The Sautrantika arguments

·期刊原文
The Sautrantika arguments against the traikalyavada in the light of the contemporary tense revolution

A.Charlene McDermott
Philosophy East and West 24, no. 2, APRIL 1974.
(c) by The University Press of Hawaii
p.193-200

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p.193

Many and many a grief ago (or so the pointer on a
Buddhist chronometer might license one to express
matters) , the Sautraantikas successfully
countermanded a four-pronged resurgence of the
eternalist heresy.(1) And, though the general
dynamics of the Sautraantika-Yogaacaara critique of
the Sarvaastivaadin doctrines is by now widely
disseminated and fairly well understood (thanks
especially to the efforts of S. Schayer, T.
Stcherbatsky and L. de la Vall俥 Poussin), there
remains a cluster of difficulties surrounding the
inadequately explicated technical notions of the
Sarvaastivaadins. Thus, still another rereading of
the Sautraantika-Sarvaastivaadin dialogue would seem
to be in order--this one in tandem with the writings
of some of the so-called tense-revolutionaries and
their philosophical predecessors,(2) for the reason
that recent Western philosophical literature on time
and change contains a partial replication of the
various Buddhist positions and counterpositions.
Registering several prima facie conceptual and
methodological parallels between the two traditions
therefore promises to be a step in the direction of
further disambiguation of Sarvaastivaadin
terminology, a task which is nowhere near completion.
Having given a very sketchy indication of a few
of these similarities below, I hope to exploit them
in a subsequent study in the following manner: The
more developed Western theories, as applied to their
Buddhist counterparts, may not unreasonably be
expected to provide an inventory of possible
alternatives for filling in vague outlines and for
deciding on the exact import of the illustrative
examples which accompany discussions of such key
words as, for example, bhaava, praapti, anyathaa,
etc.(3) The emphasis is primarily, if not
exclusively, epistemological, (4) amounting to a
partial reconstruction of the positions of
Dharmatraata, Gho.saka, Buddhadeva, and Vasumitra,
respectively, to each of which is adjoined the
'saatarak.sita-Kamala'sila rebuttals.(5) One note of
caution--none of what follows warrants imputing the
status of a systematized tense logic to any structure
disclosed in the several Buddhist proposals; any
formal devices mentioned have a purely heuristic
function.

I

The first view to be considered is that of
Dharmatraata, the view which reduces becoming to
bhaava-anyathaatva or alteration in the bhaava
(manner of being, manifestation or appearance) of a
substance (dravya) which itself does not undergo
change; but this kind of reduction is better
described as a reductio ad absurdum of becoming. One
is tempted to baptize Dharmatraata's interpretation
"Buddhist-Saa.mkhya"(6) and the Abhidharmako'sa
expositor (see Louis de la Vall俥 Poussin, '
L'Abhidharmakosa V, p. 54) yields (doubtless due to
pardonable eristic enthusiasm) to this temptation. No
matter! There is also

p.194

an undeniable kinship between Dharmatraata and the
above-cited detensers,(7) for whom reality is at
bottom a becomingless neo-Eleatic whole.
A standard d.r.s.taanta, namely, that of the
transformation of milk into curds (cf., A. B. Keith's
r俿um? of this debate in Buddhist Philosophy in
India and Ceylon, 1923, p. 165) is better replaced by
the following less misleading (and more evocative)
picture painted by F. H. Bradley:

We seem to think that we sit in a boat and are
carried down the stream of time and that on the bank
there is a row of houses with numbers on the door.
And we get out of the boat and knock at the door of
No. 19 and re-entering the boat suddenly find
ourselves opposite No. 20, and having done the same
we go on to No. 21. And all this while the firm fixed
tow of the past and future, stretches in a block
behind us and before us.(8)

The changes rung on what is assumed to be a
sempiternal substance are as mere epistemological
precipitates, (9) its modes of monifestation to
consciousness. The problem of temporal evolution is
here not solved but dissolved

II

Next, Kamala'siila records his ramification of the
Sautraantika polemics against Gho.saka's
lak.sa.na-anyathaatva, the mythos of a universe of
peregrine dharmas, each afiiliating itself in its
wanderings with the diverse lek.sa.nas or
characteristics of pastness, presentness, and
futurity, respectively. Again, as in I, alteration is
not attributed to the dharmic essence itself;(10)
instead, according to hypothesis If, change is
explained in terms of a dharma's adjuncts. It is not
quite accurate to speak of the unseating of old
lak.sa.nas in favor of new ones, for in same
inscrutable way, the "soul" of a given dharma is
never totally dissevered from any of the three
lak.sa.nas: pastness, presentness, or futurity. The
illustration of a man who "although devoted to one
wile, is not free from passion from other wives"
(Schayer, p. 30), far from clarifying this, merely
dogmatically reasserts it. Yet, if all three aspects
are alleged to be timelessly compresent in (or at
least not entirely absent from) each dharma, what
sense is to be attached to the key notion of the
acquisition (praapti) of lak.sa.nas? The upshot of A.
N. Prior's (albeit semantically slanted) analysis of
this matter-namely, that one cannot form a tensed
utterance by attaching "some sort of modifier to... a
non-temporally characterized 'content' " seems to me
to sum up neatly the Sautraantika case against
Gho.saka.(11)
Too, C. D. Broad's objections of McTaggart's
(Ghosaka-like) view are germane to the Sautraantika
attacks on both Gho.saka and Vasumitra (see footnote
21 below). Broad says:

When I utter the sentence 'It will rain', I do not
mean that in some mysterious nontemporal sense of
'is', there is a rainy event, which now possesses
some determinate form of the quality of futurity and
will in course of time lose futurity and acquire
instead the quality of presentness. what I mean is
that raininess will be, but is not now, being
manifested in my neighborhood.(12)

p.195

[Moreover] Broad claims even to find a logical defect
in talk of events, or as he puts it
"event-particles," as "acquiring presentness" and
then losing it. If this did happen, he says, "the
acquisition and loss of presentness by this
event-particle is itself an event-particle of the
second-order, which happens to the first-order
event-particle. Therefore every first-order
event-particle has a history of indefinite length...
Yet, by definition, the first-order eventparticle
...has no duration, and therefore can have no history
in the time series along which presentness is
supposed to move."(13)
In any case, Broad and the Sautraantikas concur
in their rejection of the theory that becoming is a
species of qualitative change (however widely their
paths may diverge beyond this point); rather, both
regard it as an irreducible given. What then of the
indictment levelled by one of his critics against
Broad that, in the process of arriving at this
rejection, Broad has succumbed to "the spell of
Indo-European language, which bristles with time
distinctions"? (14) Regretfully, a
Maadhyamika-oriented critique of Sautraantika
stark-coming-into-being lies beyond the narrow limits
of this article. We turn now to a consideration of
the proposal of Buddhadeva.(l5)

III

Buddhadeva's anyathaa-anyathaatva theory identifies
change with the diverse orientational features or
relationships of an invariant dharma. "'When a dharma
is wandering through the Times, it is called in each
case 'another one' in a different sense in accordance
with its relation to the antecedent and subsequent
moments, just as the same woman is called 'mother'
and 'daughter"' (Schayer, p. 31). Now, while one
cannot be faulted for maintaining (a) that the
present moment precedes the moment which will follow
it and succeeds the moment which precedes it (except,
perhaps, on grounds of insipidity or triteness), to
go on therefrom to conclude (b) that the present
moment is (in a timeless sense of the word 'is') past
with respect to the subsequent moment and future with
respect to the antecedent moment, is to overlook the
lexical character of the terms 'past', 'present', and
'future', as it were, to demand the cake one has just
eaten. To drive this point home, the referent of the
term 'this' in the phrase 'this moment' (or of
'present' in the phrase 'is present') varies in such
a manner that whenever one uses a sentence in which
'this moment' (or 'is present') figures in order to
make a statement, one thereby refers to a time
simultaneous with the time of utterance of that
statement, that is, simultaneous with the tensed
utterance token; similarly, with necessary
adjustments, for the terms 'past' and 'future'.
Hence, reducing disguised to obvious nonsense, it
plainly will not do to say that this moment (where
'this' refers to the time of the utterance) is
timelessly east (where 'past' refers to a time
earlier than the time of the same utterance).

p.196

David Lewis' embroiderings on this are illuminating.
On pages 186-187 of his "Anselm and Actuality,"(16)
he remarks that: "although 'This time is present' is
always true, 'All times are present' is never true.
If we take a timeless point of view and ignore our
own location in time, the big difference between the
present time and other times vanishes. That is not
because we regard all times as equally present, but
rather because if we ignore out own location among
the worlds we cannot use temporally indexical terms
like 'present' at all."
Arguing in a similar vein, Broad refuses to
concede that a description of events in terms of
their "B-relations" (namely, the tenseless two-place
predicates 'is earlier than','is at','is later than')
can ever replace without loss an analysis in terms of
the "A-determinants" ('pastness', 'presentness',
'futurity') of the events.(17) In a later study I
intend to examine more fully the relevance of Broad's
contention to the Sautraantika rejoinder to
Buddhadeva; for the present, I merely note the
recurrence of theory III (and minor variations
thereupon) as, dybbuklike, it takes possession of the
fancies of any number of distinguished Eastern and
Western philosophers. The locus classicus (in the
latter tradition) of the hypothesis that past,
present, and future, in some sense, exist, is
Augustine's Confessions, book 9, chapters 17 and 18
(which hypothesis is later supplanted by Augustine's
reflection that "neither past nor future is existent
... the present of things past is in memory; the
present of things present is in intuition; the
present of things future is in expectation" (18)). An
essentially similar view, albeit in modern dress, is
espoused by the C-tensers. For all that, it is no
less defeasible according to both the Sautraantikas
and A. N. Prior.(19)

IV

The same sort of emasculation of change occurs in the
avasthaa-anyathaatva theory of
Vasumitra-Sa.mghabhadra, who also hold that dharmas
an continuants the applicability of the temporal
predicates 'past', 'present', and 'future' being due,
according to them, to fluctuations in each dharma's
kaaritra or potency to project results
(phalaak.sepaa). Vasumitra maintains that: "a dharma
...receives different designations due to different
avasthaas.... Just as, in an abacus, the same ball,
when thrown in the place of units means ons, in the
place of hundreds, hundred; in the place of thousands
thousand. In the same manner a dharma (=bhaava), when
staying in its kaaritra, is called present, when
fallen down from it is called past, when it has not
yet reached it is called future."(20) But, in this
context, the possibility of regarding a dharma's
time-avasthaas as its spatial positions having been
ruled out,(21) the explanatory value of the abacus
example is questionable.
There follow several unsuccessful attempts to
define the notion of kaaritra,

p.197

which we cannot hope to detail here. But whether
kaaritra be defined as, for example, the capacity of
giving or grasping a result (phala-daana-grahana
(Schayer, p. 36) or, again, as the potency to project
a result (phalaaksepa'sakti (Schayer, p. 37), insofar
as a dharma's functionality is thereby regarded as
(1) an aspect of the dharmasvabhaava, distinguishable
from the dharma, cogent reasons for that
functionality's being held in abeyance at one time,
and becoming productive at another, cannot be
given.(22) (2) Neither is a halfway house, namely,
the theory that the dharmasvabhaava and its kaaritra
or functionality both are and aren't identical, a
congenial resting place. (3) Nor is there much solace
to be derived from the evasive stance that the
relationship between svabhaava and kaaritra is
ineffable. (4) If, finally, a dharma's Kaaritra is
alleged to have a merely nominal existence
(praj~naptisat), he will, ipso facto, have conceded
the Sauttraantika's point.
In sum, the Sautraantika critic would obliterate
the (to him pseudo-) distinctions between a dharm's
essence or intrinsic nature, its functionality, and
the point of time at which that functionality
manifests itself. (Cf., A. N. Prior, Past, Present
and Future, pp. 187-188. "A world-state proposition
in the tense-logical sense is simply an index of an
instant; indeed, I would like to say that it is an
instant, in the only sense in which 'instants' are
not highly fictitious entities. To be the case at
such-and-such an instant is simply to be the case in
such-and-such a world; and that in turn is simply to
be the case when such-and-such a world-proposition is
the case." Such demystification cannot but have a
salutary effect on the philosophy of, e.g.,
Ve^nka.tanaatha who, claiming to have found
inconsistencies in the Buddhist theory of
momentariness, would replace it with a proliferation
of ontological categories.)(23) An entity is no more
and no less than its capacity to produce effects
(arthakriyaa-kaaritva), a thanatomanic, dimensionless
chronon, (24) identical with the instantaneous
dynamics of its own coming-into and passing-out-of
being. An aggregate of such fluxions, each of which
we regard as redolent with past traces and proleptic
of future projections, is fused (via the primordial
confusion that is endemic to our conceptual
apparatus) into a continuum (k.sa.nasantaana), a mere
facade superimposed on an "overblotted series of
intermittences."(25) But that is an old and
well-known story.

V

Having undercut the "platonic" moorings of the four
preceding views, it remains to ease the most
significant of the mental cramps that accrue to the
Sautraantika's own posture: namely, that arising from
their supposed inability to explain cognition of and
discourse about "inexistent" past and future moments.
Here the attentive reader of later Buddhist
epistemology has only to cast a recapitulative glance
at the adequately (and often) expounded Sau-

p.198

traantika theory of reference to irrealia in general,
wherein past and future virtualities emerge as a
subset of possibilia and are to be dealt with
accordingly. To my 1970 discussion of this
matter,(26) I merely append the following remarks of
Prior:

Philosophers may be worried about the fact that
certain undoubted truths appear to be about objects
which, though not in the least abstract, are merely
fictitious, or are mere has-beens or will be's (i.e.
they have ceased to exist or have not yet begun to).
Quantification, it seems to me, is relevant to this
worry, put not quite in the way Quine says it is:
indeed in almost exactly the opposite way. Quine says
in effect that non-existents cannot figure as the
values of bound variables; I would suggest that, on
the contrary, this is the only way in which
non-existents of this sort can figure I cannot
directly refer to what does not exist but is merely
imagined to exist or is merely going to exist; but I
can make purely general (i.e. quantified) statements
about the imaginary or future denizens of the world.
The quantification, however, must occur within a
'modality'. I may, indeed, imagine some real object
to be a mermaid; we can then say that there is an x
such that x is imagined by me to be a mermaid: but if
what is involved is as we say, a 'merely imaginary'
mermaid, then we cannot say that there is an x such
that I imagine that x is a mermaid, but only that I
imagine that there is an x such that x is a mermaid,
Analogously, it may be that some existing person is
going to live so long as to rule England in A.D.
3000; more likely, however. the ruler of England at
that date does not yet exist, in which case we cannot
say that for some x, it will be the case then that x
rules England, but only that it wilt be the case then
that for some x,x rules England.(27)

In short (and here I think the Sautraantikas
would very likely go along with Prior the P-tenser,
had they his refined tools), in analyzing 'It will be
the case that something  s' (F(卿x)x), we do not
mean (or need) to say that some identifiable already
existing x will continue to exist and will ((卿x)F
 x).(28)
The foregoing leads should he pursued further; in
addition, the ordinary man's felt difference between
the apprehension of anterior and posterior truths, as
well as the status of that difference (and all other
temporally rooted distinctions) to an enlightened
being, ought to be investigated. In relentless
disregard of these desiderata tempus loquendi (my
allotted time) yields its place to tempus tacendi.
_____________________________________________________

1. More accurately, the Sautraantikas unveiled a
Nicodemian reversion to eternalism on the part of
the Sarvaastivaadins, For the Sarvaastivaadins,
having explicitly decried the view that time is
an eternal substance, posit in its place real,
perdurable dharmas. Cf. Abhidharmako'sa, IV, 28,
Ya'somitra, Sphu.taarthaa, Abhidharmako'sa
vyaakhya ed. Wogihara (Tokyo: The Publication
Association of Abbidharmakosavyaakhyaa,
1932-1936) , p. 375, line 4, "kaalo nitya.h
padaartho'stiityeke/... /kaalo naama ka e.sa
dharmaiti/kaala ity asyaabhidhaanaasya kim
adhidheyam, sa.msaara
paridiipanaadhivacanam,....'

2. In an article entitled "Tense Logic! Why Bother?"
Nous III (Feb., 1969), pp. 17-32), G.J. Massey
examines the programs of "a dedicated band of
revolutionaries [who], under the aegis of Arthur
Prior. impugn the legitimacy of certain central
notions of modern logic and have begun to develop
and explore alternative logics, so called tense
logics, reminiscent of certain ancient and
medieval logical developments" (p.17). Massey
goes on to subclassify twentieth-century
logicians as follows: "Hereafter we shall refer
to logicians who insist on de-tensed formalized
languages as de-tensers, and to the
revolutionaries who demand tensed ones as
tensers, either P-tensers or C-tensers according
to their style of tense logic" (pp.
18-19).'Tenser and de-tenser agree that one can
refer only to what is real...but this agreement
is more verbal than substantival. For the

p.199

P-tenser 'real' means 'what now exists';. for the
, de-tenser, real' means what exists (tenseless)
'; and for the C-tenser, it means 'what has
existed , exists now, or win exist" (p.21).

3. The need to unpack the equally refractory
conception of kaaritra is far less pressing,
since Saantarak.sita-Kamala'siila have subjected
it to a relatively thorough examination; hence I
shall do little more than reiterate their
comments.

4. For reasons of brevity and coherence and not
because I regard them as unimportant, I ignore
ethically and/or eschatologically based critical
rejoinders.

5. See chapter 3 of S. Schayer's monograph,
Contributions to the Problem of Time in Indian
Philosophy (Krakow: Polski Builetyn
Orientalistycany, 1938) (hereafter cited as
Schayer, Contributions).

6. See footnote 9.

7. Sec footnote 2. Mutatis mutandis, of course. A
fully articulated model of a block universe
comprising four-dimensional objects and time
slices thereof, cannot be ascribed to
Dharmatraata Buddhist sophistication does not
extend to endowing empirical time with the status
of a fourth dimension or to assigning loci to
past and future dharmas. They are placeless
(ades爏tha). (See Schayer, op. cit., p. 21.)
For these and other reasons, it would be
prochronistic (even were I competent to do so) to
take up the question of the relationship between
the Buddhist world-model and that proposed by
quantum physics. However, it is interesting to
note that M. Capek ("Time in Relativity Theory
Arguments for Philosophy of Becoming, pp.
434-454, J. Fraser, ed., in The Voices of Time
(New York: G. Braziller, 1966) pp, 434-454)
contends that a modern analogue of view I "not
only does not follow from relativity theory, but
is even incompatible with it (p. 451). In this
Capek stands diametrically opposed to (among
others) A. Gruunbaum, Philosophical Problems of
Space and Time (New York, Knopf, 1963), and to W.
V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
1960), p. 170.

8. F.H. Bradley, The Principles a Logic (London:
Oxford University Press, 1922), vol. I, pp.
54-55. Bradley, however immediately discards this
picture in favor of another.

9. 0n p. 30 of Schayer, Contributions, the bhaava is
said to be "a special quality (=gu.navi'se.sa) to
which are related cognitive process
(j~naanaprav.riti), expressed in distinction of
terms (abhidaana): future, present and past"
Schayer also observes that it is not all certain
that 'gu.na in 'gu.navi'se.sa' ought to be
equated with the 'gu.na of Saa.mkhya metaphysics.

10. However, in contrast to I, account II aplicitly
rules out the suggestion of an alternating
current of manifestations and evanishments. (See
Schayer, Cortributions, p. 32, note)

11. A. N. Prior, Past, Present ad Future (Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 15.

12. C.D. Broad Examination Of McTaggart's Philosophy,
vol 2, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1938), p.316.

13. A. N. Prior, Post, Present and Future, pp.7-8.

14. D. Williams, "The Sea Fight Tomorrow", in
Structure, Method and Meaning, ed by P. Henle, H.
Kallen, and S. Langer (New York, Liberal Arts
Press, 1951), p. 299. A propos, one feels that a
linguist's approach to the problem might be very
rich in results. (Zeno Vendler's distinction
between achievements and processes is an example
that comes immediately to mind. Vendler notes in
Linguistics and Philosophy (Ithca, New York,
Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 114) that
"running or erasing the street are processes
going on in time and as such can't be broken down
into indivisible time instants--their very notion
indicates a time stretch; whereas spotting (an
achievement) connotes a unique indivisible time
instant."

15. In order to facilitate exposition, I have
reversed the order in which Kamala'sila reviews
the last two theories.

16. Nous 4 (May, 1970).

17. That is, one cannot assimilate tensed to
tenseless predicates. See C D. Broad,

p.200

"Time and Change, " in Aristotelian Society
Supplementary Volume 8 (1928), p. 187. The "A-B"
dichotomy derives from McTaggart's now famous
distinction between two essentially different
types of temporal series, the "A-series" which
runs from past to present to future and the
"B-series" which runs from earlier to later than
with a permanent generating relation of earlier
than. For a fuller discussion, see chapters 1-4
of R M. Gale, The Language of Time (London:
Routledge & K. Paul), 1968.

18. Book 9, chapter 20 of Augustine's Confessions, p.
83; A. Hyman and J. Walsh, Philosophy in the
Middle Ages (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

19. See especially the last chapter of Prior's Post,
Present and Future.

20. S. Schayer, Contributions, p. 31.

21. See footnote 7.

22. In this regard, the positing of jati, jaraa,
sthiti, and anityataa is both unwarranted and
unhelpful, as is the assumption of second-order
kaaritras (namely, kaaritras of kaaritras), the
latter giving rise to a vicious infinite regress.

23. Sec S. Dasgupta, R History of Indian Philosophy,
vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1940), pp. 273-274.

24. On the strict Sautraantika notion of a k.sa.na
(directly intuitable it at all, only via the
transcendental intuition of a yogin) and its
relationship to the impermanent but briefly
persisting "moment" of earlier Buddhism, se E.
Conze Buddhist Thought in India (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp.134-137.
(See also E Sarathchandra, Buddhist Psychology of
Perception (Colombo: Ceylon University Press,
1958), pp. 42-44.) Regarding the latter notion,
compare A. Moles' remark in his Information
Theory and Esthetic Perception (Urbana, Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, 1966), p. 15: "The
act of perception, being an electrochemical
process is carried on at a tremendously high
speed. Nonetheless it does possess a measurable
duration....The threshold of perception could be
described as the 'length of the present'. Its
value is around.05 second"

25. For this well-turned phrase (as well as for the
paper's subtitle), I am indebted, of course, to
the poet Ezra Pound.

26. Cf., my An Eleventh-Century Buddhist Logic of
'Exists' (Reidel: Dordrecht. 1970).

27. A. N.Prior, Papers on Time mad Tense (Oxford: The
Clarendon Prey 1968), p. 143.

28. Or that a now existing x stands forever in a
variety of relations to other denizens of a
frozen universe.