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Collection: Part 11 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 11
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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
0:09–0:14water-clock batakya yantra marking the time allowed to each speaker, as was the custom
0:14–0:17of the formal vada.
0:17–0:25Praul, Satradhara enters, bows to the assembly. Before the argument begins, a bow not to
0:25–0:30a god established by argument, but to the one whose being no argument can either grant
0:30–0:34or take away. What you are about to hear is not history.
0:34–0:40Udaiana lived, his opponents live only in his pages. As the shadow of an arm lives in
0:40–0:46the shape it prevents the lamp from lighting. I have gathered those shadows into one robe
0:46–0:52and one voice, and named him K. Shannabhadra, the fortunate of the moment, for he speaks
0:52–0:57for every teacher who held that nothing lasts, that nothing looks outward from within
0:57–1:02a body and that the word I is a habit mistaken for a fact.
1:02–1:08The dispute you will hear turns on one question, asked in four different rooms, who is asking,
1:08–1:13is there anyone who suffers, who remembers, who is bound and who might be freed, or is
1:13–1:19there only a river of moments, mistaking its own ripples for a bank?
1:19–1:25Waterclock begin, let the two sides speak by turn, as the law of debate requires,
1:25–1:31and let neither claim victory before the other has been given his full measure of time.
1:31–1:32Exit.
1:32–1:36Act 1. The 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.
1:48–1:52Kariya, 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 from
1:55–1:59the 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 a smoke resembles, smoke arises to take
2:09–2:10its place.
2:10–2:14The candle flame you call one flame is a hundred flames introducing themselves to
2:14–2:18each other so 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.
2:41–2:45You hear the shape of it, he has shown me a pot that breaks, and asked me to
2:45–2:50conclude that a self, which nobody has yet seen break, must break too.
2:50–3:16The law is shown that capacity and incapacity to act cannot sit together in one and the
3:16–3:18same thing at one and the same time.
3:18–3:21The pot the instant after it is fired is capable of holding water.
3:21–3:23The pot the instant before is not.
3:23–3:28If it were one pot both capable and incapable you would have planted a contradiction in a
3:28–3:29single seed.
3:29–3:33Only if each moment is its own separate thing does the contradiction dissolve.
3:33–3:37Now we are at the root of it and I thank you for reaching it quickly.
3:37–3:40The 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
3:45–3:47or merely the fitness to produce it?
3:47–3:48to the act.
3:48–3:496.
3:49–3:50FITMESS.
3:50–3:51The seed is fit to sprout before it sprouts.
3:51–3:527.
3:52–3:54Then here the trap you have set for your own foot.
3:54–3:57If capacity is the act itself.
3:57–3:59Your reason collapses into your conclusion.
3:59–4:04You would be proving momentariness by citing an activity that already presupposes it,
4:04–4:08which is no inference at all, only a restatement, so you rightly chose fitness.
4:08–4:11But fitness is not exhausted by one moment.
4:11–4:14A seed sitting in a granary is fit to sprout in the sense that nothing in its
4:14–4:16own nature forbids sprouting.
4:16–4:20It lacks only the water, the warmth, the soil it has not yet met.
4:20–4:24Does the seed's fitness vanish the instant it is not sprouting?
4:24–4:26If so, no seed could ever wait for rain.
4:26–4:31Yet seeds wait for rain every season and remain seeds throughout the waiting.
4:31–4:34Your capacity must therefore be something that persists through the interval before
4:34–4:39its exercise, which is the very enduring thing you deny.
4:39–4:42Say rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is
4:42–4:47past hand to hand in a relay each one a new, the flame alone continuous in appearance only.
4:47–4:52A relay 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
5:07–5:10out through the front, and there is a second wound in this argument.
5:10–5:15deeper than the first. You say a thing must perish because it must inevitably perish. That
5:15–5:22destruction requires no further cause, being simply the nature of the existent, but then tell me.
5:22–5:27A stone standing in the sun for ten years has, on your view, secretly been ten thousand stones,
5:27–5:33each perishing by its own nature, and yet requiring, unnoticed, no hammer, no weathering,
5:33–5:38no cause at all to break it. Do you not find it strange that a doctrine built to explain
5:38–5:43change ends by needing no explanation for the one change, destruction, that matters most.
5:53–5:59You have renamed the difficulty identity and hoped the water clock would run out before anyone
5:59–6:06noticed. It has not run out, but I will not drag a tired point further. A debater, like a physician,
6:06–6:09should 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,
6:14–6:18and turn to the second pillar of your house, which is grander and will fall harder.
6:20–6:22Act 2 The Hall of Mirrors
6:22–6:28The lamp is trimmed. KSH Anabhadra rises to pace, more animated.
6:29–6:32Grant me this then, Akaria, since you love a direct question.
6:32–6:35When you dream of a garden, is the garden outside you?
6:35–6:36you.
6:36–6:37No.
6:37–6:41And yet, 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
6:57–7:01has simply not yet ended cognition painting itself with the appearance of an outside
7:01–7:05because that is cognition's nature, needing no outside to paint from.
7:05–7:11A pleasant vertigo and old, here is its flaw. You argue from some cognitions being objectless
7:11–7:16the dream to all cognitions possibly being objectless the waking world, but a house does not become
7:16–7:22imaginary, because some houses are painted on stage cloth, worse. How do you and I agree,
7:22–7:27this very afternoon, that dream and waking even differ enough to compare. You yourself
7:27–7:32distinguish them, you would not walk off this dais believing the floor absent. Though you might
7:32–7:37in 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
7:42–7:48dream state cannot furnish and the world can, namely, a stable object which persists to be
7:48–7:54checked against, corrected by, return to. Say the difference you speak of is only a difference
7:54–7:59of vividness of coherence internal to cognition itself. Cognition illuminates itself as a lamp
7:59–8:04needs no second lamp to be seen by. What you call an external pot is only this cognition
8:04–8:09wearing for a while, the appearance cold potness needing nothing beyond itself to explain that
8:09–8:15appearance. Then account for this, border. Two of us, you and I, look at the same jar at the
8:15–8:21same moment and report the same shape, the same weight when lifted, the same sound when struck.
8:21–8:25If each of us were merely cognition self-illuminating its private appearance,
8:25–8:30our two jars would be two private paintings with no canvas in common.
8:30–8:35Coincidence would have to explain their agreement. A coincidence repeated at every meal,
8:35–8:39every market, every court such as this one, for every person who has ever lived.
8:39–8:44I 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,
8:49–8:56Namely, 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.
8:56–9:02If nothing is outside cognition, to whom, and by what channel, are you even now speaking?
9:02–9:09You have found the seam in the robe, Akaria, the 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 they out of worlds.
9:19–9:24stand muster self, stand behind the scene of it. Perhaps there is a world and perceptions of it,
9:24–9:29arising and passing, and nothing more, no owner, no witness, only the seeing self lit,
9:29–9:34onaless, as a series of lamps lit one from the last need, no single flame keeper walking behind
9:34–9:39them with a torch. Now you have named the true battlefield, and I will meet you there gladly,
9:39–9:42for it is the one this whole inquiry was undertaken to reach.
9:42–9:47Act 3. The Cognizer Behind The Cognition.
9:47–9:54Udayana rises for the first time and steps down from the teacher's seat, level with KSH
9:54–10:00Anupadra, a mark by the customs of the Vada that he now argues not from authority but
10:00–10:01from evidence alone.
10:01–10:07KShanupadra set aside every scripture, every school, every inherited word,
10:07–10:13and answer only from what is given to you this instant. When you say I am tired, or I understand,
10:13–10:18or, 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,
10:33–10:39or at the very 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
10:50–10:55that he exists? You cannot even frame your denial. I do not exist, without the very eye your
10:55–11:00sentence tries to erase standing behind the erasing. Every school of grammar teaches that
11:00–11:04a word need not name a thing behind it. It rains names no it that does the raining.
11:04–11:09So I know may name no I that does the knowing only the knowing dressed by grammar in a subject
11:09–11:15it does not require. A fair parry and I will not wave it off. It rains indeed names no separate
11:15–11:19rainer but notice the difference between the two cases carefully for it is the whole of the
11:19–11:25matter. I can be shown that it rains is a grammatical convenience because I can point
11:25–11:30to the falling water and ask where in this is a separate rainer and find none the raining and
11:30–11:34and the water falling are one and the same event, nothing withheld.
11:34–11:36Now perform the same test on knowing.
11:36–11:41Point me to the knowing of the jar and ask, is there, decides the knowing, an agent whom
11:41–11:42the knowing serves.
11:42–11:46Watch yourself the next time you learn a fact you did not want to hear.
11:46–11:49One part of the event is the arising of the knowledge.
11:49–11:53Another, distinguishable part, is the resistance.
11:53–11:56The wish it were otherwise, the ownership of the discomfort.
11:56–12:00I cut, we say, and the cutting is one thing, the cutter another.
12:00–12:06The iron does not own the wound it makes, so too I know. The knowing is an act, and every act,
12:06–12:12by the plain evidence of every other act we have ever examined, requires an agent distinct from
12:12–12:18itself, one who begins before the act and remains after it, since the sickle is duller after the
12:18–12:22cutting than before, while the reaper is not consumed by his reaping.
12:22–12:26Then let the agent be nothing more than the body, or the aggregate of senses,
12:26–12:31and understanding acting together, no further self is needed beyond these five heaps in corporation.
12:56–13:02call it mine, and 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
13:07–13:08one's own.
13:08–13:11A chorea, may I ask, what troubles me?
13:11–13:14Grant the self as real, how do you distinguish it, in cognition, from the mere flow of
13:14–13:16experiences that is supposed to own?
13:16–13:19A crowd is nothing over and above the people in it.
13:19–13:23A good question, and better than half the objections raised by opponents in this
13:23–13:29hall if the pupil will forgive the comparison. Consider memory, I recall today a mango I tasted
13:29–13:34twenty years ago as a boy, the tasting was one event, decades gone, its very moment perished
13:34–13:40past recovery. The remembering is another event, this instant. In a body grown old and changed
13:40–13:45in every visible particular, for the remembering to be my remembering of my tasting, and not
13:45–13:50merely a report about some other person's banished pleasure, as impersonal to me as a stranger's
13:50–13:55diary. One thing must have been present at the tasting and remain present at the remembering.
13:55–14:00Binding the two moments is one person's history, rather than two person's unconnected events.
14:00–14:06A crowd, once dispersed, remembers nothing. There is no crowd left to do the remembering,
14:06–14:11but I remember momentary cognitions. Each perishing entire before the next arises
14:11–14:15could no more explain the spreading than a single wave could recall the shape of a wave
14:15–14:17that broke on the shore an hour before it was born.
14:18–14:22Some among my own teachers speak of a store consciousness, a hidden continuity beneath
14:22–14:25the surface flashes, to carry precisely this weight.
14:26–14:32Then, K. Shannabhadra, I welcome you halfway across the hall already, for you have just described,
14:33–14:38in Buddhist dress, exactly what I have been calling the self throughout this debate,
14:38–14:40something that endures beneath and behind the passing flashes,
14:40–14:47is not identical with any one of them and is required to explain memory, ownership and
14:47–14:50the very possibility of your addressing me as one and the same listener from the start
14:50–14:52of this Vata to its end.
14:52–14:53Rename it if you wish.
14:53–15:00I will not quarrel over the name once the reality it is going to explain is granted.
15:00–15:01Act 4.
15:01–15:03The Silence Beyond Argument.
15:03–15:05The water clock is nearly spent.
15:05–15:11JSH Anandhadra has returned to his seat, subdued but not yet defeated.
15:11–15:15Yu Dayana resumes the teacher's seat.
15:15–15:19Suppose Akaria I grant you the self, persisting, remembering, distinct from body and from the
15:19–15:21bare 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?
15:33–15:35That is the only question.
15:35–15:39In the end, that either of our schools was ever built to answer, everything before this
15:39–15:45was clearing the ground for it, consider, if there is no self, only a self-illuminating
15:45–15:49flow, then no one is bound and no one is freed, and every teacher who ever taught the
15:49–15:54path out of suffering was teaching an empty room to leave, but if there is a self,
15:54–15:58one 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 sane persistence is what
16:03–16:08makes liberation more than a word. The self that has mistaken itself for the body, that
16:08–16:13has suffered by that mistake, is the very self capable of unlearning the mistake and,
16:13–16:19unlearning it, ceasing 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
16:25–16:29water that lasts long enough to notice it was never only a wave can be freed from
16:29–16:32thinking so. And the order behind this, the law by which
16:32–16:37knowledge, freeze 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
16:41–16:45road runs next. It is, though the water clock will not permit
16:45–16:50me the whole of that road tonight. And a wise debater ends before his welcome does.
16:50–16:55I will say only this, and let it stand as this evening's final word rather than as
16:55–16:59the closing of the matter, a law that makes minds able to know a world neither mind
16:59–17:04invented is either a brute coincidence repeated without end, or it is the trace of an intention,
17:04–17:09as the ordered strokes of a word on this hull's pillar are either an accident of weathering
17:09–17:14no one would seriously credit, or the work of a hand that meant them. I hold the second
17:14–17:18view, whether I have proved it to your satisfaction is a debate for another day and a fuller
17:18–17:23clock. Tonight it is enough that you lead this hull no longer certain there is no one
17:23–17:24to leave it."
17:24–17:31KSH Anab had arises, folds his hands, not in defeat exactly, but in the particular respect
17:31–17:37one debater owes another who has taken his argument seriously enough to break it carefully
17:37–17:40rather than merely refuse it.
17:40–17:44I came to empty your hall of assulf, Akaria, and find instead I cannot empty even the
17:44–17:45coming.
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.
17:51–17:57Avada well-thought does not end in one man's silence. It ends in both men's better thinking.
17:57–17:58Epilogue
17:58–18:05Sutradhara returns as the lamp is lowered. So the argument closes, though the question
18:05–18:10it examined does not. It has been asked in every age by every thinking creature who has
18:10–18:16ever paused mid-sentence and wondered who exactly was speaking.
18:16–18:22Udayana's answer was not the last word spoken on this floor across the centuries since his
18:22–18:28opponents returned in other robes with sharp eye instruments, and will return again after
18:28–18:34this performance ends. That is not the defeat of philosophy but its work. If you leave this
18:34–18:39hall with the question sharpened rather than settled, the play, like the treatise
18:39–18:45from which it borrows its bones has done what it's 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 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. Udaiana 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 a smoke resembles, smoke arises to take its place. The candle flame you call one flame is 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. 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? to the act. 6. FITMESS. The seed is fit to sprout before it sprouts. 7. 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. Say rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is past hand to hand in a relay each one a new, 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 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 Anabhadra 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? 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 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 they out of worlds. 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 flame keeper 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 KSH Anupadra, a mark by the customs of the Vada that he now argues not from authority but from evidence alone. KShanupadra 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 rains names no it that does the raining. So I know may name no I 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 ask where in this is a separate rainer and find none the raining and 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 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 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. JSH Anandhadra has returned to his seat, subdued but not yet defeated. Yu Dayana resumes the teacher's seat. Suppose Akaria 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 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 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 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, 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's set out to do. Exhumed on these.

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