The History of Buddhist Thought c25.47

c25.47

He proceeds through all the characteristic doctrines of the Vaibhāshikas, treating them in the same way—on the impossibility of motion, on the sense faculties, the skandhas, action and actor, the truth of pain, the self, time, etc. In the chapter on Binding and Release *saṃsāra*² itself is said to be unreal. “If the saṃskāras transmigrate, they do not transmigrate as anything permanent nor as impermanent, and the argument for the existence of a being is just the same.” Here the saṃskāras are the elements of which all compound things consist. But nothing is permanent except the three uncompounded things, and if the compounds are impermanent they perish as soon as they arise. This assumes the doctrine of momentariness (*kṣaṇikavāda*), according to which each thing consists of a series of moments. Nor does the individual (*pudgala*) transmigrate. “If it is said that an individual transmigrates, he must be sought in fivefold way in the skandhas, in the āyatanas and the dhātus, but he (apart from these) does not exist. Who then transmigrates?” The ātman is as unreal as the son of a barren woman. “From one form of grasping (*upādāna*) to another it would have no existence in *saṃsāra*; as it is without existence and without grasping, how does it transmigrate?” There is no transmigration of an ātman, adds the commentator, and as there is no transmigration of compounded things either, therefore there is no transmigration at all.