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Part 11 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 11

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asr-draft

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en (0.996083)

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18:31

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

Plain text

Setting the debating hall of a royal court in Mithila, a lamp burning though it is day, a waterclock bataki yantra 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 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 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. Kariya, I will not waste the water in the clock on Curtis's. You teach that behind these eyes there sits an unmoving watcher, one and the same from the child who feared the dark to the old man who no longer does. I teach otherwise that everything real bursts into being and perishes within a single moment and that a new thing resembling the old only as smoke resembles smoke arises to take its place. The candle flame you call one flame as a hundred flames introducing themselves to each other so quickly that you cannot see the greeting end and the farewell begin. There is no one who watches. There is only watching and then more watching each instance new. Then let me ask you the question a debate is built to ask. What is your proof? Not your poetry, your proof. Whatever is real is momentary. The pot on your shelf is momentary, even you will grander 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. 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. pop the instant before is not. If it were one pop both capable and incapable, you would have planted a contradiction in a single seed. Only if each moment is its own separate thing does the contradiction dissolve. Now we are at the root of it, and I thank you for reaching it quickly. The Water Clock rewards a swift opponent more than a cautious one. Tell me plainly, is this capacity you speak of the very act of producing the effect or merely the fitness to produce it? Prior to the act? FITMESS. The seed is fit to sprout before it sprouts. Then here the trap you have set for your own foot. If capacity is the act itself. Your reason collapses into your conclusion. You would be proving momentariness by citing an activity that already presupposes it, which is no inference at all, only a restatement, so you rightly chose fitness. But fitness is not exhausted by one moment. A seed sitting in a granary is fit to sprout in the sense that nothing in its own nature forbid sprouting. It lacks only the water, the warmth, the soil it has not yet met. Does the seeds fitness vanish the instant it is not sprouting? If so, no seed could ever wait for rain. Yet seeds wait for rain every season and remain seeds throughout the waiting. Your capacity must therefore be something that persists through the interval before its exercise, which is the very enduring thing you deny. Say rather that each momentary seed hands its fitness to the next as a torch is passed hand to hand in a relay each run in 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 smuggled a continuant and through the back door of your metaphor, while showing me out through the front, and there is a second wound in this argument. Deeper than the first, you say a thing must perish because it must inevitably perish. That destruction requires no further cause, being simply the nature of the existent, but then tell me. A stone standing in the sun for ten years has, on your view, secretly been ten thousand stones, each perishing by its own nature, and yet requiring, unnoticed, no hammer, no weathering, no cause at all to break it. Do you not find it strange that a doctrine built to explain change ends by needing no explanation for the one change, destruction, that matters most? You press hard on a difficult joint, Akaria. I did not concede a momentary thing's ending is not caused as its beginning is caused precisely because existence and impermanence are not to. Then you have not answered. You have renamed the difficulty identity and hoped the water clock would run out before anyone noticed. It has not run out, but I will not drag a tired point further. A debater, like a physician, should know when the patient has understood the diagnosis. Let a set momentariness aside is unproved, not as disproved by force but is never shown, and turn to the second pillar of your house, which is grander and will fall harder. Act 2 The Hall of Mirrors The lamp is trimmed, KSH Anab had a rise 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 water clock, my own robe, are one long dream that has simply not yet ended cognition painting itself with the appearance of an outside because that is cognition's nature, needing no outside to paint from. A pleasant vertigo and old, here is its flaw. You argue from some cognitions being objectless the dream to all cognitions possibly being objectless the waking world, but a house does not become imaginary, because some houses are painted on stagecloth, worse. How do you and I agree, this very afternoon, that dream and waking even differ enough to compare, you yourself distinguish them, you would not walk off this dais believing the floor absent. 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, Bada. 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 else speaking? You have found the seam in the robe, Ocaria, the very act of debate, and you presuppose as a second party outside my own stream of cognition, which the doctrine of mind only cannot without embarrassment allow. I concede this pillar cracks, though I do not yet concede the house has fallen. There remains a room you have not entered, even should the outer world stand musterself, 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, Analyst as a series of lumps lit one from the last needs no single flamethrower 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 each anabhadra a mark by the customs of the vada that he now argues not from authority but from evidence alone. Kesh Anabhadra set aside every scripture, every school, every inherited word, and answer only from what is given to you this instant. When you say I am tired or I understand or, indeed, I deny that I exist, what does the word I report? A convenient fiction, a label the stream of consciousness applies to itself out of habit as a river might be named though no single thing called the river is there apart from the water. A fiction, you say. But even a fiction must be told by someone or believed by someone or at the very least, occur to someone. The awareness I exist is not like the awareness the sky is blue, which might in principle be doubted, argued over, corrected by a better eye. Has any person, waking or dreaming, learned or unlearned, ever doubted that he exists while forming the thought that he exists. You cannot even frame your denial. I do not exist. Without the very eye your sentence tries to erase standing behind the erasing. Every school of grammar teaches that a word need not name a thing behind it. It reigns names know it that does the reigning. So I know may name no eye that does the knowing only the knowing dressed by grammar in a subject it does not require. A fair parry and I will not wave it off. It reigns indeed names no separate reiner, but notice the difference between the two cases carefully for it is the whole of the matter. I can be shown that it rains as a grammatical convenience, because I can point to the falling water and ask where, in this, is a separate rainer and find none, the raining and the water falling are one and the same event, nothing withheld. Now perform the same test on knowing. Point me to the knowing of the jar and ask, is there, decides the knowing, an agent whom the knowing serves. Watch yourself the next time you learn a fact you did not want to hear. One part of the event is the arising of the knowledge. Another, distinguishable part, is the resistance. The wish it were otherwise, the ownership of the discomfort. I cut, we say, and the cutting is one thing, the cutter another. The iron does not own the wound it makes. So too I know. The knowing is an act, and every act, by the plain evidence of every other act we have ever examined, requires an agent distinct from itself. One who begins before the act and remains after it, since the sickle is duller after the cutting than before, while the reaper is not consumed by his reaping. Then let the agent be nothing more than the body, or the aggregate of senses and understanding acting together, no further self is needed beyond these five heaps in cooperation. Ask yourself, then, why any body does not serve as any person's self-knowledge. If self-cognition took the body merely as a body, my hand should as readily report I of your hand as of mine, bodies do not differ in their bare bodily nature, in a way that could sort themselves so precisely, one to one, into billions of private claims of mine. Something already distinguishes this body as belonging to a knower before the knower can call it mine, and that distinguishing cannot itself come from the body, on pain of circularity. The body needing to already be known as one's own in order to explain why it is known as one's own. A courier, 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 in tire 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 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 it from it that does not require a fable, you have won me a self, have you won me a self worth having? That is the only question, in the end, that either of our schools was ever built to answer, everything before this was clearing the ground for it, consider, if there is no self, only a self-illuminating flow, then no one is bound and no one is freed, and every teacher who ever taught the path out of suffering was teaching an empty room to leave, but if there is a self, One that persists through error and correction, through sleep and waking, through the tasting of the mango and its remembering thirty years hence, then that same persistence is what makes liberation more than a word. The self that has mistaken itself for the body that has suffered by that mistake is the very self capable of unlearning the mistake and, unlearning it, ceasing to suffer, not vanishing, as your momentary flashes vanish, but continuing, Correctly, at last, without the old confusion, a wave has nothing to be freed into. Only water that lasts long enough to notice it was never only a wave can be freed from thinking so. And the order behind this, the law by which knowledge, freeze and ignorance binds a fact that inquiry of this kind is even reliable, you would ground in a further being a maker would you not? I have heard this is where your road runs next. It is, though the water clock will not permit me the whole of that road tonight, and a wise debater ends before his welcome does. I will say only this, and let it stand as this evening's final word rather than as the closing of the matter. A law that makes minds able to know a world neither mind invented is either a brute coincidence repeated without end, or it is the trace of an intention, as the ordered strokes of a word on this hall's pillar are either an accident of whethering 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 said, 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. Suttra Dharah 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, 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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