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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c14.s2: 2. The Vibhajyavādins

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c14.s2

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2. The Vibhajyavādins

c14.s2.1

The origin of the Vibhajyavādins must remain obscure, though doubtless early. The exact force of the title is uncertain. But in the Canon it appears that to be an answerer in detail (vibhajjavādin) was one of the four rational ways of answering an inquiry. You might meet it by (1) a general proposition: (2) a number of particular propositions replying in detail; (3) a counter question; or (4) by waiving aside an unintelligible or irrelevant question. It has been contended, therefore, that, when established generalizations were being arraigned by criticism or when in the Asokan age errors springing from uncritical interpretation of doctrine were to be expunged, the way to purity of ideas lay especially in the *Distinguo* of the second of these methods.¹ This view is strengthened by the fact that once or twice in the Suttas we actually find the Buddha represented as declining to make the general assertion anxiously awaited by his interlocutor and replying instead: ‘Herein I am a particularizer; I am no generalizer’, and in the comment on the *Kathāvatthu* Buddhaghosa ascribes many of the disputes to want of particularization. A different origin, though one not out of sympathy with the spirit of the preceding suggestion, is ascribed in the *Abhidharmakoça*, where the name is traced to the fact that the school answer the old question: ‘Does all exist?’ with a distinction; the present and the past which has not yet borne its fruit exist; the future and the past which has borne its fruit do not exist.²

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¹ AN. i. 197; Mil., p. 445; *Points of Controversy*, pp. xl. f. KV. v. 6, distinction between popular and philosophical truth; xix. 2, application of idea of the void erroneously; xi. 5, misinterpretation of term Kappa, age.

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² Poussin, AK., p. vi., following AK. v. 25. As known to us the school is of Ceylon, but doubtless derived fr m the mainland. Later it dominated Burma and Siam; see Eliot, *Hinduism and Buddhism*, ch. xxxvi. ff.

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It is reasonable to accept the view that the *Abhidhamma Piṭaka*, as we have it in the Pali Canon, is the definite work of this school, a systematic scholasticism based on the Suttas, but nevertheless often advancing in detail beyond them. The date of the Abhidharma and its redaction in its present shape are alike unknown to us, but we may reasonably believe that it was composed from the first in Pali, whereas the Vinaya and the Suttas were redacted in Pali—doubtless with many additions of original composition—on the basis of earlier work in a dialect more closely vernacular.

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