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wavide the doctrine according to which the effect exists before it is produced. Very concretely, this means that the situation described by the statement "John makes a pot" or "the pot comes into being contains already a pot, be it that the pot at that moment is still hidden in the clay from which it is being made.
Satkaryavada becomes an essential part of classical Samkhya philosophy; it is taken over by some schools and vehemently combated by others. The scholastic debates about this issue in later texts make one easily forget how profoundly strange this doctrine really is not only for modern Western readers!). They may have the further effect that the doctrine becomes familiar, and that one stops being surprised by its extraordinary content. Familiarity is easily mistaken for understanding. A better understanding, I submit, can be obtained by becoming aware of what specific problem the doctrine was meant to solve. In the case of satkaryavada this problem was the direct consequence of certain ideas regarding the relationship between lan guage and reality shared by all thinkers of that time.
The problem was shared by all thinkers, but they did not all propose the same solution. An altogether different solution was proposed by a particularly famous thinker. Nägariuna, In order to understand his solution we have to take into account that Nagariuna was a Buddhist The Buddhists of his time, as I pointed out earlier, had come to believe that the phenomenal world does not really exist. This belief had not been part of the message taught by the historical Buddha. It was the result rather of subsequent elaborations and reinterpretations of the early teachings. Whatever the details of this development with which we cannot deal at this moment--the Buddhists had come to believe on the presumed authority of the Buddha, that the phenomenal world does not really exist-but they could not prove it. This changed however, with Nagariuna, who could. The phenomenal world does not exist be cause it cannot exist. And it cannot exist because it is self-contradictory,
The basic argument to prove this has already been sketched above. The state ment "the pot comes into being" describes a situation that must contain a pot.it does not. The statement is therefore contradictory, and nothing comes into being. will cite one verse from Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika that deals with this particular problem: "If any unproduced entity is found anywhere it could be pro- duced. Since that entity does not exist, what is produced?" In the case of our pot this means: if there is a pot at the time it is going to be produced, it can be produced. If there is no such pot, the subject of "the pot is produced" has nothing to refer to, and the statement is empty. This is true if we assume, as Nagarjuna apparently did, that the terms of a statement have to refer to something that is there in the situation described
Nagariuna proved, with this and similar arguments, what a number of Buddhists had already believed before and without him. He did more, however. By introducing these rather nihilistic arguments into Buddhist philosophy he created a school of philosophy, known by the name of Madhyamaka or Madhyamika, that survived for a long time in India and survives to this day among Tibetan Buddhists.
My reflections so far have shown, I hope, that at least two crucially important doctrines held by different schools of Indian philosophy found their historical origin
not in meditative experience or supernatural revelation but in the need to deal with difficulties arising from shared assumptions: The satkaryavada of Samkhya and the nihilism of Madhyamaka are both to be understood as responses to a conviction shared by all thinkers of that time, concerning the relationship between language and reality that at first view would barely seem to justify such encompassing meta physical conclusions.
I will now turn to Bharthari, a Brahmanical thinker of the fifth century of the common era who is best known today as a "linguistic philosopher." Bhartrhari owes this reputation to the fact that the Indian
ation to the fact that the Indian grammarians, who were and marily linguists with few or no philosophical aspirations, came to accept him as . - or rather the-philosopher of grammar. They added his philosophy, ar part of it, to their own rather technical and nonphilosophical reflections, and now claimed that grammar, too, had a philosophical dimension. Also, some modern scholars have concentrated on aspects of Bharthari's thought that, they claim, show similarities with modern linguistics.
But whatever we think of the reputation that Bhartrhari acquired in later times, he was, first of all, a thinker of his own time who thought about the problems that Were around at that time. One of the problems he had to confront is the one we have ust discussed: how a pot can come into being if it is not yet there
There can be no doubt that this problem played a central role in Bharthari's thinking. He formulates it most clearly in the following verse: "If Isomethingl exists alreadyl, why does it come into being? But if it does not exist how does it come into being?" What is more, he offers no less than four different solutions to this problem in four different parts of his Väkyapadiya. The challenge, as you will recall, s to find something that the word "pot" in the statement "the pot comes into being" Fefers to and that is part of the situation described. Unlike the Samkhyas, who claim that the pot already exists at the time it comes into being, and unlike Nagarjuna, who Elaims that the very statement is self-contradictory, Bharthari presents objects that are present in the situation described and that are, he proposes, referred to by the
ord "pot." His first suggestion is that the word "pot" refers to the universal that pheres in all pots. He borrowed this notion of universals from another school of philosophy, but gave it an interpretation that was uniquely his own. For him the Universal is not just an eternal and unchangeable things that inheres in all pots: no, From Bharthari's point of view the universal plays an active role in manifesting the pot.
His second solution to the problem at hand is that the word "pot" refers to the substance of which the pot is made-or better: is going to be made. This substance
there while the pot is being made, so that the word "pot" does refer to somethine Tven at the time that the pot is being produced.
Bharthari's third solution is altogether different. He realizes that the demand that the words constituting a sentence have to refer to something in the situation de
cribed leads to major difficulties, for example in the case of negative existential state. ments. If I say "Martians do not exist," what does the word "Martians" refer to? Not
anything out there, one would say. Bharthari solves this problem by maintaining
Philosophy East & West
Johannes Bronkhorst
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