Ten Faults in the Abhidharma
Having let the Sarvāstivādin state his case in full, Jizang now takes it apart in ten distinct moves — from the claim that a self-natured "existence" contradicts the very concept of the way, through a citation chain running from the Vimalakīrti and the Lotus to the Great Perfection of Wisdom Treatise, to the charge that the Abhidharma tradition has ended up losing sight of both truths at once. The part closes by opening the treatise's third sect: Harivarman and the Satyasiddhi school, in its own account of how it emerged from within the Sarvāstivāda it claims to surpass.
1. Ten Names, and the Verdict in Advance
Jizang names all ten faults at once before explaining any of them — a table of contents in miniature, exactly like the naming of the four sects in Part 1 — and states the overall verdict before the detailed case: the name "Dharma Without Compare" outruns what it actually delivers.
破斥第二凡有十門。一乖至道。二扶眾見。三違大教。四守小筌。五迷自宗。六無本信。七有偏執。八非學本。九弊真言。十喪圓旨。蓋無比之名有餘。所明之理不足。非但遠乖方等。亦近迷三藏。略舉十門顯其虛實。
Refuting it, second: there are ten gates in all. First, it runs contrary to the ultimate way. Second, it merely reinforces the multitude's own views. Third, it violates the great teaching. Fourth, it clings to the small raft. Fifth, it loses sight of its own root tradition. Sixth, it is without the root faith. Seventh, it falls into one-sided grasping. Eighth, it is not the proper basis of study. Ninth, it obscures the words of truth. Tenth, it loses the perfect purport. The name "without compare" is more than sufficient; the principle it actually sets forth is not. It stands not only far removed from the teachings of the broad Mahāyāna canon, but comes close, even within the Three Baskets themselves, to falling into confusion. Let these ten gates be briefly set out, to make plain what in it is empty and what is real.
2. Faults One and Two: Against the Way Itself, and Reinforcing Ordinary Views
The first fault is the deepest: the very concept of "the way" (道), Jizang argues, is by definition beyond the four propositions and the hundred negations — so any position built on asserting the real existence of dharmas has already, by its own grammar, missed the target. The second fault presses the same point through the Vimalakīrti and Lotus sūtras: to "see existence" is simply to hold a view, and holding any view at all, be it for existence or for non-existence, is what the Buddha's teaching calls a wrong view.
乖至道者。夫道之為狀也。體絕百非。理超四句。言之者失其真。知之者反其愚。有之者乖其性。無之者傷其體。故七辨輟音。五眼冥照。釋迦掩室。淨名杜口。豈可以有而為道哉。
It runs contrary to the ultimate way: as for the way's own condition, its essence cuts off the hundred negations, and its principle transcends the four propositions. Whoever speaks of it loses what is true in it; whoever claims to know it turns, in that very claim, into a fool. To assert it exists is to run contrary to its nature; to assert it does not exist is to wound its very essence. This is why the sevenfold eloquence falls silent, and the five eyes look on in dark, wordless illumination; why Śākyamuni shut the door of his chamber, and Vimalakīrti sealed his mouth in silence. How, then, could existence possibly be taken for the way?
第二扶眾見。然道實非有。遂言見有得道。乃是見有。非見道也。故淨名云。法名無染。若染於法。乃是染著。非求法也。又夫見有者名為有見。非見道矣。故法華云。入邪見稠林若有若無等。依止此諸見具足六十二。問若執有無。此有何失。答正觀論云。淺智見諸法若有若無等。是則不能見滅見安隱法。於彼有大過矣。
Second, it merely reinforces the multitude's own views. The way is, in truth, not a matter of existence at all — yet the Abhidharma goes on to say that one attains the path by seeing existence. But this is simply seeing existence; it is not seeing the way. Hence the Vimalakīrti Sūtra says: "The Dharma is named the undefiled. If one becomes defiled even by the Dharma itself, this is simply attachment and defilement — it is not the seeking of the Dharma." Moreover, whoever sees existence thereby holds what is called a view of existence — this is not seeing the way at all. Hence the Lotus Sūtra says: "Entering the dense thicket of wrong views, whether of existence or of non-existence" and so on; resting on these various views, the sixty-two views are thereby completed in full. Question: If one holds to existence or non-existence, what fault is there in this? Answer: The Treatise on Correct Contemplation says: "Those of shallow wisdom see all dharmas as existent or as non-existent," and so on; such a person is then unable to see the dharma of cessation, the dharma of peaceful security — in this there is a very great fault indeed.
"The sevenfold eloquence" and "the five eyes" name accomplishments of a buddha's own speech and vision; that both are said here to fall silent before the way is Jizang's way of saying that even a buddha's fullest powers of articulation do not reduce the way to something that can be asserted to exist. "Śākyamuni shut the door of his chamber" and "Vimalakīrti sealed his mouth in silence" both allude to famous scenes of instructive silence — the Buddha's own withdrawal after his enlightenment, and Vimalakīrti's wordless answer, in the sūtra of his name, to a question about the gate of non-duality, answered by no answer at all.
The Treatise on Correct Contemplation (正觀論) cited here is this school's own name for Piṅgala's commentary on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā — the very treatise this collection has already translated in full, under the title it circulated by in Kumārajīva's Chinese. Jizang is not citing an outside authority to settle this dispute; he is citing his own school's root text, by one of the several names Chinese readers of the period knew it by.
3. Faults Three and Four: Against the Broad Teaching, and Clinging to the Small Raft
The third fault invokes a direct scriptural warning against exactly this position; the fourth turns the Abhidharma's own most famous self-justifying image — the raft that carries one across the river, the finger that points at the moon — back against it, arguing that the school has mistaken the vehicle for the destination.
第三違大教。思益經云。於未來世有惡比丘。說有相法得成聖道。佛垂此勅懸誡將來。既曰惡人。理是邪說。違背大教。宜須破之。
Third, it violates the great teaching. The Sī-yì Sūtra says: "In the world to come there will be evil monks who teach that one accomplishes the sagely path by means of dharmas that possess marks." The Buddha handed down this decree, hanging it as a warning for ages yet to come. Since he already calls such people evil, the position in question must, by that very principle, be a heterodox teaching, one that violates the great teaching outright — and it should accordingly be refuted.
第四守小筌。夫為未識源者。示之以流。令尋流以得源。未見月者。示之以指。令因指以得月。窮流則唯是一源。亡指則但是一月。蓋是如來說小之意也。而毘曇之徒執固小宗不趣大道。守筌喪實。故造論破之。
Fourth, it clings to the small raft. For one who does not yet know the source, one shows the tributary stream, so that by tracing the stream he may arrive at the source; for one who has not yet seen the moon, one points with a finger, so that by means of the finger he may find the moon. When the stream is followed to its end, there is only the single source; once the finger is forgotten, there is only the one moon — and this is precisely the Tathāgata's intention in teaching the lesser vehicle. Yet the followers of the Abhidharma cling fast to their small tradition and do not advance toward the great way; they hold on to the raft and thereby lose the substance it was meant to deliver. This is why the treatise was composed, to refute them.
The raft and the pointing finger are among the most familiar images in the whole Buddhist canon, but Jizang's use of them here is pointed in a specific direction: not "all teachings are provisional, so none should be taken too seriously," but the much narrower claim that the Hīnayāna teaching of existence was always meant as a stream leading somewhere else, never as the source itself. The fault is not in the Buddha's having taught it — the fault belongs entirely to a later school that stopped at the raft and mistook the stopping-place for the destination.
4. Fault Five: Losing Sight of Its Own Root Tradition
The fifth fault is, in a sense, an internal contradiction: the Abhidharma masters are themselves supposed to be transmitting the Buddha's own early discourses, the Āgamas — yet those very discourses, Jizang points out, already teach the markless, and two of the Buddha's own foremost disciples are recorded as awakening precisely through emptiness, not through seeing existence.
第五迷自宗。諸聖弟子有所述作。本為通經。而阿含之文親說無相。故善吉觀法空而悟道。身子入空定而佛歎。阿毘曇人但明見有。故自迷本宗。
Fifth, it loses sight of its own root tradition. Whatever the noble disciples composed, they composed originally in order to make the sūtras understood — yet the very text of the Āgamas itself speaks directly of the markless. This is why Subhūti awakened to the path by contemplating the emptiness of phenomena, and why Śāriputra entered the concentration of emptiness and was praised for it by the Buddha himself. The followers of the Abhidharma, however, expound only the seeing of existence — and so they lose sight of their own root tradition, by their own hand.
5. Fault Six: Without the Root Faith
The sixth fault draws on the Mañjuśrī-paripṛcchā Sūtra's claim that every school of Buddhism, including the eighteen schismatic schools, ultimately derives from the Mahāyāna. If the Abhidharma's own tradition traces back to a Mahāyāna root, then a follower who refuses to trust the Mahāyāna is, in effect, refusing to trust his own ancestry.
第六無本信。文殊問經云。十八及本二皆從大乘出。無是亦無非。我說未來起。十八者。謂十八部異執也。及本二者。根本唯二部。一大眾部。二上座部。而阿毘曇是十八部內薩婆多部。從大乘出。即大為小本。而執小之流聞大乘不信。是以破之。
Sixth, it is without the root faith. The Mañjuśrī-paripṛcchā Sūtra says: "The eighteen schools, together with the original two, all emerge from the Mahāyāna. There is no right and no wrong among them; I speak of how they will arise in the future." "The eighteen" refers to the eighteen schools of divergent doctrine; "the original two" means that, at the root, there are only two schools: first, the Mahāsāṃghika; second, the Sthavira. The Abhidharma belongs to the Sarvāstivāda, one of the eighteen schools within this scheme, and this scheme states that it emerges from the Mahāyāna — so the great vehicle is the root of the small. Yet those who cling to the small vehicle, on hearing of the Mahāyāna, do not believe in it. This is why it must be refuted.
問何以知執小之人不信大法耶。答智度論云。旃延弟子答龍樹云。我聞大乘心不都信。故外國執小乘者與學大乘人分河飲水。
Question: How is it known that those who cling to the small vehicle do not believe in the great teaching? Answer: The Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom says that a disciple of Kātyāyana answered Nāgārjuna, saying: "When I hear the Mahāyāna, my mind does not believe it entirely." This is why, in foreign lands, those who cling to the Hīnayāna and those who study the Mahāyāna divide the very river between them and drink from separate banks.
The scheme of "the original two" schools branching into eighteen (or, by another count used later in this treatise, twenty) is a piece of Buddhist sectarian history that Jizang will return to in enormous detail in Part 9 and Part 10 of this collection, tracing the full genealogy of every named sub-school. Here it is invoked only for its conclusion: every one of the eighteen schools, on this text's own telling, descends from the Mahāyāna, which makes a Hīnayāna follower's distrust of the Mahāyāna a kind of filial disloyalty to his own tradition's actual root.
6. Faults Seven and Eight: One-Sided Grasping, and the Wrong Basis of Study
The seventh fault charges the Abhidharma with sectarian exclusivity in the face of a scripture that explicitly asks for pluralism among the schools. The eighth stages an exchange with Nāgārjuna himself, over the question of whether the four conditions of causation are properly studied through the Abhidharma or through the Perfection of Wisdom — and Nāgārjuna's own answer is that prolonged study of the Abhidharma actually breeds wrong view.
第七有偏執。大集經云。雖有五部。並不妨如來法界及大涅槃。而阿毘曇人保執自宗排斥他說。便違法界拒大涅槃。累障既深。宜須傷歎。
Seventh, it falls into one-sided grasping. The Mahāsaṃnipāta Sūtra says: "Though there are five schools, none of them stand in the way of the Tathāgata's Dharma-realm or of great nirvāṇa." Yet the followers of the Abhidharma hold fast and cling to their own tradition, and push aside every other teaching — and in doing exactly this, they violate the Dharma-realm and reject great nirvāṇa. Their accumulated obstruction runs deep indeed, and it is fitting to grieve over it.
第八非學本。大品經云。欲知四緣。當學般若。外人問龍樹云。欲學四緣。應學毘曇。云何乃學般若。論主答曰。初學毘曇似如可解。轉久推求則成邪見。問曰學毘曇云何乃成邪見。答若言四緣生諸法者。誰復生於四緣。若四緣更從他生。則他復從他。如是無窮。若其四緣自然而有不從他生者。萬物亦應不由四緣。當墮無因。故從則無窮。窮則無因。由此二門則不信因果。故久學毘曇成於邪見。
Eighth, it is not the proper basis of study. The Larger Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra says: "If you wish to know the four conditions, you should study the Perfection of Wisdom." An outsider asked Nāgārjuna: "If one wishes to study the four conditions, one should study the Abhidharma — why, then, study the Perfection of Wisdom instead?" The author of the treatise answered: "When one first studies the Abhidharma, it seems as though it can be understood; but the longer one presses the investigation, the more it turns into wrong view." Question: How does studying the Abhidharma come to turn into wrong view? Answer: If one says that the four conditions give rise to all dharmas, then what, in turn, gives rise to the four conditions themselves? If the four conditions are said to arise from something else again, then that something else must in turn arise from something further still, and so on without end. But if the four conditions are said to exist spontaneously, not arising from anything else, then the ten thousand things too ought not to depend on the four conditions, and one falls into holding there is no cause at all. So if one follows the chain of dependence, it runs on without end; and if one halts the chain, one falls into having no cause. By these two gates alike, one ends up disbelieving in cause and effect altogether. This is why prolonged study of the Abhidharma turns into wrong view.
The dilemma pressed in fault eight — either the chain of conditions regresses without end, or it terminates in something uncaused — is the identical structure already used against the outsiders' causal theories in Part 1 of this collection. Jizang is showing that the Abhidharma's account of causation, for all that it considers itself thoroughly Buddhist, collapses into exactly the same infinite-regress-or-uncaused-origin trap that the outsiders' theories did. The four conditions (四緣) — causal, immediately antecedent, objective, and dominant — are examined at length in the opening chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.
7. Faults Nine and Ten: Obscuring the Truth, and Losing Both Truths at Once
The last two faults bring the ten-point refutation to its climax. The ninth argues, through the conversion story of the Buddha's very first disciples, that the deepest truth cannot be spoken in the terms of "existence" at all. The tenth generalizes the charge into the treatise's most severe verdict: by clinging to existence without penetrating emptiness, the Abhidharma masters end up understanding neither of the two truths properly — not even the conventional truth they think they have secured.
第九弊真言。大集經云。甚深之義不可說。第一義諦無聲字。陳如比丘於諸法獲得真實之知見。本起經云。頞鞞沙門即五人之一。為身子說偈云。一切諸法本。因緣空無主。息心達本源。故號為沙門。身子聞之即得初果。尋大小二經。皆明見空成聖。而阿毘曇謂觀有得道。故隱覆真言。
Ninth, it obscures the words of truth. The Mahāsaṃnipāta Sūtra says: "The meaning of what is most profound cannot be spoken; the ultimate truth has no sound and no syllable." The monk Ājñāta-Kauṇḍinya attained a true and real knowledge and vision of all dharmas. The Sūtra on the Origins says that the śramaṇa Aśvajit, one of the five original disciples, spoke a verse for Śāriputra's sake, saying: "All dharmas have their root in causes and conditions, empty and without a master; when the mind is stilled, one reaches the fundamental source — and this is why one is called a śramaṇa." On hearing this, Śāriputra at once attained the first fruit. Examining both the Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna sūtras alike, both make clear that seeing emptiness is what accomplishes sagehood — yet the Abhidharma holds that one attains the path by contemplating existence. It has therefore obscured the very words of truth.
第十喪圓旨。涅槃經云。欲令眾生深識真諦。是故如來宣說於俗。若使眾生不因俗諦而識真者。諸佛如來終不說俗。毘曇之流雖知俗有。不悟真空。既惑真空。亦迷俗有。是故真俗二俱並喪。
Tenth, it loses the perfect purport. The Nirvāṇa Sūtra says: "Wishing to make sentient beings deeply recognize the ultimate truth, the Tathāgata therefore proclaims the conventional truth. If sentient beings could not, by means of the conventional truth, come to recognize the ultimate, the buddhas and tathāgatas would never have taught the conventional at all." The followers of the Abhidharma, though they know conventional existence, do not awaken to ultimate emptiness. And precisely because they are confused about ultimate emptiness, they are likewise mistaken about conventional existence as well — for this reason, both the ultimate and the conventional truths are lost together, at one and the same time.
The tenth fault's closing logic — that failing to understand emptiness means one has not really understood conventional existence either, since the two truths are only properly grasped together — is the treatise's single most important recurring argument, and it returns as the explicit "guiding doctrine" of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā itself far later in this collection, in the discussion of the two truths in Part 11. Aśvajit's four-line verse to Śāriputra — 諸法因緣生，我說即是空 in its more famous later form — became one of the single most quoted verses in the whole history of Chinese Madhyamaka; it is the verse from which Nāgārjuna's own twenty-fourth chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā takes its famous line equating dependent origination with emptiness. Jizang cites it here in its earliest attested form, from the account of Śāriputra's own conversion.
8. Opening the Third Sect: Harivarman's Own Account
With the Abhidharma refuted on all ten counts, Jizang turns to the third sect: Harivarman's Satyasiddhi (成實, "establishing what is real"), presented here through the voice of one of Harivarman's own senior disciples. The biography given is pointed in its own right — Harivarman is presented as a former Sarvāstivādin who grew dissatisfied with that very tradition and set out to surpass it by studying across sectarian lines.
排成實第三。一立義。二破斥。有訶梨跋摩高足弟子。序其宗曰。成實論者。佛滅度後九百年內有訶梨跋摩。此云師子鎧之所造也。
Pushing aside Satyasiddhi, third. First, establishing its position; second, refuting it. There is a senior disciple of Harivarman who sets out his own school's position, saying: "The Satyasiddhi-śāstra — within the ninth century after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa there was Harivarman, whose name translates as 'Lion's Armor,' and it was he who composed this treatise."
其人本是薩婆多部鳩摩羅陀弟子。慨其所釋近在名相。遂徙轍僧祇大小兼學。鑽仰九經。澄汰五部。再卷邪霧。重舒慧日。於是道振罽賓。聲流赤縣。成是能成之文。實謂所成之理。二百二品十六卷文。四諦建章。五聚明義。說既精巧。歸眾若林。
"This person was originally a disciple of Kumāralāta of the Sarvāstivāda school. Lamenting that his teacher's own explanations stayed too close to names and marks, he transferred his allegiance and studied the Mahāsāṃghika tradition as well, taking in both the lesser and the greater alike. He bored deeply into the nine scriptural divisions, and sifted clean the five schools; he rolled back the mists of heterodoxy a second time, and unfurled once more the sun of wisdom. And so his way shook the land of Kashmir, and its fame flowed as far as the red-soiled lands of China. 'Establishing' names the text that does the establishing; 'what is real' names the principle thereby established. In two hundred and two chapters across sixteen fascicles of text, it builds its framework on the four truths and makes its meaning clear through five categories. Its exposition being both refined and skillful, those who turned to it gathered as thick as a forest."
問跋摩既排斥八犍。陶汰五部。成實之宗正依何義。答有人言。擇善而從。有能必錄。棄眾師之短。取諸部之長。有人言。雖復斥排群異。正用曇無德部。有人言。偏斥毘曇。專同譬喻。真諦三藏云。用經部義也。檢俱舍論。經部之義多同成實。
Question: Since Harivarman rejected the Eight Aggregations and sifted out the five schools, precisely which doctrine does the Satyasiddhi tradition rely on? Answer: Some say: he chose what was good and followed it, recording without exception whatever showed genuine ability, discarding the shortcomings of the various masters and taking up the strengths of every school. Others say: although he rejected and pushed aside every divergent position, what he actually relied on was, specifically, the Dharmaguptaka school. Others say: he singled out the Abhidharma alone for rejection, and aligned himself exclusively with the Sautrāntika lineage. The Tripiṭaka master Paramārtha said that he made use of the Sautrāntika doctrine specifically. Examining the Abhidharmakośa confirms that the Sautrāntika's own doctrine is, in large part, the same as Satyasiddhi's.
Notice the structural symmetry with Part 2's opening of the Abhidharma sect: there too, Jizang began with the school's own most confident self-presentation before dismantling it. Here the self-presentation is more biographical than doctrinal — Harivarman is introduced as a figure who moved between schools out of genuine dissatisfaction, a portrait that makes the coming refutation, in Part 4, land differently than it did against the Abhidharma masters: Jizang's ten-point case against Satyasiddhi will turn not on accusing it of crude literalism, as with the Abhidharma, but on arguing that for all its genuine sophistication, it never actually reaches the Mahāyāna it is sometimes mistaken for.
Part Three Complete
This closes Part Three: the ten-point refutation of the Abhidharma school, running from its contradiction of the very concept of the way through its clinging to the raft, its estrangement from its own Āgama roots, its lack of faith in the Mahāyāna it descends from, and its final loss of both the ultimate and the conventional truth at once; and the opening of the third sect, Harivarman's Satyasiddhi, introduced through his own disciple's account of a teacher who broke from the Sarvāstivāda precisely because it stayed too close to names and marks.
Part Four opens the case for whether Satyasiddhi is, in the end, a Hīnayāna or a Mahāyāna teaching — a question this treatise answers with ten proofs of its own, beginning with the direct testimony of Sengrui, who sat at Kumārajīva's side as the Satyasiddhi-śāstra was first translated into Chinese.