It may be supposed that this doctrine of an unqualified ultimate truth comes near to the Vedantic âtman or Brahman like the tathatâ doctrine of As'vagho@sa; and we find in La@nkavatâra that Râva@na asks the Buddha "How can you say that your doctrine of tathâgatagarbha was not the same as the âtman doctrine of the other schools of philosophers, for those heretics also consider the âtman as eternal, agent, unqualified, all pervading and unchanged?" To this the Buddha is found to reply thus--"Our doctrine is not the same as the doctrine of those heretics; it is in consideration of the fact that the instruction of a philosophy which considered that there was no soul or substance in anything (nairatmya) would frighten the disciples, that I say that all things are in reality the tathâgatagarbha. This should not be regarded as âtman. Just as a lump of clay is made into various shapes, so it is the non-essential nature of all phenomena and their freedom from all characteristics (_sarvavikalpalak@sa@navinivrttam_) that is variously described as the garbha or the nairâtmya (essencelessness). This explanation of tathâgatagarbha as the ultimate truth and reality is given in order to attract to our creed those heretics who are superstitiously inclined to believe in the âtman doctrine [Footnote ref 5]."
So far as the appearance of the phenomena was concerned, the idealistic Buddhists (_vijñânavâdins_) agreed to the doctrine of pratîtyasamutpâda with certain modifications. There was with them an external pratîtyasamutpâda just as it appeared in the
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[Footnote 1: Asa@nga's _Mahâyânasûtrâla@mkâra_, p. 65.]
objective aspect and an internal pratîtyasamutpâda. The external pratîtyasamutpâda (dependent origination) is represented in the way in which material things (e.g. a jug) came into being by the co-operation of diverse elements--the lump of clay, the potter, the wheel, etc. The internal (_âdhyâtmika_) pratîtyasamutpâda was represented by avidyâ, t@r@s@nâ, karma, the skandhas, and the âyatanas produced out of them [Footnote ref 1].
Our understanding is composed of two categories called the _pravichayabuddhi_ and the _vikalpalak@sa@nagrahâbhinives'aprati@s@thapikâbuddhi_. The pravicayabuddhi is that which always seeks to take things in either of the following four ways, that they are either this or the other (_ekatvânyaiva_); either both or not both (_ubhayânubhaya_), either are or are not (_astinâsti_), either eternal or non-eternal (_nityânitya_). But in reality none of these can be affirmed of the phenomena. The second category consists of that habit of the mind by virtue of which it constructs diversities and arranges them (created in their turn by its own constructive activity--_parikalpa_) in a logical order of diverse relations of subject and predicate, causal and other relations. He who knows the nature of these two categories of the mind knows that there is no external world of matter and that they are all experienced only in the mind. There is no water, but it is the sense construction of smoothness (_sneha_) that constructs the water as an external substance; it is the sense construction of activity or energy that constructs the external substance of fire; it is the sense construction of movement that constructs the external substance of air. In this way through the false habit of taking the unreal as the real (_mithyâsatyâbhinives'a_) five skandhas appear. If these were to appear all together, we could not speak of any kind of causal relations, and if they appeared in succession there could be no connection between them, as there is nothing to bind them together. In reality there is nothing which is produced or destroyed, it is only our constructive imagination that builds up things as perceived with all their relations, and ourselves as perceivers. It is simply a convention (_vyavahâra_) to speak of things as known [Footnote ref 2]. Whatever we designate by speech is mere speech-construction (_vâgvikalpa_) and unreal. In speech one could not speak of anything without relating things in some kind of causal