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SOUL
qualities like pleasure, pain etc. or it must be something impermanent just as rain and sunshine do not affect sky even while affecting a piece of leather". The Buddhist's point is that all real thing being momentary in duration a soul supposed to be permanent in duration cannot be anything real, and this consideration leads him to undertake an elaborate defence of his thesis on momentarism. In this connection he offers four arguments as follows:
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(1) First it is argued that a real thing is what exhibits causal efficiency while a non-momentary thing can exhibit no causal efficiency - not successively because it is inconceivable why it should not exhibit it at once, not at once because it is inconceivable what it should be doing after exhibiting it; the suggestion that a non-momentary thing exhibits causal efficiency appropriate to the available accessories is rejected on the ground that a thing exhibits causal efficiency irrespective of what accessories are available to it." This is the crux of an argument which as it stands is replete with so many side-considerations. The Buddhist's point is that each real thing exercises two types of causality, viz. material causality in relation to the incoming member of the series to which it itself belongs, accessory-causality in relation to the incoming members of the so many series existing nearby (in all strictness, of all the remaining series that are there). And since according to him to thus exercise a dual causality is the very nature of a real thing he fails to see why an alleged non-momentary thing should exercise this causality not all at once but successively and partwise (as it must on the first alternative under consideration) or it should exercise this causality all at once but should yet continue to exist (as it must on the second alternative under consideration). And the suggestion that a non-momentary thing successively produces different effects as different accessories are available to it makes no sense to him. because he already grants that the net-effect produced by a real thing is different in case different accessories are available to it, his point being that this thing's own role in causation is in no way affected by what accessories are available to it.
(2) Secondly, it is argued that it is a self-contradictory proposition that a thing is real and yet non-momentary.40 Really, .what is thus offered is no new argument but the bold assertion that a real thing must be momentary in duration. The assertion has semblance of argument because it inter alia says: A real thing
