The Fruit Is Not Already in the Cause
Refuting the Fruit's Pre-existence in the Cause破因中有果品第七
The oldest quarrel in Indian philosophy now arrives, and this chapter takes the first half of it. Sāṃkhya holds that nothing new is ever made: the pot was in the clay all along, waiting to be brought out, because what does not exist cannot come to be. It is a serious position with serious arguments — a finger that stays one finger whether bent or straight, a man who is one man at every age, and a systematic list of the eight reasons a genuinely existing thing can go unnoticed. The chapter answers each, and closes on the sentence that keeps the whole treatise from being mistaken for nihilism.
Translation Note — the parallel with the Twelve Gate Treatise
This chapter and the next cover the same ground as the second gate of the Twelve Gate Treatise, which this site carries in Part 2 and Part 3. The two treatises were rendered into Chinese by the same translator within a few years of each other, and the overlap is close enough that a reader can profitably keep both open. Terminology has been matched throughout so that the same Chinese yields the same English on both sets of pages.
The most striking convergence is the catalogue of eight reasons why something real may go unperceived, which appears in both texts as the pre-existence doctrine's strongest defense. The eight causes are the same eight; their order differs, and every illustration is different. We have kept each text's own order and its own examples, and matched only the names of the causes.
1. Nothing Is Lost: the Potter's Stages
The Outsider opens by answering the previous chapter directly. Things do abide, and the proof is what happens on a potter's wheel — a continuous sequence in which each stage becomes the next and nothing is ever discarded.
外曰：諸法非不住，有不失故、無不生故(修妬路)。有相諸法如泥團，從團底、從底腹、從腹咽、從咽口，前後為因果。種種果生時，種種因不失。若因中無果，果則不生。但因變為果，是故有諸法。
Outsider: Things are not without abiding, because what exists is not lost and what does not exist does not arise.sūtra Things that have marks are like a lump of clay: from the lump comes the base, from the base the belly, from the belly the neck, from the neck the mouth — earlier and later standing to each other as cause and fruit. As each kind of fruit arises, the corresponding cause is not lost. If there were no fruit in the cause, the fruit would not arise at all. It is simply the cause changing into the fruit — and therefore things exist.
內曰：若果生故有不失，因失故有失(修妬路)。汝言瓶果生時泥團不失，瓶即是泥團。若瓶果生，是時失泥團因故，是則無因。若泥團不失，不應分別泥團、瓶有異。今實見形、時、力、知、名等有異，故有應失。
Insider: If what exists is not lost because the fruit arises, then since the cause is lost, what exists is lost.sūtra You say that when the pot-fruit arises the lump of clay is not lost, and that the pot just is the lump of clay. But if the pot-fruit arises, then at that moment the lump-of-clay cause is lost — and so there is no cause. And if the lump of clay is not lost, one should not be able to distinguish the lump from the pot as different at all. Yet we in fact observe them to differ in shape, in time, in what they can do, in how they are known, and in name — and therefore what exists must be lost.
The Outsider's principle is stated in eight characters and is the whole of Sāṃkhya causation: 有不失故、無不生故 — what exists is never destroyed, and what does not exist never comes into being. It is not an eccentric view. It is what you get if you take seriously the thought that something cannot come from nothing, and it survives today in every intuition that creation is really rearrangement.
The reply is a demand to look at what actually happened on the wheel. Five differences are listed and they are worth taking one at a time. Shape: the lump is round and the pot is hollow. Time: one is now, the other was. What they can do — 力 — the pot holds water and the lump does not; this is the strongest of the five, because a capacity that was absent and is now present is a real acquisition. How they are known: they are recognized differently. Name: they are called different things.
And then the dilemma. The Outsider needs the clay to persist so that nothing is created; but he also needs a pot at the end, which is to say something the clay was not. If the lump really survives unchanged, there is nothing to distinguish it from the pot, and no pot was made. If the differences are real, something has been lost. He cannot keep both the continuity and the product.
2. The Bending Finger, and the Three Ages of a Life
Two similes in defense, and both are cases where a single thing plainly persists through real change. Neither is casual: the finger is about change in shape, the three ages about change over a lifetime.
外曰：如指屈申(修妬路)。指雖屈申形異，實是一指。如是泥團形瓶形雖異，而泥不異。
內曰：不然。業能異故(修妬路)。屈申是指業，指是能。若業即是能者，屈時應失指，復次屈申應是一。如汝經，泥團即是瓶故，指喻非也。
Outsider: As with a finger bending and straightening.sūtra Though a finger's shape differs when it is bent and when it is straight, it is really one finger. Just so, though the shape of the lump and the shape of the pot differ, the clay does not differ.
Insider: Not so. Because the act and the agent differ.sūtra Bending and straightening are the finger's acts, and the finger is what acts. If the act just were the agent, then in bending, the finger should be lost; and further, bending and straightening should be one and the same. But on your own text, the lump of clay just is the pot — and so the finger simile does not hold.
外曰：如少壯老(修妬路)。如一人身亦少亦壯亦老，因果亦如是。
內曰：不一故(修妬路)。少不作壯，壯不作老，是故汝喻非也。復次若有不失，無失(修妬路)。若有不失者，泥團不應變為瓶，是則無瓶。若有不失者，無無故亦不應失，然則都無失。
Outsider: As with youth, prime and age.sūtra One and the same person's body is young, and in its prime, and old. Cause and fruit are just so.
Insider: Because they are not one.sūtra Youth does not make the prime, and the prime does not make old age — and so your simile does not hold. Furthermore, if what exists is not lost, then nothing is lost at all.sūtra If what exists is not lost, the lump of clay should not change into a pot, and so there is no pot. And if what exists is not lost, then — since there is no non-existent thing to be lost either — nothing should be lost whatever, and so nothing is ever lost at all.
The finger is refuted with the act-and-agent distinction that this treatise has been sharpening since Chapter Two, and the refutation turns on a mismatch the Outsider did not notice. In the finger case there really are two things: a finger, and the bending it does. That duality is what lets the finger persist — it is not identical with any of its postures, so it survives all of them. But Sāṃkhya's own doctrine says the clay is the pot, with no such duality anywhere. So the finger illustrates a structure the Outsider has explicitly denied himself. It is the wrong model for his own view.
The three ages get a four-character answer, and it is the right one: 少不作壯, youth does not make the prime. Nobody's youth was still present, doing work, at forty. The stages of a life are exactly a case of the earlier being gone by the time the later arrives, which is what the Outsider needs to deny. As with the finger, the example illustrates the opposite of what it was brought in for.
Then the consequence pressed to its limit, and this is the section's real conclusion. If what exists cannot be lost, and what does not exist is not there to be lost, then nothing is ever lost of anything. The doctrine that was meant to preserve continuity has abolished change entirely — which is the subject of the next exchange.
3. No Impermanence, No Right and Wrong
The Outsider accepts the consequence and asks what is wrong with it. The answer does not stay in metaphysics for a moment; it goes straight to what a world without change would mean for a person.
外曰。無失有何咎(修妬路)。若常故無失，泥團不應變為瓶。無無常，有何過？內曰：若無無常，無罪福等(修妬路)。若無無常，罪福等悉亦當無。何以故？罪人常為罪人，不應為福。福人常為福人，不應為罪。罪福等者，布施竊盜、持戒犯戒等，如是皆無。
Outsider: What harm is there in nothing being lost?sūtra If, being permanent, nothing is lost, then the lump of clay should not change into a pot. What is the fault in there being no impermanence?
Insider: If there is no impermanence, there is no offense or merit.sūtra If there is no impermanence, then offense and merit and the rest must all be absent too. Why? An offender would always be an offender and could never do merit; a person of merit would always be a person of merit and could never do wrong. And "offense and merit and the rest" means giving and stealing, keeping the precepts and breaking them, and so on — all of which would be absent.
This is one of the most important arguments in the treatise, and it is important because of which way it points. A reader who has followed ten chapters of demolition may have formed the impression that this text is hostile to the moral life. Here it turns out that impermanence is the condition of the moral life, and that it is the opponent's stable world which destroys ethics.
The reasoning is exact. If nothing is ever lost, then whatever a person is, they permanently are. A thief is a thief with no possibility of becoming otherwise; a generous person cannot fall. There is no reform, no corruption, no practice, no path. And the list of casualties is deliberately concrete rather than abstract — giving and stealing, keeping and breaking the precepts. These are not categories; they are what people do, and a fixed world has no room for the doing of them.
The same point is made from the other side by the Twelve Gate Treatise in its sixth part, where an opponent charges that emptiness abolishes the Four Noble Truths and is told that it is fixed natures which abolish them. It is worth holding on to as this treatise moves toward its last chapter, where the same accusation is made and answered at length: what emptiness is incompatible with is not the world but the freezing of it.
4. If Cause and Fruit Are One, There Is No Future
Back to the pot. The Outsider argues from the very fact that clay is the pot's cause, and the reply catches him at the moment the pot breaks.
外曰：因中先有果，因有故(修妬路)。若泥中先無瓶，泥不應為瓶因。
內曰：若因先有果故有果，果無故因無果(修妬路)。若泥團作瓶，泥不失故，因中有果。是瓶若破，應因中無果。
Outsider: The fruit exists beforehand in the cause, because the cause exists.sūtra If there were no pot beforehand in the clay, the clay should not be the pot's cause.
Insider: If there is a fruit because the fruit is in the cause beforehand, then, the fruit being absent, there is no fruit in the cause.sūtra If the lump of clay makes a pot and the clay is not lost, then there is a fruit in the cause. But if that pot is broken, there must then be no fruit in the cause.
外曰：因果一故(修妬路)。如土因泥果、泥因瓶果，因變為果更無異法，是故不應因中無果。
內曰：若因果一，無未來(修妬路)。如泥團現在，瓶為未來，若因果一則無未來，無未來故亦無現在，無現在故亦無過去，如是三世亂。
Outsider: Because cause and fruit are one.sūtra Earth is the cause and clay the fruit; clay is the cause and the pot the fruit. The cause changes into the fruit and there is no further different thing — and so it will not do to say there is no fruit in the cause.
Insider: If cause and fruit are one, there is no future.sūtra The lump of clay is present and the pot is future; and if cause and fruit are one, there is no future. There being no future there is no present either; and there being no present there is no past — and so the three times are thrown into confusion.
The first reply uses the pot's destruction as a lever, and the lever works because the Outsider's principle is symmetrical. His rule for reading the present off the future was: the pot is going to come out of this clay, therefore the pot is in the clay now. Very well — the pot is also going to be smashed. By the same rule, the smashing is in the clay now, which is to say the absence of the pot is in the clay now. A doctrine that finds futures already present cannot pick and choose which futures.
The three-times argument then repeats what Part 7 established, and its brevity here is a mark of the treatise's economy — a result once earned is used again in a sentence. If the pot is genuinely present in the clay, then the future is present, and once the future has collapsed into the present the whole apparatus of tense goes with it. There is nothing left to be future to.
5. Only the Names Change
A subtler retreat, and philosophically the most interesting move the Outsider makes in this chapter. Perhaps there is one substance throughout, and "pot" and "jar" are labels applied at different moments to something that never really becomes anything.
外曰：名等失、名等生故(修妬路)。更無新法，而故法不失，但名隨時異。如一泥團為瓶，瓶破為瓫，瓫破還為泥。如是都無去來，瓶瓫安在？但隨時得名，其實無異。
內曰：若爾因無果(修妬路)。若名失名生者，此名先無後有，故因中無果。若名先有，泥即是瓶。是故知非先有果。
Outsider: Because names and the rest are lost, and names and the rest arise.sūtra There is no new thing, and the old thing is not lost; only the names differ with the times. One lump of clay becomes a pot; the pot breaks and becomes a jar; the jar breaks and becomes clay again. In all this there is no coming and going — where are the pot and the jar? They merely receive names according to the time, and in reality there is no difference.
Insider: If so, there is no fruit in the cause.sūtra If names are lost and names arise, then this name was not there before and is there afterward — and so there is no fruit in the cause. And if the name were there beforehand, then the clay just is the pot. Therefore one knows that the fruit is not there beforehand.
外曰：不定故(修妬路)。泥團中不定出一器，是故泥中不定有名。
內曰：若泥不定，果亦不定(修妬路)。若泥團中瓶不定，汝言因中先有果亦不定。
Outsider: Because it is not fixed.sūtra It is not fixed that one particular vessel will come out of a lump of clay — and so it is not fixed which name is in the clay.
Insider: If the clay is not fixed, the fruit is not fixed either.sūtra If the pot is not fixed within the lump of clay, then your claim that the fruit exists beforehand in the cause is not fixed either.
The Outsider's position here is close to a familiar modern one: there is only matter, rearranged, and "pot" and "jar" are our words for stages of it. He even asks the sceptical question himself — 瓶瓫安在, where are the pot and the jar?
The reply is a fork he cannot escape, and it is worth setting out plainly. He has said the names arise and are lost. Then take the name: it was not there and now it is. Whatever else is going on, something has come into being that was not there before, and his own principle forbids that. But if he says instead that the name was there in the clay all along, then the clay already was the pot, and the potter did nothing.
The last exchange is smaller and sharper. The Outsider observes that a lump of clay might become any of several vessels, so nothing determinate is in it. That is a fair observation about clay, and it is fatal to his thesis: the whole doctrine was that the fruit is already there, which is a claim about something determinate. Concede indeterminacy and the doctrine has been abandoned in the act of defending it.
6. The Subtle Pot, and Eight Reasons a Real Thing Goes Unseen
Here is the Outsider's best material, and it is genuinely good: a catalogue of the ordinary ways in which something perfectly real fails to be perceived. Set down in the fourth or fifth century, it is a small treasure of observation, and the same list appears in the Twelve Gate Treatise in the same argumentative role.
外曰：微形有故(修妬路)。泥團中瓶形微故難知，陶師力故是時明了。泥中瓶雖不可知，當知泥中必有微形。有二種不可知：或無故不知，或有以因緣故不知。因緣有八。何等八？遠故不知，如遠國土。近故不知，如眼睫。根壞故不知，如聾盲。心不住故不知，如人意亂。細故不知，如微塵。障故不知，如壁外事。勝故不知，如大水少鹽。相似故不知，如一粒米投大聚中。如是泥團中瓶，眼雖不見，要不從蒲出，是故微瓶定在泥中。
Outsider: Because the subtle shape is there.sūtra The pot's shape within the lump of clay is subtle and hard to know; it is by the potter's work that at that time it becomes clear. Though the pot in the clay cannot be known, one should know that there must be a subtle shape in the clay. There are two kinds of not-knowing: either one does not know because the thing is not there, or one does not know although it is there, on account of some cause. And of such causes there are eight. Which eight? One does not know because a thing is too far off, as with a distant country. One does not know because it is too near, as with one's own eyelashes. One does not know because the faculty is damaged, as with the deaf and the blind. One does not know because the mind is not settled, as with a person whose thoughts are scattered. One does not know because a thing is too subtle, as with an atom. One does not know because of an obstruction, as with what lies beyond a wall. One does not know because it is overwhelmed, as with a little salt in a great body of water. One does not know because of sameness, as with a single grain of rice thrown into a great heap. Just so with the pot in the lump of clay: though the eye does not see it, it certainly does not come out of rushes — and therefore the subtle pot is definitely in the clay.
內曰：若先有微形，因無果(修妬路)。若瓶未生時，泥中有微形，後麁時可知者，是則因中無果。何以故？本無麁相後乃生故，是以因中無果。
Insider: If a subtle shape is there beforehand, there is no fruit in the cause.sūtra If, before the pot arises, there is a subtle shape in the clay, and it can be known later when it has become coarse, then there is no fruit in the cause. Why? Because the coarse mark was not there at first and arises afterward — and therefore there is no fruit in the cause.
The eight are worth reading as observation before reading them as argument. Two of them are about distance and they are a matched pair: a country too far to see, and eyelashes too close. Two are about the observer rather than the object — a damaged faculty, and a mind too scattered to attend. One is about scale, one about a physical screen. And the last two are the subtlest and the best: a thing can be missed because something larger drowns it out, as a pinch of salt is lost in a lake; or because it is indistinguishable from its surroundings, as one grain of rice in a heap of rice. Neither of those is a failure of the eye. They are failures of discrimination, and noticing them is a real achievement.
The rhetorical work this list does is to shift the burden. The Insider has been saying the pot is not in the clay because nobody can find it there. The list replies: here are eight ways in which not finding proves nothing.
And then the refutation, which does not dispute a single one of the eight. It grants the whole framework and asks a question about what changed. If the pot was there subtly and is now there coarsely, then coarseness was not there before and is there now. Whatever else was already present, that is new — and one new thing is all that is needed, because the doctrine's claim was that nothing whatever comes to be. The Outsider has explained how the pot could have been hiding, and in the explaining has admitted that its manifest form was not.
Readers who wish to compare the two treatises will find the same eight causes in the Twelve Gate Treatise's second part, in a different order and with an entirely different set of illustrations — medicine in the eye rather than eyelashes, a bird high in the sky rather than a distant country, an ink dot on black rather than rice in rice, a bell drowning out the sound of a brush rather than salt in water. It is the same argument in two hands, and the divergence of examples suggests a shared stock of debating material rather than one text copying the other.
7. The Potter Takes Clay, and Not Rushes
The Outsider's strongest practical argument, and one that any account of causation has to answer: why is production selective? If the pot is not in the clay, why not make it out of straw?
外曰：因中應有果，各取因故(修妬路)。因中應先有果。何以故？作瓶取泥不取蒲。若因中無果者，亦可取蒲。而人定知泥能生瓶，埏埴成器，堪受燒故，是以因中有果。
內曰：若當有有、若當無無(修妬路)。汝言泥中當出瓶，故因中先有果。今瓶破故，應當無果，是以因中無果。
Outsider: There must be a fruit in the cause, because each thing takes its own cause.sūtra There must be a fruit beforehand in the cause. Why? Because to make a pot one takes clay and not rushes. If there were no fruit in the cause, one might just as well take rushes. But people know for certain that clay can produce a pot — that it is kneaded and worked into a vessel and will bear the firing — and therefore there is a fruit in the cause.
Insider: If what is to be, is; then what is to be absent, is absent.sūtra You say that a pot is going to come out of the clay, and that therefore the fruit is in the cause beforehand. But the pot is also going to be broken — so there must equally be no fruit; and therefore there is no fruit in the cause.
外曰：生住壞次第有故無過(修妬路)。瓶中雖有破相，要先生次住後破。何以故？未生無破故。
內曰：若先生非後，無果同(修妬路)。若泥中有瓶生便壞者，何故要先生後壞，不先壞後生？汝言未生故無破，如是瓶未生時無住無壞，此二先無後有，故因中無果。
Outsider: There is no fault, since arising, abiding and breaking come in order.sūtra Though the pot has the mark of breaking in it, it must first arise, then abide, and break afterward. Why? Because what has not arisen has no breaking.
Insider: If arising is first and not later, the absence of the fruit follows just the same.sūtra If there is a pot in the clay which arises and then breaks, why must it arise first and break afterward, rather than break first and arise afterward? You say that because it has not arisen there is no breaking; then likewise, before the pot arises there is no abiding and no breaking. These two were not there before and are there afterward — and so there is no fruit in the cause.
The clay-and-rushes argument deserves its force. Causation is not arbitrary; potters buy clay, and a workshop stocked with straw produces no pots. If there is nothing pot-like in the clay to begin with, what makes clay the right material? The Outsider even names the properties — it can be kneaded, worked into shape, and fired without shattering — which is a perfectly good account of why clay and not straw. Though it may be worth noticing that in giving that account he has answered his own question without any appeal to a pre-existing pot.
The Insider does not take that route. He runs the symmetry argument again, and by now it has the character of a refrain: any rule that reads the future back into the present must read all of it back. The pot is coming, so the pot is here; the breaking is coming, so the breaking is here. And the Outsider's reply — that arising, abiding and breaking have a fixed order — is met with a question he has no way to answer. Why that order? If both are equally present in the clay from the start, nothing in the clay determines which comes out first. The very appeal to sequence concedes that abiding and breaking were absent at the beginning and present later, and that is the admission the whole chapter has been driving at.
8. Continuity Without Permanence
The chapter's last exchange is the one that keeps everything before it from being read as nihilism, and it is worth arriving at slowly. The Outsider's charge is the natural one: if you deny that the fruit is in the cause, you deny that anything carries over, and nothing carries over is annihilation.
外曰：汝破有果故有斷過(修妬路)。若因中有果為非者，應因中無果。若因中無果，則墮斷滅。
Outsider: Since you refute the fruit's being in the cause, you fall into the fault of annihilation.sūtra If it is wrong that the fruit is in the cause, then there must be no fruit in the cause; and if there is no fruit in the cause, one falls into annihilation.
內曰：續故不斷，壞故不常(修妬路)。汝不知耶？從穀子牙等相續故不斷，穀子等因壞故不常。如是諸佛說十二分因緣生法，離因中有果、無果故不著斷常，行中道入涅槃。
Insider: Because there is continuation, nothing is cut off; because there is breaking down, nothing is permanent.sūtra Do you not know? Because from the grain of seed the sprout and the rest follow on in succession, nothing is cut off; and because the grain of seed and the other causes break down, nothing is permanent. In just this way the buddhas taught things as arising through the twelve links of dependent origination: because it stands apart both from the fruit's being in the cause and from its not being in the cause, one does not cling to annihilation or to permanence, but walks the middle way and enters nirvāṇa.
The seed and the sprout are doing something exact, and the two halves of the sentence should be read as a pair, because each rules out one error.
Because there is continuation, nothing is cut off. The sprout does not arrive from nowhere. It comes from this seed and not from that one, in an unbroken succession — which is the whole of what the Outsider wanted from his pre-existing fruit, granted to him without the fruit.
Because there is breaking down, nothing is permanent. And the seed is gone. Dig where it was and there is no seed hiding inside the sprout, waiting. What secures the continuity is not the survival of anything but the fact that this arose from that.
The last clause is the one to keep, and it is the treatise's clearest statement of its own position anywhere before the final chapter: 離因中有果、無果故不著斷常，行中道入涅槃 — standing apart from both the fruit's being in the cause and its not being in the cause, one clings to neither annihilation nor permanence, but walks the middle way. Notice that the middle way is not a compromise between the two doctrines, and not a third doctrine about where the fruit is. It is the refusal of the question that generated both, together with an account — dependent origination — that explains everything the question was asked to explain.
Which is also why Part 12 must come next, and why a reader who stops here will misunderstand the book. Having demolished the doctrine that the fruit is in the cause, the treatise now turns and demolishes the opposite doctrine with equal thoroughness. 離……有果、無果 means exactly what it says.
Part Eleven Complete
This closes Part Eleven: the potter's continuous stages, and the five ways in which a pot is not a lump of clay; the bending finger that needs a duality the doctrine denies itself; youth that does not make the prime; a world with nothing lost, in which no thief could ever reform; the pot's future breaking read back into the clay by the opponent's own rule; names that either arise, and so are new, or were always there, in which case the potter did nothing; the eight ways a real thing goes unnoticed, granted entire and answered by asking what became coarse; the clay that is chosen and not the rushes; and finally the seed that continues into the sprout and is gone.
Part Twelve takes the opposite doctrine and treats it no better. If the fruit is not in the cause, then it must come to be — and the chapter asks when. Not in the pot, which already is; not in the clay, where it is not yet; and not in a moment of arising, which turns out on inspection to be half of each. The chapter ends with a sentence that gathers the whole treatise into four terms: a thing does not produce a thing, a non-thing does not produce a non-thing, and neither produces the other.