its mythological heritage. One of the ingredients it took over (found in con-
temporary Mahayana as well) was the periodic creation and destruction of the
world through an endless round of kalpas, world epochs. In the rationalized
version, Samkhya reconciled this with its Parmenidean substance stasis by
elaborating the concepts of potentiality and latency. Prakriti is always the same;
it merely emanates or withdraws the world of actuality like a tortoise protrud-
ing and retracting its legs (Halbfass, 1992: 56–61). Potentiality (shakti) now
becomes the next philosophical battleground. Vaisheshika took the opposite
stance from Samkhya, positing a pluralism of entities with maximal distinct-
iveness across time; there is no latency, but continuously new combinations
which make up new realities, wholes which have existence over and above
their parts. A later Vaisheshika philosopher, Udayana (ca. 1000), went so far
as to argue that a tree that has a small part cut from it becomes a totally new
tree (Halbfass, 1992: 94).Potentiality and Ontological Pluralism. The Samkhya-Vaisheshika debate
gave prominence to an issue that reverberated through monist-pluralist lineups
of Indian philosophy for over a millennium. In the orthodox formulation by
Ishvarakrishna, Samkhya held the position of satkaryavada: the effect preexists
within its material cause. Vaisheshika upheld asatkaryavada, denying that
distinctive entities could be so connected, since this would reduce one substance
to another. Here again the Hindu philosophers were elaborating a conflict
which had emerged among the Buddhists. Already in the early Abhidharma
period, Buddhist factions had argued about the causality of dependent origi-
nation: Sarvastivadins held that past, present, and future all exist in their own
right as momentary point-instants of space-time; the Kashyapiyas had argued
for existences across time in the form of effects which are inherent in an earlier
existent. Nearer the era of the Samkhya-Vaisheshika disputes, the Madhyami-
kas eliminated entirely the reality of time as well as of any substance in which
causality could inhere; the opposite stance was taken by Yogacara, whose
storehouse consciousness containing the seeds of all experience implies an
unlimited scope for preexisting potentialities.
Samkhya and Vaisheshika reproduced a Buddhist problem space on the
Hindu side of the board, but they maintained their distinctive non-Buddhist
identities by making different combinations out of the common stock of
philosophical ingredients. Samkhya shared the Buddhist dislike for reifying
qualities, as well as the Buddhist sense of the illusoriness of manifested world
appearance, but differed by positing an unchanging substance beneath it all—in
fact, two of them. Vaisheshika resembled the Buddhist doctrine of ever-chang-
ing aggregates assembling and reassembling across time, but maintained its
distinctiveness by accepting the reality of all manner of physical and meta-236 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths