Mahayana camp to incorporate the prestige of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmak-
osha by interpreting it through the lens of Yogacara idealism. It is this lineage
which the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang encounters in the 630s, and brings
back to China as the hyper-sophisticated Yogacara system called Fa-hsiang.
Dharmakirti’s Synthesis. The greatest intellectual success from this flow of
energy in the Buddhist camp where all the networks ran together at Nalanda
was Dharmakirti (ca. 650). He met the challenges both against Buddhism and
within it by purifying and synthesizing its major philosophical doctrines.
Against the conservative Madhyamika attack on the new logic, Dharmakirti
set out to extend and vindicate the logical innovations of Dignaga, while using
them as a frame into which to pour his own substantive philosophy. That
philosophy was essentially the old Sarvastivada-Sautrantika ontology of point-
instants, stripped from its casing of memory-taxing classifications that makes
Abhidharma scholasticism so tedious. Dharmakirti drove out the last vestiges
of a realist tone, reducing every element to unreality. He ensured that Buddhist
aggregation doctrine would stand at the extreme opposite from the realists of
the Hindu camp, and in this respect Dharmakirti moved toward the Yoga-
carins. His most creative stroke was to use Madhyamika tools to transcend
both realism and idealism.
Everything hinges on the meaning of being, existence, or reality, which
Dharmakirti treats as interchangeable terms. Reality is that which is causally
efficacious. A real fire is that which burns: an action, not an entity. The real
is that which causes something, and therefore that which is changing. There is
nothing but the chain of dependent origination—the classic doctrine of the
Buddha, which Nagarjuna had used in demonstrating that nothing has an
essence of its own. This flow of change cannot be broken into ultimate
elements, little static bits with change connecting them; there is nothing but
causality itself (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:85–91; Halbfass, 1992: 165). Our con-
ceptions of entities are not reality but mental constructs, differentiations im-
posed by the mind, according with Dignaga’s doctrine of the negativity of
distinctions.
Abhidharma scholasticism had included time and space as real elements of
the universe; in fact Sarvastivada tended to identify empty space or ether with
nirvana as the object of meditation (Conze, 1962: 164–165). Yogacara ideal-
ism, breaking with this heterogeneous omni-realism, had denied the reality of
any external world, including space and time. Dharmakirti applied his crite-
rion: since the real is that which is causal, time and space are unreal constructs,
without efficacy apart from the “thusness” of immediate point-instants. Dhar-
makirti further subjected time and space to dialectical dissolution, something
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