physical entities. Samkhya and Vaisheshika were almost reciprocal images of
each other in their relations to Buddhist doctrines. On the other side, later
Nyaya-Vaisheshikas (Shridhara ca. 900s, Udayana ca. 1000) took over the
concept of potentiality (Halbfass, 1992: 57–58). By then Samkhya had faded
and no longer counted as a rival, and the Vaisheshikas’ concern was to give
their position maximal opposition to Buddhist momentariness. In characteristic
Vaisheshika fashion, they did so by reifying potentiality and adding it to the list
of elements which constitute the universe. This comprised Nyaya-Vaisheshika
turf: every dispute led to expanding the categories of their realist system.
Samkhya, like the Yoga which became textually associated with it, had
greater influence in popular Hindu culture than among philosophical circles;
its greatest appeal was the mythological residue in its concepts and meta-
phors.^48 On the technical side, Samkhya’s ungainly and memory-taxing enu-
merative lists overlapped too much with similar classificatory systems of
Nyaya-Vaisheshika and several Buddhist positions. Greater prominence in the
intellectual field went to newer systems which pushed forward a few basic
unifying principles on a higher level of abstraction. The Advaita revolution
displaced Samkhya from the lineup of active positions, borrowing its argu-
ments for satkarya and its terminology, while eliminating the embarrassment
of its dualist inconsistencies and transferring its Parmenidean stance to a purer
monism. Hereafter there are occasional Samkhya commentators, but they seem
remote and uncertain about the original system. After ca. 600–700, Samkhya
no longer responds to external critiques as a living philosophy; it has become
an inert record (EIP, 1987: 16, 29–30, 45).
The Ontology of Evanescent Point-Instants. On the Buddhist side, the effects
of the Samkhya challenge are seen in Vasubandhu II. Why did the greatest
creativity of the Hinayana schools occur much later than the greatest Mahay-
ana philosophies, the Madhyamika in the 100s c.e. and the Yogacara idealism
in the 300s? Nagarjuna had explicitly critiqued both Sarvastivadin essence
realism and Sautrantika nominalism; Madhyamika had good claim to express
the detachment from philosophy and the attainment of nirvana that was the
hallmark of original Buddhism. Nevertheless, Vasubandhu II (ca. 400–480) put
together the ingredients for a powerful intellectual comeback on the Hinayana
side. It was his network, more than that of the Madhyamikas or Yogacaras,
which produced the greatest creativity; the ontology of evanescent point-in-
stants expounded by the great logicians Dignaga and Dharmakirti was a de-
velopment of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmist metaphysics.
I would reconstruct the dynamics of the situation as follows. The Hindus
made their attack by moving into the central attention space occupied by the
Buddhist schools. There, although the Mahayanists had been the creative
External and Internal Politics: India • 237