THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF MAHAYANA BUDDHISM 87Sarvastivadin Abhidharmists, among others, that the irreducible dharmas
forming the ultimate building blocks of experience were each endowed with
svabhava: their own particular being or nature. Ac;tually, the Mahayanists
claimed, dharmas were empty of svabhava. Conditional relations functioned as
described in the doctrine of dependent co-arising, but there were no
"essences" acting as nodes in the relationships, just as mathematical relation-
ships could function among the integers in decimal notation even if they were
only zeros. In fact, if dharmas had any essence, the principles of causation and
the Four Noble Truths could not operate, for essences by nature cannot
change and thus cannot be subject to causal conditions. Whether the Abhid-
harrnists meant the concept of svabhava to imply an unchanging essence is a
moot point, but in time the doctrine of emptiness became a rallying point for
the rejection of the entire Abhidharma enterprise.
The Mahayanists maintained that their interpretation of emptiness was the
true meaning of the Buddha's not-self doctrine. From their point of view, the
Abhidharmists had understood only the concept that the individual person
was empty of self (pudgala-nairiitmya), whereas in actuality the concept should
be expanded to include the realization that dharmas were empty of any own-
being or nature (dharma-nairiitmya) as well. In their eyes, the Abhidharmists
were still attached to a subtle notion of "self" in the dharmas, and this attach-
ment prevented them from realizing the true Buddhist goal. Only by viewing
experience in truly ultimate terms, as a mathematics of zeros, would one lose
all attachments for views of systems and existents, and thereby gain ultimate
liberation. Thus this new approach viewed all dharmas as mere conventional
truths, whereas the ultimate truth was one: emptiness in both of its modes.
Rather than fleeing sarp.sara while still considering it essentially real, as the
Abhidharmists recommended, the Mahayanists summoned their listeners to
reevaluate sarp.sara as empty and achieve release right where they were.
The ways in which they used the siinyata doctrine to induce this reevalua-
tion varied from text to text. The primary early Mahayana discourses-the
Prajiiii-piiramitii (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutras-generally tried to undercut the
Abhidharma mind-set by portraying the Buddha and his chief disciples as repu-
diating the conventional teachings of the Siitra Pi taka. This repudiation took
the form of paradoxical witticisms that played the conventional level of truth
against the ultimate, erasing dualities between subject and object, conditioned
and unconditioned, pure and impure, conventional and ultimate, even same
and different (or separate, which difforent seems to mean in these texts). Because
dharmas have no own-being, there is nothing bound in sarp.sara, nothing freed
in nirval).a; nothing is observed to arise, nothing is observed to cease. There are
no beings to save from sarp.sara, and yet the bodhisattva remains firm in his vow
to save all beings. The world is a phantom conjured up by karmic action, the
magician, but the phantom maker is itself maya (a phantom). When one
achieves the Perfection ofWisdom by contemplating dependent co-arising,
one is without labels or conventions, thus realizing the tathatii (suchness) of all
things, which is the same as the suchness of the Buddha, one's own suchness,
the suchness of nothing at all (Strong EB, sees. 4.2.2, 4.2.3).