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Part 10 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 10

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en (0.997333)

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18:49

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1. 0:03–0:09Setting the debating hall of a royal court in Mithila, a lamp burning though it is day, a
2. 0:09–0:15water-clock batakya yantra marking the time allowed to each speaker as was the custom of
3. 0:15–0:17the formal vada.
4. 0:17–0:25Praul, Satradhara enters, bows to the assembly. Before the argument begins, a bow not to a
5. 0:25–0:30god established by argument, but to the one whose being no argument can either grant
6. 0:30–0:34or take away. What you are about to hear is not history.
7. 0:34–0:40Udaena lived, his opponents live only in his pages. As the shadow of an arm lives in the
8. 0:40–0:46shape it prevents the lamp from lighting. I have gathered those shadows into one robe
9. 0:46–0:52and one voice, and named him K. Shannabhadra, the fortunate of the moment, for he speaks
10. 0:52–0:57for every teacher who held that nothing lasts, that nothing looks outward from within
11. 0:57–1:03a body and that the word I is a habit mistaken for a fact. The dispute you will hear turns
12. 1:03–1:10on one question, asked in four different rooms, who is asking, is there anyone who suffers,
13. 1:10–1:16who remembers, who is bound, and who might be freed, or is there only a river of moments,
14. 1:16–1:23mistaking its own ripples for a bank. Waterclock begin, let the two sides speak by turn,
15. 1:23–1:29As the law of debate requires, and let neither claim victory before the other has been given
16. 1:29–1:31his full measure of time.
17. 1:31–1:32Exit.
18. 1:32–1:34Act 1.
19. 1:34–1:36The river that is not there.
20. 1:36–1:39Udayana is seated on the teacher's seat.
21. 1:39–1:45KSH Anabhadra enters, hands folded and takes the opponent's seat.
22. 1:45–1:48The student sits at Udayana's feet.
23. 1:48–1:52Kariya, I will not waste the water in the clock on Curtis's.
24. 1:52–1:55You teach that behind these eyes there sits an unmoving watcher, one and the same from
25. 1:55–1:59the child, who feared the dark to the old man who no longer does.
26. 1:59–2:04I teach otherwise that everything real bursts into being and perishes within a single moment,
27. 2:04–2:09and that a new thing resembling the old only as smoke resembles, smoke arises to take
28. 2:09–2:10its place.
29. 2:10–2:14The candle flame you call one flame as a hundred flames introducing themselves to
30. 2:14–2:18each other so quickly that you cannot see the greeting end and the farewell begin.
31. 2:18–2:20There is no one who watches.
32. 2:20–2:24There is only watching and then more watching each instance new.
33. 2:24–2:27Then let me ask you the question a debate is built to ask.
34. 2:27–2:28What is your proof?
35. 2:28–2:31Not your poetry, your proof.
36. 2:31–2:32Whatever is real is momentary.
37. 2:32–2:36The pot on your shelf is momentary, even you will grant that it eventually breaks.
38. 2:36–2:40And the disputed things, the self, the soul, the enduring word, are real.
39. 2:40–2:41Therefore they too are momentary.
40. 2:41–2:43You hear the shape of it.
41. 2:43–2:48He has shown me a pot that breaks and asked me to conclude that a self, which nobody
42. 2:48–2:53has yet seen break. Must break too, on the strength of a resemblance he has not established.
43. 2:53–2:57This is not proof. It is a wish wearing the clothing of a syllogism. Tell me.
44. 2:57–3:03K. Shannipadra, where is the invariable bond between being real and lasting one moment only?
45. 3:03–3:08A putt lasting years is as real, while it lasts. As a spark lasting an instant.
46. 3:08–3:12You have shown me one case. You have not shown me the law.
47. 3:12–3:16The law is shown that capacity and incapacity to act cannot sit together in one and the
48. 3:16–3:20same thing at one and the same time. The pot, the instant after it is fired, is capable of
49. 3:20–3:25holding water. The pot, the instant before, is not. If it were one pot both capable and
50. 3:25–3:29incapable, you would have planted a contradiction in a single seed.
51. 3:29–3:33Only if each moment is its own separate thing does the contradiction dissolve.
52. 3:33–3:37Now we are at the root of it, and I thank you for reaching it quickly. The Water Clock
53. 3:37–3:42rewards a swift opponent more than a cautious one. Tell me plainly, is this capacity
54. 3:42–3:47you speak of the very act of producing the effect, or merely the fitness to produce it.
55. 3:47–3:48Prior to the act.
56. 3:48–3:51FITMESS The seed is fit to sprout before it sprouts.
57. 3:51–3:54Then here the trap you have set for your own foot.
58. 3:54–3:59If capacity is the act itself, your reason collapses into your conclusion.
59. 3:59–4:04You would be proving momentariness by citing an activity that already presupposes it,
60. 4:04–4:08which is no inference at all, only a restatement, so you rightly chose fitness.
61. 4:08–4:11But fitness is not exhausted by one moment.
62. 4:11–4:15A seed sitting in a granary is fit to sprout in the sense that nothing in its own nature
63. 4:15–4:16forbids sprouting.
64. 4:16–4:20It lacks only the water, the warmth, the soil it has not yet met.
65. 4:20–4:24Does the seed's fitness vanish the instant it is not sprouting?
66. 4:24–4:26If so, no seed could ever wait for rain.
67. 4:26–4:31Yet seeds wait for rain every season and remain seeds throughout the waiting.
68. 4:31–4:34Your capacity must therefore be something that persists through the interval before
69. 4:34–4:39its exercise, which is the very enduring thing you deny.
70. 4:39–4:43rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is passed hand
71. 4:43–4:47to hand in a relay each one in you the flame alone continuous in appearance only.
72. 4:47–4:52A relay needs a track along which the runners are ordered some reason why this moment's
73. 4:52–4:56fitness is inherited by that moment's fitness and not by some other moment entirely disconnected
74. 4:56–4:59from it in another field.
75. 4:59–5:04Another country what ties runner to runner if not someone thing running you have smuggled
76. 5:04–5:07a continuant and through the back door of your metaphor while showing me out through
77. 5:07–5:12the front, and there is a second wound in this argument. Deeper than the first, you
78. 5:12–5:17say a thing must perish because it must inevitably perish. That destruction requires no further
79. 5:17–5:23cause, being simply the nature of the existent, but then tell me. A stone standing in the
80. 5:23–5:28sun for ten years has, on your view, secretly been ten thousand stones, each perishing
81. 5:28–5:34by its own nature, and yet requiring, unnoticed, no hammer, no weathering, no cause at all
82. 5:34–5:38to break it. Do you not find it strange that a doctrine built to explain change ends by
83. 5:38–5:43needing no explanation for the one change, destruction, that matters most?
84. 5:43–5:47You press hard on a difficult joint, Akaria. I did not concede a momentary
85. 5:47–5:52thing's ending is not caused as its beginning is caused precisely because existence and
86. 5:52–5:56impermanence are not too. Then you have not answered. You have renamed the difficulty
87. 5:56–6:01identity and hoped the water clock would run out before anyone noticed. It has not run out,
88. 6:01–6:06But I will not drag a tired point further. A debater, like a physician, should know when the
89. 6:06–6:11patient has understood the diagnosis. Let a set momentariness aside as unproved,
90. 6:11–6:16not as disproved by force but as never shown, and turn to the second pillar of your house,
91. 6:16–6:22which is grander and will fall harder. Act 2. The Hall of Mirrors
92. 6:22–6:28The lamp is trimmed. KSH Annabhadra rises to pace, more animated.
93. 6:28–6:33Grant me this, then, Akaria, since you love a direct question. When you dream of a garden,
94. 6:33–6:39is the garden outside you? No. And yet, while dreaming the garden feels every bit as outside as
95. 6:39–6:44this whole feels to you now, waking cognition and dream cognition are on the point that matters
96. 6:44–6:49the feeling of externality identical. If a feeling of externality can occur with no external thing
97. 6:49–6:53behind it in the dream, what forces you to posit an external thing behind it now?
98. 6:53–6:56Perhaps this whole assembly, this water clock, my own robe,
99. 6:56–7:01a one-long dream that has simply not yet ended cognition painting itself with the appearance
100. 7:01–7:05of an outside because that is cognition's nature, needing no outside to paint from.
101. 7:05–7:11A pleasant vertigo and old, here is its flaw. You argue from some cognitions being objectless the
102. 7:11–7:16dream to all cognitions possibly being objectless the waking world, but a house does not become
103. 7:16–7:22imaginary because some houses are painted on stage cloth, worse. How do you and I agree,
104. 7:22–7:28this very afternoon. That dream and waking even differ enough to compare. You yourself distinguish
105. 7:28–7:33them, you would not walk off this dais believing the floor absent. Though you might in a dream,
106. 7:33–7:37that very distinguishing is a cognition of a difference between two kinds of cognition.
107. 7:38–7:43Made from a vantage outside both. What is it, if not the report of something the dream state
108. 7:43–7:48cannot furnish and the world can, namely, a stable object which persists to be checked
109. 7:48–7:52against, corrected by, return to.
110. 7:52–7:56Say the difference you speak of is only a difference of vividness of coherence, internal
111. 7:56–7:58to cognition itself.
112. 7:58–8:02Cognition illuminates itself, as a lamp needs no second lamp to be seen by.
113. 8:02–8:06What you call an external pot is only this cognition, wearing for a while, the appearance
114. 8:06–8:10cold potness, needing nothing beyond itself to explain that appearance.
115. 8:10–8:12Then account for this, border.
116. 8:12–8:17Two of us, you and I, look at the same jar at the same moment and report the
117. 8:17–8:22the same shape, the same weight when lifted, the same sound when struck. If each of us were
118. 8:22–8:27merely cognition self-illuminating its private appearance, our two jars would be two private
119. 8:27–8:32paintings with no canvas in common, coincidence would have to explain their agreement. A
120. 8:32–8:38coincidence repeated at every meal, every market, every court such as this one, for
121. 8:38–8:43every person who has ever lived. I would sooner believe in the jar and consider further.
122. 8:43–8:48Your own inference, the one you are giving me now, depends on my mind receiving a reason
123. 8:48–8:53from outside itself, namely your voice, entering by my ear, addressed to a listener you take
124. 8:53–8:56to be distinct from the sound and from your own mind producing it.
125. 8:56–9:02If nothing is outside cognition, to whom, and by what channel, are you even now speaking?
126. 9:02–9:06You have found the seam in the robe, Akaria, the very act of debate and you presuppose
127. 9:06–9:10as a second party outside my own stream of cognition, which the doctrine of mind
128. 9:10–9:12only cannot, without embarrassment, allow.
129. 9:12–9:16I can see this pillar cracks though I do not yet concede the house has fallen.
130. 9:16–9:20There remains a room you have not entered, even should dare to world, stand muster self,
131. 9:20–9:22stand behind the scene of it.
132. 9:22–9:26Perhaps there is a world and perceptions of it arising and passing and nothing more.
133. 9:26–9:31No owner, no witness, only the seeing self-lit, onaless as a series of lamps lit one from
134. 9:31–9:35the last need, no single flankeeper walking behind them with a torch.
135. 9:35–9:39Now you have named the true battlefield, and I will meet you there bledly, for it
136. 9:39–9:44is the one this whole inquiry was undertaken to reach.
137. 9:44–9:47Act 3 The Cognizer Behind The Cognition
138. 9:47–9:54Udayana rises for the first time and steps down from the teacher's seat, level with K.S.H.
139. 9:54–10:00Anupadra, a mark by the customs of the Vada, that he now argues not from authority but
140. 10:00–10:02from evidence alone.
141. 10:02–10:08K.S.H. Anupadra set aside every scripture, every school, every inherited word, and
142. 10:08–10:14answer only from what is given to you this instant. When you say I am tired, or I understand,
143. 10:14–10:18or, indeed, I deny that I exist. What does the word I report?
144. 10:18–10:23A convenient fiction. A label the stream of consciousness applies to itself out of habit,
145. 10:23–10:27as a river might be named though no single thing called the river is there apart from
146. 10:27–10:28the water.
147. 10:28–10:33A fiction, you say. But even a fiction must be told by someone, or believed by someone,
148. 10:33–10:38Or at the very least, occur to someone, the awareness I exist is not like the awareness
149. 10:38–10:43the sky is blue, which might in principle be doubted, argued over, corrected by a better
150. 10:43–10:44eye.
151. 10:44–10:49Has any person, waking or dreaming, learned or unlearned, ever doubted that he exists
152. 10:49–10:51while forming the thought that he exists?
153. 10:51–10:53You cannot even frame your denial.
154. 10:53–10:59I do not exist, without the very I your sentence tries to erase standing behind the erasing.
155. 10:59–11:03Every school of grammar teachers that a word need not name a thing behind it, it
156. 11:03–11:07rain's names know it that does the raining. So I know may name no eye that does the knowing,
157. 11:07–11:10only the knowing, dressed by grammar in a subject it does not require.
158. 11:10–11:15A fair parry, and I will not wave it off. It rains indeed names no separate rainer,
159. 11:15–11:20but notice the difference between the two cases carefully, for it is the whole of the matter.
160. 11:20–11:25I can be shown that it rains as a grammatical convenience, because I can point to the
161. 11:25–11:30falling water and ask where, in this, is a separate rainer and find none. The raining
162. 11:30–11:34and the water falling are one and the same event, nothing withheld.
163. 11:34–11:36Now perform the same test on knowing.
164. 11:36–11:41Point me to the knowing of the jar and ask, is there, decides the knowing, an agent whom
165. 11:41–11:42the knowing serves.
166. 11:42–11:46Watch yourself the next time you learn a fact you did not want to hear.
167. 11:46–11:49One part of the event is the arising of the knowledge.
168. 11:49–11:53Another, distinguishable part, is the resistance.
169. 11:53–11:56The wish it were otherwise, the ownership of the discomfort.
170. 11:56–12:00I cut, we say, and the cutting is one thing, the cutter another.
171. 12:00–12:06The iron does not own the wound it makes, so too I know. The knowing is an act, and every act,
172. 12:06–12:13by the plain evidence of every other act we have ever examined, requires an agent distinct from itself,
173. 12:13–12:18one who begins before the act and remains after it, since the sickle is duller after the cutting
174. 12:18–12:22than before, while the reaper is not consumed by his reaping.
175. 12:22–12:26Then let the agent be nothing more than the body, or the aggregate of senses,
176. 12:26–12:31and understanding acting together, no further self is needed beyond these five heaps in corporation.
177. 12:56–13:02call it mine, and that distinguishing cannot itself come from the body, on pain of circularity.
178. 13:02–13:07The body needing to already be known as one's own in order to explain why it is known as
179. 13:07–13:08one's own.
180. 13:08–13:11A chorea, may I ask, what troubles me?
181. 13:11–13:15Grant the self as real, how do you distinguish it, in cognition, from the mere flow of experiences
182. 13:15–13:16that is supposed to own?
183. 13:16–13:19A crowd is nothing over and above the people in it.
184. 13:19–13:23A good question, and better than half the objections raised by opponents in this
185. 13:23–13:29hall if the pupil will forgive the comparison. Consider memory, I recall today a mango I tasted
186. 13:29–13:34twenty years ago as a boy, the tasting was one event, decades gone, its very moment perished
187. 13:34–13:40past recovery. The remembering is another event, this instant, in a body grown old and changed
188. 13:40–13:45in every visible particular, for the remembering to be my remembering of my tasting, and not
189. 13:45–13:50merely a report about some other person's vanished pleasure, as impersonal to me as a stranger's
190. 13:50–13:55diary. One thing must have been present at the tasting and remain present at the remembering.
191. 13:55–14:00Binding the two moments is one person's history, rather than two person's unconnected events.
192. 14:00–14:06A crowd, once dispersed, remembers nothing. There is no crowd left to do the remembering,
193. 14:06–14:11but I remember momentary cognitions. Each perishing entire before the next arises
194. 14:11–14:15could no more explain the spreading than a single wave could recall the shape of a wave
195. 14:15–14:17that broke on the shore an hour before it was born.
196. 14:18–14:22Some among my own teachers speak of a store consciousness, a hidden continuity beneath
197. 14:22–14:25the surface flashes, to carry precisely this weight.
198. 14:26–14:31Then, K. Shannabhadra, I welcome you halfway across the hall already,
199. 14:31–14:36for you have just described, in Buddhist dress, exactly what I have been calling
200. 14:36–14:40the self throughout this debate, something that endures beneath and behind the passing
201. 14:40–14:47flashes, is not identical with any one of them, and is required to explain memory, ownership,
202. 14:47–14:50and the very possibility of your addressing me as one and the same listener from the start
203. 14:50–14:55of this vata to its end. Rename it if you wish. I will not quarrel over the name once the
204. 14:55–15:03reality it is going to explain is granted. Act 4. The Silence Beyond Argument. The
205. 15:03–15:09water clock is nearly spent. KSH Anandhadra has returned to his seat, subdued but not
206. 15:09–15:15yet defeated. Udayana resumes the teacher's seat.
207. 15:15–15:19Suppose Akaria, I grant you the self, persisting, remembering, distinct from body and from the
208. 15:19–15:23bear act of knowing. One question remains and it is the one that first sent me to my
209. 15:23–15:27teachers as a boy before I had heard the word momentary. Why is there suffering and
210. 15:27–15:31is there any exit from it that does not require a fable? You have won me a self.
211. 15:31–15:33Have you won me a self worth having?
212. 15:33–15:38That is the only question in the end that either of our schools was ever built to
213. 15:38–15:43answer. Everything before this was clearing the ground for it, consider, if there is no self.
214. 15:43–15:49Only a self-illuminating flow, then no one is bound and no one is freed, and every teacher who
215. 15:49–15:53ever taught the path out of suffering was teaching an empty room to leave, but if there is a self.
216. 15:53–15:58One that persists through error and correction, through sleep and waking, through the tasting of
217. 15:58–16:03the mango and its remembering thirty years hence, then that same persistence is what makes
218. 16:03–16:08liberation more than a word, the self that has mistaken itself for the body, that has
219. 16:08–16:13suffered by that mistake, is the very self capable of unlearning the mistake and, unlearning
220. 16:13–16:19it, ceasing to suffer, not vanishing, as your momentary flashes vanish, but continuing,
221. 16:19–16:25correctly at last, without the old confusion, a wave has nothing to be freed into, only
222. 16:25–16:29water that lasts long enough to notice it was never only a wave can be freed from
223. 16:29–16:30thinking so.
224. 16:30–16:34And the order behind this, the law by which knowledge, freeze and ignorance binds,
225. 16:34–16:39a fact that inquiry of this kind is even reliable, you would ground in a further being a maker,
226. 16:39–16:42would you not? I have heard this is where your road runs next.
227. 16:43–16:47It is, though the water clock will not permit me the whole of that road tonight,
228. 16:47–16:53and a wise debater ends before his welcome does. I will say only this, and let it stand as this
229. 16:53–16:57evening's final word rather than as the closing of the matter. A law that makes minds
230. 16:57–17:02able to know a world neither mind invented is either a brute coincidence repeated without end,
231. 17:02–17:08or it is the trace of an intention, as the ordered strokes of a word on this hall's pillar are either
232. 17:08–17:13an accident of weathering no one would seriously credit or the work of a hand that meant them.
233. 17:13–17:18I hold the second view, whether I have proved it to your satisfaction is a debate for another day
234. 17:18–17:22and a fuller clock. Tonight it is enough that you lead this hall no longer certain there is
235. 17:22–17:28no one to leave it. KSH Anab had arises, folds his hands, not in
236. 17:28–17:34defeat exactly, but in the particular respect one debater owes another who has taken his
237. 17:34–17:40argument seriously enough to break it carefully rather than merely refuse it.
238. 17:40–17:44I came to empty your hall of assulf, Akaria, and find instead I cannot empty even the
239. 17:44–17:47coming. Then the water clock has done its work.
240. 17:47–17:51Go and sit with the question further that, too, is a discipline. Avada well thought
241. 17:51–17:57does not end in one man's silence. It ends in both men's better thinking.
242. 17:57–18:04Epilogue. Sutradhara returns as the lamp is lowered. So the argument closes, though the
243. 18:04–18:10question it examined does not. It has been asked in every age by every thinking creature
244. 18:10–18:17who has ever paused mid-sentence and wondered who exactly was speaking. Udayana's answer
245. 18:17–18:23was not the last word spoken on this floor across the centuries since his opponents returned
246. 18:23–18:30in other robes with sharp eye instruments and will return again after this performance ends.
247. 18:30–18:35That is not the defeat of philosophy but its work. If you leave this hall with the question
248. 18:35–18:40sharpened rather than settled, the play, like the treatise from which it borrows
249. 18:40–18:45its bones, has done what it 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 batakya 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 whose being no argument can either grant or take away. What you are about to hear is not history. Udaena 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. Kariya, 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. Shannipadra, where is the invariable bond between being real and lasting one moment only? A putt 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. FITMESS 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 seed's 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. rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is passed hand to hand in a relay each one in you the flame alone continuous in appearance only. A relay 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 too. 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 Annabhadra rises to pace, more animated. Grant me this, then, Akaria, since you love a direct question. When you dream of a garden, is the garden outside you? No. And yet, while dreaming the garden feels every bit as outside as this whole 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, a 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 stage cloth, 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. Though you 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 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, Akaria, the very act of debate and you presuppose as a second party outside my own stream of cognition, which the doctrine of mind only cannot, without embarrassment, allow. I can see 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 muster self, stand behind the scene of it. Perhaps there is a world and perceptions of it arising and passing and nothing more. No owner, no witness, only the seeing self-lit, onaless as a series of lamps lit one from the last need, no single flankeeper walking behind them with a torch. Now you have named the true battlefield, and I will meet you there bledly, 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. Anupadra, a mark by the customs of the Vada, that he now argues not from authority but from evidence alone. K.S.H. Anupadra 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 I your sentence tries to erase standing behind the erasing. Every school of grammar teachers that a word need not name a thing behind it, it rain's names know it that does the raining. 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 as a grammatical convenience, because I can point to the falling water and 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 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. 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. A chorea, may I ask, what troubles me? Grant the self as real, how do you distinguish it, in cognition, from the mere flow of experiences that 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 vanished 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 the spreading 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 granted. Act 4. The Silence Beyond Argument. The water clock is nearly spent. KSH Anandhadra has returned to his seat, subdued but not yet defeated. Udayana resumes the teacher's seat. Suppose Akaria, 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. Only 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 law 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 hall'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 hall 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, Akaria, 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. Sutradhara 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 eye instruments and 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 set out to do. Exhumed Omnis

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