Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s2.10

c15.s2.10

The Vaibhāṣika position is not approved by the Sautrāntika on the decidedly legitimate ground that all forms of this view really involve belief in the existence of a permanent substance persisting throughout time, the time distinctions appearing in it. If, it is pointed out, the past exercises efficiency at present, it clearly cannot be distinguished from the present, an objection which no attempt to distinguish between efficiencies will enable us to remove. Secondly, we can as experience shows know non-existing entities just as well as we can know existing entities; now non-existing entities have *ex hypothesi* no efficiency, so that it is not necessary that the past should have efficiency to be known. Again, if a distinction is drawn between an efficiency and an entity, there is immediately raised the insoluble problem why the efficiency started at any particular time and stopped at another. The true doctrine is that there is no distinction between the entity, the efficiency, and the time of its appearance;¹ entities appear from non-existence;² they exist for a moment; then they cease to exist. Their existence activity and action are all one. This harmonizes with the fact that, when we remember a thing as the past we do not and cannot know it as existing in the past; we know it in the same way as we knew it when it was present;