________________
292
Reading the Past: Texts and History
which inspired philosophers to develop most of the fundamental doctrines that were to accompany and even define the different schools of thought for centuries to come.
Since time and space do not permit me to argue each of the following points in detail, I will limit myself to a short presentation based on research published elsewhere.
The First Episteme
Sarvästiväda
The Sarvästivadins may have been the first systematic philosophers in India. It seems likely that these Buddhists created, in a short time span, a coherent system of thought out of traditional material. This traditional material consisted primarily of lists of socalled dharmas. For present purposes it will not be necessary to provide a detailed description of these dharmas. The lists of dharmas were revised, new dharmas were introduced, and an altogether different categorization was imposed upon them (the socalled Pañcavastuka). All these changes did have consequences that had more than mere scholastic interest. Or rather: these changes were the scholastic expression of a changed and systematized way of understanding the world, of an ontology that had not so far been part of the Buddhist tradition.
The ontology which Sarvästiväda imposed upon its Buddhist heritage is thoroughly atomistic in its nature. It denies the existence of composite things. Existence, it is maintained, only belongs to their ultimate parts. These ultimate parts are the dharmas.
These dharmas are not to be identified with material atoms. Most of the dharmas which the Sarvästivadins inherited from the preceding Buddhist tradition concem mental states, and even those few that do concem the material world are not themselves material atoms. This does not mean that the existence of material atoms is rejected. Their existence is accepted, but they are conceived of as conglomerations of certain dharmas, among them the qualities form, odor, taste, and touch. Material atoms in Sarvästivāda are not therefore the ultimate constituents of matter.
The same atomistic attitude which postulates that only the dharmas really exist is applied to things extended in time: all that exists is momentary, so that strictly speaking only momentary dharmas exist.
The world, seen in this way, consists of series of momentary dharmas that succeed each other. This succession is clearly not haphazard: the world is a relatively stable and to some extent predictable place. This is due to the fact that a causal mechanism is responsible for the orderly continuation of things. This causal mechanism, which receives due attention in the Sarvästiväda texts, sees to it that each succeeding moment is determined by the immediately preceding one.
This model of the world, in which all things and processes are presented as "trains" of momentary entities, and in which the earlier entities are proximate causes that "push" the later ones forward, applies also, and especially so, to mental processes. Recall that most dharmas are mental by nature. Indeed, the canonical source inspiring much of the thought about causality-the doctrine of pratityasamutpada, "origination in dependence," see below-primarily concerns the causal interrelationship between
Bronkhorst: Systematic Philosophy between the Empires
293
mental factors.
In explaining mental processes, the Sarvästivādins were confronted with difficulties which had to be dealt with. They were of the opinion that two mental events cannot simultaneously occur in one person. This leads to difficulties in the case of some such mental event as the observation of one's own desire. This involves two mental events: the desire and the observation of which it is the object. The desire, being the cause of its own observation, has to precede the observation. Since mental events are momentary, and the desire is therefore no longer present when it is observed, this would imply that one observes a nonpresent event. Confronted with this dilemma, the Sarvästivädins concluded that something nonpresent exists. Future and past things all exist: sarvam asti. This peculiar belief gave the Sarvästiväldins their name.
The vision which the Sarvästivädin systematizers imposed upon the world is very different from the common sense perception of the world. These Buddhist thinkers were confronted with the task of explaining how it is that such a thoroughly atomistic world appears to us as if it consists of objects that are extended both in space and in time. They provided an answer by bringing in the words of language. Composite objects such as chariots, houses, and indeed persons-do not really exist, but are believed to exist because there is a word for them. These things derive their pseudo-existence from the words of language. This implies of course that the world of our experience (which does not really exist) has a close and intrinsic connection with the words of language (Bronkhorst 2000a: 76-127, esp. 94ff.).
Other Buddhist Schools
The interpretation of reality first elaborated by the Sarvästivadins spread to other Buddhist schools in continental India, not without being adapted and modified in the process. Soon all continental Indian Buddhists shared notions such as the momentariness of all that exists, and the fundamental nonexistence of composite objects. Even the schools that adhered to the so-called pudgala-väda tried to define the pudgala-whose existence they supposedly accepted-in terms that owed much to the scholastic efforts of the Sarvästivädins and related schools. That is to say, the fundamentally atomistic understanding of reality became common property of all those continental schools that have left us traces of their intellectual labor.
Vaiseşika
The same basic understanding of reality also spread further, beyond Buddhism. We have seen that very little documentary evidence regarding the earliest form of Vaiseşika has survived, but the texts that have survived allow us to conclude that Vaiśesika, probably from its beginning, is pervaded by the same atomistic vision of the world which we associate with Sarvästivada and other Buddhist schools of that period. In the case of Vaisesika, this is all the more striking since it obviously made a point of rejecting Sarvästiväda and of replacing their positions with different ones of their own. Vaiseṣika did not accept that only ultimate constituents exist; this does not change the fact that it postulated the existence of ultimate constituents, atoms, which it then granted existence beside composite objects. Vaiśeşika was not willing to deny the existence of things extending in time, either; yet its analysis of mental and related
