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