A Book Written to Be Argued With.
The Hundred Treatise is not a teacher explaining his thought to a pupil. It is a debate manual. On one side stands 外, the outsider — a Sāṃkhya philosopher, a Vaiśeṣika, a Jain ascetic — who states his case fully, in his own vocabulary, and is quoted without distortion. On the other stands 內, the insider, who almost never asserts anything, and instead lets each position collide with its own premises. Ten chapters, roughly a hundred and ninety exchanges, and by the end the self, the pot, the senses, causation, space, time and nirvāṇa have all been let go of — including, in the last chapter, the argument that let them go.
How to read this collection
The treatise runs to two fascicles and about twenty thousand characters of Chinese, organized in ten chapters of very uneven length. We have split it into fourteen parts by the shape of the argument rather than by counting chapters: seven chapters fit one page each, while the first two — on discarding merit, and on refuting the self — are long enough to need three pages apiece.
Two features of the text govern how these pages are laid out, and both are explained in full on Part 1. Āryadeva's root lines do not appear as verses — Kumārajīva rendered them as terse prose aphorisms inside Vasu's commentary, each closed by the marker (修妬路) — so the root text is marked inline rather than set in verse blocks. And the speakers are not "question" and "answer" but 外 and 內, the outsider and the insider, which is why they appear here as Outsider and Insider throughout.
What each part page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation.
- Reading notes on what each argument is actually claiming, and against whom.
- Cross-links to the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and the Twelve Gate Treatise wherever the three treatises share an argument.
- Honest marking of the places where the received text is damaged, ambiguous, or incomplete.
Read by Part
From an argument about whether a book may open with the word "evil," through the longest sustained refutation of the self in Chinese Madhyamaka, to a last chapter in which the treatise turns on itself and asks what its own refutation is made of.
The Preface and the Homage
Sengzhao's preface, which is nearly everything we know about how the text reached China — including the fact that half of it did not. Then the question that starts the argument: which teacher deserves the name World-Honored One?
Refuting the Self
Three parts on Sāṃkhya's self, whose mark is awareness, and Vaiśeṣika's self, which merely possesses knowledge. An ox, a horse, a black cloth, a walking staff — and a knife that must cut whatever it can hurt.
You Are the Destroyer
The final chapter, in which the opponent asks what an argument that empties everything is itself made of. The answer brings the two truths, a fourth position found in the opponent's own texts, and a mirage.
Translation Notes
The Chinese source is Kumārajīva's translation, revised at Chang'an in 404 CE — five years before the same workshop produced this site's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Twelve Gate Treatise. Terminology is matched across all three, so that a reader moving among them meets the same English for the same Chinese. See also this site's note on translation method.
On the missing half
Sengzhao's preface states that the treatise had twenty chapters of five verses each — a hundred verses, which is where the title comes from. Only the first ten chapters were brought into Chinese: the last ten, he writes, "he judged to be of no benefit to this land, and so they are wanting and were not transmitted." The Hundred Treatise, as it exists in Chinese and therefore as it exists at all, holds roughly fifty of its hundred verses. There is no Sanskrit and no Tibetan witness to tell us what was in the other half.
There is a second and smaller hole. In the middle of Chapter Three, the received text carries an in-line editorial note — 此中四紙辯名字無可傳譯, "four sheets of argument concerning names occur at this point, which cannot be carried over in translation." Four sheets of the argument are simply not there, and whoever prepared the Chinese said so rather than closing the gap silently. Both losses are flagged where they occur, in Part 1 and Part 7.
On the author, the commentator, and the title
Āryadeva (提婆) was Nāgārjuna's pupil and, by the tradition's account, the sharpest debater of his generation; Sengzhao places him some eight centuries after the Buddha. The commentary is by one 婆藪開士, "Vasu the Illumining Being," about whom essentially nothing is known beyond Sengzhao's few lines of praise. His exposition is translated here as primary text, exactly as Piṅgala's commentary is on this site's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā pages — this treatise, unlike the Twelve Gate Treatise, is not a self-commentary, and there are genuinely two voices in it.
We title the work in English rather than in Sanskrit. The form Śataśāstra sometimes given is a back-formation from the Chinese; the text survives only in Chinese, with no Sanskrit or Tibetan witness. "Hundred Treatise" also follows the rendering already used on this site's Great Calming and Contemplation pages, where Zhiyi quotes this treatise by name. Note that Āryadeva's Catuḥśataka, the "Four Hundred," is a different and separate work.