Chapter 5: The Expressed and the Expresser
Does language pick out the particular or the universal? The Mīmāṃsakas argue for the particular from ordinary use: asked to bring a vase, nobody supposes the universal is meant, and one cannot hand over a concept. Sakya Paṇḍita answers that particulars stand apart, each determined on its own, and are limitless, so no name can be assigned to them, and that once a convention is fixed the original particular can hardly be found again. The chapter then establishes the universal as what language expresses and removes the objections that follow.
Condensed from Khenpo Sodargye’s Chinese lecture transcripts on the Pramāṇayuktanidhi, and rendered into English. Root verses are given as the lectures give them; the prose beneath summarises the exposition. On the provenance and the limits of this rendering, see the series introduction.
Chapters: 1. Objects · 2. Cognition · 3. Universals and Particulars · 4. Proof and Exclusion · 5. Expressed and Expresser · 6. Connection · 7. Contradiction · 8. Definitions · 9. Perception · 10. Inference for Oneself · 11. Inference for Others
The Way the Expressed and the Expresser are Cognised
Three parts: (1) refuting others’ positions; (2) establishing our own position; (3) removing disputes.
1. Refuting Others’ Positions
Two parts: refuting that the particular is the expressed, and refuting that the universal is the expressed.
a. Refuting that the Particular is the Expressed
Two parts: the particular of the object, and the particular of cognition.
i. Refuting that the Particular of the Object is the Expressed
Certain schools hold that for “vase” and the like, The particular of the external object is the expressed.
The expressed (所诠) is the content language conveys — what is being said, and equally what is known. The expresser (能诠) is what conveys it: the words that bring something to a hearer’s understanding. Saying “the vase is impermanent,” the impermanence of the vase is the expressed and the uttered phrase the expresser. The chapter’s question: in ordinary speech, does the expresser pick out the particular or the universal? (Full definitions come under “our own position” below.)
[Mīmāṃsaka; within Buddhism, Vātsīputrīya] The expressed is the particular of the external object. Their argument: saying “bring me the vase,” nobody supposes the universal is meant — the listener understands the particular and fetches it. One cannot pull a concept out of one’s head and hand it over. Since actual vases are brought, the particular is what is named.
Particulars stand apart, each determined on its own; Being limitless, no name can be assigned to them; And even when conventions are put to use, The original particular can hardly be found again.
The reply presses two faults. First, the name cannot be assigned at the outset. Particulars stand apart unmingled and are limitless by place (vases in every city and household), by time (past, present, future), and by form (large, small, white, red, gold, silver). Naming each is impossible. Temporally the difficulty is sharper still: a vase rises and falls many times in a second, so by the time “vase” has been uttered the vase named has perished — as if a child were named and died the instant after, the name being untransferable since it was laid on a particular.
Second, even if named, the name could not be used. The particular originally named is already gone. Had a master yesterday named the world’s vases “vase,” today “bring me the vase” would fetch nothing, since yesterday’s particulars have perished.
Why then does naming work? Because we conflate particular and universal and assign the name to that. A child is named Zhāng-sān and the name serves for life — and after death too, while a continuum of the universal persists in mind. Were the name on the particular, it should expire with the body. Observation shows otherwise, so the name was never on the particular.
Past and future would not be expressible, For they have no particular at present.
A further consequence: if the expressed were the particular, past things (whose particulars no longer exist) and future things (next year’s blossoms, of which not a mote is present) could not be spoken of at all. Yet we do speak of the future Buddha Maitreya and the past Buddha Kāśyapa. So the content of speech is not the particular.
The upshot for everyday language: speaker and hearer both take themselves to be dealing in particulars, and both are mistaken.
If convention could express the particular, The eye-faculty and the rest would have no purpose.
A consequence pressed on the Mīmāṃsakas: expressed and expresser go with known and knower — the known is the expressed. If language truly stated a thing’s particular, what is to be known would already have been said and known, and the senses would be idle. The eye knows a form’s particular, the ear sound’s, the tongue taste’s; if saying “pillar” already presented the pillar’s colour, sound, smell, taste and tangibility to consciousness, no faculty would be needed. (Presentation is of two kinds: directly, to non-conceptual cognition; or in conception, by way of the universal — the latter a rough imagining, not cognising the thing.)
The same argument form appeared under exclusion: were exclusion resident in the external particular, the fault of “the blind being able to see” would follow.
The external object has no connection [with the name], So the sense-faculties cannot grasp them as related; Joining “this is that” is the work of investigation — And that is exclusion.
External particulars have no connections among themselves; each exists fragmentary and unmingled. So the link between the sound “vase” and the particular vase is not located in the object, and the non-conceptual senses — which take only what is there — cannot grasp such a relation. Relation (相属) means connection or linkage.
Two consequences if the link were in the object. First, uttering “vase” should let the eye see the vase’s particular or the ear hear it. Second, saying “please bring me the vase” in Chinese to an Englishman or Tibetan who knows no Chinese should bring the vase at once. It does not: a Tibetan herd-boy understands “yak” in Tibetan and nothing in Chinese. So name-meaning linkage is not in the object.
Tying the expressed meaning to the expressing phrase — “ah, the vase I spoke of is this” — is not the work of the senses but of conception, and that is exclusion.
When the connection is first established, Though one points out the particular, The name is in fact assigned to the universal — Names are coined for the use of convention.
To assign a name one first points out a particular — pointing at the child, then calling him Wang-Ming. This raises the question whether the name lands on the particular or the universal. It lands on the universal. The namer takes himself to be naming the particular but names the child’s universal; the hearer takes himself to hear a name for the particular, but from the side of the expressed the name is laid on the universal. Were it on the particular, the earlier faults return: today the child’s particular is wholly changed, and if yesterday I named a vase “vase,” a pillar found today cannot take its place.
The verse’s last line gives the purpose: names are coined so that convention can be used — so that affirmation and denial, judgment, can be performed. The particular is not required for that.
If the senses could grasp the object mixed with its name, Then even without knowing the name one would know it.
[Objection] The object of naming is a complex of name and external particular together.
Reply: if universal and particular, or name and object, were one entity, that fused entity would be an object of the senses, and merely seeing a thing would yield its name without ever having learned it. Anyone seeing a vase would call out “this is a vase” though he had never heard the word. This plainly does not happen. (Here name and language are used interchangeably, as are meaning and object.)
The Buddha taught that a name must be set down for each thing, since without names things cannot be distinguished — to know a hundred faces and not one name leaves the acquaintance useless. But the name is imputed by conception, not grasped by the senses. Were names on particulars, the names of the dead — past masters of the early translations, the great epistemologists — could not be used once their aggregates dissolved. In fact famous names serve for thousands of years.
[Objection:] Mind follows along through the sense-doors, And seeing-with-name resembles non-conception, [hidden by] non-conceptual force; Otherwise, since seeing and cognising have distinct objects, Knowing the external object would never come about.
[Non-Buddhist schools] Granting no real name-meaning relation in general, when an object is grasped the senses and mental consciousness combine. Their simile: consciousness is a monkey in a house with five glass windows, each window a sense-faculty; whichever window it looks out of, that sense-cognition arises together with its conceptual cognition, both at the moment of grasping. They hold the essence of consciousness is conception, so eye-, ear- and nose-consciousness all involve it. We fail to notice because sense-cognitions so closely resemble non-conceptual cognition that the conception in them goes undetected.
Their supporting consequence: if seeing and conceiving were truly distinct, they could never connect — eye-cognition is direct but non-conceptual, conception is conceptual but not direct — and convention would collapse.
[Reply:] The two cognitions — with and without conception — Apprehend a single cognised object at once; Or though they apprehend in sequence, they do so so quickly That the unwise grasp them as one.
Sakya Paṇḍita answers that the two cognitions take their object in either of two ways.
Simultaneously, on the True Aspectarian Yogācāra view of “equal subject-and-object”: while conception grasps a pillar the eye is also fixed on it, both cognitions arising at once from one object. Rongtön Paṇḍita notes the two factors that mislead the unwise here — sameness of object and sameness of time.
Sequentially: for a red pillar, direct non-conceptual seeing in the first moment, conception in the second (the “Subject-and-Object as One” school’s view discussed earlier). The sequence is so quick that the unwise take it as simultaneous, or take conception to have turned into non-conception, failing to notice that non-conception precedes conception.
Objection: do two cognitions toward one pillar imply two continua? No. Two conceptions in one continuum would, since a conception fixes on one object and cannot grasp another (attachment and aversion at once would mean two continua, which does not occur). But sense-cognitions have no clinging, so all six can arise together — the Pramāṇavārttika states this — and they do not obstruct the arising of conception.
ii. Refuting that the Particular of Cognition is the Expressed
Cognition too has its own particular nature, So to assign a name to it is unreasonable.
[Objection] Analysis shows no external particular is the expressed — naming would be impossible, names unusable, past and future inexpressible. But cognition is present then and there, so cognition’s particular is the expressed. A supporting thought: the universal is just one’s own mind, and unreal appearances like floating hair-strands are also mind; so if the universal is the expressed, the real expressed has become mind.
Reply: cognition equally has its own self-standing nature, so all the same faults follow. Name a pillar’s mind-particular at the first moment, and at the next it has perished, the original unfindable and the name unusable. Divided by time, place and form, mind-particulars are equally limitless: nobody can name them all, nor needs to.
b. Refuting that the Universal is the Expressed
Two parts: the class-universal, and the universals of word and meaning.
i. Refuting that the Class-Universal is the Expressed
[Objection:] Words do not express the individual; The class-universal is the expressed, so there is no fault.
[Vaiśeṣika] Conceding that the particular or individual instance brings the naming faults, they hold instead that the class-universal is the expressed. The class-universal was treated in Chapter 3: among the assemblage-, class- and name-universals, it is the common designation for things of one kind. Their reasoning is by elimination — the general as such is too wide, the particular brings the earlier faults, so the class-universal is the only way out. “Vase” designates the class vase, covering gold, silver, and every other.
[Reply:] In the external object there is no universal; Even were there one, naming it would serve no purpose.
Two replies. There is no general in the external object. The substantialist general was refuted earlier: by time, place or form no such general exists; it can be neither one with the instances nor other than them, and there is no third mode of existing. If the general does not exist, the class-universal — a subset of it — cannot either. Gorampa: “If water does not exist, how can the ocean made of water exist?”
Even granting it, naming it is useless. Class-universal and general alike are unclear in content and cannot function, whereas the expressed must be clear and capable of producing effects. A name attached to such a general could never lead us to know the thing’s particular.
[Objection:] We name a particular that is linked to the universal; By that, the particular is cognised.
The opponent shifts: not the lone class-universal but the particular closely related to the universal is named, and through it the particular is known. Their reasoning: without a universal, limitless particulars cannot be named one by one; the lone universal cannot be named either, being a non-entity; so the two must be joined.
The diagnosis: they have confounded the functions of conception and non-conception, of universal and particular. What we cling to is the particular; what we speak is the universal. Their real difficulty is that they have not understood exclusion; with exclusion in hand the issue would not be hard.
[Reply:] Cast off the universal — useless, powerless — And assign the name straight to the particular itself.
The linked universal does nothing for the knowing of name and meaning and accomplishes nothing — like a barren woman’s son, no use carrying it about. If you hold the particular to be the expressed, say so plainly and drop the universal beside it, as one may as well shake off a travelling companion as timid as oneself: go alone, or do not go.
[Objection:] But particulars are limitless, so names cannot be assigned to them. [Reply:] Then on your view too the same problem stands.
The opponent concedes the particular cannot be named, being limitless. But by that very reasoning the universal-linked particulars he posits are equally limitless, so his naming is equally untenable. Adding a linked universal resolves nothing.
ii. Refuting that the Universals of Word and Meaning are the Expressed
The Snowland school and the Śrāvaka sect Hold that word-universal and meaning-universal are the true expressed.
[Early Tibetan epistemologists; Sāṃmitīya, of the Eighteen Śrāvaka schools] Neither external nor cognitive particular is the expressed; the expressed is the non-associated factor combining word-universal and meaning-universal.
A non-associated factor, on the Abhidharmakośa’s Hīnayāna account, is a real conditioned thing that is neither matter nor mind/mental-event — names, phrases, “attainment cords.” So what people call “vase” or “pillar” is a fusion of name-universal and meaning-universal, a non-associated factor, and that is the content of their speech.
Two readings of the position: some take the early Tibetans to have held the meaning-universal alone to be the expressed — their universal, unlike the later Tibetans’, being a real entity rather than a non-entity — with the Sāṃmitīyas holding the non-associated factor. Jamyang Loter Wangpo’s commentary takes word- and meaning-universal together.
If a name is assigned to a non-associated factor, How could one know the unrelated form? Just as in saying “vase” One cannot come to know an unrelated cow.
Two faults. The non-associated factor cannot be named, since on Mahāyāna analysis it is wholly nominal — outside mind and matter no such substantial entity exists.
Even if named, the name would do no good. By their own account the factor is neither matter nor mind. The name was bestowed on the factor, not on the pillar’s form; so later use of “pillar” could never make the form pillar known. The absurdity: name a vase and later know a yak by it. Name a child Lili; Lili gone, saying “Lili” cannot make known another child, Yuanyuan — the referent of the naming and the referent of the use are wholly other. Were wholly other things knowable through each other, unnamed things would be known too.
Sakya Paṇḍita’s own school escapes this: it does take the meaning-universal as the true expressed and the word-universal as the true expresser, but does not take them to be real existents (treated under “our own position” below).
[Objection:] Though they have no real connection, Resemblance causes a confusion through which the object is apprehended.
The opponents fall back on resemblance: granted there is no real relation between the form of a vase and the non-associated factor “vase,” the two resemble each other, so in use we mistake the factor for the form and thereby reach the particular.
[Reply:] If similarity caused the error, then by reason of time and place The confusion would only be occasional, not invariable. But here the confusion is constant — So it is not similarity that produces the error.
Error from resemblance is by nature occasional, varying with time and place. Devadatta and Maitreya may look alike in dress and height, and twins in identical caps and shoes are confused at first sight; but on closer look one nose is bigger, and in time nobody mistakes them. Yet name and form are confused always, in all places and all forms. So resemblance is not the cause.
The real cause is that the nature of conception is itself mistaken. Because conception’s very essence is in error, whatever appears to it is incorrect, whether we grasp the vase’s form or its name — a constant error, not an occasional one.
Hence the early Tibetans have two errors: holding the universal to be substantial and other than mind; and failing to see that conception is by nature mistaken. Sakya Paṇḍita’s school also takes the universal as expressed, but regards it as non-substantial — outside particular phenomena its essence does not exist — and traces the constant confusion to conception’s mistaken nature. These two differences answer the natural question of why the early Tibetans fall into fault where our own school does not.
In sum, neither particular nor universal is truly the expressed.
2. Establishing Our Own Position
Three parts: definition, classification, and determining the meaning.
a. Definition
What is known and what makes known through a name.
The expressed is the content understood through a name — “name” taken broadly as language, words, phrases. The expresser is the name that conveys the meaning: the means or device by which an intended meaning is brought across. Uttering the sound “vase” belongs to the expresser; the content or object arising through that language is the expressed.
b. Classification
By the difference between speaking and using, Each has two, making four in all; In analysis we distinguish them with care; In actual use we conflate them as one and so obtain [our aim].
Expressed and expresser are classified from two angles, analysis (“speaking”) and ordinary use. Under analysis each divides into real and clung-to — four from the speaker’s side, and four again from the hearer’s, eight in all. In actual use the real and clung-to are conflated and no analysis is needed: if I say “bring the vase” and you bring one, communication has succeeded; questioning whether I mean the universal or the particular, the real or the clung-to, is beside the point. This verse is the key to the chapter, as sandalwood and aloeswood were to the chapter on exclusion.
Speaker’s side. Saying “vase”: the clung-to expressed is the vase’s particular — what I take myself to state, but only cling to; the real expressed is the universal in my own mind, which is what I actually state. The clung-to expresser is the particular sound of the convention “vase”; the real expresser is the word-universal of “vase.”
Hearer’s side. The clung-to expresser is my taking him to have truly uttered the vase; the clung-to expressed is my taking him to have stated the vase’s particular. Both are clinging. Were the particular really stated, saying “vase” to someone who knows no Chinese would raise the universal of vase in him however often repeated — which it does not. The real expresser is the word-universal, through which the vase’s form arises in my mind; that arisen form is the meaning-universal, the real expressed.
Both Sakya Paṇḍita and Mipham Rinpoche hold the real expresser-and-expressed to be the word- and meaning-universals, the clung-to to be the particular vase and the particular sound of the name. Speaker and hearer share, from beginningless time, the habit of joining inner and outer in this way, and that shared confusion is enough for communication to work.
c. Determining the Meaning
Three parts: establishing that there is no real expressed; the principle of mistaken naming without a referent; the legitimacy of obtaining the cognised object through mistaken use.
i. Establishing that there is no Real Expressed
External object and cognition are particulars; The two universals are unreal; None of these four is the expressed, So in the ultimate there is no expressed.
Four candidates, all failing. The external particular and the cognitive particular cannot be the expressed: names cannot be assigned to them and, if assigned, cannot connect in use. The meaning-universal and word-universal can be posited provisionally, but on examination both are non-entities — and a non-entity cannot be the expressed. Outside these four there is no other candidate, so no expresser either.
Objection: earlier the word- and meaning-universals were called the real expresser and expressed — is this a contradiction? No: convention was set up provisionally for beings’ conception, whereas true examination finds no phenomenon that is the expressed. Saying one has seen space and saying one has not come to the same thing.
The “ultimate” here is the ultimate within epistemology, not the Madhyamaka ultimate free of all elaboration: within conventional valid cognition that genuinely functions, no real expressed turns up on examination.
Word-universal and meaning-universal defined. Hearing “vase,” the concept of the word arises — the word-universal; relying on it, the form of the external vase appears in mind — the meaning-universal. Of a Mr Li one knows, the name appearing is the word-universal, his appearance the meaning-universal. From the speaker’s side the meaning-universal arises with the name “Mr Li” (not “Mr Wang”); from the hearer’s side the word-universal comes first, then the meaning-universal. In conception there is nothing apart from names, and the two differ only by isolate: conception under the name-aspect and under the form-aspect.
Other masters explain differently — an image of someone seen being the meaning-universal, an impression from written description the word-universal — but in expounding the Pramāṇayuktanidhi the former account, Gorampa’s in his commentary, is followed.
Aside: Recapitulation
The expresser is the name, the expressed the meaning.
Real expressed and real expresser are the meaning-universal and word-universal. Saying “vase,” the real expresser is the name-universal “vase”; the real expressed is the vase’s form arising by way of it.
Clung-to expresser and clung-to expressed are the name-particular and meaning-particular. In fact the particular can be neither stated nor heard.
So: what we actually state is always word-universals; the content stated is meaning-universals; what we cling to is the sense that on the strength of the word-universal we have stated the object itself.
ii. The Principle of Mistaken Naming Without Referent
The very nature of conception is mistaken; Within it appear the word-universal and the meaning-universal; Clinging to them as the external object, We nominally call them the expressed.
Every conception beyond direct cognition is mistaken by nature, as fire is hot — knowing a vase, knowing exclusion, knowing anything. (On the Mahāyāna account the same follows from conception being the cause of the three realms.) What appears within conception — the forms of vase and pillar — is the meaning-universal, the real expressed in conventional speech, and these are non-entities. Clinging to them as the external object, we assign a name; by nominal positing this can be called the real expressed within convention.
The relation to the previous section: in the ultimate no universal exists, while conventionally the nominally posited universal does — as a barren woman’s son has no body but nominally has a name.
Are universal and expressed then meaningless? No: they answer to our habits. From the standpoint of essence no conception is real — isolate “impermanence” from “the vase is impermanent” and its essence cannot be found, a point the Pramāṇavārttika stresses repeatedly — but on the surface of conception the confused universal exists, and that is what people call the real expressed.
iii. The Legitimacy of Obtaining the Cognised Object Through Mistaken Use
Through the perfuming of mistaken latent tendencies, The name is assigned by conflating [universal and particular]; In using the convention we cognise in the same way, So although it is mistaken, it is also real.
The habit of conflating particular and universal runs through every continuum from beginningless time. Naming a child Lili, the namer joins the child’s momentary particular to the continuum of the child’s class, without analysing that the particular of the moment of naming is already gone. Nor need he: convention is provisional, and a name for the continuum suffices. When the child enters middle school nobody asks whether this is the particular child or the universal one.
So the naming is in fact upon a nominally posited continuum, and on true examination mistaken — yet also real, in the sense that the mistaken mode is itself sufficient to reach our aims. By the name we judge the person present or absent and arrive at a real conclusion. As with a bright lamp: its light shows outside, and by mistaking the light for the lamp we nonetheless find the lamp.
A boundary worth marking: epistemology shows that all conceptions are by nature mistaken, but it does not show direct cognition to be mistaken. That is shown in the Madhyamakālaṃkāra — external object is external object, cognition is cognition, with no real link between them — so that by ultimate reasoning direct cognition too is mistaken. The Samādhirāja is quoted: “Eye, ear, nose are no pramāṇa; tongue, body, mind are not either. If the faculties were pramāṇas, what would the noble path be good to whom?“
3. Removing Disputes
Five disputes: (1) sameness with the real-universal position; (2) sameness with the cognition-particular position; (3) sameness with the non-associated-factor position; (4) that without an expressed convention collapses; (5) that a mistaken connection is not needed.
a. Removing the Charge of Sameness with the Real-Universal Position
[Objection:] If word-and-meaning do not exclude their other, Then the expressed would have to be a real entity.
A dilemma pressed on Sakya Paṇḍita’s school. Does your joined word-and-meaning universal exclude other phenomena or not? If it does not, then non-vase having gone unexcluded, the vase’s isolate cannot be set up and “vase” could not make the vase known, being unseparated from pillar, conch and torch. If it does exclude non-vase, then since non-vase is a non-entity and has been excluded, the universal’s own essence becomes a real entity.
In the ultimate they do not exclude, But in appearance the exclusion is itself a confusion.
The reply distinguishes standpoints, “appearance” here meaning the standpoint of exclusion. From the side of the particular nothing is excluded: the particular is each phenomenon’s own essence, and exclusion is a non-entity like a barren woman’s son — so the first horn has no purchase. From the side of appearance, that is, exclusion by conception, non-vase and non-pillar are excluded; but our general does not thereby become a real entity, since it was never a substantial general in the first place.
We do not accept the universal — we accept it only as confusion — So how could our position be the same as theirs?
The second horn only bites a school that takes the universal as substantial. Our general is not the early Tibetans’, not the Śrāvakas’, still less the non-Buddhists’: it is only an image of confused conception, in essence no different from a barren woman’s son, and it is that image we call the expressed in setting up convention.
b. Removing the Charge of Sameness with the Cognition-Particular Position
[Objection:] If you express the image in conception, Then cognition itself becomes the expressed.
If the universal in the appearance-aspect is not the expressed and no real expressed exists in mental consciousness, then the essence of cognition — its particular — becomes the expressed by default, with nothing else left.
The self-aware reverse of cognition is not the expressed; The mistaken nominal posit is unreal — And so, in order that people may enter [convention], A name is assigned to the conceptual image.
Cognition and the image it bears are two. The self-aware reverse of cognition — the consciousness aspect — is not the expressed. The meaning-universal of “vase” is not the consciousness but the conceptual image arising in it, which people mistake for the vase’s external particular; that mistaken portion, a non-entity, is what is commonly called the expressed.
The mirror analogy. A mirror reflecting an elephant: the expressed is the reflected image, not the mirror. The mirror cannot be identified with the image, or absurdities follow — with no image present the mirror would not exist, or given the mirror the image would have to be present. Outside the mirror no image exists, yet the image has its function: by it one can remove a blemish from the face. Essence and function must be distinguished — the image, though a non-entity, works.
Is naming a mistaken expressed meaningful? Yes: by such mistaken setting-up all beings can use convention. At first the thing is mistaken for the external object and named; later, hearing the name, all take it to refer to that thing. Modern naming bodies work this way — when DVDs appeared, a term was chosen and thereafter used in the country of origin and beyond; everyone took the particular to be named, while in fact particular and universal were conflated. Without naming, the world would be the world of ignorance described in the sūtras — as with a yak, which has no separate names for green grass, withered grass and flowers, and takes in whatever looks eatable.
An aside on the mind’s continuity, from Mipham Rinpoche’s great commentary on the Pramāṇavārttika: when the five faculties and five sense-cognitions are destroyed, mental consciousness remains; when coarse mental consciousness is gone, the subtle remains; when the subtle is gone, the ālaya remains; when the ālaya is gone, the luminous mind continues. Hence mind does not arise from brain and body, and every being has the possibility of bondage and of liberation. Mipham Rinpoche also cites the Pramāṇavārttika line “the nature of the mind is luminous; it is only temporarily obscured by adventitious stains” in Clarifying the Wish-Fulfilling Jewel, in the Great Illusory Net, and in certain Great Perfection teachings.
c. Removing the Charge of Sameness with the Non-Associated-Factor Position
[Objection:] If you assign names to a universal that is exclusion, That is the same as [naming] a non-associated factor.
Having refuted the early Tibetans and the Hīnayāna on the non-associated factor, the school is charged with holding the same thing under another name: your exclusion-natured universal is neither mind/mental-event nor external matter — exactly the Sāṃmitīyas’ non-associated factor.
If the meaning-universal were a real entity, your charge would hold; But it is unreal, And one should know that exclusion has no object of its own — So there is no real expressed and no real expresser.
The charge would hold if our meaning-universal were truly established — a real general pervading every instance, as the non-Buddhists hold, or a substantial entity outside mind and object, as the Sāṃmitīyas hold. Ours is not substantially existent at all, so the fault does not arise.
The opponent presses further: if your expressed is a non-entity, the particular cannot be known through it, any more than a vase can be known by means of a barren woman’s son.
Reply: the general’s essence is non-existent, yet by it the particular is known, precisely because the mind of exclusion has no object of its own. Having no object of its own, it can take the particular of the thing for its object. Had exclusion a real apprehended object, people would know only that object and never the external vase.
The counter-example also misses. Universal and barren woman’s son are alike non-existent in essence, but the difference lies in convention: we have the habit of reaching the vase’s particular through the universal of vase and no habit at all of reaching a pillar through a barren woman’s son. Nobody names a pillar “barren woman’s son,” so saying “pillar” raises no such confusion.
Why habit does this work: the perfuming of beginningless mistaken latent tendencies abides in the ālaya. A Tibetan raised in Tibet has language, habits and mentality bound up with Tibetan culture, and his conventional exchanges develop along those lines — as a yak raised in the herd develops along the herd’s. What holds water is called “vase” and not “pillar” for no reason found on the side of the particular; it could as well have been called yak or prayer-wheel. Only shared social habit fixes it. This is the sense of Yogācāra’s “all phenomena are mind-only”: things are produced by mind, varying with habit.
So “the meaning-universal is the expressed” and “the expressed does not exist” come to the same thing, and the verse admits both readings.
d. Removing the Charge that without an Expressed Convention Collapses
[Objection:] If the expressed is only mistaken and false, Then all conventions are destroyed.
If apart from a mistaken expressed conflating particular and universal no real expressed exists, then convention rests on a false base and everything built on it — eating, walking, snow mountains, oceans — becomes false. Saying “vase” would be no different from saying “barren woman’s son” or “celestial palace,” and the actual water-holding vessel could not be known. Real communication would be burnt up.
By taking the particular through the mistaken mode, Convention turns out to be perfectly reasonable.
The concession first: a real particular expressed does not exist, since neither the external particular (the faults pressed on the Mīmāṃsakas would return) nor the particular of cognition can serve.
The answer: the expressed is set up by taking the object through a mistaken mode. By the world’s habit and tradition the meaning-universal and the thing’s particular are conflated and mistaken as one, and on that basis naming and communication proceed — which makes all worldly conventions not merely acceptable but reasonable. On the surface it looks as though people really converse and the senses really grasp the external; on epistemological examination everything runs by the conflation of particular and universal, with no real interchange of particulars.
Supporting citations that convention, though mistaken, is indispensable and leads on to the ultimate: Pramāṇaviniścaya, that epistemological reasoning brings one indirectly to the unstained ultimate; Pramāṇasamuccaya, that the inconceivable nature is not reached by deliberation, though inferential reasoning removes wrong views about the Bhagavān’s profound intent; Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, “Without depending on the conventional, the supreme meaning is not attained”; Bhāviveka’s Tarkajvāla, “Without the ladder of correct convention, to ascend the high tower of the true is, for the wise, not reasonable”; Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra, “With conventional truth as method, the ultimate truth is what arises from method.” Mipham Rinpoche’s great commentary holds that anyone who would uphold the Buddha’s teaching must master this science, since all sūtric and tantric Dharma rests on understanding epistemological convention.
Communication by shared confusion is like dialogue in a dream: beings dream together, and waking dialogue works as dream-dialogue does — or, on the Yogācārin’s self-appearance, both parties see a real linguistic exchange where none exists.
e. Removing the Charge that a Mistaken Connection is not Needed
[Objection:] By means of stipulated terms the connection is known; A mistaken connection is not required.
The relation between name and object is known simply by stipulation, so the school’s “mistaking particular and universal as one” is superfluous. When something new appears — a tractor, a schoolbag — a special name is laid down, a natural link arises between thing and speech, and the matter is settled.
The particular and the meaning-universal, The mistaking of these two as one — among these three, However you assign the term, Without confusion there is no true name.
The reply forces a trilemma: at the outset, did you attach the stipulated term to the particular, to the universal, or to the two mistaken as one? There is no fourth locus.
On the particular — impossible: no name can be laid down at the outset, the particular perishes in an instant, on the second use the original is unfindable, and particulars are numberless by time, place and form.
On the universal — more impossible still: no real universal exists apart from the particular, nor an inseparable one. Affirming a real universal brings on the faults pressed on the Śrāvakas, the early Tibetans and the non-Buddhists.
On the two mistaken as one — then you have simply adopted our position and helped establish it. Naming a newborn “Sun” or “Moon,” the namer is not naming the particular, which perishes in an instant and from the second moment onward is another’s; nor the universal, a non-entity you do not accept.
Mistaking particular and universal as one, The elder name-maker assigns the term that leads people in; And on the strength of that confusion the external object is grasped.
The opponent may object that the mistaken conflation is our view, not his. But all naming and using in fact proceeds this way, and the ancient name-makers knew it and deliberately brought people onto that track: an unnamed thing gives people no shared concept and so no usable convention, so a name is laid down — “from now on, this thing is a prayer-wheel” — for future users to affirm and deny by. “Elder name-maker” is a term of respect and covers modern namers too.
The conjurer analogy, from the auto-commentary of the Pramāṇayuktanidhi: a conjurer recites mantras to confuse his audience, and once confused all share one illusion of elephants and horses. Films and television work the same way — when conditions are right, quarrels appear on a screen and the whole audience sees them, knowing all the while that two people cannot really be fighting inside a small box. A storyteller does the like: the story finished long ago, but the false impression in the teller’s mind becomes a falser thing still in the children’s, taken as real — error within error. So a confused cause can produce a shared, workable state.
Convention has a real side, which cannot bear ultimate scrutiny; as with exclusion in the earlier chapter, exclusion accords with reality, and through this confusion the real particular is reached.
Concluding Verse
In convention there is no true expressed; The clung-to expressed is the particular itself; Mistaking them as related, we go about our work, And the one who grasps the object is not deceived.
The true expressed of convention does not exist; apart from the universal expressed there is no real one, and no contradiction arises with the earlier positing, any more than between “seeing space” and “not seeing space.”
But an expressed of a kind does exist: the clung-to expressed, the external particular spoken of. Saying “vase,” I cling to the vase’s particular; saying “yak,” to the yak’s.
“Mistaking as related”: people take the clung-to expressed to be the real expressed, never noticing the meaning-universal. The mistaking of meaning-universal and particular as one is the so-called relation between expresser and expressed — the work of clinging, with no true rope joining them outside it. Yet the particular is reached, so the one who grasps the object in this way is not deceived: I say “bring me the vase” and the vase comes, because what I cling to as the expressed is in fact the external particular vase. As a wish-jewel in a house emits light outside, and by mistaking the light for the jewel one finds the jewel; or, in the Pramāṇayuktanidhi exegesis, as a person in a glass house sees distant things blurred and unclear, and drawing nearer on the strength of that sight finds the particular.
The principle of the Seven Treatises, finally: relation and contradiction between phenomena do not exist in the real essence at all; affirmation and denial are nominally posited by conception. And nominal positing is of two kinds — false, not existing even conventionally, as in seeing a stone as a tiger; and true, the universal mistaken for the particular, by which, though nominal, the particular is genuinely reached.
End of the Fifth Chapter, Examining the Expressed and the Expresser, of the Pramāṇayuktanidhi.
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