BETWEEN VASUBANDHU AND KUMARILA

BETWEEN VASUBANDHU AND KUMARILA

Name of the Author: Bibhuti S. Yadav and Wiliam C. Allen

Name of the Journal: Journal of Dharma: Dharmaram Journal of Religions and Philosophies

Period of Publication: April-Junel995

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Introduction

In this essay we stage Vasubandhu's response to Kumarila. We say 'stage' to indicate the theme and method of Sanskrit thought. At least five hundred years separate Vasubandhu (2nd century C.E.) and Kumarila (7th century C.E.). It seems time separates the two only to unite them in a historical discourse. Why else would a domineering figure like

Kumarila reflect on the theme and method that Vasubandhu had once raised? Vasubandhu wrote in a meditational stance, tracing reflectively the genesis of the world in consciousness. The objects of consciousness equals consciousness of objects, the images that consciousness posits as referents in time and space. The world is not autonomous

reality, only an apparitional presence; and it tortures human beings just as well. Suffering and salvation, Buddhas and the three worlds, are conceived and sustained in self-referential consciousness. Vasubandhu announced the death of ontology, thus shaking the moral, religious and social stance that Vedic realism entails.

Kumarila stages Vedic realism, and does so in the face of Vasubandhu's text. He never mentions Vasubandhu by name, only the group think (siddhanta) the latter had inaugurated. Kumarila, too. never thinks as a person, only as an exponent of the Vedic group-think. The discourse between Kumarila and Vasubandhu is rot between a person and a person, not

even between two authors. There are no persons and no authors, no private themes or methods of thought. Who the person was before becoming the author is irrelevant, the author is a consequence of the act of writing, and writing embodies a tradition of theme and thought. Philosophical discourse is between a text and a text, and a text is only a medium

through which a group-think reiterates its identity in words. Philosophy is conceived in memory (smrti); born of memory, the philosopher perpetuates the memory. History of Sanskrit thought is like a stage where a philosopher plays out the drama of group-identity in the face of difference. The historical persistence of a claim (paksa) necessitates

the staging of all forms of counter-claims (purvapaksa). That is because philosophy raises questions that are so fundamental that they need to be raised- and answered again and again. Here we stage a question that is central to the texts of Kumarila and Vasubandhu: What is consciousness conscious of?

The key term is 'of'. In Sanskrit grammar, the dative case ending which 'of' denotes, indicates a relation of power, as in 'king's person'. The person is of the king and represents the power the king has over the people (raja-purusha). So also is the case with 'of' in "what is consciousness conscious of?" Does the relation emanate from a

consciousness that seeks to create and bear the world? That is, does 'of' mean that the world is from and therefore for consciousness? Or does 'of' refer to objects that are transcendent to consciousness and necessitate human action by virtue of that very transcendence? Does the world belong to consciousness, or is it that consciousness belongs to

the world? Where is the power and therefore the privilege-placed? The question of the relation of consciousness and the world has been revived recently in philosophical discourse, with wider implications for issues like identity and difference, I and other, text and the reader. What is consciousness conscious of in reading a text? Who has the privilege, the text or the reader? We stage the debate between Kumarila and Vasubandhu in the hope that it will be of interest to the scholarly community for the same reasons.

1. The Difference

Both Kumarila and Vasubandhu espouse an act theory of consciousness. And they both situate the possibility of human actions in 'of', in the relation that obtains between consciousness and the world. Kumarila reads 'of' to denote the transcendence-and difference- of everything from consciousness. He takes an objectivist stance, placing the

possibility of the act in the transcendent. The self is transcendent to consciousness it has; if not, it would not be the subject or the agent of an act. The object, too, is transcendent to consciousness; if not, the subject need not engage in any cognitive or religious acts. Kumarila finds meaning in difference. There is a difference between self

and the consciousness it has, consciousness and objects. Consciousness is not sovereign. The self uses consciousness to say 'I', to becoming an agent by doing things, and announcing its sovereignty over the results that ensue from its own acts. It is this lordship of the self, its existence as an agent that bears consciousness to achieve results,

that accounts for the possibility of all acts, specially ritual acts. It is the difference of self from consciousness, and of objects form both, that necessitates epistemology and Vedic texts as instrumental reason (sadhana) with which to materialize 'material and moral ends (abhyudaya). The ends are transcendent to human acts, the realization of

which terminates the acts. In the middle are things that are just as transcendent to consciousness, but which must be used to materialize the ends. The desire to achieve the ends drives human beings to act (pravritti), and between the self and ends there is the autonomous world of objects. It is this autonomy that makes the difference between dream and reality, wish-fulfillment and the need to woik. Facts are not fantasy, the world not a dream. The world is there for all to see and to do. It is this world that consciousness is conscious of.

Vasubandhu takes a projectivist stance. He concedes that the world is sustained in the difference of subject and object, agent and act. But he insists that difference is not a thing in itself; it rather is a result of the self-differentiating activity of consciousness itself (bheda vasana). Consciousness is spermatic and possessive (yija- vasana), and

it appropriates a world by differentiating in the form of subject and object, and it is in this differentiation that the world is sustained. Consciousness is Its own before and after, and in the middle it manufactures a world which it then places out there in time and space as its own other. Consciousness is the house where the world dwells (alaya),

and there is nothing, no agent and no act, outside the house. This is not to deny that in the everyday world the self is not perceived to be transcendent to consciousness, or the object to the subject. This is only to say that consciousness comes to have a self in the act of self-transcendence, and that the self seeks its own certainty by imagining

an object transcendent to itself. The self does epistemology to affirm self-certainty. Why else would it attribute knownness to objects only as a means to infer its own existence? It even practices methodic doubt, denying the existence of all objects only to dramatize its own indubitability. The troth is that the so called "methodic doubt" is only a dramatic medium through which the ego finds comfort in face of itself: consciousness is sovereign. The difference of subject and object, of the act and content of

doubting, is conceived in the self-differentiating act of consciousness of itself. But the sovereignty is paradoxical, for consciousness alienates itself by attributing autonomy to its own creation. It creates contents in difference to itself, and falls prey to its own contents. Difference is a sign of self-alienating consciousness, and it is this alienation that constitutes the condition of all work, secular and sacred. Kumarila's claim that human beings act because they desire things (ends) that they lack is naive.

Human beings do not desire things because they lack them; rather, they lack things because they desire them. Lack is not a thing, it is not in things, and it of course is not nothing. There are no such things. Lack is a property of self­differentiating consciousness. It is also naive to claim, as Kumarila does, that with the loss of the ontological

autonomy of objects is lost the difference between dream and the public world. The truth is that consciousness encloses itself in its magical network. It reacts to its own act, endowing 'thereness' to whatever it itself manufactures (mirmitam). It is this endowed 'thereness' of objects that accounts for the difference between wishes and reality, the

private and the public world. Consciousness is like an author. It writes the world and then thinks it is reading a text autonomous to itself. There is no point in ritual acts,

in doing sacred violence to soothe anxiety about heaven and hell. That would only give a religious texture to a very sick consciousness. The point is to do meditation, to trace the genesis of the world, including heaven and hell, in spermatic consciousness, and to reclaim tranquillity by emancipating consciousness from its own alienation. What Vasubandhu calls alienation, Kumarila calls salvation; what Kumarila affirms as the material and moral ends of man, Vasubandhu the divide - and difference - of Sanskrit thought is complete.

The divide is not without anguish. Kumarila lived in an era when conflicts about the world and worth of human work had hit home, generating much reflection on the nature of the family and the relations it entails. The deeds of Siddhartha Gautama sti 11 dominated the forms of life and thought. Ought an individual exit the family -and civil society - to

discover the meaning of being in time9 Kumarila had a first hand experience of the divide. His nephew, Dharmakirti, left the Vedic fold; like most great Buddhist acharyas, he studied Vedic thought and found it wanting. Dharmakiriti became a monk and later turned out to be the greatest logician in the history of Buddhist thought. Kumarila was a family man. In his view the father was a father, the son a son, and the former had power over the latter by virtue of sheer difference. Human relations are more than the images the

persons in the relations have of one another. He saw no good in a renunciative form of life which, he believed, the philosophers justified through a theory of metasocial consciousness. Human relations are commanded by the transcendent Vedas, and they cannot be reduced to what consciousness thinks of them. Kumarla takes an objectivist stance in defense of Hindu society, the sanatana dharma. He saw meaning in social stability, in the ideology that a Brahmin is a Brahmin, a Shudra a Shudra, and none can be reduced to

what the other thinks of it. Human consciousness is so fickle, its sovereignty so dangerous to the social order. Kumarila believed that the historical identity of sanatana dharma, the Hindu social order, was enclosed in a source that transcends human consciousness. He saw a threat to the

social order in Vasubandhu's dismissal of things transcendent to consciousness. Society cannot be a convention or construction, for consciousness may reconstruct it tomorrow. Kumarila had to refute the theoiy of consciousness that he thought was a threat to sanatana dharma. He disguised himself as a monk, mastered the categories of Mahayana Buddhist

thought from the inside, and later used that knowledge to publicly defeat his Buddhist achaiya. Gaining knowledge deceitfully and using it against one's own mentor is a sin in Sanskrit discourse. The intellectual triumph ensued in existential grief, which Kumarila overcame by self-immolation near Prayag. ft is significant that Shankaracharya was

there, looking for a competent critic who could honor him by writing a commentary on his work. He requested Kumarila to do him the honor. Kumarila refused. Only death on the holy fire could erase the anguish in his conscience.

We dwell on the anguish for a reason. Kumarila believed that there was a fundamental difference between him and his nephews, Vedic Hinduism and Buddhism. And he reflected seriously on the difference, thus doing Buddhism the honor he denied Shankaracharya. Few philosophers of Kumarila's stature have taken the difference as seriously.

Unfortunately, modem scholars have ignored Kumarila's discourse of Buddhism, and vice versa. The intellectual circle is saturated with neo-Vedantic jargons like 'global ethos' and 'unity of religions'. What good is the ethos that silences difference? What good is a unity that denies a textual and historical body to the religions? Kumarila had no

patience for simplistic jargons. He wrote in the face of the Buddhist difference, knowing fully well that a text makes sense only in the context of competing texts. Kumarila and Vasubandhu take irreconcilable positions regarding moral and social values, cognitive and religious practice, nature and structure of scriptural texts, and schemes of salvation. There difference is fundamental and cannot be compromised in the name of empty unity.

In what follows we present Kumarila's stance from the 'Niralambanavada' and 'Sunyavada' chapters of his Slokavartikam. Later we stage Vasubandhu's response form his Vimsatika. n. Rumania on Vasubandhu

There are three keys to Kumarila's system of thought: common-sense, epistemology, and scriptural authority. Kumarila honored the great convention in Sanskrit thought, namely, the wisdom of common-sense. Even if the Scriptures or God go against the wisdom of lived experience, the authority of experience is to be followed. Philosophers are no

exception; after all, they, too, are as embodied in their cogito as are the ordinary folks. Philosophy may have apriori hypotheses, but then it must be confined to explaining metaempirical concerns. And if it is concerned with empirical facts, as it should, then it must share at least one truth with ordinary folks, namely, that there is a world out

there (sadrsau bala panditau). No matter how enlightened, the philosopher cannot take a stance at odds with the empirically evident (prasiddham). He cannot claim truth value for the tip of the finger touches itself" and expect to be taken seriously. There is a great deal of rationality and wisdom in the life of common folks,

Kumarila takes pride in constructing an epistemology in defense of commonsense. He asks Vasubandhu to consider the everyday assertion "I see blue." The assertion implies that I, the cognitive subject, is there, as is the object, say a cow, that has the property blue. And the cogito, the sensory act of seeing, relates entities that are altogether

different. The subject is in the nominative and uses its sensory consciousness to come in contact with what it itself is not. The object, in this case the blue cow, is in the accusative, which occupies a point of space that the subject cannot. And the cogito, the sensory consciousness, connects the subject and the object in a purposive way. An entity

cannot be both the agent and object of the same act. This is how life is in the everyday world. The subject has a cogito that is naturally referential, the object is an entity inevitably referred to, and it is this rcfcrcntiality that sustains the world. Not to accept this, as Vasubandhu does, is to be at odds with commonsense. A cognitive episode

affirms the difference of the subject from its sensory acts, and the act that moves toward an object is just as different. The subject may use its consciousness to cognitively or materially appropriate an object, but it just cannot be the object it appropriates. 1 may say "1 have a blue cow", but 1 cannot say that 1 am the cow 1 have. So also is the

case with "1 see a blue cow". 1 see the cow, not myself; 1 see a particular cow, not all cows, blue or not blue; and 1 certainly do not see any or all things that are different from cows, f may, in a subsequent moment, say "1 see a white cow". The sensations of blue and white have something in common, namely, my consciousness. But what makes for their

difference is the locus in which they respectively reside, i.e., the blue and white cows. Without such difference, there can be no sensory contact, and thus no experience at all. Sensory contact is always with objects that are definite, vivid, unambiguous, real and my consciousness cannot change the spatial presence and temporal order of things. "1 see blue" does not equal

"I see my sensation of blue", My knowing something is different from my knowing that I know.

Kumarila accuses Vasubandhu, indeed Mahayana itself, of dismissing the wisdom of common folks People believe that there are things out there, the things can be known and spoken about, and that knowability and speakability are properties of things, not consciousness. There is a correspondence between things and our knowledge of them, but they cannot be

reduced to what we think of them. That is because consciousness is empty (nirakara), having no innate or intrinsic forms such as extension, shape, size, color, sound or smell. That also is why consciousness does not like playing magical tricks, or doing meditation; it only likes doing epistemology as the means of determining the order of things

transcendent to itself. The vision that consciousness projects its impressions in space only to encounter them in a cognitive episode, is fundamentally flawed. Consciousness does bear impressions, but they are signs of sensory contact with real objects in the past. Impressions also presuppose a self that had the experience, stored them in its

consciousness, and then recalls in the present. Without belief in the self that precedes and succeeds its experience, the presence of impression, and the causative relation between them cannot be explained. Dream objects too, refer to past experience. Kumarila wonders why Vasubandhu cannot understand the simple troth that if an entity has no

experience of any tiring at all, it cannot even dream or fall into illusion. It is because consciousness has known a shell as a shell, a piece of silver as silver, that it sometimes mistakes one for the other. No sensory contact with objects, no dreams; no valid perception, no illusions. That is also the case with fantasy or imagination. It is

impossible to imagine a round-square, or to fantasize about a barren-woman's son. The limits of consciousness constitute its greatness. It is because consciousness is incapable of doing somethings, that it can do great things, doing epistemology to determine the being or nonbeing of things, for instance.

Kumarila was not a therapist. His texts suggest he could never be one. But he wonders if some psycho-ethical anomalies are not behind the philosophical drive to disregard commonsense. If the objects of consciousness are nothing, then how does Vasubandhu come to know that nothing? Philosophers practice tlieir craft by reflecting on lived

experience, which ultimately is enclosed in sensory contact with objects. If Vasubandhu, like most ordinary folks, has no contact with nothing, then how can he think of explaining it to others, specially his peers. If cognitions have no troth hitting property, and if consciousness can create a state of affairs at will, then there is no point in

human beings doing anything to materialize the desired ends (purusartha). Why say "bring the cow" or better still, why say anything at all? If wishing to be in nirvana equals being there, then why follow the words of Tathagata at all? Practice entails difference between dharma and adharma, what ought not to be known or done, and what ought not to be done after it is known to be worthless. Between the day he achieved enlightenment and the time he died, the Tathagata discoursed on dharma, meaning that he affirmed the

difference between the speaker and the hearers. If difference is nothing more than an image the egocentric consciousness projects in space, then Vasubandhu has to answer these questions. Was Tathagata's consciousness so egocentric that he could speak only to his own shadows? How enlightened, in that case, is a Tathagata whose audience is only his own

alter-ego? Or, the real Tathagata, the one who is enlightened, is forever sitting in silence; he cannot say a word. In that case, whose words have the Buddhists heard? Could it be that the hearers are prior to the speaker, and that Buddhists can only hear the echoes of their own words? What value and dignity do Tathagata and people have as persons, if they are none other than the image one has of the other?

It should be noted that Kumarila's quarrel is not with Tathagata who rightly warned against the dangers of possessive materialism, the habit of defining the self in terms of the things it desires to have. His quarrel is with those Mahayana philosophers who, he thinks, are obsessed with nothingness and who elevate the imagination to a theory. Kumarila

sees danger in excessive empowerment of consciousness and its subjectivity. The hearer becomes more important than the word and its source, the reader erases the text only to inscribe instead the signs it wishes to see, and consciousness becomes the lord of the world, including the religious world. Dharma and adharma, heaven and hell, Tathagata and

his words-all are construed as constructions of samsaric consciousness. Nothing means anything in itself anymore. This is precisely what Mahayana did to the history of Buddhist thought. There on the Grdhakut mountains, the historical Tathagata inaugurated a discourse in everyday language. He vowed not to play games with ordinary folks, insisting that

he will speak truthfully and usefully, that he will say what he means, and mean what he says (yathavaditathakari). The historical Tathagata had guts; he left politics and diplomacy in order to speak some plain troths to the world. There is a great reciprocity of speech and intentionality, word and meaning, in his discourse. This reciprocity is canonized in the Pali texts,

Mahayana changed all this. It invented a Tathagata who could succumb to the overpowering subjectivity of his audience. The new Tathagata appears on the same Grdhakura mountains only to erase the truth and memory of earlier words, i.e., the Pali canons. Hs sees no good in truth, no point in the reciprocity of speech and intention, saying and meaning.

There on the mountains, and in the presence of Sariputra, the new Tathagata does what the Shakyamuni of Kapilvastu would never do. He plays games with people by practicing the doctrine of expedient device (upays kausalya). Among other things, the doctrine dishonors the wisdom of commonsense. It assumes that ordinary folks are incapable of hearing

words of truth, that they are like children who need toys to play with, and that Tathagata ought to give them just that The Tathagata is still trustworthy; he had no intention to lie. But there are extraneous reasons, the consciousness and language of ordinary folks among them, that force him to lie. He must discourse with the world that just cannot

bear truth. He performs strategic and diplomatic discourse, using words skillfully. He uses words he himself knows are false, but he does so in ways that people believe his words. The new Tathagata has no courage to say what he knows, so sensitive he is about people's image of themselves and their language. He delights in politically correct speech, using words to mean neither truth nor lies (na satyam na mrsa). He speaks "hue falsehood", making assertions that have a texture of troth but indeed are false (samvrtisatya). Mahayana canonized this texturality, this assumption of truth through words that are admittedly false, and called it Prajnaparamita sutras. There are no

scriptural texts in Mahayana, if the texts are construed as embodiment of troth. There are only textures, the illusion of troth in words. Kumarila valued clarity and rigor in philosophical discourse, both of which he sheltered in either/or logic. If a thing is. then it is; it cannot both be and not be at the same

time. If an assertion, say "X is Y", is true, then it cannot be anything else. It cannot be neither true nor false, or both true and false at the same time. An assertion can be troly false, in which case the word true' cannot be used as a qualifier of what is patently false. There can be no "true falsehood", no samvrti which also is satya. Kumarila

notes with sadness that Mahayana philosophers have devalued either/or logic, and will that, the value of clarity and coherence in formal discourse. He accuses them of sloppiness, double-talk, politically correct speech, even downright cunningness. Why else would Vasubandhu - and Nagarjuna - use samvrti as a qualifier of satya, when he uses

samvrti to signify the false, the illusionary, and the fictional? How can something be true and false at the same time? That is as ludicrous as saying "my assertion is false, but I speak the truth". Ordinary folks do not use language in that sense, let alone the philosopher. Having lost the reciprocity of intention and speedy and with that the value

of troth in philosophical discourse, Vasubandhu only gives a texture of troth to w hat he himself knows is false. Like the Tatliagata the Mahayana invented. Vasubandhu lias no courage to say what he means, and mean what he says. If samvrti means the false and fictional, then say so. It will do no good to compound it with satya, which means 'troth'.

Samvrti is samvrti; satya is satya; and the two cannot be compounded as samvrtisatya. Troth is truth: it cannot be cut in half to signify contradictory meanings. Vasubandhu's discourse is semantically flawed, which in fact is a cover of politically correct speech. The discourse of samvrtisatya is performed so as not to offend ordinary folks who believe that an assertion is good only if it is true, and tnre only if it displays the ontological order of tilings. But Vasubandhu has no faith in the combination of good and

truth, no trust in ordinary folks who believe in that very combination Kumarila sees an irony in all this. The Mahayana philosopher is an elite intellectual who is severely alienated from ordinary' folks in defense of whose interests he claims to speak.

Kumarila was a convinced man. He believed that a good form of life was a prerequisite for a clear and convincing form of thought. Category' mistakes, misleading analogies, incomplete or incoherent argument, defiance of commonsense - such anomalies ensue from moral failure. There is a causative relation between dharma and shastra, .sbemg good and

the ability' to see things as they are in themselves (dharmaja). K good man speaks the truth, no matter how unpleasant the speech. A man w ith no moral sense speaks deceitfully , no matter how pleasant or politically correct the speech. In Kumarila's view. Vedic texts are the key to the good life: loss of faith in the texts entails confused and

deceptive forms of discourse (adharmaja). Vedic texts do not lie. They are like the sun. revealing truths that are good for ail. As long as the sun shines, people do not mistake fantasy for perception, darkness for light, dream for reality. So also as long as Vedic texts are present, people can differentiate the unpleasantly tme from the unpleasantly

false, dharma from adharma. truthful speech from the politically correct speech. However, there are beings, like the owls, that cannot see under the sun. And Mahayana philosophers, in Kumarila's estimate, are just that, the owls. Because they cannot see

under the sun. they conclude that there are no things to see. Things, for them, are there only if they can see; and if they cannot see, the tilings are not there. Enclosed in the owl's syndrome, the philosophers replace light with darkness, day witli night, perception with hallucination. They even propose dreams as a paradigm of reflection, thus

pushing their alienation from common folks to the limit. Why must the philosophers take pride in the alienation? Why must the philosophic cogito achieve critical virtues only by denying the obvious? Kumarila discerns signs of moral anomalies in the Mahayana discourse. Rendered inefficient by the anomalies, defying social obligations that Vedic texts

command, philosophers Like Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna are unable to see what common folks believe are there for all to see. Vedic taxis place good in the social order. They command us to do things with the things that transcend consciousness, and they do so to enhance the material and moral good of all human beings. Because Mahayana philosophers do

not listen to Veda, they not only have no sense of the common good, they also have lost touch with commonsense. Kumarila still has hope for people like Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna. they being his kin after all If only they could once again listen to the Vedic text and all that it entails! If only they could believe once again that the Vedic text is infallible - and therefore good - by virtue of being transcendent to human consciousness !

HI- Vasubandhu on Rumania

Vasubandhu hears Kumarila veiy well. He hears him say that sense object contact entails correspondence of sense and sense data, words and objects, knowledge and things themselves. Contact displays relation between things that are autonomous and different.

To deny this is odd, for it amounts to saying that one senses, knows and speaks about nothing.

Way are some philosophers obsessed with nothingness?

Vasubandhu is amused by Rumania's rhetoric, which he likes to clear right away. This he does by honoring two. not one. conversions, of Sanskrit discourse. First, that sense object contact is the basis of lived experience, and. secondly, that philosophy must honor that very experience. In deference to common sense, he asks Rumania to concede that

sense object contact does entail correspondence between sense organs and the entity present to them, and that, by the same token, it cannot entail correspondence between sense organs and things that remain in themselves unsensed. Whenever there is contact, there is perception; in the absence of contact, knowledge is not known to occur. No contact, no

correspondence. To deny this is odd, for that amounts to saying that one sees color or hears sound without coming in sensory contact with them. Vasubandhu returns the rhetoric: How can Rumarila talk about things-in-themselves when he lias no sensory contact and thus no knowledge of them? For all we know, they might be fictional. Why this obsession with

the autonomy of things, with die ontology of absolute difference? Experience shows tiiat an entity comes to be, dial other entities causatively precede and succeed it, and diat it is diis interdependence tiiat constitutes the world. In defiance of conunonsense, Kumarila polarizes the world in tenns of tiring and nothing, being and nonbeing. He denies

the middle. The trntii is tiiat neither being nor nothing are autonomous, and denial of one does not necessarily mean affirmation of the other. There is just too much concern for certainty and order hi Kumarila's discourse. The ontology of difference, die claim tiiat a tiring is in itself, is actually a cover for the ideology' of social difference.

It lias to do with the belief tiiat a Brahmin is a Brahmin, and notiring else; a Shudra is a Shudra and nothing else; and tiiat to deity die difference is to violate the natural order of tilings.

Vasubandhu, and Iris tradition sees no good in the canonization of die myth of social difference. If the Vedic text is self-evidently true and good for all. then why is it tiiat not all human beings. Buddhists included, have faith in it? Vasubandhu. too. believes in causative relation. He believes tiiat something is hue only because it promotes the

material and moral good of all human beings, and not because it is true in itself. This kind of truth die Vedas do not contain, and hence there is no universal faith in them. And even if they do contain universal good - and thus truth - , then ivhy is it that Kumarila does not grant the universal right to hear, read and interpret them? Why this

marginalization of the mass of humanity? Veda is not like the sun; it does not reveal ail things to all human beings regardless of caste and gender. It is unreasonable to say that those ivho do not believe in Veda are as ignorant as oivls. There is no point in double talk, in first denying people the universal right to use the Vedic lens and then

accusing them of acting like oivls. Hoiv can people see and know if universal sensory contact between people and the Vedic text is prohibited apriori? The truth is tiiat Veda is manufactured to canonize the material privilege and false pride of the elite: minority, the higher castes.

Vasubandhu belongs to a tradition that extended sense object contact to scriptural experience, to Tathagata speaking for all and sundry and human beings hearing his words. It

violates commonsense to say that language speaks itself, or that there are words without a speaker. There is no such thing as a text in itself, no words that float autonomously even if there are no human beings who speak or hear them. A word is so by virtue of being spoken and heard, and a text is so because it is written read and interpreted. Why

can't Kumarila recognize what most human beings do. that autonomy of things, and thus impersonal origin of words, may entail the false and the illusionary? It is common knowledge that a forest fire, though of impersonal origin, can make a blue lotus appear red. Commonsense also says that the moral worth and truth value of words have to do with

qnalitatix c contact between speaker end hearer, text and its readers. It is also common know ledge that people believe the w ords of a person w ho is known to bo good. And Tafhagata is such a person. If only Kumarila could find meaning in the words of Tathagata who spoke contextually and skillfully!

According to Vasubandhu's doctrine of alayavijnana, the perception of an object is the perception of an external entity which is an embodiment of the fruition of the seed in consciousness and the consciousness which so embodies itself because of its internal causative transformations. Both sense organs and objects sensed are expressions of the same

seed. There is a one to one correspondence between senses and sense objects. There is correspondence between die act of definite seeding and definite manifestation of materiality. There is a definite desire to see which transforms itself into a definite sense organ and tiiat entails a corresponding object Both sense organ and object sensed

are because of the arrival of consciousness through definite transformations of itself into sense organ and corresponding sense object. As is the desire to see so is the sense object in correspondence with the organ; as is the desire to hear so is the sound or word that we hear, etc. There is always correspondence between die definiteness of sense organ and object.

What is consciousness conscious of? We have seen that for Kumarilaweight is on the side of the object. If you deny that which consciousness is conscious of, you deny consciousness itself. If there is no object, there can be no consciousness. Vasubandhu would put the matter the other way around, no consciousness, no object. The knower and the

known, the appropriating cogito and the appropriated object are devoid of subject/object polarity. This subject object duality is an imagined (kalpana) difference. Vasubandhu does not deny that this polarity exists, but the attributes projected there do not exist apart from consciousness. Both subject and object are constructions (nirmita). The

controversy hinges on the function of two key words in the discourse: imagination, (kalpana) and cognition (pramiti). Cognition is an implied form of imagination, a trick of consciousness. Cognitions occur in the history of consciousness which is pure imagination. Vasubandhu is critiquing epistemology which for Kumarila and other realists is the

means of enlightenment, however, for Vasubandhu epistemology does not give liberation but bondage. The knowing subject and the known object are instruments of dunking. Vasubandhu wants to transcend how we know and what we know because both are works of imagination. How we know and what we know are the anguish of suffering caused by klesha.

Consciousness concretizes this imagined attribute and thing. There is duality of seer and seem eyes and visual object. When the eyes see blue, what is the locus of the blueness? It does not belong to a dlianna outside of consciousness, rather it belongs to consciousness which projects this kind of dlianna and its attributes. Vasubandhu questions the ontological autonomy of the attributes and properties that consciousness associates with external objects. He does not deny that they are there; he denies that they are there

apart from consciousness. How is the knower and the known caused to be? They are instantiations of die self-differentiating propensity of consciousness. To ask what consciousness is conscious of is a misleading question because it assumes that consciousness is one thing and the object is another and that both are given there and

form a relation. But how does consciousness come to know what it knows? How do two or more people become aware of the same thing? It is because of a common psycho-history of consciousness that we come to believe a certain tiling is there. One such important belief is a hell in wlichbeings suflertorments. Kumarila insists that definiteness depends on

the certainly of objects that aie there, but Vasubandhu demonstrates that definiteness exists in dreams and in hell Consciousness is powerfill enough to see anything at any time or space. Objective public experience is possible because of mental streams (samtanya) like ghosts (pretas). We can speak of and account for collective experiences of objects

even though they are not given at a specific time and place, like die experiences of ghosts/3 It is like an apparition "It is evident diat all die ghosts experience a river of puss. Not only one ghost sees die puss river; ad the ghosts see the river full of puss because of die sameness of karmic impressions. Ghost is used as the example here. In spite

of die fact that there is no real puss river, all ghosts see the same river because of the sintilarity of the fmition of their karma" Similarly, object i\i ly of object experience has to do with similarities of cognitions rather than sintilarity of objects; similarity of cognitions has to do witii die recurring presence and persistence of impressions (y asanas). not objects.

Vasubandhu. no less than Kumarila, believes that pltilosophers should respect die vision for common sense, but without taking recourse to a transcendental stance. Vasubandhu also agrees with Kumarila that the world is sustained in die relation of contact between senses and the world. Regarding tliis sensory contact however. Vasubandhu offers a new

understanding of its role and relation within the doctrine of Dependent Origination. First contact is not a tiling in itself, nor are the senses or die objects between which contact happens. They are not given. We see tilings not because we have eyes, rather it is because we see things that we have eyes. His is a functional model. Secondly, contact is a happening between particular sense organs and objects. It happens to consciousness. Consciousness is presupposed in sense organs.

Vasubandhu maintains respect for commonsense, wisdom and rationality, but he wants to find out how tliis lived experience comes 10 be. He takes an immanent, not transcendental stance. Contact, object, and senses are not transcendental to consciousness; they happen to and through consciousness. According to the doctrine of Dependent Origination, a

thing conies to be and ceases to be and what ceases to be may come to be again. There is no ceiling. To say what is never cannot be is non-sense. Whereas Kumarila accuses Vasubandhu of explaining objects away, Vasubandhu is interested in examining how objects come to be and what is the role of consciousness in bringing objects to being and then

erasing them or not erasing them from its horizon. Consciousness is primary. Consciousness comes to acquire objects and then looses them in its own interests. Kumarila has done epistemology for one purpose, namely, to make rational decisions about whether to take things or leave them. We engage in actions to acquire things we desire

most. Once we know things, we have a basis on which to decide whether they are good or not. Against this Vasubandhu argues that if human consciousness does not desire things, there is no point in doing epistemology'. It is because consciousness desires objects that it needs to know them. It is because consciousness does not like certain objects that it needs to reject them. There is a desire behind the cogito. The vasana is already present in the need to do pramana. The acquisitive consciousness is already presupposed in

the need to to do epistemology. Objects happen to consciousness. Consciousness seeks objects. Prameya is visaya. The knowable object is a desired object. The object is known because it is desired or not desired Epistemology is done as a means to fulfill human interest. There is no detached or objective interest in doing epistemology'.

Vasubandhu phenomenalizes epistemology. He does so by offering a reinterpretation of the nature of contact. Vasubandhu's unique understanding of contact distinguishes him from everybody else. He aptly explains the notion of contact betw een sense organs and objects yvithout postulating the externality of objects. How does this contact occur? It occurs

as in dreams. The subtle but distinguishing point at yvhich Vasubandhu parts company with his predecessors and contemporaries is the reality of contact and the reality of the object yvith yvhich one comes into contact. The whole meditation tradition of Vasubandhu is rooted in the problem of contact. Contact is not an innocent tiring. The sense organs

do not passively come into contact with what is there. There is a discernible psychohistory' of consciousness (karma-klesh) that accounts for why yve perceive things as yve do. Vasubandhu is interested in the causes and conditions through yvhich consciousness comes to assume epistemic texture. He asserts that cognitions always happen in the background

of actions. Samskaras precede past actions, the need to know and knowledge itself. Samskaras determine the need for the very awareness of the object known, the knowledge through which to know the object, and the subject that knows it. His point is to show that epistemology is an act of the imagination. Vasubandhu's position is that speak ability and

knowlability and the suffering they entail are properties of the knowing consciousness, not of objects. Whereas the realist, including Kumarila, regard consciousness as descriptive, for Vasubandhu it is constmctive. Inference and the correspondence theory of knowledge on which it depends is all a construct of consciousness. Causality is also a

constniction of consciousness. Consciousness establishes its own dependence on things of which it is the creator (svabija). The autonomy of objects is rooted in the notion of contact. If contact is lost, then the whole world is lost. Vasubandhu believes he can keep the contact without loosing the world. There is evidence of sensory perception without objects. There is evidence of contact of sense witli objects that are not really there. In the moment of contact there is a

feeling of definiteness, vividness, non- erroneousness, indubitability and immediacy: yet there is no real object. Vasubandhu questions the vciy notion of contact. He does not deny contact: rather he questions the realist's understanding of what contact entails. He questions the givenness, presence, and immediacy of the contact. In contact there is

the idea of sensory limit. What constitutes the sensory limit if the object is not present? It is the idea, not the alleged object, that accounts for the sensory' limit. The moment I see this, the visual sensation and the object are gone. So what accounts for the sensory limit is the ideation of consciousness, not a sense of consciousness.

Regarding this sensory limit, if the so called object in sensory perception is not there, then what is present? Vasubandhu takes recourse to the notion ofpratibhasa. The so called objects are counter present to the mind which is remembering without knowing that it is doing so. Memory is presupposed in perception. Vasubandhu accepts that contact

occurs, but it is not contact of the object present. It is of our impression fvasana) of past experience that is brought into the present. He does not question the moment of contact; questions the presentness of the object because that which is perceived is already past. It is the mind that recollects the past object. Even though it seems to be

present, it is erroneously perceived to be there. Kumarila says that without experience there can be no memory. Vasubandhu says that without memory there can be no sense perception. For Vasubandhu life is a stage on which consciousness plays its magic. Consciousness lias transformed itself into the world. The agent of salvation cannot be

different from the agent of suffering. We should understand how consciousness works and use it wisely. The locus of salvation cannot be different from the locus of suffering. Salvation is within this world here and now . It is the emancipation of consciousness from its own constructions.

Among the weightier objections leveled against Vasubandhu is the problem of other minds. Kumarila detects a defect in Vasubandhu's position. If subjectivity of consciousness is so powerful that it can create the world then it is beyond control: it lias become sovereign. It won't accept people as they are, but people w ill be reduced to my image of what they are. Vasubandhu's position is not solipsism. He recognizes an intcr-subjcctivilv of mental streams and accounts for human interaction on tire basis of karmic coincidence.

Consciousness, driven by its ownvasanas, transforms or projects itself into outside objects and die idea or awareness of objects is caused by such projections. This stance engenders a serious objection from realists like Kumarila: Experience show s diat by engaging in good and bad activities in the company of real actually existing good friends

and bad friends, we become good and bad respectively. If such persons are not there independently, then how can Vasubandhu account for this causal efficacy relation. By hearing good and evil words we have the idea of doing good or evil. How is even the hearing of the words of the Buddha possible if there are no w ords and no speaker of the words?

Vasubandhu offers a courageous response to this objection. "All that you (realists) have declared to be impossible, all this is possible because of the mutuality of the power of one mental stream over others, that is, the mutual affectability of all persons. This mutuality occurs in the contact of a given person's consciousness with another person's

consciousness, not between a person and an object". Whereas Vasubandhu confined his discussion in the previous portion of the text to the relation between consciousness and objects, here he is addressing the relation between two persons. Regarding the ability of one person to influence another, the point is contact between a person who does good

things and a person in whose presence the good things are done. What is this contact between? It is not between two people. The contact is the mutuality between two minds. The contact here implies appropriate compresence and concurrence between two streams of consciousness. The mutual affectability has nothing to do with real objects. The contact has

to do with the mutuality of the intention in a certain person to speak certain words either true or false and the desire of another person to hear words either tme or false. The mutuality is the concurrence of the desire of a certain person who says and does certain things and the desire of another to hear them and do them. These are the things that

account for mutuality which is the basis for moral life. What are the conditions of moral life? Mutuality has to do with certain mental forces in our mind that become good or bad in interaction with other good or bad persons who say or do good or bad things in our presence. Mind is replete with repressed impressions.

Notwithstanding Vasubandhu's explanation here, the objection continues that if there is no real body and no real words, then how can anyone be culpable of murder, for example? All human moral and religious transactions are only possible because of the reality of real persons in compresence. So how can Vasubandhu establish a basis for moral life? To

this objection Vasubandhu asserts that contact is conceived and constituted by consciousness only. The relation is consciousness only; the persons are consciousness only. So what is the meaning of death if there is no real body and what is the meaning of words if there are no real words? Vasubandhu's explanatory account suggests that death has

nothing to do with activities like picking up and using a weapon, rather death and murder have to do with the desire to kill an object. And what is an object? This object is really an embodiment in space of our likings. needs, aversions, etc. What motivates the butcher to pick up a weapon and kill a sheep is the desire to do so. This sheep is an

extemalization of the image (yasana) the butcher has of the object, If we really understood the other person in his otherness and lived with this otherness, we would not need to love or kill. The subject that picks up the weapon to kill is not an object. There are no real polar dualities. They are only differentiations of consciousness. The idea of sin

or crime is possible only when it is associated with the idea of agency. Agency is no more than the self-consciousness that happens to consciousness. Consciousness bifurcates itself into subject and object and then the act of killing occurs. Killing only makes sense because of the notion of the subject tiiat does it. Morality and culpability

presuppose the idea of an agent which is the activity of consciousness itself. This agent does something, not to a thing, but to an object which is a symbol of hatred eventuating in killing or love resulting in beneficent behaviour toward the symbolic referent. The subject reduces other tilings to objects. An object is consequent upon the

desire to love or hate. And this desire bonds the person who does to the person to whom it is done. Religion has to do with the relation of I and it and this relation of I and it is constituted by consciousness. There is no thou even religiously speaking. It is the subject to which moral culpability or praise is attributed. Without the subject there

can be no good or bad deeds. Vasubandhu says this is possible because agency (personhood) is constituted by consciousness, not by things. Vasubandhu, no less than Kumarila, speaks in the name of his scriptural tradition, namely the Prajnaparamitta sutras. He speaks in the name of Tathagata. The difference is that

these sutras are the work of a human being, however enlightened he may be. The Lotus Sutra sets the stage on which Tathagata speaks words which are projections. He speaks in a disguised form concerning the doctrine of Dependent Origination. A thing is not a given. An object is equal to how it comes to be. It has a history. It depends on something else; it is not autonomous. It is not a thing in itself. A tiling is not in itself over there about which we can say it is or is not. The premise of either/or logic is that a

thing is given; it is the ontological status quo. Vasubandhu demonstrates the reasonability of questioning this assumption without doing violence to common sense. The faith in the Buddha has to do with the desire to hear his words which in turn has to do with the kind of person I have constituted myself to be. Vasubandhu lias heard the words of the Buddha, acknowledging primacy to the hearing, not the speaking. Having heard the words of Tatliagata. Vasubandhu has decided to follow them in renunciation of the very world which Kuinarila affirms and defends. He renounces the world, however, as a monk only to return to it with liberative words. The controversy whether there is something

transcendental to consciousness or not is the destiny of Buddhism. It faces this challenge wherever it goes. This controversy defines Buddhism. It lias always had to face the question of social efficacy if objects do not exist. Vasubandhu wants to overcome what consciousness has done through its own work. Consciousness is used with the intention to

overcome the world of objects over there in time and space. Consciousness lias created the world and has the ability to change the world by changing itself. In the Vimsatika Vasubandhu answers charges concerning why the Buddha spoke false words. Buddhism has recognized a two-fold designation of the Buddha's teaching, nitartha and

nevartha. Neyartha is referred to as provisional teaching. It literally signifies to be led or driven to something else. The term entails the acceptance of a given point of view only to lead the holder of that point of view to something else. There is an efficient alienation between the medium and the aim. Buddha know s that what he is using as a means

is false, but believed to be tme by his listeners. There is efficient reciprocity between the two intentionalities, speaker and listener. Buddha's words are only a means to an end. What does this means ultimately tell us? It tells us that there is no thing in itself either spiritual or material, no atman. no vastu. There are no tilings in themselves

internal or external. They do not have attributes. There are no ontological properties of entities by themselves. They are all imagined (yikalpd). There is no know ing subject in itself. There is no doing subject in itself and no tiling in itself with which to do things. This is w hy the Buddha spoke false words. He spoke of rupa provisionally, but he

had something else in mind, namely, to lead people from this teaching to the idea that all is consciousness. The Buddha has a liberative mission to enter each and every house. He speaks the language of the house tactfully, strategically, but his mission is the same. Each house is a projection of consciousness itself. The house is empty by itself but

its inhabitant manufacture the house. They construct devices, boundaries, gates and schemes of being and non-being. Their house plays magic on them. The mission of the Buddha

entering the house in which eternal entities are discussed is to tactfully and strategically lead the inhabitants of the house to the realization that there is emptiness of eternal self- subject-agent.

He speaks the language of eternal entities in order to turn the inhabitants on to deconstruct the belief in defense of which the house speaks the language it does. Those who are dispositionally ready to hear the discourse on momentariness enter the path of nonessencelessness.

That is the mission.