interesting; it is the parallel of the Sautrāntika view which sees a complete continuity of consciousness, in which each moment is charged with all the past, and it offers, if not an explanation, still the possibility of an explanation of the facts of memory. We need not assume that the doctrine is any older than the Sautrāntika school.1

But the elaboration of twenty-four with its obvious weaknesses as we can see them in their exposition in the Abhidhammatthasarıgaha is opposed by others, who give four causes only, while one set of Sarvästivadins made seven.' The four are the true cause (hetu), which engenders a thing, like the seed; the support (alambana) which serves to engender thought and its sequels (cittacaitta) born of the true cause; the immediately contiguous (samanantara) cause, which is either the destruction of the cause, as the seed is destroyed to produce the shoot, or the stream of thought which gives room for the presentation in question; and the dominant (adhipati), denoting that on whose existence the other depends. The last of these is styled also the means, and the second and third are classed as embracing (parigrahaka) causes, since they envelop the true cause, and further its maturity.

Simpler is the series also of four found in the Nettipakarana in explaining sight perception in elaboration of the old canonical doctrine of the collision of organ, object, and attention; we have the act of attention as cause proper; the eye as dominant cause ; coloured matter as the support or object; and light as a dependent (sannissaya) cause. The act of attention (manasikāra) is of the same character as the resulting visual consciousness; hence it is its true cause.3

The Vaibhaṣikas have a sixfold division of causes which marks

1 Duka, pp. 3 f.; KV. xv. 1 f.; NP., p. 78; VM. in JPTS. 1893, pp. 109, 138; Vibhanga; Poussin, TDC., p. 52; Compendium, pp. 42 f., 187 f., 259 f., 279 f. The attempt in Points of Controversy (pp. 294, n. 3, 390 f.) to see an important contribution in this doctrine is erroneous.

2 Mvy. 115; MK. i. 2; MKV., pp. 77 f.; MA., pp. 87 f.; AKV. in TDC., p. 54, n. 2; Bhavya (Rockhill, Life, p. 196); the extra three are Karman, Ähara, Niçraya. Lañk., p. 85 has six-bhaviṣyat, sambandha, lakṣaṇa, kāraṇa, vyañjana, and upekṣā.

9 MKV., p. 85; NBh. iv. 1. 14; SDS., p. 16. See KV. x. 1, negativing the Mahasanghika view of continuity of the aggregates. See AKV. in MKV . p. 77; TRD., p. 39.

no special advance: they reckon the efficient (kāraṇa) cause, which does not impede the effect, e. g. the objects and other causes of vision; co-operative causes (sahabhu-hetu), e. g. in producing merit, correct views, &c.; causes of the same nature (sabhāga), merit producing merit; united (samprayukta) causes, e. g. faith and intelligence; omnipresent (sarvatraga) causes, like false views which affect every act; and causes of fruition (vipāka), distinguished as having effects, that is, feelings different in character from the cause which is an action. There is more that is useful in the fivefold division of some schools which reckon efficient causes, e. g. seed; causes of knowledge, e. g. smoke showing flame; causes of manifestation (vyañjaka), the lamp, the jar; causes of destruction (dhvańsaka), denied by some as heretical as all things are momentary ; and causes making one attain (prapaka) such an object as Nirvana.2

There is more originality in a theory which expresses satisfactorily in one aspect the point of view of the Sautrantikas; the nature of things is eternal causation, unsubstantial, momentary (kṣanika); things exist only in virtue of dependence (idampratyayataphala). Causation or the relation of cause and effect (kāryakāraṇa-bhāva) is not a process of the evolution of the cause into the effect, as in the Samkhya doctrine (satkārya-vāda), nor of the creation by the cause of an effect differing from itself, but is the necessary succession of determined effects (niyāmatā); its dependence constitutes the whole nature (dharmatā), suchness (tathatā), of things; they have no other reality. Their production is in the nature of magic (māyā); no real causality can be attributed to the impermanent; their action and causality are merely their becoming and vice versa. Hence we cannot talk rationally of the destruction of things by a cause."

The idea here expressed is not uncanonical, in so far as it deals with the conception of order (niyāmatā, dhammatā), and we find in Buddhaghosa an interesting fivefold division of the principle

1 NP., p. 80; SDS., p. 16; cf. NBT., pp. 13, 18; Bhāmatī, ii. 2. 21; Vivaranaprameya, p. 34; TRD., p. 39.

3 AKV. f. 156. Vedāntakalpataru,

2 Mvy. 114; AKV. (Burn. MS. f. 133); TDC., p. 55. Gülistamba Sutra, TCD., pp. 62 f.; Bhāmatī, ii. 2. 19; p. 273; MKV., p. 9; SDS., p. 17. Cf. KV. vi. 2; xi. 7; trs. pp. 386 f. Mrs. Rhys Davida, Buddhism, pp. 119 ff. See Mil., p. 268.

of order: the order of act and result; the physical order (utuniyama), e. g. winds and rains; the order of seeds, physical organic order, e. g. sugary taste from the cane; the order of thought (citta), the relation of antecedent and subsequent states of consciousness; and the order of the Law, the phenomena which herald a Bodhisattva's advent to earth for the last time, cosmic conditions of production of the norm.

5. The Chain of Causation, Internal and External

It was in this period that the orthodox interpretation of the chain of causation, conceived as the wheel of the Law came into being. This view was confronted by, but easily triumphed over, in the scholasticism, though hardly in the popular idea, a variant which is preserved in pictorial form at Ajaṇṭā as well as in Tibet and has textual authority. The interpretation rests on the conception of the being in an intermediate state (antarābhara) which some schools regarded as existing between one birth and another; that is the consciousness, which, defiled by ignorance and previous dispositions, seizes on name and form and the six organs; observes a pair-human or animal according to his previous desert-in union, feels love for the mother, in desire enters the father's head, fixes itself on his thought, grasps the organ of enjoy. ment, becomes an embryo (bhava) and is duly born. Even cruder is another theory known from Brahmanical sources only which places in the embryo the development from consciousness to grasping.2

1

The Abhidharmakoça 3 presents us with a scholastic view of the chain which has obvious merits. It is clear that the succession of the factors cannot be taken too seriously; contact, feeling, thirst, grasping, are ever renewed in our life; grasping arises from ignorance and dispositions, which must be ever present to make feeling lead to it; contact presupposes the existence of organs, name and form, and consciousness; the whole therefore 1 Candamahāroṣaṇa Tantra, ch. xvi (JRAS. 1897, p. 463); Waddell, JRAS. 1894, pp. 867 ff.; Lamaism, pp. 108 ff.; Poussin, TCD., p. 39.

2 Brahmavidyabharaṇa, ii. 2. 19 (SBE. xxxiv. 404 f).

AK. iii. 21 ff. See also Calistamba Sūtra, in MKV., p. 566; Ç., p. 225; Oltramare, FBDC., pp. 42 f.; TCD., pp. 40 ft.

are rather simultaneous coefficients of existence (bhavanga). The vital element, as is clear from the Canon where consciousness appears as sixth element, and where it clearly dominates matter in name and form, is consciousness, and accordingly it is existence (bhavanga) par excellence; it is the seed which grows, watered by thirst, opened up by ignorance in the field of action, which with thirst engenders it; these three, therefore, are coefficients to the cause as consciousness, an idea exactly in harmony with the revised estimate of causes. The chain, therefore, can now be regarded properly as a series of states (avastha) of consciousness under the influence of these factors. Determined by previous dispositions produced by ignorance, it is incarnated as rebirth consciousness, or mind, confused however by the process of birth renewal. Then it assumes with matter the form of the five aggregates, possessing the senses of mind and body, that is touch.1 Then the other four senses develop, and actual birth takes place. Then comes a period of contact, marked by feeling but without appreciation of the causes of feeling which is obtained in the next stage of feeling; then comes thirst viewed as especially sexual desire; then grasping in the shape of the four infections, desire, heresy, ritualism, belief in the self; then the act which produces a future birth, and ultimately that birth with death to follow.

The Sautrantikas give four aspects of the cause of the production of misery as taught in the chain. They hold that things must be looked upon by one who understands them truly as caused (hetutas): it is false that there is no cause; as resulting from several coefficients: it is false that there is one cause, the Lord of the deists or the nature of the Samkhya; as produced: it is false that things merely develop, and do not have a true beginning; and as arriving for this reason and that: things do not come to pass from a deliberate plan, there are many causes in the world.2 A further departure of interest 3 is made by the application of the conceptions embodied in the chain of causation to external 1 KV. xiv. 2 agrees with this view against the Pubba-and Apara-seliyas who accept all six senses in the embryo.

2 MVy. 54; Dharmasamgraha, 98; AKV. vii; TDC., pp. 56 f.

3 Gülistamba Sutra in TCD., pp. 68 ff.; Lañk., pp. 85 f.; NP., pp. 78 ff.; Ç., pp. 219 ff.

reality; it develops parallel with a formal distinction between two kinds of the chain, the one viewed from the point of view of the true cause, the other from that of the coefficients, understood here, however, is the limited and narrow sense of the four elements and space which the Canon gives as cause of the descent of the embryo into the womb. This idea is developed in full, one aspect being the ordinary list of cause sequence, the other dealing with the part played by these external elements in the process. There is also given the series of states of the seed from the first to the development into the flower, which constitutes the true causal combination (hetupanibandha) of the external chain of causation (bahya pratitya-samutpāda); the coefficient series (pratyayopanibandha) contains earth, water, fire, wind, ether, and the season, these co-operating to bring the seed to fruition. The transition from this view to the parallel conception that in the case of the development of consciousness the true coefficients are to be found not so much in the elements as in ignorance, action, and thirst, was obvious and was easily made.1

The doctrine, though usually illustrated by the case of the seed, was capable of extension to other material objects, despite their like of life; we find in the Nettipakarana as well as the seed the case of the lamp; the true cause of the flame is itself, the oil, wick &c., are but coefficients, an interesting example of the concep tion of formal cause.

6. The Later Doctrine of Momentariness and Causal Efficiency The Sautrantika doctrine of momentariness received no substantial development in the school, but was energetically defended by Ratnakirti (A. D. 950) 2 from the attacks made upon it by the Nyaya-Vaiçeṣika school which declined to accept the denial of substance and true causation which it involved. The production of effects, he maintains, can be explained on the doctrine of momentariness and causal efficiency as the characteristics of existence, and not otherwise. Take any existent object, such as 1 VM. xix (Warren, HOS. iii. 242 f).

2

Kṣaṇabhangusiddhi, Six Buddhist Nyāya Tracts, ed. Haraprasād Shāstrī (BI. 1910), pp. 20-77. Cf. TRD., pp. 28-31; 40 explains how momentariness is not perceived.