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Collection: Part 10 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 10
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0:03–0:09Setting the debating hall of a royal court in Mithila, a lamp burning though it is day, a
0:09–0:15water-clock bataki yantra marking the time allowed to each speaker, as was the custom of
0:15–0:17the formal vada.
0:17–0:22Praul, Satradhara enters, bows to the assembly.
0:22–0:28Before the argument begins, a bow, not to a god established by argument, but to the
0:28–0:31one who's being no argument can either grant or take away.
0:31–0:34What you are about to hear is not history.
0:34–0:38Udayana lived, his opponents live only in his pages.
0:38–0:43As the shadow of an arm lives in the shape it prevents the lamp from lighting.
0:43–0:50I have gathered those shadows into one robe and one voice, and named him K. Shannabhadra,
0:50–0:55the fortunate of the moment, for he speaks for every teacher who held that nothing lasts,
0:55–1:00that nothing looks outward from within a body, and that the word I is a habit mistaken
1:00–1:07for a fact. The dispute you will hear turns on one question, asked in four different rooms,
1:07–1:13who is asking? Is there anyone who suffers, who remembers, who is bound, and who might be freed,
1:13–1:20or is there only a river of moments, mistaking its own ripples for a bank? Waterclock begin,
1:20–1:27let the two sides speak by turn, as the law of debate requires, and let neither claim victory
1:27–1:31before the other has been given his full measure of time.
1:31–1:32Exit.
1:32–1:34Act 1.
1:34–1:36The river that is not there.
1:36–1:39Udayana is seated on the teacher's seat.
1:39–1:45KSH Anabhadra enters, hands folded and takes the opponent's seat.
1:45–1:48The student sits at Udayana's feet.
1:48–1:52Carrier, I will not waste the water in the clock on Curtis's.
1:52–1:55You teach that behind these eyes there sits an unmoving watcher, one and the same
1:55–1:59from the child who feared the dark to the old man who no longer does.
1:59–2:04I teach otherwise that everything real bursts into being and perishes within a single moment
2:04–2:09and that a new thing resembling the old only as smoke resembles smoke arises to take its
2:09–2:10place.
2:10–2:15The candle flame you call one flame as a hundred flames introducing themselves to each other
2:15–2:18so quickly that you cannot see the greeting end and the farewell begin.
2:18–2:20There is no one who watches.
2:20–2:24There is only watching and then more watching each instance new.
2:24–2:27Then let me ask you the question a debate is built to ask.
2:27–2:28What is your proof?
2:28–2:31Not your poetry, your proof.
2:31–2:32Whatever is real is momentary.
2:32–2:36The pot on your shelf is momentary, even you will grant that it eventually breaks.
2:36–2:40And the disputed things, the self, the soul, the enduring word, are real.
2:40–2:41Therefore they too are momentary.
2:41–2:43You hear the shape of it.
2:43–2:48He has shown me a pot that breaks, and asked me to conclude that a self, which nobody
2:48–2:53has yet seen break, must break too, on the strength of a resemblance he has not established.
2:53–2:58This is not proof. It is a wish wearing the clothing of a syllogism. Tell me, K. Shana
2:58–3:04Padra, where is the invariable bond between being real and lasting one moment only. A
3:04–3:09pot lasting years is as real, while it lasts. As a spark lasting an instant, you have shown
3:09–3:12me one case. You have not shown me the law.
3:12–3:16The law is shown that capacity and incapacity to act cannot sit together in one and the
3:16–3:20same thing at one and the same time. The pot, the instant after it is fired, is
3:20–3:25capable of holding water the pot the instant before is not if it were one pot both capable
3:25–3:29and incapable you would have planted a contradiction in a single seed.
3:29–3:32Only if each moment is its own separate thing does the contradiction dissolve.
3:33–3:36Now we are at the root of it and I thank you for reaching it quickly.
3:36–3:40The water clock rewards a swift opponent more than a cautious one.
3:40–3:45Tell me plainly, is this capacity you speak of the very act of producing the effect
3:45–3:48or merely the fitness to produce it? Prior to the act.
3:48–3:51Fitness. The seed is fit to sprout before it sprouts.
3:51–3:56Then here the trap you have set for your own foot. If capacity is the act itself.
3:56–4:01Your reason collapses into your conclusion. You would be proving momentariness by citing an
4:01–4:06activity that already presupposes it, which is no inference at all, only a restatement,
4:06–4:12so you rightly chose fitness. But fitness is not exhausted by one moment. A seed sitting in
4:12–4:16a granary is fit to sprout in the sense that nothing in its own nature forbids sprouting.
4:16–4:22It lacks only the water, the warmth, the soil it has not yet met. Does the seeds fitness vanish
4:22–4:27the instant it is not sprouting? If so, no seed could ever wait for rain. Yet seeds wait for rain
4:27–4:32every season and remain seeds throughout the waiting. Your capacity must therefore be something that
4:32–4:38persists through the interval before its exercise, which is the very enduring thing you deny.
4:38–4:42Say rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is passed
4:42–4:47hand-to-hand in a really each-runner-new-the-flame-alone continuous appearance only.
4:47–4:52A really needs a track along, which the runners are ordered, some reason why this moment's fitness
4:52–4:57is inherited by that moment's fitness and not by some other moment entirely disconnected from it,
4:57–5:03in another field, another country, what ties runner to runner, if not someone thing running,
5:03–5:07you have smuggled a continuant and through the back door of your metaphor while showing me
5:07–5:12out through the front, and there is a second wound in this argument. Deeper than the first,
5:12–5:17You say a thing must perish because it must inevitably perish. That destruction requires no
5:17–5:23further cause, being simply the nature of the existent, but then tell me. A stone standing in the sun
5:23–5:29for ten years has, on your view, secretly been ten thousand stones, each perishing by its own nature,
5:29–5:35and yet requiring, unnoticed, no hammer, no weathering, no cause at all to break it.
5:35–5:39Do you not find it strange that a doctrine built to explain change ends by needing no
5:39–5:44explanation for the one change, destruction, that matters most.
5:44–5:46You press hard on a difficult joint, Akaria.
5:46–5:50I did not concede a momentary thing's ending is not caused as its beginning is caused precisely
5:50–5:53because existence and impermanence are not to.
5:53–5:55Then you have not answered.
5:55–5:59You have renamed the difficulty identity and hoped the water clock would run out before
5:59–6:00anyone noticed.
6:00–6:04It has not run out, but I will not drag a tired point further.
6:04–6:09A debater, like a physician, should know when the patient has understood the diagnosis.
6:09–6:14Let a set momentariness aside as unproved, not as disproved by force but as never shown,
6:14–6:19and turn to the second pillar of your house, which is grander and will fall harder.
6:19–6:23Act 2 The Hall of Mirrors
6:23–6:29The lamp is trimmed, KSH Anab had a rises to pace, more animated.
6:29–6:32Grant me this then Akaria, since you'll have a direct question.
6:32–6:35When you dream of a garden, is the garden outside you?
6:35–6:36No.
6:36–6:41Yet, while dreaming the garden feels every bit as outside as this hall feels to you now,
6:41–6:45waking cognition and dream cognition are on the point that matters the feeling of externality
6:45–6:46identical.
6:46–6:50If a feeling of externality can occur with no external thing behind it in the dream,
6:50–6:53what forces you to posit an external thing behind it now?
6:53–6:57Perhaps this whole assembly, this water clock, my own robe, are one long dream that has
6:57–7:02simply not yet ended cognition painting itself with the appearance of an outside because
7:02–7:05that is cognition's nature, needing no outside to paint from.
7:05–7:09A pleasant vertigo and old, here is its flaw.
7:09–7:13You argue from some cognitions being objectless the dream to all cognitions possibly being
7:13–7:18objectless the waking world, but a house does not become imaginary, because some houses
7:18–7:21are painted on stagecloth, worse.
7:21–7:23How do you and I agree?
7:23–7:27This very afternoon, that dream and waking even differ enough to compare.
7:27–7:31You yourself distinguish them, you would not walk off this dais believing the floor
7:31–7:32absent.
7:32–7:37might in a dream that very distinguishing is a cognition of a difference between two kinds of
7:37–7:42cognition made from a vantage outside both. What is it? If not the report of something the dream
7:42–7:49state cannot furnish and the world can, namely, a stable object which persists to be checked against,
7:49–7:54corrected by, return to. Say the difference you speak of is only a difference of vividness of
7:54–8:00coherence internal to cognition itself. Cognition illuminates itself as a lamp needs no second lamp
8:00–8:05to be seen by. What you call an external pot is only this cognition wearing for a while,
8:05–8:10the appearance cold potness needing nothing beyond itself to explain that appearance.
8:10–8:16Then account for this, border. Two of us, you and I, look at the same jar at the same moment and
8:16–8:22report the same shape, the same weight when lifted, the same sound when struck. If each of
8:22–8:27us were merely cognition self-illuminating its private appearance, our two jars would be two
8:27–8:32private paintings with no canvas in common, coincidence would have to explain their agreement.
8:32–8:38A coincidence repeated at every meal, every market, every court such as this one, for every
8:38–8:44person who has ever lived. I would sooner believe in the jar and consider further. Your own inference,
8:44–8:49the one you are giving me now, depends on my mind receiving a reason from outside itself,
8:49–8:54namely your voice, entering by my ear, addressed to a listener you take to be distinct from the
8:54–8:59sound and from your own mind producing it. If nothing is outside cognition, to whom,
8:59–9:04and by what channel, are you even now speaking? You have found the seam in the robe, Ocaria,
9:04–9:09the very act of debate and you prespose as a second party outside my own stream of cognition,
9:09–9:12wish the doctrine of mind only cannot, without embarrassment, allow.
9:12–9:16I concede this pillar cracks though I do not yet concede the house has fallen.
9:16–9:19There remains a room you have not entered, even should dare to world,
9:19–9:24stand must the self stand behind the scene of it. Perhaps there is a world and perceptions of
9:24–9:29of it, arising and passing, and nothing more. No owner, no witness, only the seeing self-lit,
9:29–9:33onalus, as a series of lumps lit one from the last need, no single flanky pro-walking
9:33–9:35behind them with a torch.
9:35–9:39Now you have named the true battlefield, and I will meet you there gladly, for it is
9:39–9:44the one this whole inquiry was undertaken to reach.
9:44–9:50Act 3 The Cognizer behind the cognition. Udayana rises for the first time and steps
9:50–9:57down from the teacher's seat, level with K. S. H. Anabhadra, a mark by the customs of the Vada
9:57–10:01that he now argues not from authority but from evidence alone.
10:02–10:08K. S. Anabhadra set aside every scripture, every school, every inherited word,
10:08–10:12and answer only from what is given to you this instant, when you say I am tired,
10:12–10:18or I understand, or, indeed, I deny that I exist. What does the word I report?
10:18–10:23A convenient fiction, a label the stream of consciousness applies to itself out of habit,
10:23–10:27as a river might be named though no single thing called the river is there apart from the water.
10:27–10:33A fiction, you say. But even a fiction must be told by someone or believed by someone or at the
10:33–10:39very least, occur to someone. The awareness I exist is not like the awareness the sky is blue,
10:39–10:45which might in principle be doubted, argued over, corrected by a better eye. Has any person,
10:45–10:50waking or dreaming, learned or unlearned, ever doubted that he exists while forming the thought
10:50–10:56that he exists. You cannot even frame your denial. I do not exist. Without the very eye your sentence
10:56–11:01tries to erase standing behind the erasing. Every school of grammar teaches that a word need not
11:01–11:06name a thing behind it. It reigns names know it that does the reigning. So I know may name no
11:06–11:10eye that does the knowing only the knowing dressed by grammar in a subject it does not require.
11:10–11:15A fair parry, and I will not wave it off. It rains indeed names no separate rainer,
11:15–11:20but notice the difference between the two cases carefully, for it is the whole of the matter.
11:20–11:25I can be shown that it rains is a grammatical convenience, because I can point to the falling
11:25–11:30water and to ask where, in this, is a separate rainer, and find none, the raining and the
11:30–11:35water falling are one and the same event, nothing withheld. Now perform the same test on
11:35–11:41knowing. Point me to the knowing of the jar and ask. Is there, decides the knowing, an agent
11:41–11:46whom the knowing serves? Watch yourself the next time you learn a fact you did not want to hear.
11:46–11:50One part of the event is the arising of the knowledge. Another,
11:50–11:56distinguishable part, is the resistance. The wish it were otherwise, the ownership of the discomfort.
11:56–12:01I cut, we say, and the cutting is one thing, the cutter another. The iron does not own the
12:01–12:08the wound it makes. So too I know. The knowing is an act, and every act, by the plain evidence
12:08–12:13of every other act we have ever examined, requires an agent distinct from itself, one
12:13–12:18who begins before the act and remains after it, since the sickle is duller after the
12:18–12:23cutting than before, while the reaper is not consumed by his reaping.
12:23–12:27Then let the agent be nothing more than the body, or the aggregate of senses, and
12:27–12:30understanding acting together no further self is needed beyond these five heaps in
12:30–12:36corporation. Ask yourself, then, why any body does not serve as any person's self-knowledge.
12:36–12:42If self-cognition took the body merely as a body, my hand should as readily report I of your hand
12:42–12:47as of mine. Bodies do not differ in their bare bodily nature, in a way that could sort themselves
12:47–12:53so precisely, one to one, into billions of private claims of mine. Something already
12:53–12:57distinguishes this body as belonging to a knower before the knower can call it mine,
12:57–13:02and that distinguishing cannot itself come from the body, on pain of circularity.
13:02–13:07The body needing to already be known as one's own in order to explain why it is known as one's own.
13:08–13:13Akaria, may I ask what troubles me? Grant the self as real, how do you distinguish it,
13:13–13:17in cognition, from the mere flow of experiences it is supposed to own? A crowd is nothing over
13:17–13:22and above the people in it. A good question, and better than half the objections raised by
13:22–13:26opponents in this hall, if the pupil will forgive the comparison.
13:26–13:31Consider memory, I recall today a mango I tasted twenty years ago as a boy, the tasting was
13:31–13:36one event, decades gone, its very moment perished past recovery.
13:36–13:41The remembering is another event, this instant, in a body grown old and changed in every
13:41–13:45visible particular, for the remembering to be my remembering of my tasting, and not
13:45–13:49merely a report about some other person's banished pleasure, as impersonal to me as
13:49–13:51a stranger's diary.
13:51–13:56One thing must have been present at the tasting and remain present at the remembering.
13:56–14:00Binding the two moments is one person's history, rather than two person's unconnected events.
14:00–14:04A crowd, once dispersed, remembers nothing.
14:04–14:09There is no crowd left to do the remembering, but I remember momentary cognitions.
14:09–14:13Each perishing entire before the next arises could no more explain this bridging than
14:13–14:17a single wave could recall the shape of a wave that broke on the shore an hour before
14:17–14:18it was born.
14:18–14:22Some among my own teachers speak of a store consciousness, a hidden continuity beneath
14:22–14:26the surface flashes, to carry precisely, this weight.
14:26–14:31Then, K. Shannabhadra, I welcome you halfway across the hall already, for you have just
14:31–14:37described, in Buddhist dress, exactly what I have been calling the self throughout this
14:37–14:42debate, something that endures beneath and behind the passing flashes, is not identical
14:42–14:48with any one of them, and is required to explain memory, ownership, and the very possibility
14:48–14:52of your addressing me as one and the same listener from the start of this vata to its end.
14:52–14:57Rename it if you wish. I will not quarrel over the name once the reality it is going to explain is
14:57–15:07graded. Act 4. The Silence Beyond Argument. The waterclock is nearly spent. KSH Anandhadra has
15:07–15:13returned to his seat, subdued but not yet defeated. Udayana resumes the teacher's seat.
15:13–15:19Suppose a carrier I grant you the self, persisting, remembering, distinct from body and from the
15:19–15:21bear act of knowing.
15:21–15:24One question remains and it is the one that first sent me to my teachers as a boy before
15:24–15:26I had heard the word momentary.
15:26–15:30Why is there suffering and is there any exit from it that does not require a fable?
15:30–15:31You have won me a self.
15:31–15:33Have you won me a self worth having?
15:33–15:38That is the only question in the end that either of our schools was ever built to
15:38–15:39answer.
15:39–15:41Everything before this was clearing the ground for it.
15:41–15:43Consider if there is no self.
15:43–15:49a self-illuminating flow, then no one is bound and no one is freed, and every teacher who
15:49–15:53ever taught the path out of suffering was teaching an empty room to leave, but if there is a self,
15:53–15:58one that persists through error and correction, through sleep and waking, through the tasting
15:58–16:03of the mango and its remembering thirty years hence, then that same persistence is what makes
16:03–16:08liberation more than a word, the self that has mistaken itself for the body, that has suffered
16:08–16:14by that mistake, is the very self capable of unlearning the mistake and, unlearning it,
16:14–16:19ceasing to suffer, not vanishing, as your momentary flashes vanish, but continuing,
16:19–16:25correctly at last, without the old confusion, a wave has nothing to be freed into. Only water
16:25–16:30that lasts long enough to notice it was never only a wave can be freed from thinking so.
16:30–16:33And the order behind this, the lull by which knowledge,
16:33–16:37freeze and ignorance binds a fact that inquiry of this kind is even reliable,
16:37–16:41you would ground in a further being a maker would you not? I have heard this is where your road
16:41–16:47runs next." It is, though the water-clock will not permit me the whole of that road tonight,
16:47–16:53and a wise debater ends before his welcome does. I will say only this, and let it stand as this
16:53–16:58evening's final word rather than as the closing of the matter. A law that makes minds able to know
16:58–17:03a world neither mind invented is either a brute coincidence repeated without end, or it is the
17:03–17:08trace of an intention, as the ordered strokes of a word on this hull's pillar are either
17:08–17:13an accident of weathering no one would seriously credit, or the work of a hand that meant them.
17:13–17:17I hold the second view, whether I have proved it to your satisfaction is a debate for another
17:17–17:22day and a fuller clock. Tonight it is enough that you lead this hull no longer certain
17:22–17:23there is no one to leave it."
17:23–17:31KSH Anab had arises, folds his hands, not in defeat exactly, but in the particular
17:31–17:37respect one debater owes another who has taken his argument seriously enough to break it carefully
17:37–17:39rather than merely refuse it.
17:39–17:45I came to empty your hall of assulf, Hikariya, and find instead I cannot empty even the coming.
17:45–17:47Then the water clock has done its work.
17:47–17:51Go and sit with the question further, that, too, is a discipline.
17:51–17:54Avada well thought does not end in one man's silence.
17:54–17:57It ends in both men's better thinking.
17:57–18:02Epilogue. Suttred Harah returns as the lamp is lowered.
18:02–18:08So the argument closes, though the question it examined does not. It has been asked in
18:08–18:14every age by every thinking creature who has ever paused mid-sentence and wondered who,
18:14–18:20exactly, was speaking. Udayana's answer was not the last word spoken on this floor across
18:20–18:26the centuries since his opponents returned in other robes with sharp-eyed instruments,
18:26–18:33will return again after this performance ends. That is not the defeat of philosophy but its work.
18:33–18:38If you leave this hall with the question sharpened rather than settled, the play,
18:38–18:45like the treatise from which it borrows its bones, has done what it's set out to do. Exhumed Omnis.

Plain text

Setting the debating hall of a royal court in Mithila, a lamp burning though it is day, a water-clock bataki yantra marking the time allowed to each speaker, as was the custom of the formal vada. Praul, Satradhara enters, bows to the assembly. Before the argument begins, a bow, not to a god established by argument, but to the one who's being no argument can either grant or take away. What you are about to hear is not history. Udayana lived, his opponents live only in his pages. As the shadow of an arm lives in the shape it prevents the lamp from lighting. I have gathered those shadows into one robe and one voice, and named him K. Shannabhadra, the fortunate of the moment, for he speaks for every teacher who held that nothing lasts, that nothing looks outward from within a body, and that the word I is a habit mistaken for a fact. The dispute you will hear turns on one question, asked in four different rooms, who is asking? Is there anyone who suffers, who remembers, who is bound, and who might be freed, or is there only a river of moments, mistaking its own ripples for a bank? Waterclock begin, let the two sides speak by turn, as the law of debate requires, and let neither claim victory before the other has been given his full measure of time. Exit. Act 1. The river that is not there. Udayana is seated on the teacher's seat. KSH Anabhadra enters, hands folded and takes the opponent's seat. The student sits at Udayana's feet. Carrier, I will not waste the water in the clock on Curtis's. You teach that behind these eyes there sits an unmoving watcher, one and the same from the child who feared the dark to the old man who no longer does. I teach otherwise that everything real bursts into being and perishes within a single moment and that a new thing resembling the old only as smoke resembles smoke arises to take its place. The candle flame you call one flame as a hundred flames introducing themselves to each other so quickly that you cannot see the greeting end and the farewell begin. There is no one who watches. There is only watching and then more watching each instance new. Then let me ask you the question a debate is built to ask. What is your proof? Not your poetry, your proof. Whatever is real is momentary. The pot on your shelf is momentary, even you will grant that it eventually breaks. And the disputed things, the self, the soul, the enduring word, are real. Therefore they too are momentary. You hear the shape of it. He has shown me a pot that breaks, and asked me to conclude that a self, which nobody has yet seen break, must break too, on the strength of a resemblance he has not established. This is not proof. It is a wish wearing the clothing of a syllogism. Tell me, K. Shana Padra, where is the invariable bond between being real and lasting one moment only. A pot lasting years is as real, while it lasts. As a spark lasting an instant, you have shown me one case. You have not shown me the law. The law is shown that capacity and incapacity to act cannot sit together in one and the same thing at one and the same time. The pot, the instant after it is fired, is capable of holding water the pot the instant before is not if it were one pot both capable and incapable you would have planted a contradiction in a single seed. Only if each moment is its own separate thing does the contradiction dissolve. Now we are at the root of it and I thank you for reaching it quickly. The water clock rewards a swift opponent more than a cautious one. Tell me plainly, is this capacity you speak of the very act of producing the effect or merely the fitness to produce it? Prior to the act. Fitness. The seed is fit to sprout before it sprouts. Then here the trap you have set for your own foot. If capacity is the act itself. Your reason collapses into your conclusion. You would be proving momentariness by citing an activity that already presupposes it, which is no inference at all, only a restatement, so you rightly chose fitness. But fitness is not exhausted by one moment. A seed sitting in a granary is fit to sprout in the sense that nothing in its own nature forbids sprouting. It lacks only the water, the warmth, the soil it has not yet met. Does the seeds fitness vanish the instant it is not sprouting? If so, no seed could ever wait for rain. Yet seeds wait for rain every season and remain seeds throughout the waiting. Your capacity must therefore be something that persists through the interval before its exercise, which is the very enduring thing you deny. Say rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is passed hand-to-hand in a really each-runner-new-the-flame-alone continuous appearance only. A really needs a track along, which the runners are ordered, some reason why this moment's fitness is inherited by that moment's fitness and not by some other moment entirely disconnected from it, in another field, another country, what ties runner to runner, if not someone thing running, you have smuggled a continuant and through the back door of your metaphor while showing me out through the front, and there is a second wound in this argument. Deeper than the first, You say a thing must perish because it must inevitably perish. That destruction requires no further cause, being simply the nature of the existent, but then tell me. A stone standing in the sun for ten years has, on your view, secretly been ten thousand stones, each perishing by its own nature, and yet requiring, unnoticed, no hammer, no weathering, no cause at all to break it. Do you not find it strange that a doctrine built to explain change ends by needing no explanation for the one change, destruction, that matters most. You press hard on a difficult joint, Akaria. I did not concede a momentary thing's ending is not caused as its beginning is caused precisely because existence and impermanence are not to. Then you have not answered. You have renamed the difficulty identity and hoped the water clock would run out before anyone noticed. It has not run out, but I will not drag a tired point further. A debater, like a physician, should know when the patient has understood the diagnosis. Let a set momentariness aside as unproved, not as disproved by force but as never shown, and turn to the second pillar of your house, which is grander and will fall harder. Act 2 The Hall of Mirrors The lamp is trimmed, KSH Anab had a rises to pace, more animated. Grant me this then Akaria, since you'll have a direct question. When you dream of a garden, is the garden outside you? No. Yet, while dreaming the garden feels every bit as outside as this hall feels to you now, waking cognition and dream cognition are on the point that matters the feeling of externality identical. If a feeling of externality can occur with no external thing behind it in the dream, what forces you to posit an external thing behind it now? Perhaps this whole assembly, this water clock, my own robe, are one long dream that has simply not yet ended cognition painting itself with the appearance of an outside because that is cognition's nature, needing no outside to paint from. A pleasant vertigo and old, here is its flaw. You argue from some cognitions being objectless the dream to all cognitions possibly being objectless the waking world, but a house does not become imaginary, because some houses are painted on stagecloth, worse. How do you and I agree? This very afternoon, that dream and waking even differ enough to compare. You yourself distinguish them, you would not walk off this dais believing the floor absent. might in a dream that very distinguishing is a cognition of a difference between two kinds of cognition made from a vantage outside both. What is it? If not the report of something the dream state cannot furnish and the world can, namely, a stable object which persists to be checked against, corrected by, return to. Say the difference you speak of is only a difference of vividness of coherence internal to cognition itself. Cognition illuminates itself as a lamp needs no second lamp to be seen by. What you call an external pot is only this cognition wearing for a while, the appearance cold potness needing nothing beyond itself to explain that appearance. Then account for this, border. Two of us, you and I, look at the same jar at the same moment and report the same shape, the same weight when lifted, the same sound when struck. If each of us were merely cognition self-illuminating its private appearance, our two jars would be two private paintings with no canvas in common, coincidence would have to explain their agreement. A coincidence repeated at every meal, every market, every court such as this one, for every person who has ever lived. I would sooner believe in the jar and consider further. Your own inference, the one you are giving me now, depends on my mind receiving a reason from outside itself, namely your voice, entering by my ear, addressed to a listener you take to be distinct from the sound and from your own mind producing it. If nothing is outside cognition, to whom, and by what channel, are you even now speaking? You have found the seam in the robe, Ocaria, the very act of debate and you prespose as a second party outside my own stream of cognition, wish the doctrine of mind only cannot, without embarrassment, allow. I concede this pillar cracks though I do not yet concede the house has fallen. There remains a room you have not entered, even should dare to world, stand must the self stand behind the scene of it. Perhaps there is a world and perceptions of of it, arising and passing, and nothing more. No owner, no witness, only the seeing self-lit, onalus, as a series of lumps lit one from the last need, no single flanky pro-walking behind them with a torch. Now you have named the true battlefield, and I will meet you there gladly, for it is the one this whole inquiry was undertaken to reach. Act 3 The Cognizer behind the cognition. Udayana rises for the first time and steps down from the teacher's seat, level with K. S. H. Anabhadra, a mark by the customs of the Vada that he now argues not from authority but from evidence alone. K. S. Anabhadra set aside every scripture, every school, every inherited word, and answer only from what is given to you this instant, when you say I am tired, or I understand, or, indeed, I deny that I exist. What does the word I report? A convenient fiction, a label the stream of consciousness applies to itself out of habit, as a river might be named though no single thing called the river is there apart from the water. A fiction, you say. But even a fiction must be told by someone or believed by someone or at the very least, occur to someone. The awareness I exist is not like the awareness the sky is blue, which might in principle be doubted, argued over, corrected by a better eye. Has any person, waking or dreaming, learned or unlearned, ever doubted that he exists while forming the thought that he exists. You cannot even frame your denial. I do not exist. Without the very eye your sentence tries to erase standing behind the erasing. Every school of grammar teaches that a word need not name a thing behind it. It reigns names know it that does the reigning. So I know may name no eye that does the knowing only the knowing dressed by grammar in a subject it does not require. A fair parry, and I will not wave it off. It rains indeed names no separate rainer, but notice the difference between the two cases carefully, for it is the whole of the matter. I can be shown that it rains is a grammatical convenience, because I can point to the falling water and to ask where, in this, is a separate rainer, and find none, the raining and the water falling are one and the same event, nothing withheld. Now perform the same test on knowing. Point me to the knowing of the jar and ask. Is there, decides the knowing, an agent whom the knowing serves? Watch yourself the next time you learn a fact you did not want to hear. One part of the event is the arising of the knowledge. Another, distinguishable part, is the resistance. The wish it were otherwise, the ownership of the discomfort. I cut, we say, and the cutting is one thing, the cutter another. The iron does not own the the wound it makes. So too I know. The knowing is an act, and every act, by the plain evidence of every other act we have ever examined, requires an agent distinct from itself, one who begins before the act and remains after it, since the sickle is duller after the cutting than before, while the reaper is not consumed by his reaping. Then let the agent be nothing more than the body, or the aggregate of senses, and understanding acting together no further self is needed beyond these five heaps in corporation. Ask yourself, then, why any body does not serve as any person's self-knowledge. If self-cognition took the body merely as a body, my hand should as readily report I of your hand as of mine. Bodies do not differ in their bare bodily nature, in a way that could sort themselves so precisely, one to one, into billions of private claims of mine. Something already distinguishes this body as belonging to a knower before the knower can call it mine, and that distinguishing cannot itself come from the body, on pain of circularity. The body needing to already be known as one's own in order to explain why it is known as one's own. Akaria, may I ask what troubles me? Grant the self as real, how do you distinguish it, in cognition, from the mere flow of experiences it is supposed to own? A crowd is nothing over and above the people in it. A good question, and better than half the objections raised by opponents in this hall, if the pupil will forgive the comparison. Consider memory, I recall today a mango I tasted twenty years ago as a boy, the tasting was one event, decades gone, its very moment perished past recovery. The remembering is another event, this instant, in a body grown old and changed in every visible particular, for the remembering to be my remembering of my tasting, and not merely a report about some other person's banished pleasure, as impersonal to me as a stranger's diary. One thing must have been present at the tasting and remain present at the remembering. Binding the two moments is one person's history, rather than two person's unconnected events. A crowd, once dispersed, remembers nothing. There is no crowd left to do the remembering, but I remember momentary cognitions. Each perishing entire before the next arises could no more explain this bridging than a single wave could recall the shape of a wave that broke on the shore an hour before it was born. Some among my own teachers speak of a store consciousness, a hidden continuity beneath the surface flashes, to carry precisely, this weight. Then, K. Shannabhadra, I welcome you halfway across the hall already, for you have just described, in Buddhist dress, exactly what I have been calling the self throughout this debate, something that endures beneath and behind the passing flashes, is not identical with any one of them, and is required to explain memory, ownership, and the very possibility of your addressing me as one and the same listener from the start of this vata to its end. Rename it if you wish. I will not quarrel over the name once the reality it is going to explain is graded. Act 4. The Silence Beyond Argument. The waterclock is nearly spent. KSH Anandhadra has returned to his seat, subdued but not yet defeated. Udayana resumes the teacher's seat. Suppose a carrier I grant you the self, persisting, remembering, distinct from body and from the bear act of knowing. One question remains and it is the one that first sent me to my teachers as a boy before I had heard the word momentary. Why is there suffering and is there any exit from it that does not require a fable? You have won me a self. Have you won me a self worth having? That is the only question in the end that either of our schools was ever built to answer. Everything before this was clearing the ground for it. Consider if there is no self. a self-illuminating flow, then no one is bound and no one is freed, and every teacher who ever taught the path out of suffering was teaching an empty room to leave, but if there is a self, one that persists through error and correction, through sleep and waking, through the tasting of the mango and its remembering thirty years hence, then that same persistence is what makes liberation more than a word, the self that has mistaken itself for the body, that has suffered by that mistake, is the very self capable of unlearning the mistake and, unlearning it, ceasing to suffer, not vanishing, as your momentary flashes vanish, but continuing, correctly at last, without the old confusion, a wave has nothing to be freed into. Only water that lasts long enough to notice it was never only a wave can be freed from thinking so. And the order behind this, the lull by which knowledge, freeze and ignorance binds a fact that inquiry of this kind is even reliable, you would ground in a further being a maker would you not? I have heard this is where your road runs next." It is, though the water-clock will not permit me the whole of that road tonight, and a wise debater ends before his welcome does. I will say only this, and let it stand as this evening's final word rather than as the closing of the matter. A law that makes minds able to know a world neither mind invented is either a brute coincidence repeated without end, or it is the trace of an intention, as the ordered strokes of a word on this hull's pillar are either an accident of weathering no one would seriously credit, or the work of a hand that meant them. I hold the second view, whether I have proved it to your satisfaction is a debate for another day and a fuller clock. Tonight it is enough that you lead this hull no longer certain there is no one to leave it." KSH Anab had arises, folds his hands, not in defeat exactly, but in the particular respect one debater owes another who has taken his argument seriously enough to break it carefully rather than merely refuse it. I came to empty your hall of assulf, Hikariya, and find instead I cannot empty even the coming. Then the water clock has done its work. Go and sit with the question further, that, too, is a discipline. Avada well thought does not end in one man's silence. It ends in both men's better thinking. Epilogue. Suttred Harah returns as the lamp is lowered. So the argument closes, though the question it examined does not. It has been asked in every age by every thinking creature who has ever paused mid-sentence and wondered who, exactly, was speaking. Udayana's answer was not the last word spoken on this floor across the centuries since his opponents returned in other robes with sharp-eyed instruments, will return again after this performance ends. That is not the defeat of philosophy but its work. If you leave this hall with the question sharpened rather than settled, the play, like the treatise from which it borrows its bones, has done what it's set out to do. Exhumed Omnis.

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