Sautrāntika

The Sautrāntika (T. mdo sde pa; C. jingliang bu 經量部) were an early Buddhist school which are commonly identified as a branch of the Sarvāstivādins.

Their name means literally "those who rely upon the sutras", which indicates that they accepted sutras as the word of the Buddha (buddhavacana), but they did not consider the Abhidharma to be also the word of the Buddha.

The Sautrantikas rejected the Sarvāstivādin's view that "things in all three times exist."

The views of this group are known primarily through through the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya of Vasubandhu.

Historical context

Charles Willemen distinguishes the the Sautrantika school from the Vaibhasika school, identifying these schools as two branches of the Sarvastivada who disagreed over the authority of the Abhidharma teachings. Willemen states:

One branch, the Vaibhasikas, who were active in Kashmir from the third till the middle of the seventh century C.E. and were long considered to be the orthodoxy, said that the Abhidharmapitaka was the Buddha’s word. The earlier and very diverse western Sarvastivada groups in the Gandhara area did not agree and considered only the sutras to be definitive truth. These groups were called Sautrantika, as opposed to Vaibhasika, and they did not have an Abhidharmapitaka, only abhidharma works.

The Sautrāntika are often associated with the Dārṣṭāntika, though the exact nature of their relationship is unclear. According to Charles Willemen, the Dārṣṭāntikas are Sarvāstivādins who kept the long, traditional vinaya, in contrast to the shorter Dasabhanavara of the Vaibhāṣika school.

No separate vinaya (monastic code) specific to the Sautrāntika has been found, nor is the existence of any such separate disciplinary code evidenced in other texts; this indicates that they were likely only a doctrinal division within the Sarvāstivādin school.

According to Dessein & Teng (2016), the Sarvastivada scholar Samghabhadra, in his Nyayanusara, attacks a school of thought named Sautrantika which he associates with the scholars Śrīlāta and his student Vasubandhu.

According to Quian Lin, some Chinese sources identify a teacher named *Kumāralāta (究摩羅陀), as the "first teacher of the Sautrāntikas." Kumāralāta is also identified as the teacher of Harivarman (250-350 CE), the author of the Tattvasiddhi Śāstra.

Doctrine

Emphasis on sutra over "commentaries"

Jan Westerhoff states:

It is commonly agreed that the Sautrāntikas developed out of the Sarvāstivāda, and this school has acquired considerable subsequent doxographic prominence by being considered (together with the Sarvāstivāda or Vaibhāṣika) as one of the two schools of the ‘lower vehicle’ in Indo-Tibetan explications of the different schools of Buddhist philosophy. The name of the school tells us that the sūtras were of particular importance for its followers, and Yaśomitra, a commentator on Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, defines them as those who regard the sūtras, but not the commentaries (śāstras), as authoritative. [...] The term śāstra is here to be understood as referring to the Abhidharma treatises, and it is these, therefore, which the Sautrāntikas were considered to reject. For the Sautrāntikas, it is argued, the authority of the Abhidharma was not simply derivative relative to the sūtras, but was no authority at all.

Limited information

Jan Westerhoff states:

No Sautrāntika treatises have come down to us, and it does not appear as if there ever was a distinct Sautrāntika ordination lineage. The term ‘school’ here refers to doctrinal distinctions, not to the fact that the Sautrāntikas would have had their own set of monastic rules differing from those of other schools. Most of our information about their positions is based on Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, which is supposed comment from a Sautrāntika perspective on a root text that describes Sarvāstivāda doctrines. It is unlikely that Vasubandhu was the first Sautrāntika (though the term is not attested before his usage in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya), yet how these early Sautrāntika views of ‘an anti-Abhidharma Hīnayāna tradition with no literary remains’ would relate to Vasubandhu’s position, and whether it in turn agrees with the positions of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, which have also sometimes been labelled as ‘Sautrāntika’ positions, is a moot point.

Rejection of doctrine that "things exist in the three times"

The Sautrantikas rejected the Sarvāstivādins view that "things in all three times exist."

Jan Westerhoff states:

What seems to be relatively clear, however, is that the Sautrāntikas (at least as described by Vasubandhu) disagreed with the eponymous doctrine of the Sarvāstivāda, the idea that things in all three times exist. Some authors argued that the Sautrāntikas do not appear to be ‘a group having a defined set of doctrinal positions’, apart from the fact that their ‘perspective can be characterized only by a rejection of the definitive Sarvāstivāda position that factors exist in the three periods of time’. So far it might be most satisfactory to consider the term ‘Sautrāntika’ to refer to a broader range of positions unified by the fact that they put special emphasis on the sūtras and reject the Sarvāstivāda theory of transtemporal existence.

Theory of "momentariness"

Jan Westerhoff states:

If, as the Sautrāntikas hold, the Sarvāstivāda account [of existence in the three times] is to be rejected, what then is the status of past and future entities? According to the exposition of Sautrāntika we find in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, everything lasts only for a moment. Not only do past and future entities fail to exist in any substantial way, the present also does not possess any temporal thickness; immediately after coming into existence each moment passes out of existence. The theory of momentariness therefore claims that all constituents of the world, all dharmas, whether mental or material, only last for an instant (kṣaṇa) and cease immediately after arising. Permanence is a mere appearance produced by the fact that very similar moments rapidly arise and cease one after another, succeeding each other in such quick succession that we are ordinarily unable to perceive them as moments, but only see change that is underpinned by objects that endure through time. This peculiar cinematographic conception of reality conceives of the world as a kind of three-dimensional film projection. Individual dharmas succeed each other like frames in a movie, and blur into each other because our perception lacks the temporal discrimination necessary to tell them apart.

Collete Cox states:

The [Sautrantika] criticized orthodox Sarvastivada ontology as thinly veiled permanence and instead argued for a doctrine of extreme momentariness. They rejected unequivocally the existence of past and future factors, and equated the existence of present factors with an instantaneous exertion of activity. In contrast to the complex array of existent factors proposed by the Sarvastivadins, the [Sautrantika] claimed that experience is best described as an indistinguishable process.

Vasubandhu's argument for momentariness

Jan Westerhoff states:

Vasubandhu’s argument for momentariness takes as its first premise the idea that everything is impermanent, a position that is, of course, well supported by the Buddha’s theory of the three marks of existence. If everything eventually perishes, what brings this about in each particular case? There may be an external cause operating on each object, moving it from existence to non-existence, or each object may eventually destroy itself without any external influence. Once its existential power is exhausted it simply vanishes. The first possibility seems to be what accords most closely with the manifest image of the world, where windows are shattered, flowers wither, and humans die, all because of the influence of external causes (the brick, the heat, the tumor in the brain). Yet there are difficulties with conceptualizing these as causing non-existences, unless we assume that non-existences are real objects, first-class ontological citizens of the world, and not merely linguistic hypostatizations, as the Buddhists assume. The second premise of the argument is therefore the claim that particular non-existences are not things that can stand in causal relations. When something causes the non-existence of something else there is no thing that is causally brought into existence.

Three arguments for momentariness

Westerhoff identifies three arguments for establishing momentariness that developed within the Buddhist philosophical tradition:

• spontaneity of destruction,
• the momentariness of cognition, and
• change.

Further reading on momentariness:

• Westerhoff (2018), "The Abhidharma Schools"

Perception

Jan Westerhoff states:

The theory of momentariness has immediate consequences for the Sautrāntika’s account of perception. Perception appears to require temporally extended objects, and the argument just given seems to show that there are no such things. Perception takes place in time, and so the earliest a perception of any dharma at moment t can arise is at the moment after t. At the moment after t, however, the dharma has already passed out of existence. Yet when we perceive something, we presumably perceive something that exists.

The Sarvāstivāda solved this issue by their assumption that the past object, though currently not efficacious, still exists. The Sautrāntikas, on the other hand, accepted that we can perceive non-existent objects, such as past or future entities. Their disagreement with Sarvāstivāda lies primarily in their view of whether there needs to exist a separate object-support condition (ālambana-pratyaya) for every perception, something the Sarvāstivāda affirms and the Sautrāntika denies.

The basic idea behind the Sautrāntika account is that at one mental moment, t, an object is grasped, though no knowledge of the object is produced. This moment t then causes its successor moment, t’, which produces an inferential knowledge of the object that was grasped at t. At t’ the object-support condition no longer exists, and this object-support condition is also not what is causally responsible for t’, which is rather brought about by the immediately preceding condition (samanantara-pratyaya) t. The knowledge of the external object at t’ appears under an aspect or form (ākāra). This aspect can be understood both as a specific way of apprehending an object, and as an entity corresponding to the object so apprehended.

Further reading on perception:

• Westerhoff (2018), "The Abhidharma Schools"
• Ronkin, Noa  (Summer 2022), Abhidharma, 6. Epistemology: Perception and the theory of the consciousness process, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Other aspects of doctrine

Sautrantika doctrines expounded by elder Śrīlāta and critiqued in turn by Samghabhadra's Nyayanusara include:

• The theory of anudhatu (or *purvanudhatu, "subsidiary element"), which is also associated with the theory of seeds (Bīja) espoused by Vasubandhu. This theory was used to explain karma and rebirth.

• The doctrine that caitasikas (mental factors) are but modes of citta (mind) and are not separate elemental dharmas which come together in "association" (samprayoga) as the Vaibhāṣika believed.

• The doctrine that the sense-elements (dhatu) alone are real existents, not the aggregates (skandha) or sense spheres (ayatana).

Sub-schools

The Tibetan tradition distinguishes between two sub-schools within Sautrāntika school:

• Sautrantikas Following Scripture whose description of the two truths accords with that of the Vaibhashikas; and
• Sautrantikas Following Reasoning who follow the pramana tradition of Dignaga and Dharmakīrti.

Jan Westerhoff states:

Indian and Tibetan doxography also mentions the categories of Sautrāntika ‘following scripture’ (āgamānuyāyī) and Sautrāntika ‘following reasoning’ (yuktyānuyāyī), the former referring to the kind of Sautrāntika discussed by Vasubandhu, the latter to the systems of Diṅnāga and Dharmakīrti.

This distinction is emphasized in the four tenet systems of Tibetan Buddhism.

Sources

• Buswell, Robert E.; Lopez, Donald S. (2014), The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Princeton University 
• Cox, Collete (2004), "Mainstream Buddhist Schools", in Buswell, Robert E., Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Vol. 1, MacMillan Reference USA, pp. 501–507 
• Dessein, Bart; Teng, Weijen (2016), Text, History, and Philosophy: Abhidharma across Buddhist Scholastic Traditions, BRILL 
• Lin, Qian (2015), Mind in Dispute: The Section on Mind in Harivarman’s *Tattvasiddhi (PDF) (Phd thesis), University of Washington 
• Shantarakshita (2005), The Adornment of the Middle Way: Shantarakshita's Madhyamakalankara with commentary by Jamgon Mipham, translated by Padmakara Translation Group, Boston: Shambhala Publications, ISBN 1-59030-241-9 
• Westerhoff, Jan (2018), The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Oxford University Press 
• Willemen, Charles (2004), "Dharma and dharmas", in Buswell, Robert E., Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Vol. 1, MacMillan Reference USA, pp. 217–224 

External links

• Sautrāntika, Wikipedia
• "Sautrāntika Theory of Perception [Part 14]". www.wisdomlib.org. 
• "Sautrāntika theory of Inference [Part 15]". www.wisdomlib.org.