- From about 100 to 500 c.e., the growth of the main Hindu darsha-
nas (Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, all except late-blooming
Advaita); this is also the time of Buddhist-Hindu confrontation, the debates
across a now-unified attention space.
Several explicitly epistemological-metaphysical themes now become the
object of debate. Typically the issue is raised first between the Buddhist sects,
then crops up within the Hindu darshanas, through confrontations that drive
initially inchoate schools of thought into increasingly polarized positions on
philosophical turf.
Nominalism and realism, universals and particulars arose as issues among
the early Buddhist schools. How do the lists of world ingredients in the
Abhidharma compilations stand the test of illusion? The Sarvastivada, the
“everything-exists-theory,” holds that all the dharma elements are real, by war-
rant of the intentionality of consciousness: the mind never has a true cognition
without an object. The Sarvastivadins’ debating partners, the Sautrantikas,
pointed to an inconsistency in treating non-concrete categories on the same
level as material substances; they supported a nominalism of abstract categories
on a non-referential aspect of mind. As the notion of universals emerged, other
Buddhist schools attacked it, declaring that the only reals are particulars,
indeed the inexpressible suchness (tathata) which was to become a hallmark
of certain forms of Buddhist mysticism. Carrying this argument to an extreme,
Nagarjuna held that all dharmas (world constituents) are void; none contains
any self-essence at all.
The Hindu schools crystallized on a similar level of abstraction. The Nyaya
school of logic took a nominalist stance, holding the conventionalism of world
meanings. The Vaisheshika category scheme lists substance and quality, plus a
hierarchy of universals and particulars of various levels of generality paralleling
Aristotle’s genera and species. Now debate with the Buddhists kicked in, raising
critical questions: How can bare substances exist without any qualities? How
can there be relations between substances and their qualities without an infinite
regress of intermediating connectors? By around 550, the Nyaya-Vaisheshika
alliance had backed off from early nominalism and was taking a stance of
increasingly intransigent realism: relations are real; relations among relations
are real; even non-existence is real. Debate was polarizing into positions of
world illusion and pluralist realism.
Causality and potentiality became sites of argument over the reality and
plurality of substance. Nagarjuna had pointed up the problem by defining the
real as that which is causally efficacious. Therefore, since everything is linked
in a chain of causes, nothing is independently real, possessing its own nature.
There are no universals and no substance. Out of this stance the Yogacara
school propounded a full-fledged Idealism: what appear to be world objects
820 •^ Meta-reflections