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160 Buddhist Philosophy
[CH. itself the experience of the conditions of the preceding moment, and this alone is what we find and not any permanent observer.
The Buddhist definition of being or existence (sattva) is indeed capacity, and we arrived at this when it was observed that in all proved cases capacity was all that could be defined of being --seed was but the capacity of producing shoots, and even if this capacity should require further capacity to produce effects, the fact which has been perceived still remains, viz. that the existence of seeds is nothing but the capacity of producing the shoots and thus there is no vicious infinite?. Though things are momentary, yet we could have concomitance between things only so long as their apparent forms are not different (atadrūpaparāvịttayoreva sādhyasādhanayoḥ pratyakşeņa vyāptigrahaņāt). The vyāpti or concomitance of any two things (e.g. the fire and the smoke) is based on extreme similarity and not on identity.
Another objection raised against the doctrine of momentariness is this, that a cause (e.g. seed) must wait for a number of other collocations of earth, water, etc., before it can produce the effect (e.g. the shoots) and hence the doctrine must fail. To this Ratnakīrtti replies that the seed does not exist before and produce the effect when joined by other collocations, but such is the special effectiveness of a particular seed-moment, that it produces both the collocations or conditions as well as the effect, the shoot. How a special seed-moment became endowed with such special effectiveness is to be sought in other causal moments which preceded it, and on which it was dependent. Ratnakīrtti wishes to draw attention to the fact that as one perceptual moment reveals a number of objects, so one causal moment may produce a number of effects. Thus he says that the inference that whatever has being is momentary is valid and free from any fallacy.
It is not important to enlarge upon the second part of Ratnakīrtti's arguments in which he tries to show that the production of effects could not be explained if we did not suppose
1 The distinction between vicious and harmless infinites was known to the Indians at least as early as the sixth or the seventh century. Jayanta quotes a passage which differentiates the two clearly (Nyāyamañjari, p. 22):
"mülaksatikarimāhuranavasthăm hi dūsanam.
mülasiddhau tvarucyāpi nānavasthā niväryate.” The infinite regress that has to be gone through in order to arrive at the root matter awaiting to be solved destroys the root and is hence vicious, whereas if the root is saved there is no harm in a regress though one may not be willing to have it.
