If They Are Different, There Is No Pot

Two distinct faults, and they pull in opposite directions, which is what makes the horn as bad as the other one.

The first is deprivation. Real difference means not sharing: if the pot is genuinely other than existence, then the pot does not have existence, and a pot without existence is nothing at all. The same subtraction runs for oneness. The Outsider wanted three real items so that the sentence "there is one pot" would have three things to be about; what he gets is a pot that neither exists nor is single.

The second is independence, and it is the sharper of the two. Genuinely different things have separate fates — when this man dies, that man should not die. So smash the pot and existence should be untouched, oneness should be untouched, and by the same token the loss of the pot's oneness should leave the pot intact. That is plainly not how anything behaves. Difference cheap enough to leave the three items in one sentence is too cheap to make them three; difference strong enough to make them three is strong enough to let each survive the others' destruction.

The three kinds are worth keeping, because they are a genuine contribution and the treatise does not sneer at them. Separate difference is the ordinary kind: two men, each of whom can be removed without the other noticing. Transformative difference is difference across a change in the same stuff — the dung-ball and the ash-ball are not two things standing side by side, but neither are they simply the same. And conjoined difference is what a Vaiśeṣika quality has to its substance: distinguishable, but not separable, and destroyed together.

That third kind is exactly the tool the Outsider needs, and it is a reasonable one. He can now say: yes, the pot and its oneness are different, and no, they do not have independent fates, because their difference is the conjoined kind.

The reply's second half is where the round is actually decided, and it is a point of debating law rather than metaphysics: 我欲破汝異，云何以異證異 — I am setting out to refute your difference; how can you prove difference by difference? The whole question at issue is whether these items are different. To answer by classifying kinds of difference is to help oneself to the thing in dispute. It is the same charge as the horse in Part 4, where illustrating the self by means of the self was named a position of defeat, and the demand is the same: 應更說因, give another reason.

This is the shortest exchange in the chapter and one of the most economical arguments in the treatise: the Outsider's own filing system does the work.

Vaiśeṣika's categories are exclusive — that is their whole purpose. A substance is not a quality; a quality is not a universal. So placing the pot in 陀羅驃 (dravya, substance), oneness in 求那 (guṇa, quality), and being among the general marks does secure their difference, precisely as intended. But exclusivity runs in both directions, and the Insider simply reads the third line off the first two. If being belongs to a category the pot is not in, the pot does not have being. If number belongs to another, the pot is not one. The Outsider has bought the difference of the three terms at the price of the middle one.

It is worth noticing that this is the same move that broke the black-cloth simile in Part 4 — there too, the rule that substances do not become qualities was quoted back at the man whose system it is. The Hundred Treatise is unusually fond of this manoeuvre, and it is a sign of what the text was for: whoever carried it into a debate hall was expected to know the opponent's categories better than the opponent used them.

The counter-accusation is nicely aimed. It was the Outsider who insisted on three real items, and three real items in one pot is what "many pots" amounts to: the pot-as-existent, the pot-as-one, and the pot itself. What the world calls a single pot, his analysis has resolved into a small crowd.

Then the argument that gives the section its name, and it is a genuinely deep one. 數法初一: the first of the numbers is one. Every larger number is built by repeating it — many is many ones. So if oneness has been detached from the pot, nothing has been left that could be counted, and "many pots" is as unavailable as "one pot." The Outsider has been assuming that if singularity fails he can retreat to plurality, and the reply closes that exit: plurality was never an alternative to unity, it was an accumulation of it.

The trap here is a good one and worth laying out slowly, because the Outsider walks into it by defending himself well.

He needs conjunction to confer existence on the pot. The Insider points out that whatever being is, it is not the pot — so it is a non-pot, and the pot is therefore conjoined with a non-pot; and if conjunction transfers properties, the pot should catch non-pot-hood. The Outsider's escape is precise: "non-pot" names a mere absence, and absences have no conjunctions. Nothing can be joined to nothing.

And that escape is what finishes him. He has just conceded the principle that what does not exist cannot enter into conjunction. Now apply it to his own account. Before the pot is joined to being, does the pot exist? On his story, no — existence is what the conjunction is supposed to deliver. But a thing that does not yet exist cannot be joined to anything, by the rule he has himself just laid down. So the conjunction can never take place, and existence can never be delivered.

This is the general shape of every argument against a thing that acquires its existence from something else, and the treatise will meet it again in Part 12, where the same reasoning is turned on arising itself. What has to exist in order to receive existence already has it; what does not exist is not available to receive anything.

The distinction between 作因 and 了因 — a productive cause and a revealing cause — is the technical heart of this section and will return in Part 13, where the Outsider uses it to argue that permanent things can have causes without being produced. A potter is a productive cause of the pot; a lamp is a revealing cause of what was already in the room.

The dilemma is then exhaustive. If being reveals, the pot was already there without it, and being is redundant. If being confers, then being produces, and the lamp analogy has been abandoned. There is no third option, because the analogy's entire content was the claim that revealing is not producing.

The second stroke is subtler and aims at the regress. The Outsider's method is to establish a thing by pointing at its mark. Apply the method to being itself: what is its mark? If it needs one, the same question arises again without end; if it does not — if some things are simply known to exist without a mark — then the method has an exception, and the pot may as well be one. Either the rule is universal and destroys itself, or it admits exceptions and cannot be used to force the pot into needing being.

And then, in one dry sentence, the treatise takes back the lamp it has been demolishing since Part 2 and lends it to the opposite side: as a lamp lights itself and does not borrow an outer lighting, so the pot exists of itself and does not wait upon an outer being. The Outsider's own favorite image, granted to him on his own terms, argues against him.

The first horn is a small masterpiece of consequence-drawing. If the body is one thing and it is fully present in the foot, then everything that belongs to the body belongs to whatever the body is fully present in. The head is one of those places. So the head contains a foot — 頭中應有足. It is absurd, and it follows exactly from taking "the whole is present in each part" at its word.

The second horn is quieter and does the real damage. Distribute the whole among the parts, giving each part the amount that fits it, and you have not described a whole plus parts; you have described the parts twice over. There is nothing left for "the body" to name.

And then the last sentence, which is easy to skim and is the hinge of the chapter: 有分無故，諸分亦無 — the whole being absent, the parts are absent too. A foot is a foot only as part of a body; a wheel is a wheel only as part of a cart. Take away the whole and what is left is not a heap of well-defined parts but material that was only ever "parts" by reference to something now gone. This is why the treatise does not end up with atoms as survivors of the analysis, and it is what the Outsider tries to prevent in the next section.

The exchange over threads and sand is the best-argued in the chapter, and the Outsider wins the middle round outright.

His analogy is that quantity converts capacity into effect: one thread will not hold an elephant, a rope of them will. The Insider's counter-examples are meant to show that quantity alone guarantees nothing — a thousand barren women and a heap of sand yield nothing at all. And the Outsider spots the flaw immediately, in the sharpest reply he makes anywhere in the treatise: those cases fail because the power is absent in each individual. A single thread does have a little tensile strength; a single drop does have a little volume. Sand has no oil in it at all, so no amount of sand yields oil. Multiplying zero gives zero; multiplying something gives more. His distinction is correct.

So the Insider abandons that line and returns to the dilemma the chapter has been building, and this is why the atom argument is placed here, after the whole-and-part section rather than before it. The question is no longer whether atoms can accumulate power. It is whether there are atoms — that is, well-defined parts — before there is a whole for them to be parts of. And the answer given is the sentence from the previous section: 有分無故分亦無. Before the pot exists, there is nothing that counts as a part of the pot; and once the pot exists, the parts' power has nothing left to accomplish. The productive moment falls between two times at neither of which it can occur.

Note also the promise 後當破 — "it will be refuted later." That is a forward reference to Part 13, where the partless atom is attacked directly and at length: an atom that touches another has sides, an atom distinguishable from space has a boundary, an atom with color and taste has aspects — and anything with parts is impermanent. The floor is not left standing.

The first sentence of the reply is the one to memorize, because it states the method of the entire treatise in a single clause: it was you who said being is different from the pot; I said only that if being is different from the pot, then there is no pot.

Nothing has been asserted. Every destructive result in four chapters has been a conditional whose antecedent the Outsider supplied. The pots were not destroyed by the Insider; they were destroyed by a theory about pots, and the Insider's whole contribution was to carry that theory to its end. This is the point that Part 14 exists to make in full, when the same accusation is made again and answered at length. Here it gets one sentence, and the sentence is enough.

Then the counter-charge, and it is not a debating flourish — it is precise. 無見有、有見無: seeing being where there is none, and seeing none where there is being. The Outsider does both. He posits a whole-that-has-parts over and above the assembled limbs, which is seeing something where there is nothing; and he denies that the assembled limbs are the body, which is seeing nothing where there is something. Whatever a destroyer of dharma is, the man who says this assembled thing in front of you is not a body has a stronger claim to the title.

And the closing image is the oldest and most famous in Buddhist philosophy. Wheels, axle, frame, pole — put together, and there is a cart; and there is no further cart standing behind them. It is the image the nun Vajirā gives in the earliest strata of the canon, the one Nāgasena uses on King Milinda, and it is doing exactly the same work here that it does there. The point was never that carts are unreal. It is that "cart" is what the assembly is called, not the name of a hidden extra passenger.

The mark ◎ closes the chapter. What has been established across Chapters Three and Four is a single result reached from both sides: the things of the world are neither identical with what constitutes them nor different from it. Chapters Five and Six now turn from the object to the one perceiving it — first the faculties, then the objects they are supposed to reach.