Being, Oneness, and the Pot

Everything in this chapter and the next depends on seeing what the Chinese phrase contains, so it is worth pausing on the words. 有一瓶 is three characters: 有, being or existence; 一, one; 瓶, pot. English flattens this into "there is one pot," where "there is" and "one" feel like grammatical scaffolding rather than parts of the world. For the schools being argued with, they are not scaffolding. Vaiśeṣika holds existence to be a real universal, inhering in everything that exists, and number likewise to be a real quality. So the sentence names three items, and the question of how they hang together is a serious metaphysical question with a serious answer expected.

The Insider's reply sets the frame for both chapters at once. Are these three one, or are they different? Chapter Three takes the first horn and Chapter Four takes the second, and their titles say so: Refuting Oneness and Refuting Difference. This is the same dilemma that was run against the elephant and its trunk in Part 2, where the treatise pointed forward to exactly these two chapters. It is now being run at the scale of everything there is.

That parenthesis is not a modern editorial insertion. It stands in the received Chinese text — 此中四紙辯名字無可傳譯 — and it is the most candid sentence in the whole treatise. Somewhere in the middle of this argument there were four sheets of further reasoning about names, and whoever prepared the Chinese decided they could not be brought across and said so in the text rather than closing the gap silently.

Why untranslatable? Almost certainly because the argument turned on features of Sanskrit that Chinese does not have. An argument "about names" at this point in the chapter would very likely have been working with grammatical machinery — case endings, gender, the way a Sanskrit adjective agrees with its noun, the formation of abstract nouns like sattva from sat. Chinese has none of that apparatus. The reasoning would not have been difficult to translate so much as impossible to exhibit: rendered word by word into Chinese it would have ceased to be an argument at all.

This is worth sitting with, because it is a second and quite different kind of loss from the one Sengzhao reported in Part 1. There, ten whole chapters were left out on a judgment about what China needed. Here, a passage the translator evidently wanted was defeated by the languages. We know the length — four sheets — and the subject, and nothing else, and no Sanskrit or Tibetan witness survives to tell us more. Readers should know that the argument they are reading has a hole in it at this point, and that the hole is honestly marked.

The second move is more sophisticated than the first and deserves credit. The Outsider is inventing a restricted existence — not being at large, but pot-being, an existence proper to pots and found nowhere else. That secures the one-way implication he needs: pot-being and pot travel together, while being in general does not.

A modern reader will recognize the manoeuvre. It is what happens whenever a general term proves too general and is quietly indexed to save a thesis. The cost is that the general term stops doing the work it was introduced to do — if what pots have is pot-being, and cloths have cloth-being, then "existence" has become a name for a heap of unrelated properties, and the unity it was supposed to explain has been given up.

One note on the root line. The received text reads 瓶有二。何故二？無瓶, punctuated as we have translated it. The clauses are compressed even by this treatise's standards and can be parsed otherwise — for instance taking 瓶、有 as the two items ("pot and being are two") and reading the question as asking why, being two, a pot is anywhere absent. The argument that follows is the same either way, since it turns on the gap between being and pot; we follow the received punctuation and flag the alternative.

The test for generality is worth having: say "being" and you have committed yourself to pots, cloths, carts and everything else; say "pot" and you have committed yourself to nothing about cloth. The scope of what a word obliges you to grant is the measure of how general it is — and two terms with different scopes are not one term.

The father-and-son reply is the finest short exchange in this chapter, and it is worth reading twice. The Outsider's point is that generality is relative: a man is a son looking upward and a father looking downward, so "general" and "particular" are positions rather than natures, and nothing prevents being from occupying both.

The answer accepts the example and then reads it more carefully than the man who offered it. Before the son is born he is not a father. Fatherhood is not a property the man was carrying about in himself, waiting to be noticed; it arrives with the son and could not have arrived otherwise. So the example does not show that one thing has two natures. It shows that both terms are relational — that neither "father" nor "son" names anything a person is on their own.

Hence 是喻同我, this simile agrees with my position, which is the treatise doing what it does best: not refuting the example but accepting it and pointing out whose case it makes. Everything the Insider wants is in it. Being and pot are not two fixed items that might be identified or distinguished; they are terms whose sense depends on each other, and things constituted by dependence have no nature of their own. The Outsider handed over the demonstration while trying to escape it.

The reply looks nihilistic and is not, but the appearance is worth taking seriously rather than waving away.

What is being refuted is a particular account of what a pot is: a thing whose existence is a real universal inhering in it and not different from it. Run that account and the pot is swallowed by the universal — it becomes a general mark rather than a particular one. But general marks live on particulars; strip the particulars away and there is nothing for generality to be generality of. So the account destroys both of its own terms.

This is not the claim that nobody carries water. The treatise will say so explicitly in Part 14, when the Outsider finally accuses it of contradicting the world outright and gets the answer that dependently arisen things are exactly what ordinary people accept, and that it is the theories of fixed natures which cannot account for the pots we actually use. Here, mid-argument, that reply has not been earned yet, and the Insider simply lets the opponent's own theory finish itself off.

This is the elephant-and-trunk argument from Part 2 arriving at the chapter it was promised to, and it is now given properly. Identity is transitive: if the foot is not different from the body and the head is not different from the body, then the foot is not different from the head. Indra returns to make the point, as he did at the top of the chapter.

The Outsider's repair is precise and worth stating in his own terms: identity holds vertically, between each part and the whole, but not horizontally, between the parts. That is exactly the position, and the reply exposes what it costs. Once the parts are genuinely different from each other, the "whole" they are each identical with has to be different from itself in as many ways as there are parts — which is to say there is no single whole there at all. 但有諸分: only the parts, and no body over and above them.

This dilemma — the whole is either identical with its parts and therefore not one, or distinct from them and therefore never found — is one of the two hinges of the entire treatise, and it will be applied to atoms in Part 8, to the perceived object in Part 10, and to space in Part 13. What is being established here is a tool.

The forest is the best example the Outsider produces in this chapter, and the reply is correspondingly important. What the Insider does is not deny that we say "one forest." It is to point out that the same dilemma reappears one level down, and then again below that.

Watch the descent. Is the forest one? Then the pines are one, being not different from it. Is the forest many? Then it is not one forest. Very well — take a single pine and ask the same question of its root, trunk, branches, joints, flowers and leaves. And of a leaf, and of the leaf's parts. 盡應如是破: every thing whatever is to be broken in this same way. There is no level at which the analysis bottoms out in something simply and unproblematically one.

This is why the chapter can spend its length on a pot without being about pots. The pot was chosen because it is the least interesting object anyone could name; and the argument that dissolves it dissolves the forest, the army, the tree, the body, and — as Part 8 will insist — the atom that was supposed to be the floor beneath them all.

The Insider's disclaimer is the important sentence and it recurs throughout the treatise in various forms: 我說汝過，非受多瓶 — I am stating your fault; I do not accept many pots. The many pots were never his thesis. They are what follows from the Outsider's premises, produced in order to be shown unacceptable. Mistaking a consequence drawn for reductio for a position held is the commonest misreading of Madhyamaka, and it is the misreading that Part 14 exists to answer.

The symmetry that follows is elegant. The Outsider had used the many parts to break up the one pot; the Insider runs the same "not different" in reverse — if the parts are not different from the pot, then the pot's oneness infects the parts, and they cannot be many either. The premise was the Outsider's and it cuts both ways.

Then the three times, which is the passage this chapter is best remembered for. Clay, pot, earth: past, present and future strung along a single causal line. The ritualist's own principle is that cause and fruit are one substance. But if the pot in the lump of clay is really the same thing, it is there now, and so is the earth it will crumble to — and past, present and future have collapsed into one another. The consequence is drawn in the plainest possible terms: 已作、今作、當作者，如是語壞, the words "already made," "being made" and "to be made" are destroyed. A theory that makes tense unintelligible has not explained production; it has abolished it. Chapters Seven and Eight will take this up as their main business.

The closing question is the one that matters, and it should be read slowly, because it looks like a defeat for the Insider's own position and is not: if there is neither long nor short, how can there be mutual dependence?

The Outsider offered mutual dependence as a way of having cause and fruit without either being fixed. The Insider agrees that nothing is long in itself — that is his own doctrine — and then presses one step further than the Outsider wanted to go. Mutual dependence was being used as a foundation, a stable relation on which two unstable terms could rest. But a relation needs relata. If neither term has any nature of its own, there are not two things standing in the relation, and "mutual dependence" cannot be the bedrock either.

This is the treatise refusing to let its own favorite notion harden into a thesis, and it is worth noticing early, because the same refusal is what Part 14 will make explicit when the Outsider argues that emptiness must at least depend on non-emptiness. The answer there is this answer: 若無一，則無相待. Dependence is not a floor. It is the name for there being no floor.

The mark ◎ at the end of the Chinese closes the first fascicle. 百論卷上 ends here, and 卷下 opens with Chapter Four, which takes the other horn of the dilemma set in this chapter's first exchange: if being, oneness and pot are not one, are they different?