Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s2.18

c15.s2.18

In the Kathāvatthu⁴ we find an elaborate, but as usual not very profitable, refutation of the Sarvāstivādin view that everything exists, understood in the sense that past, present, and future equally exist; the passages of the Suttas in favour of the former view are refuted effectively enough by other passages, without anything more than dialectical ingenuity. The conclusion arrived at is that the present alone exists, and the same doctrine is stoutly maintained against the Kassapikas, who are credited with asserting that some of the past, i. e. that which is to bear fruition exists, as well as some of the future, i. e. that which is inevitably to be, as distinct from that which is only contingent. The fact is extremely interesting and raises an obvious difficulty in the face of the doctrine which is attributed elsewhere to the Vibhajyavādins¹ and which certainly appears in the *Milindapañha*; that text certainly admits the existence of past potentialities of future action, though it denies the existence of the future and the past that has performed its activity. We have in fact in this point a suggestion that the *Kathāvatthu* as we have it cannot be regarded as representing always Vibhajyavādin views, and with this concurs the obvious consideration that in not a few cases the argument is very obviously much the better in the case of the opponent than of the Vibhajyavādin, and, for example in the case of the discussion of time itself, we find in the work two distinct doctrines. The true momentariness of all consciousness is on the one hand asserted, while on the other hand it is denounced as a heresy to hold that all existence is to be reduced to conscious moments, the case of the elements, trees, &c., being adduced against such an idea, and stress is laid on the fact that the Canon assumes the more or less permanent existence of external sense matter, of the sense organs as material, and objects to any attempt to identify either with actual consciousness.² We may derive from these views the conception that for the *Kathāvatthu* consciousness was momentary—this is asserted even of the consciousness of a god—but that material things had some endurance, though they were not permanent, and this view is in accord with the relative permanence of body admitted in the Canon. But the *Kathāvatthu* certainly does not make explicit the doctrine.