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Collection: Part 10 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 10
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Duration: 18:31
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0:07–0:14Setting the debating hall of a royal court in Mithila, a lamp burning though it is day, a water clock bataki,
0:14–0:20mantra marking the time allowed to each speaker, as was the custom of the formal vada.
0:20–0:27Sushradhara enters, bows to the assembly. Before the argument begins, a bow not to a god
0:27–0:33established by argument, but to the one who's being no argument can either grant or take away.
0:33–0:40What you are about to hear is not history. Udayana lived, his opponents live only in his pages.
0:40–0:45As the shadow of an arm lives in the shape it prevents the lamp from lighting. I have gathered
0:45–0:53those shadows into one robe and one voice and named him Kei Shanabhadra, the fortunate of the moment,
0:53–0:58for he speaks for every teacher who held that nothing lasts, that nothing looks outward from
0:58–1:04within a body, and that the word I is a habit mistaken for a fact. The dispute you will hear
1:04–1:11turns on one Christian, asked in four different rooms, who is asking, is there anyone who suffers,
1:11–1:17who remembers, who is bound, and who might be freed, or is there only a river of moments,
1:17–1:24mistaking its own ripples for a bank? Water clock, begin, let the two sides speak by turn,
1:24–1:32as the law of debate requires, and let neither claim victory before the other has been given his full measure of time.
1:32–1:44Act 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.
1:44–1:47The student sits at Udayana's feet.
1:47–1:50Carrier, I will not waste the water in the clock-on-curtises.
1:50–1:53You teach that behind these eyes there sits an unmoving watcher,
1:53–1:57one and the same from the child, who feared the dark to the old man who no longer does.
1:57–2:02I teach otherwise that everything real bursts into being and perishes within a single moment,
2:02–2:07and that a new thing resembling the old only as smoke resembles smoke arises to take its place.
2:08–2:13The candle flame you call one flame is a hundred flames introducing themselves to each
2:13–2:17each other so quickly that you cannot see the greeting end and the farewell begin.
2:17–2:18There is no one who watches.
2:18–2:22There is only watching and then more watching each instance new.
2:22–2:25Then let me ask you the question a debate is built to ask.
2:25–2:27What is your proof?
2:27–2:29Not your poetry, your proof.
2:29–2:30Whatever is real is momentary.
2:30–2:34The pot on your shelf is momentary, even you will grant that it eventually breaks.
2:34–2:37And the disputed things, the self, the soul, the enduring word are real.
2:37–2:39Therefore they too are momentary.
2:39–2:44You hear the shape of it, he has shown me a pot that breaks and asked me to conclude that
2:44–2:49a self, which nobody has yet seen break, must break too, on the strength of a resemblance
2:49–2:51he has not established.
2:51–2:55This is not proof, it is a wish wearing the clothing of a syllogism, tell me.
2:55–3:00K. Shana Padra, where is the invariable bond between being real and lasting one moment
3:00–3:01only?
3:01–3:06A pot lasting years is as real, while it lasts, as a spark lasting an instant.
3:06–3:08You have shown me one case.
3:08–3:10You have not shown me the law.
3:10–3:14The law is shown that capacity and incapacity to act cannot sit together in one and the same
3:14–3:15thing at one and the same time.
3:15–3:18The pot, the instant after it is fired, is capable of holding water.
3:18–3:21The pot, the instant before, is not.
3:21–3:25If it were one pot, both capable and incapable, you would have planted a contradiction in
3:25–3:27a single seed.
3:27–3:30Only if each moment is its own separate thing does the contradiction dissolve.
3:30–3:34Now we are at the root of it, and I thank you for reaching it quickly.
3:34–3:37The Water Clock rewards a swift opponent more than a cautious one.
3:37–3:42Tell me plainly, is this capacity you speak of the very act of producing the effect,
3:42–3:45or merely the fitness to produce it, prior to the act?
3:45–3:46Fitness.
3:46–3:48The seed is fit to sprout before it sprouts.
3:48–3:51Then hear the trap you have set for your own foot.
3:51–3:56If capacity is the act itself, your reason collapses into your conclusion, you would
3:56–4:01be proving momentariness by citing an activity that already presupposes it, which is no
4:01–4:05inference at all, only a restatement, so you rightly chose fitness.
4:05–4:08And fitness is not exhausted by one moment.
4:08–4:12A seed sitting in a granary is fit to sprout in the sense that nothing in its own nature
4:12–4:13forbids sprouting.
4:13–4:17It lacks only the water, the warmth, the soil it has not yet met.
4:17–4:20Does the seed's fitness vanish the instant it is not sprouting?
4:20–4:23If so, no seed could ever wait for rain.
4:23–4:27Yet seeds wait for rain every season and remain seeds throughout the waiting.
4:27–4:31Your capacity must therefore be something that persists through the interval before its
4:31–4:35exercise, which is the very enduring thing you deny.
4:35–4:40rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is passed hand to hand in a
4:40–4:45relay each one in you the flame alone continuous in appearance only. A relay needs a track along
4:45–4:50which the runners are ordered some reason why this moment's fitness is inherited by that moment's
4:50–4:55fitness and not by some other moment entirely disconnected from it in another field another
4:55–5:00country what ties runner to runner if not someone thing running you have smuggled a
5:00–5:04continuant and through the back door of your metaphor while showing me out through the front
5:04–5:09and there is a second wound in this argument. Deeper than the first, you say a thing must
5:09–5:15perish because it must inevitably perish. That destruction requires no further cause,
5:15–5:20being simply the nature of the existent, but then tell me. A stone standing in the sun for 10
5:20–5:26years has, on your view, secretly been 10,000 stones, each perishing by its own nature,
5:26–5:31and yet requiring, unnoticed, no hammer, no weathering, no cause at all to break it. Do
5:31–5:35Do you not find it strange that a doctrine built to explain change ends by needing no
5:35–5:40explanation for the one change, destruction, that matters most?
5:40–5:42You press hard on a difficult joint, Akaria.
5:42–5:46I did not concede a momentary thing's ending is not caused as its beginning is caused
5:46–5:49precisely because existence and impermanence are not too.
5:49–5:51Then you have not answered.
5:51–5:55You have renamed the difficulty identity and hoped the water clock would run out
5:55–5:56before anyone noticed.
5:56–5:57It has not run out.
5:57–6:00But I will not drag a tired point further.
6:00–6:05A debater, like a physician, should know when the patient has understood the diagnosis.
6:05–6:10Let a set momentariness aside as unproved, not as disproved by force but as never shown,
6:10–6:15and turn to the second pillar of your house, which is grander and will fall harder.
6:15–6:16Act 2.
6:16–6:17The Hall of Mirrors.
6:17–6:18The lamp is trimmed.
6:18–6:23KSH Annabhadra rises to pace, more animated.
6:23–6:26Grant me this, then, Akaria, since you have a direct question.
6:26–6:29you dream of a garden is the garden outside you?
6:29–6:29No.
6:29–6:34And yet, while dreaming the garden feels every bit as outside as this hall feels to you now,
6:34–6:39waking cognition and dream cognition are on the point that matters the feeling of externality
6:39–6:43identical. If a feeling of externality can occur with no external thing behind it in the dream,
6:43–6:48what forces you to posit an external thing behind it now? Perhaps this whole assembly,
6:48–6:52this water clock, my own robe, are one long dream that has simply not yet ended
6:52–6:57cognition painting itself with the appearance of an outside because that is cognition's nature,
6:57–7:02needing no outside to paint from. A pleasant vertigo and old, here is its flaw. You argue from
7:02–7:07some cognitions being objectless the dream to all cognitions possibly being objectless the
7:07–7:13waking world, but a house does not become imaginary, because some houses are painted on stage cloth,
7:13–7:19worse. How do you and I agree, this very afternoon, that dream and waking even differ
7:19–7:24enough to compare. You yourself distinguish them, you would not walk off this dais believing
7:24–7:28the floor absent. Though you might in a dream, that very distinguishing is a cognition of
7:28–7:34a difference between two kinds of cognition, made from a vantage outside both. What is
7:34–7:39it? If not the report of something the dream state cannot furnish and the world can, namely,
7:39–7:45a stable object which persists to be checked against, corrected by, return to.
7:45–7:49Say the difference you speak of is only a difference of vividness of coherence internal to cognition
7:49–7:51itself.
7:51–7:55Cognition illuminates itself as a lamp needs no second lamp to be seen by.
7:55–7:59What you call an external pot is only this cognition wearing for a while, the appearance
7:59–8:03cold potness needing nothing beyond itself to explain that appearance.
8:03–8:08Then account for this, border, two of us, you and I, look at the same jar at the
8:08–8:13same moment and report the same shape, the same weight when lifted, the same sound
8:13–8:14when struck.
8:14–8:19If each of us were merely cognition self-illuminating its private appearance, our two jars would
8:19–8:23be two private paintings with no canvas in common.
8:23–8:25Coincidence would have to explain their agreement.
8:25–8:28A coincidence repeated at every meal.
8:28–8:29Every market.
8:29–8:32Every court such as this one, for every person who has ever lived.
8:32–8:36I would sooner believe in the jar and consider further.
8:36–8:41Your own inference, the one you are giving me now, depends on my mind receiving a reason
8:41–8:46from outside itself, namely your voice, entering by my ear, addressed to a listener you take
8:46–8:49to be distinct from the sound and from your own mind producing it.
8:49–8:55If nothing is outside cognition, to whom, and by what channel, are you even now speaking?
8:55–8:59You have found the seam in the robe, Akaria, the very act of debating your presuppose as
8:59–9:04a second party outside my own stream of cognition, wish the doctrine of mind only cannot, without
9:04–9:05embarrassment allow.
9:05–9:08I concede this pillar cracks though I do not yet concede the house has fallen.
9:08–9:13remains a room you have not entered even should dare to world, stand muster self, stand behind
9:13–9:18the scene of it. Perhaps there is a world and perceptions of it arising and passing and
9:18–9:23nothing more, no owner, no witness, only the seeing self-lit, onaless as a series of lamps
9:23–9:27lit one from the last needs, no single flame keeper walking behind them with a torch.
9:27–9:32Now you have named the true battlefield, and I will meet you there bledly, for it is
9:32–9:35the one this whole inquiry was undertaken to reach.
9:35–9:38Act 3 The Cognizer behind the cognition.
9:38–9:45Udayana rises for the first time and steps down from the teacher's seat, level with K.S.H.
9:45–9:51Anupadra, a mark by the customs of the Vada that he now argues not from authority but
9:51–9:53from evidence alone.
9:53–9:59K.S.H. Anupadra set aside every scripture, every school, every inherited word, and answer
9:59–10:01only from what is given to you this instant.
10:01–10:07When you say I am tired, or I understand, or, indeed, I deny that I exist, what does the
10:07–10:09word I report?
10:09–10:10A convenient fiction.
10:10–10:14A label the stream of consciousness applies to itself out of habit, as a river might
10:14–10:18be named though no single thing called the river is there apart from the water.
10:18–10:20A fiction, you say.
10:20–10:25But even a fiction must be told by someone, or believed by someone, or at the very least,
10:25–10:26occur to someone.
10:26–10:30The awareness I exist is not like the awareness the sky is blue, which might in principle
10:30–10:37be doubted, argued over, corrected by a better eye. Has any person, waking or dreaming, learned
10:37–10:42or unlearned, ever doubted that he exists while forming the thought that he exists? You cannot
10:42–10:47even frame your denial. I do not exist. Without the very eye your sentence tries to erase standing
10:47–10:52behind the erasing. Every school of grammar teaches that a word need not name a thing
10:52–10:56behind it. It reigns names know it that does the reigning. So I know may name no eye that
10:56–11:00does the knowing only the knowing dressed by grammar in a subject it does not require.
11:00–11:05A fair parry and I will not wave it off. It rains indeed names no separate rainer,
11:05–11:10but notice the difference between the two cases carefully, for it is the whole of the matter.
11:10–11:15I can be shown that it rains is a grammatical convenience, because I can point to the falling
11:15–11:20water and to ask where in this is a separate rainer and find none. The raining and the
11:20–11:25water falling are one and the same event nothing withheld. Now perform the same test on knowing.
11:25–11:31Point me to the knowing of the jar and ask, Is there, decides the knowing, an agent whom
11:31–11:34the knowing serves, Watch yourself the next time you learn a fact
11:34–11:39you did not want to hear, One part of the event is the arising of the knowledge,
11:39–11:44Another, distinguishable part, is the resistance, the wish it were otherwise, the ownership
11:44–11:50of the discomfort, I cut, we say, and the cutting is one thing, the cutter another,
11:50–11:53the iron does not own the wound it makes, so too I know.
11:53–11:59The knowing is an act, and every act, by the plain evidence of every other act we have
11:59–12:04ever examined, requires an agent distinct from itself, one who begins before the act
12:04–12:09and remains after it, since the sickle is duller after the cutting than before, while
12:09–12:12the reaper is not consumed by his reaping.
12:12–12:17Then let the agent be nothing more than the body, or the aggregate of senses and understanding
12:17–12:21acting together no further self is needed beyond these five heaps in cooperation.
12:21–12:23Think yourself, then.
12:23–12:26Why any body does not serve as any person's self-knowledge.
12:26–12:30If self-cognition took the body merely as a body, my hand should as readily report I
12:30–12:32of your hand as of mine.
12:32–12:38Bodies do not differ in their bare bodily nature in a way that could sort themselves so precisely.
12:38–12:42One to one into billions of private claims of mine.
12:42–12:45Something already distinguishes this body as belonging to a knower before the knower
12:45–12:50can call it mine, and that distinguishing cannot itself come from the body on pain
12:50–12:55of circularity. The body needing to already be known as one's own in order to explain
12:55–12:57why it is known as one's own.
12:57–13:02Bacoria, may I ask what troubles me? Grant the self as real, how do you distinguish it
13:02–13:06in cognition from the mere flow of experiences that is supposed to own? A crowd is nothing
13:06–13:08over and above the people in it.
13:08–13:12A good question and better than half the objections raised by opponents in this
13:12–13:15hall, if the pupil will forgive the comparison.
13:15–13:20Consider memory. I recall today a mango I tasted 20 years ago as a boy. The tasting
13:20–13:25was one event, decades gone, its very moment perished past recovery. The remembering is
13:25–13:31another event, this instant. In a body grown old and changed in every visible particular,
13:31–13:35for the remembering to be my remembering of my tasting, and not merely a report about
13:35–13:40some other person's banished pleasure, as impersonal to me as a stranger's diary. One
13:40–13:44thing must have been present at the tasting and remain present at the remembering. Binding
13:44–13:49the two moments is one person's history, rather than two person's unconnected events,
13:49–13:52A crowd, once dispersed, remembers nothing.
13:52–13:57There is no crowd left to do the remembering, but I remember momentary cognitions.
13:57–14:01Each perishing entire before the next arises could no more explain this bridging than a
14:01–14:06single wave could recall the shape of a wave that broke on the shore an hour before it
14:06–14:07was born.
14:07–14:11Some among my own teachers speak of a store consciousness, a hidden continuity beneath
14:11–14:14the surface flashes, to carry precisely this weight.
14:14–14:16Then, K. Shannipadra.
14:16–14:21I welcome you halfway across the hall already, for you have just described.
14:21–14:26In Buddhist dress, exactly what I have been calling the self throughout this debate, something
14:26–14:31that endures beneath and behind the passing flashes, is not identical with any one of
14:31–14:36them and is required to explain memory, ownership, and the very possibility of your
14:36–14:40addressing me as one and the same listener from the start of this vata to its end.
14:40–14:41Rename it if you wish.
14:41–14:46I will not quarrel over the name once the reality it is going to explain is granted.
14:46–14:57Act 4. The silence beyond argument. The waterclock is nearly spent. KSH Anandhadra has returned to his seat, subdued but not yet defeated.
14:57–15:00Yu Dayana resumes the teacher's seat.
15:00–15:07Suppose a karya I grant you the self, persisting, remembering, distinct from body and from the bare act of knowing.
15:07–15:12One question remains and it is the one that first sent me to my teachers as a boy before I had heard the word momentary.
15:12–15:16Why is there suffering? And is there any exit from it that does not require a fable?
15:16–15:19You have one mere self. Have you one mere self worth having?
15:19–15:25That is the only question, in the end, that either of our schools was ever built to answer.
15:25–15:29Everything before this was clearing the ground for it, consider, if there is no self,
15:29–15:34only a self-illuminating flow, then no one is bound and no one is freed,
15:34–15:38and every teacher who ever taught the path out of suffering was teaching an empty room to
15:38–15:43leave, but if there is a self. One that persists through error and correction, through sleep
15:43–15:48and waking, through the tasting of the mango and its remembering thirty years hence, then
15:48–15:52that sane persistence is what makes liberation more than a word. The self that has mistaken
15:52–15:57itself for the body, that has suffered by that mistake, is the very self capable of
15:57–16:02unlearning the mistake and, unlearning it, ceasing to suffer, not vanishing, as your
16:02–16:08momentary flashes vanish. But continuing, correctly at last, without the old confusion,
16:08–16:14a wave has nothing to be freed into. Only water that lasts long enough to notice it was never
16:14–16:18only a wave can be freed from thinking so. And the order behind this, the law by which
16:18–16:23knowledge, freeze and ignorance binds a fact that inquiry of this kind is even reliable,
16:23–16:27you would ground in a further being a maker, would you not? I have heard this is where
16:27–16:32your road runs next. It is, though the water clock will not permit me the whole of that road
16:32–16:38tonight. And a wise debater ends before his welcome does. I will say only this, and let
16:38–16:42it stand as this evening's final word rather than as the closing of the matter. A law that
16:42–16:46makes minds able to know a world neither mind invented is either a brute coincidence
16:46–16:51repeated without end, or it is the trace of an intention, as the ordered strokes of
16:51–16:56a word on this hall's pillar are either an accident of whethering no one would seriously
16:56–17:00credit or the work of a hand that meant them. I hold the second view, whether I
17:00–17:05I have proved it to your satisfaction is a debate for another day and a fuller clock.
17:05–17:09Tonight it is enough that you lead this whole no longer certain there is no one to leave
17:09–17:10it."
17:10–17:17KSH Anab had arises, folds his hands, not in defeat exactly, but in the particular respect
17:17–17:23one debater owes another who has taken his argument seriously enough to break it carefully rather
17:23–17:25than merely refuse it.
17:25–17:30I came to empty your hall of assulf, Akaria, and find instead I cannot empty even the common.
17:30–17:34Then the water clock has done its work. Go and sit with the question further,
17:34–17:39that too is a discipline. Avada well thought does not end in one man's silence.
17:39–17:44It ends in both men's better thinking. Suttred horror returns as the lamp is lowered,
17:44–17:50so the argument closes, though the question it examined does not. It has been asked in every
17:50–17:58aged by every thinking creature who has ever paused mid-sentence and wondered who exactly was speaking.
17:58–18:04Udayana's answer was not the last word spoken on this floor across the centuries since his
18:04–18:10opponents returned in other robes with Sharpae instruments, and will return again after this
18:10–18:16performance ends. That is not the defeat of philosophy but its work. If you leave this
18:16–18:21This hall with the question sharpened rather than settled, the play, like the treatise
18:21–18:27from which it borrows its bones, has done what it set out to do, exhumed on these.

Plain text

Setting the debating hall of a royal court in Mithila, a lamp burning though it is day, a water clock bataki, mantra marking the time allowed to each speaker, as was the custom of the formal vada. Sushradhara 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 Kei Shanabhadra, 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 Christian, 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? Water clock, 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. 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-curtises. 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 is a hundred flames introducing themselves to each 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 hear 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. And 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 10 years has, on your view, secretly been 10,000 stones, each perishing by its own nature, and yet requiring, unnoticed, no hammer, no weathering, no cause at all to break it. Do 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 have a direct question. you dream of a garden is the garden outside you? No. And 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 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 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 debating your presuppose 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. 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 needs, no single flame keeper 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 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 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 cooperation. Think 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. Bacoria, 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 20 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. Shannipadra. 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 waterclock is nearly spent. KSH Anandhadra has returned to his seat, subdued but not yet defeated. Yu Dayana resumes the teacher's seat. Suppose a karya I grant you the self, persisting, remembering, distinct from body and from the bare 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 one mere self. Have you one mere 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 sane 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 whethering no one would seriously credit or the work of a hand that meant them. I hold the second view, whether I 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 whole 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 common. 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. Suttred horror returns as the lamp is lowered, so the argument closes, though the question it examined does not. It has been asked in every aged 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 Sharpae instruments, and will return again after this performance ends. That is not the defeat of philosophy but its work. If you leave this 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 on these.

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