Proof of Past and Future Lives

dharmakirti’s extended refutation of the Cārvāka / Lokāyata position that cognition is a product of the body and therefore cannot survive death. The argument occupies PV 2.34d–119 — the longest single section of Chapter 2 — and serves as a sub-demonstration within the larger establishment of the Buddha as valid cognition: without past and future lives, the Buddha could not have cultivated compassion over many lives, and so there would be no accomplisher of the resultant epithets.

The Cārvāka Thesis

Cognition depends on the body. The relation is variously characterised:

• Like alcohol possessing the power to create drunkenness (cognition as nature of the body)
• Like a lamp and its light (cognition as creation of the body)
• Like the sweetness of sugar (cognition as quality of the body)

On any of these readings, destruction of the body destroys the continuum of cognition. There are therefore no past or future lives.

The Core Reply: Mind Is Not Produced from Body

Dharmakīrti’s brief refutation (PV 2.34d–36): “Dependence is refuted. When birth is taken, breath, sense faculties, and cognition are not produced solely from the body without dependence upon similar types.” Each mental instant requires a homogeneous cause — a previous moment of cognition. If mind arose from body alone, the consequences are absurd (see below); and since we see cognition connecting from past to future across this life, there is no principled reason why it should not connect across the break of death.

gorampa (gorampa-pramanavartika, §36) structures the extended refutation (PV 2.37–119) as follows.

Absurd Consequences of Mind Arising from Body

From a body composed of the elements (PV 2.37–38)

If the four great elements can produce mind, then every place where heat and moisture are present would produce living beings, and all instances of earth would be in the nature of mind-seeds. Dharmakīrti: “there would be no place where heat and moisture would not produce living beings. Therefore all would be in the nature of seeds” (2.37).

From a body with sense faculties (PV 2.39–42)

The direction of dependence is the reverse: the sense faculties depend on mind, not mind on the sense faculties. Evidence: (a) when a sense faculty is damaged, mental cognition is not correspondingly damaged; (b) when the mind changes (by grief, distraction), the sense faculties change, as can be observed. Therefore karmas that depend on previous mental cognition are the cause of subsequent sense faculties — which, by the same reasoning, entails that at death mental cognition continues and generates new faculties. Reference: Treasury of Reasoning, “by the reason of the collection of causes being complete / and there being no hindrance, no future limit will be reached” (2.41 note).

The scriptural objection that “body and mind follow each other” is reinterpreted as indirect dependence (body affects bodily consciousness, which affects mind) — not direct support.

From a permanent body (PV 2.43–44)

The Lokāyata version in which the body is permanent and produces mind successively fails because a permanent cause cannot be affected by conditions, so succession is impossible; if succession is permitted by saying the body depends on successive cognition, the body itself must then have moments — and once the body has earlier and later moments, the preceding body-and-mind is seen to be the cause of the subsequent body-and-mind at all times, including at death. Future lives are thereby established.

Refutation of the Arhat-Exception Argument

The Lokāyata invoke the Buddhist tenet that an arhat’s final mind at death does not produce a subsequent mind — “like the mind of an arhat at death, the final mind of an ordinary being does not connect.” Dharmakīrti replies (PV 2.45–46):

• No contradiction is shown: “what is there that is contradictory to valid cognition with regard to that mind connecting to another mind? There is no contradiction at all.”
• The example is invalid: no valid cognition establishes that the arhat’s final mind does not connect
• Use of Buddhist tenets is illicit for the materialist: “Why would you follow a tenet not established by valid cognition?”
• The missing premise: if the materialist claims the arhat’s final mind fails to connect because it lacks its bodily cause, then the real reason is the body, not being “the final mind”; the “mind at death” reason is uncertain in pervasion and meaningless

Refutation of Body-Mind as Material Cause

The extended treatment (PV 2.47–78) refutes body and mind as:

• Direct cause and effect — mental cognition is not produced from a body with sense faculties (it would then clearly apprehend visual form like eye-cognition) or from a body without sense faculties (such a body has no mind). They are not produced from all five faculties together (each has its distinct empowered result)
• Material cause and effect (PV 2.49–50) — a material cause is a prior existent that, by its own existence, affects the result’s entity. The body does not so function for mind; it can affect features of the mind-continuum (like fire softening a pot) but that does not make it the material cause
• Support and supported — if the body were the direct support of mind, a dead body would still support mind; responses invoking breath, temperature, or “unconducive conditions” all fail under examination
• Co-arising by shared cause (PV 2.48) — body and mind can coexist without being support/supported, just as the five sense faculties of a being coexist, or as form and taste coexist in a single elemental collection. Shared cause is not the same as material cause
• Mind as the nature of the body — refuted by examining wetness, hardness, etc.
• Body as producer of mind by other mechanisms — refuted by case analysis

Material-Cause Principle

The underlying principle throughout is homogeneity of material cause: a phenomenon of a given kind (here, cognition / mind) requires a prior instance of its own kind as its material cause. Mental moments produce mental moments; elemental configurations produce elemental configurations. The body can be a coordinating condition (a “mere cause”) for mind — just as a previous body coordinates with previous desire to generate subsequent desire — but it cannot be the material cause. This is the same principle that underwrites momentariness and the Buddhist account of continuity in general.

Consequence: Accomplishment of Compassion Is Possible

Once the body-dependence thesis is refuted, the continuum of mind runs across lives. Training in compassion therefore has a coherent causal story — the mental seeds of compassion, if conditions are favourable and adverse circumstances (anger) absent, accumulate over many lives and can arrive at the limitless compassion of the Buddha. This is what the extended refutation was in service of: the whole rebirth proof (§36) is in the forward-sequence section establishing compassion as the accomplisher, not in the later truth-of-suffering section (gorampa-pramanavartika — Gorampa faults previous scholars for confusing the two).

Sources

• pramanavartika, Ch. 2, stanzas 34d–119 (c. 85 verses)
• gorampa-pramanavartika — §36, the most extensive running commentary; insists that the rebirth proof here is subordinate to the compassion-as-accomplisher argument, not a free-standing treatment