The Foundations of Buddhism

222 The Abhidharma

no duration in time. It is in the light of this that we should under-

stand the Abhidharma account of the twelve links of inter-

dependent arising occurring in a moment: analyse reality down

to the shortest conceivable moment of time and what we still find

is a process rather than inert, or static bits.

Instead of the theory of 'possession' the Sautrantikas pro-

posed that the mechanism whereby dharmas produce effects

long after they cease to exist can be understood by reference to

the images of seeds and 'perfuming'.2° When I perform an action

motivated by greed, it plants a 'seed' in the series of dharmas

that is my mind. Such a seed is not a thing in itself-a dharma-

but merely the modification or 'perfuming' of the subsequent flow

of dharmas consequent upon the action. In the course of time

this modification matures and issues in a particular result, in the

same way as a seed does not produce its fruit immediately, but

only after the 'modifications' of the shoot, stem, leaf, and flower.

The Sautrantikas also suggested that there are two types of

seed. In addition to seeds that are planted by our wholesome and

unwholesome deeds, there are certain seeds that subsist in the

mental continuum of beings from time immemorial; such seeds

constitute an innate potentiality for wholesome behaviour that

can never be destroyed. In the Sautrantika theory of seeds we

have the precursors of two extremely important concepts of later
Mahayana Buddhist thought: the Yogacarin 'store consciousness'

(iilaya-vijfuina) and the notion of 'the embryo of the Buddha'

(tathiigata-garbha) or Buddha-nature, the innate capacity in all

beings to gain enlightenment. The latter concept was to prove

particularly influential in the development of certain tendencies

of East Asian Buddhist thought.

For their part the Theravadin Abhidharmikas seem to have

referred the answer to the kinds of problem we have been con-
sidering to their understanding of the consciousness process, out-
lined briefly above. Between each active consciousness process
the mind returns to a basic state of consciousness ( bhavaflga) that
defines a being as an individual before emerging once more in

response to some physical or mental stimulus. Thus instead of

referring the continuity of character traits and habitual tendencies