performs its own role without encroaching upon the others, and so there should be no fault.

The treatise author answers, “If so, everything is present.” If each character already exists fully formed, all three times must now count as present. “If it exists, it is not called future; it should be called already arrived.” Once the future exists, it is no longer future.

The outsider again says that each enacts its own character and thus there is no fault. The treatise author presses this statement to the end: “The past is not past.” If the past is still passing through the past, it has left its own character: “As fire that relinquishes heat is not called fire, because it has left its own character.” Once fire relinquishes heat, it is no longer fire. If the past is still proceeding, it is not past; if it does not pass away, on what basis do you say it enacts the character of the past? Neither direction works, and therefore “the dharma of time has no substance, only speech.”

9. Direction: Wherever the Sun Goes Is East

Direction is established concretely: “The place at which the sun conjoins is the character of direction.” The place first touched by the sun is east, and the remaining directions take their names from it.

The treatise author’s refutation is equally concrete, an observation that can be revolved once in the mind. The sun circles Mount Sumeru through the four continents. When it is noon in Uttarakuru, the sun rises in Pūrvavideha; when it is noon in Pūrvavideha, the sun rises in Jambudvīpa; when it is noon in Jambudvīpa, the sun rises in Aparagodānīya; when it is noon in Aparagodānīya, the sun rises in Uttarakuru. The same place “is thus wholly east, south, west, and north.” Direction was never in the ground; it was in the observer’s position—“those on this side take it as east, while those on that side take it as west.”

The outsider retreats and says his account concerns only one continent. The treatise author answers, “If so, it has a boundary.” Once a range is marked out, each direction has a limit: “Because it has a boundary, it has parts; because it has parts, it is impermanent.” Preserve one continent, and permanence cannot be preserved. Thus “direction exists in speech, but in reality there is no direction.” The word direction remains perfectly usable, but no permanent direction abides beneath it.

10. Fine Particles: How Can a Partless Thing Combine into a Shaped Effect?

Fine particles are a nonpervading permanence. The outsider reasons backward: “Seeing that produced things are first subtle and later coarse,” one continues toward subtlety until reaching a first cause. Thus one fine particle is cause, two fine particles form the first effect, and the fine particle is round and permanent.

The treatise author answers, “Two fine particles do not conjoin with their entire bodies, because the effect is not round.” If fine particles conjoined through their whole bodies, the resulting effect should be round: “If the entire bodies of fine particles conjoined, an effect made of two fine particles should likewise be round.” Yet the eye sees it is not round. Moreover, if whole bodies conjoined, the two should be destroyed together. Therefore, they conjoin through one part: “Because they conjoin by one part, the fine particle has parts; because it has parts, it is impermanent.”

The next three supplementary refutations point to the same thing. If a fine particle differs from space, it has a boundary—“Fine particles are impermanent because they are distinguished from space.” If a fine particle exists, it should have parts of color and taste—“because color, taste, and the rest are distinct.” A shaped thing has length, shortness, squareness, and roundness, and therefore has parts. Layer by layer, “because it is impermanent, no fine particle exists.”

If a thing is truly partless, it has nowhere through which to make contact; if it can make contact, it already has this side and that side.

11. Nirvāṇa: Refuting the Final One

Once the first four are refuted, the most consequential one remains. The outsider says: “The permanent exhaustion of craving and the other afflictions is called nirvāṇa.” Without afflictions there is no further birth and death, so nirvāṇa is permanent.

The treatise author answers, “Because nirvāṇa is a constructed dharma.” You say nirvāṇa is the absence of afflictions, but absence of afflictions is attained by cultivating the path; it is “impermanent because constructed.” Further, “if afflictions are absent, this is called having nothing whatever.” If nirvāṇa does not differ at all from the absence of afflictions, one need not separately establish the designation nirvāṇa.

The outsider changes the answer: nirvāṇa is the productive cause of the absence of afflictions. The treatise author answers, “What can destroy is not what is destroyed”: “If nirvāṇa is what enables liberation, then it is not liberation.” What releases and what is released are not one thing. Moreover, before the afflictions are exhausted, the effect is absent, and “without the effect there is no cause.”

The outsider changes again: nirvāṇa is the effect of the absence of afflictions. The treatise author lays the whole route before him: “Bondage means afflictions and karma; what is bound means sentient beings; the means means the noble eightfold path.” There is what binds, the person bound, and the means of untying. These three suffice for liberation. “If nirvāṇa exists apart from these three dharmas, it has no use.”

The outsider finally says that the place where all three are absent is nirvāṇa. The treatise author changes direction. He no longer argues only over logic, but asks about the outsider’s mind: “How can one crave a place of fear?” In your own account it contains no forms of consciousness and nothing desired, so compared with conditioned dharmas it is an “exceedingly fearful place.” Why do you still want it? Throughout his defense of permanence, the outsider has really been trying to grasp something that cannot be lost. Only here does the grasping hand reveal itself.

The treatise author then gives the chapter’s final positive statement: nirvāṇa is “free from every attachment, extinguishing every recollection and conception, neither existent nor nonexistent, neither thing nor nonthing, like a lamp gone out and beyond discussion.”

12. Nirvāṇa without an Attainer

The outsider asks the last sentence of the entire chapter: “Who attains nirvāṇa?”

The treatise author answers, “There is no attainer of nirvāṇa,” still using the lamp that has gone out. Once a lamp is extinguished, one cannot ask whether it went east, west, south, north, to an intermediate direction, upward, or downward, because “all speech has ceased; there is nothing that can be discussed.” If so, who attains it? Even if nirvāṇa is posited, the attainer cannot be found. If self attains it, because self is permanent and all-pervading, it “should not attain nirvāṇa.” If the five aggregates attain it, “because the five aggregates are impermanent, because they arise and cease,” what arises and ceases cannot remain.

The most important sentence is the last: “If one says that nirvāṇa is attained, this is said within worldly convention.” The treatise author has not said there is no cultivation, no severing, and no liberation. He says that “attainment” is a word within worldly discourse. Cultivating the path and ending delusion remain; one simply does not place beneath the phrase a permanent attainer and a permanently attained object.

13. What a Reader Can Carry Away from This Chapter

First, see the empty rotation in “permanent because uncaused”: “If one calls it permanent because it has no cause, one may equally call it impermanent.” Anyone can casually assign the opposite name to something whose origin need never be explained.

Second, notice names established by negating something else. The unconstructed is established as the opposite of the constructed; formlessness is established through the disappearance of form. “Formlessness means the negation of form, not a further dharma.” Cutting a tree does not add a new thing.

Third, recognize where the sense of direction comes from. East is not on the ground but beneath the observer’s feet. As sunrise turns through the four continents, “the same place is wholly east, south, west, and north.” Time and direction remain speakable and usable; they simply have no permanent substance beneath them.

Fourth, watch the hand that wants to grasp. From space all the way to nirvāṇa, the outsider protects the same desire. At the end the treatise author no longer debates the character of a dharma, but asks, “Why does your mind crave it?”

Carried Forward

Standing ninth among ten chapters, this chapter closes the treatise’s refutation of dharmas. Most earlier targets possessed causes; here the unarisen, unceasing, uncaused, and unconstructed class is refuted as well. To reach nirvāṇa and say “there is no attainer of nirvāṇa” does not cancel cultivation and realization; it releases even the final attainment that could be appropriated as one’s own. “If one says that nirvāṇa is attained, this is said within worldly convention”—conventional speech remains fully able to stand.

Twice the chapter points outside itself. In discussing permanent dharmas, “self was refuted before” inherits the inquiry of “Refutation of a Self”; “the remaining permanent dharmas will be refuted afterward” announces this chapter’s five movements. After permanence has been refuted, only one thing remains untouched: the refutation itself. If one clings to “all dharmas are empty” and to the view that refutes, that becomes another permanence. The next “Refutation of Emptiness” addresses precisely this move.

After space, time, direction, fine particles, and nirvāṇa no longer provide a place to abide, what the chapter leaves is not a blank, but “freedom from every attachment and the extinguishing of every recollection and conception.”

Across ten chapters, the Hundred Treatise refutes the self, unity, difference, the faculties, atoms, the effect as existent or nonexistent in its cause, and permanence. Reaching this chapter, the outsider changes tactics. He no longer defends a particular dharma; he defends the act of “refutation” itself.

His calculation is clear. Since you have refuted your way through the treatise, the act that refutes must at least exist. If “refutation” exists, you have not refuted every dharma completely; if it does not exist, you have never refuted anything. It is a pair of pincers sharpened at both ends. Whether the author answers existence or nonexistence, something must remain in his hand.

The chapter’s sixteen exchanges all circle one question: what, in the end, does the speaker of emptiness still clutch? Only when the final sentence—“Because of conventional truth, it is spoken of as liberation”—comes down can the entire treatise close securely.

1. Refutation Is Like What Can Be Refuted

The first challenge is direct: “Dharmas must exist, because refutation exists,” followed by, “If refutation does not exist, the other dharmas exist.” The adept Vasu expands it: “You refute the marks of all dharmas. If this refutation exists, you should not say that all dharmas are empty, because refutation exists”; conversely, “If refutation does not exist, all dharmas exist.”

The treatise author gives the chapter’s first root statement: “Refutation is like what can be refuted.” Four words: the refuting act receives exactly the same treatment as the things it refutes.

The adept Vasu first identifies the illness: “Because you cling to refutation, you use the dharmas of existence and nonexistence to refute that refutation.” The outsider himself clings to refutation and therefore deploys something intermittently existent and nonexistent against it. Then both paths are cut at once: “If this refutation exists, it has already fallen among what can be refuted and is empty, with nothing there”; “If this refutation does not exist, what are you refuting?” If it exists, it belongs among the things refuted. If it does not, the challenge has nowhere to begin.

The final two analogies are exceedingly light: “It is like saying there is no second head; a second head does not come to exist merely because it is refuted,” and “It is like a person saying ‘absent’; saying ‘absent’ does not make an absence exist.” Saying that something is absent does not generate an “absence” and set it before us. The outsider’s entire challenge rests on turning a negation into a thing.

2. Unity and Difference Were Already Refuted

The second challenge changes angle: “Dharmas must exist, because this and that are grasped.” That is, “You grasp a dharma of difference and therefore state the faults of unity; you grasp a dharma of unity and therefore state the faults of difference.” You shoot in both directions, so you must possess unity and difference as two weapons. If both graspings are established, all dharmas exist.

The treatise author answers, “Unity is not grasped; difference is the same,” for one reason alone: “That unity and difference cannot be found was already refuted; because it was already refuted, there is nothing grasped.” Here the earlier chapters “Refutation of Unity” and “Refutation of Difference” bear their fruit. Those tools are not the author’s private property; once their work is done, they are dismantled as well.

The adept Vasu adds one candid sentence: “Furthermore, suppose someone says”—if the outsider says, “You grasp nothing, but I grasp the dharmas of unity and difference”—then “if such a question is raised, it should be refuted in this way.” If the outsider takes up the grasping on his own side, the same refutation applies without alteration. Only a refutation applied equally to both sides is free of favoritism.

3. Who Is the Destroyer?

The outsider retreats from dharmas to the person: “Because you refute another’s dharma, you are a person who destroys dharmas”—“You delight in refuting other people’s dharmas, forcibly generating faults for them while grasping nothing yourself.” The accusation concerns an attitude: you only dismantle others and accept no burden yourself.

The treatise author returns the title unchanged: “You are the destroyer.” The reason has two parts: “The speaker of emptiness grasps nothing; because there is nothing grasped, he is not a destroyer”; and “You grasp your own dharma and refute another’s grasping, so you are the destroyer.” To refute, one must first have a position on which to stand; one with no position cannot destroy anyone. The outsider holds his own dharma, and every challenge launches from there.

4. Establishing and Refuting Cannot Be the Same Act

The outsider presses further and simply declares that refuting is establishing: “Because another’s dharma is refuted, one’s own dharma is established”—“If another’s dharma is defeated, one’s own dharma wins.” It is the most natural thought in a debate: if the other loses, I win.

The author answers, “Establishing and refuting are not one,” first separating the names: “Establishing means proclaiming and praising merits; refuting means exposing faults and wrongdoing”; “Praising merits and exposing faults are not called one.” Praise gives something; exposing faults removes something. The two acts move in opposite directions.

Then comes a cutting root statement: “Establishing is called having fear.” The adept Vasu explains that “fear means lack of strength,” then continues: “If a person fears for his own dharma, he cannot establish anything concerning another’s dharma. Because he is not afraid, he delights in refuting; therefore establishing and refuting are not one.” Someone in a hurry to establish his own dharma through another person reveals uncertainty about that dharma. Establishing differs from refuting because fear is hidden inside establishment.

The final blow returns to the outsider’s own words: “Why did you previously say that the speaker of emptiness only refutes other people’s dharmas and grasps nothing himself?” You just said I refute but do not establish; now you say that refuting is establishing. Both statements cannot be used together.

5. If One’s Own Dharma Is Established, Nothing Is Established

The outsider now states it plainly: “By stating the fault in another’s grasping, one’s own grasping is established”—“Why do you not grasp and establish a dharma yourself, but only refute another’s dharma?”

The treatise author accepts the outsider’s rule and pushes it to its end: “Because another’s dharma is refuted and one’s own dharma established, nothing is established.” The adept Vasu follows the sequence: “Because another’s dharma is refuted, one’s own dharma is established; because one’s own dharma is established, nothing is established; because nothing is established, I establish nothing.”

This deserves slow reading. The author does not deny the rule but borrows it. Very well: let refuting another establish oneself. Yet what I refute is every dharma. Once no dharma is established, that “dharma of my own” is itself included among every dharma and is equally unestablished. If a rule truly applies throughout, it finally passes through the person using the rule as well. This is the method of “Refutation of Emptiness”: it does not enthrone emptiness above everything else; it lets emptiness itself complete the same passage.

6. What the World Trusts Is Conditions

The outsider shifts ground and appeals to common sense: “If dharmas were all empty and without marks, no one in the world would trust or accept this.”

The treatise author answers, “The world trusts this dharma,” because “a dharma born from conditions is, just there, without marks.” He then does something rare in this chapter: he directly names the opponents’ claims as contrary to the world. “Curds, ghee, and the rest are already present in milk; a young girl is already pregnant; excrement is already present in the food children eat”—pushed to its conclusion, an effect existing in its cause puts ghee already in milk, a fetus already in a girl, and excrement already in food. “Apart from beams and rafters there is a further house; apart from threads there is cloth”—a whole is posited apart from its materials. Then he gathers them together: “Some say the effect exists in the cause, some say it does not exist in the cause, and some say dharmas arise apart from conditions.”

The judgment is: “These are in fact empty and should not be used to describe the affairs of the world. Who would trust what such people grasp?” Those claims are what truly depart from the world. The author says of his own Dharma: “My Dharma is not so. Because it agrees with the people of the world, everyone trusts it.” What people encounter in daily use is precisely dharmas born from conditions, and what is born from conditions is, just there, without marks. Emptiness is not an additional thesis imposed upon the world; it is how the world has always been.

7. Nongrasping Is Not Called Grasping

The outsider seizes upon the preceding sentence and turns it back: “When you say there is no grasping, that itself is grasping”; moreover, to say “My Dharma accords with the world” is also a form of personal grasping.

The treatise author answers, “Nongrasping is not called grasping, as with ‘absent.’” He first restates the route: “I previously said that dharmas born from conditions are, just there, without marks; therefore I grasp nothing.” Then comes the analogy: “Having nothing grasped is not called grasping. It is like saying ‘absent.’ It truly is absent; saying ‘absent’ does not therefore make an absence exist.”

This formally states the principle behind the two brief analogies in the first movement. Negation is not a possession. Each time, the outsider does the same thing: he reads “there is none” as “there is a none,” and “not grasping” as “grasping a not-grasping.” Once that illness is seen, several later challenges in the chapter reveal themselves as the same one.

8. The Annihilator of Dharmas

The outsider raises the charge: “Because you speak of dharmas without marks, you are an annihilator of dharmas”—“There are then no dharmas at all. Because there are no dharmas at all, you are called an annihilator of dharmas.” It is a grave accusation: you are not debating; you are destroying.

The author answers, “One who refutes an annihilator of dharmas is called an annihilator of dharmas,” for only two reasons: “I myself have no dharma, so there is nothing to refute”; “You suppose I annihilate dharmas and seek to refute me, so you are the annihilator of dharmas.” I have established no dharma in my hand, and so there is no object to destroy. You, however, decide that I annihilate dharmas and move to refute me. That movement first produces a destroyer and something destroyed.

9. Mutual Dependence: Long and Short, High and Low, Emptiness and Reality

The outsider takes another route and establishes dharmas through relations: “If long exists, short must exist; if high exists, low must exist; if emptiness exists, reality must exist.” Since emptiness and reality occur in mutual dependence, emptiness must rely on reality in order to stand.

The author answers, “What mutual dependence could there be? Unity has been refuted,” adding: “If there is no unity, there is no mutual dependence.” For a relation to be established, two things must first stand in their own right. Once unity has been refuted, there are no two endpoints to lean upon one another.

The final question seals the outsider’s path: “If even a little of the nonempty remained, there should be mutual dependence. If there is nothing nonempty, there is no emptiness; how could they be mutually dependent?” If you retain even one nonempty thing, my emptiness has an object. Once nothing nonempty remains, the emptiness opposed to it need not be established either. Emptiness is not one endpoint; it gathers both endpoints away.

10. Nonestablishment Is Establishment

The outsider tries once more with an elegant analogy: “It is like saying that a room is empty and has no horse; then there exists a no-horse.” A room contains no horse—surely “no horse” is an actual state of affairs? You say dharmas are empty and without marks, “yet these words can generate many kinds of thought, so an absence must exist; consequently your nonestablishment is establishment.” The statement has content in the mind, and therefore absence exists; nonestablishment has become a kind of establishment.

The author answers, “Existence and nonexistence are all absent”: “Within the true mark of things, I use many Dharma gates to say that existence and nonexistence are both empty.” Then comes the reason: “If existence is absent, nonexistence is also absent; therefore existence and nonexistence are all absent.”

This sentence is the chapter’s hinge. “Nonexistence” can stand only by depending on “existence”; when existence cannot be found, the nonexistence opposed to it has no foothold either. The outsider always assumes that at the end of refutation an absence will remain, something he can point at and say, “See, something is still there.” The author replies: you borrowed that absence from existence.

11. If Intrinsic Nature Is Empty, Why Refute Anything?

The eleventh challenge is the chapter’s most accomplished question, and it is asked from the author’s own side: “Dharmas are empty in intrinsic nature and have no maker. Because there is no making, there should be no refutation.” If they were empty from the beginning, what are you refuting? It is “like a foolish person trying to destroy space and merely exhausting himself.”

The author answers, “Although intrinsically empty, beings are bound because they grasp marks”: “Although all dharmas are empty in intrinsic nature, beings are bound by false conceptions and discriminations.” Dharmas are empty; what binds is conception.

The chapter’s only extended analogy follows: “A fool sees a heat shimmer on a hot day, falsely conceives water, and exhausts himself pursuing it. A wise person tells him: this is not water.” The wise person’s sentence does not destroy water; it stops the conception. The adept Vasu maps analogy to teaching: “Dharmas are likewise empty in nature, but sentient beings grasp marks and therefore cling. To refute this inversion, one speaks of refutation, while in fact nothing is refuted.”

This movement fixes the character of “refutation” throughout the chapter. Refutation never falls upon a dharma—there is no dharma there to refute. It falls upon the inversion that grasps marks. Once inversion ceases, refutation has nothing more to do. There never was water on the sand; the person drenched in sweat is the one who ran after it.

12. The Fourth Proposition

The outsider changes method again and challenges from scriptural authority. You refute existence, nonexistence, and both, and “now fall into neither existence nor nonexistence,” yet “this neither existence nor nonexistence cannot be spoken”—because “the marks of existence and nonexistence cannot be found, this is called an ineffable dharma.” Such an ineffable dharma “is absent from the great scriptures of the Vaiśeṣikas, Sāṃkhyas, Nirgranthas, and others, and therefore cannot be trusted.”

The author answers, “There is a fourth proposition,” then produces evidence from each opponent’s own scripture. The Vaiśeṣika scripture says “sound is called neither large nor small”; the Sāṃkhya scripture says “a lump of clay is neither a jar nor not a jar”; the Nirgrantha teaching says “light is neither bright nor dark.” Each school has a statement that exceeds a simple binary. He ends with one question: “Why do you say there is none?”

You find the fourth proposition untrustworthy only because you have not turned back to look at your own scriptures. The answer establishes no new doctrine; it simply lays the opponent’s own belongings upon the table.

13. Because Language Follows Convention, There Is No Fault

The outsider presses the most practical question: “If everything is empty and the ineffable dharma is correct, why do you now teach good and evil dharmas to transform people?” If you hold the ineffable, why speak Dharma every day?

The author answers, “Because language follows convention, there is no fault,” and for the first time presents the two truths: “When buddhas teach the Dharma, they always rely on conventional truth and the truth of the ultimate meaning. Both are true and are not false speech.”

The analogy is thoroughly homely: “Although the Buddha knows that dharmas are without marks, the Buddha still tells Ānanda to enter Śrāvastī and beg for food.” The Buddha knows that the city lacks intrinsic nature—“if earth, timber, and the rest are removed, no city can be found”—yet still says, “Enter the city and beg for food”; “because the words follow convention, they do not fall into false speech.” If the city’s unfindability forbade the word “city,” Ānanda would go hungry that day.

The final sentence is the author’s humblest in the chapter: “I too study in accordance with the Buddha, so there is no fault.” He offers no separate rationale for himself, saying only that he follows the Buddha’s way.

14. Does Conventional Truth Count as Truth?

The outsider immediately finds an opening in the two truths: “If conventional truth is real, it is included in the truth of the ultimate meaning. If it is not real, why call it truth?” If real, it should collapse into the ultimate; if unreal, it does not deserve the name truth. The question is formidable.

The author answers, “Because of mutual dependence, as with large and small,” first distinguishing the standpoints: “Conventional truth is real for people of the world and unreal for sages.” Then comes the rose apple: “A single rose apple is large beside a jujube and small beside a melon; both statements are true.”

The analogy must be read precisely. It does not say that one may call sizes whatever one wishes. The next sentence is strict: “To call it small beside a jujube and large beside a melon would be false speech.” On the same rose apple, both large and small are true, yet not every statement is true. Conventional truth is truth precisely here: within its own scope it does not permit careless speech. The two truths are not one real level and one false level; they are the same matter viewed in two scopes, each of which forbids careless speech.

15. Relinquishing Self in This Way Is Called Attaining Liberation

The outsider finally asks what it all comes to: “From the initial relinquishment of demerit and merit through the refutation of emptiness, faults are seen in all these dharmas. What benefit is gained?” Reading from the first chapter to here, one finds faults everywhere; what, then, has the reader obtained?

The author answers, “Relinquishing self in this way is called attaining liberation,” and for the first time looks back across the whole treatise: “In this way dharmas are refuted in three modes. At the beginning, in relinquishing demerit and merit, the self is refuted; afterward all dharmas are refuted. This is called having neither self nor anything belonging to self.” Refuting the self leaves no self; refuting dharmas leaves nothing belonging to self. Only in this sentence does the sequence of ten chapters show itself as a path rather than a chain of rebuttals.

The lived character of liberation is described with striking plainness: “One neither receives nor clings to dharmas; hearing existence, one does not rejoice; hearing nonexistence, one does not grieve. This is called liberation.” This is the treatise’s sole portrait of one who has gained the point: it is not what that person knows, but that the heart no longer rises and falls on hearing the two claims existence and nonexistence.

16. Because of Conventional Truth, It Is Spoken of as Liberation

The last question carries no root-text marker and is asked directly: “Why say ‘called attaining liberation,’ rather than truly attaining liberation?” Why say only “called” and not dare to say it is really attained?

The author’s answer is decisive: “Because it is ultimately pure.” The next two clauses gather even the last margin away: “Because the self is refuted, there is no person; because nirvāṇa is refuted, there is no liberation.” There is neither someone who attains nor something attained; “how could one speak of a person attaining liberation?”

The entire treatise’s final sentence is: “Because of conventional truth, it is spoken of as liberation.”

This sentence must be read through the preceding movement. Conventional truth is “real for people of the world,” not an empty courtesy. To say “called liberation” does not say liberation is false. It says that liberation is true without ever becoming anyone’s possession. The outsider demands something to clutch—whether the refuting act, absence, or liberation. To the final word, the author gives him nothing.

Carried Forward

This is the last of the ten extant chapters of the Hundred Treatise. The preceding nine refute the dharmas established by outsiders; this chapter refutes the act of refuting itself, drawing emptiness, nongrasping, and liberation into one examination. Twice the treatise points back to its own earlier chapters. “That unity and difference cannot be found was already refuted” uses the results of “Refutation of Unity” and “Refutation of Difference”; “At the beginning, in relinquishing demerit and merit, the self is refuted” gathers the first through ninth chapters into a single sentence. Only in its final chapter does a treatise surrender its own tools. This is how the Hundred Treatise comes to rest.

Accordingly, “Because nirvāṇa is refuted, there is no liberation” must not be read as denying cultivation and realization. The preceding movement has just said that conventional truth is “real for people of the world,” and the following “Because of conventional truth, it is spoken of as liberation” speaks precisely within that scope. What is refuted is grasping liberation as an object one can possess, not liberation itself. It is as when the wise person tells the one chasing the shimmer, “This is not water”: what ceases is the conception of water; the statement “does not destroy water.”