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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s5: 6. The Later Doctrine of Momentariness and Causal Efficiency

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s5

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6. The Later Doctrine of Momentariness and Causal Efficiency

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The Sautrāntika doctrine of momentariness received no substantial development in the school, but was energetically defended by Ratnakīrti (A. D. 950)² from the attacks made upon it by the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school which declined to accept the denial of substance and true causation which it involved. The production of effects, he maintains, can be explained on the doctrine of momentariness and causal efficiency as the characteristics of existence, and not otherwise. Take any existent object, such as a jug at present perceived; it exists in the production of the effect of my perception of it; it is manifestly absurd to say that this effect is identical with the past or future, and it is equally absurd to hold that in the past and future it produces no effect; if it has any capacity to be effective, it must manifest it always, or there is no reason why it should do so now. What now exists, therefore, is essentially momentary; the jug which now affects my senses is not the same as the jug which formerly existed, for they differ essentially in capacity, and capacity is the essence of existence.

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² Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi; Six Buddhist Nyāya Tracts, ed. Haraprasād Shāstrī (BI. 1910), pp. 20-77. Cf. TRD., pp. 28-31; 40 explains how momentariness is not perceived.

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There are two obvious Nyāya objections to such a statement which Ratnakīrti seeks to meet. The first is that, as capacity is regarded as existence, it becomes impossible to know anything, since capacity cannot be known until the effect is known, and the effect in turn cannot be known until its effect is known and so on to infinity, a fatal objection in the Nyāya view. Secondly, momentariness negates the existence of any permanent perceiver of change, and destroys the possibility of inference which the Buddhists admit. The reply to the former contention is an appeal to the facts; the existence of seeds means no more than the capacity of producing shoots; even if the capacity is itself dependent on a further capacity, still the fact is undeniable, and there is no objection to an infinity which is in accord with reality. Nor is there any force in the objection that a cause such as a seed must wait for a number of subsidiary conditions, e. g. water, earth, &c., before it can produce the shoot; the true view is that the seed-moment produces the conditions as well as the shoot, its potency to do so being explained by earlier causal moments on which it depends; this comprehensive power may be illustrated by the analogy of the single perceptual moment which reveals a large number of objects. The second set of objections is rejected as equally unsound. Facts show that under certain conditions there is knowledge of concomitance either positive or negative; granting that the knowledge is subsequent to the concomitance, nevertheless it holds within itself the experience of the preceding moment, and this serves to supply the place of a permanent observer. The existence of concomitance also is possible, not because there are permanent entities, but because of the extreme similarity of the momentary existences concerned.

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These discussions clearly leave unsolved the essential difficulties of the conception of momentariness and causal efficiency. The mental series which gives the only self allowed is clearly possessed in some sense of a causal continuity, each state taking up in itself the results of previous conditions. But causation in regard to the external reality accepted by the school is not rendered intelligible, and still less the interrelation of the two disparate forms of reality.

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The Buddhist argument for momentary activity is presented with special care in the *Sarvadarçanasaṃgraha*.¹ Whatever exists is momentary, because it exists; existence is admittedly practical efficiency or activity, and activity has only two possible forms, successive and non-successive, on the principle of excluded middle. These two are both inconsistent with permanency, and therefore activity and existence are momentary. If this inconsistency with permanence is called into question, it can be established by a simple dilemma; does the permament object possess at present the capacity of past and future activity? If it does, then it must produce these effects now, since that, which has capacity, like a collection of causes, cannot fail to act. If not, then it will never have the power, and the theory that it has true existence is overthrown. Nor is it any use to assume successive subsidiaries with which the permanent object accomplishes results. If these subsidiaries do not assist the thing, they are idle; if they do, are they different from the thing or not? If they are different, then it is they that bring about the result, not the non-changing object, nor can this fact be avoided by any attempt to argue that it is the permanent entity that produces with the subsidiaries. If, on the other hand, it is the case that the subsidiaries are identical with the original thing, then it is clear that the permanent thing has changed its nature, which means that it is not permanent. It is equally impossible that a permanent thing should have activity as simultaneous; we have the dilemma: does this permanent entity after producing these effects at once survive or not? If it does, then it will go on for all time producing these effects; if it does not, its permanence is *ex hypothesi* non-existent. Hence the permanent can never be active, and, as existence is activity, the permanent is never existent, and all is momentary.

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¹ pp. 7 ff. See Aniruddha on SS. i. 33-41 who uses the *Sarvadarçanasaṃgraha*. In SS. v. 92 f. we have an attack on the Buddhist denial of genus. See also § 7.

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