Dharmakīrti’s Sambandhaparīkṣā and its Yogācāra Reception

Dharmakīrti’s Sambandhaparīkṣā [SP] (Analysis of Relation) and its principal vṛtti (Sambandhaparīkṣavṛtti) are not ‘Yogācāra’ texts; nowhere, e.g., do they refer to a “mind-only” (vijñāptimātra) principle, “storehouse consciousness” (alayavijñana), or any other doctrines typically taken to characterize the ‘idealistic turn’ of the Yogācāra movement.[i] To be sure, the only positive claim in the SP is that ‘relations’ are not ultimately real because actual entities cannot, ipso facto, rationally “depend” upon anything extrinsic to themselves merely to exist; moreover, if we attempt to insert a third independent relational ‘thing’ R into the mix to ‘connect’ two distinct entities, a and b, we wind up with an incoherent relational regress, since R itself now requires further relations.

Insofar, then, as relation (sambandha) basically coextends with dependence (pāratantrya) for Dharmakīrti and his Buddhist ilk—and all dependence requires positing a nonsensical distribution (anvaya) of some mereological ‘whole’ over and above its essentially distinct constituents—relations, just like universals, must be nothing but conceptual constructions (vikalpa). In this respect, the text deploys modes of argument most closely associated with the early Abhidharma tradition and its basically nominalist commitments—certainly not ‘idealist’ in any discernable Yogācāra sense.

However, subsequent Yogācāra thinkers like Śaṅkaranandana interpreted the SP to chiefly entail that the universe is devoid of subject-object duality; since there are no dyadic relations of dependence between momentary causes and effects, the dependent status of a ‘grasper’ upon a distinct object ‘grasped’ (grāhya-grāhaka-bhāva) is also impossible (Eltschinger: 2021). The unreality of relation in this case effectively undermines the notion of an autonomous subject through disproving a correlative external object—which, ultimately, serves to establish the doctrine of mind-only and the fundamental selflessness of all dharmas. So while Dharmakīrti does not discuss Yogācāra principles explicitly in the SP, for Śaṅkaranandana, at least, the elimination of relations was not simply a claim about the causes of self-characterized particulars (svalakṣaṇa), but also an implicit rejection of the dyadic structure of intentional content: Just as self-standing moments in a causal procession do not depend upon each other in virtue of their actual existence, so too does the manifest actuality of reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana) instantiate a constitutively non-relational and inactive mode of cognition.

In this paper, I will show that the SP and its distinct commentaries disclose an important steppingstone in the historical and philosophical progression from Abhidharma nominalism to the Yogācāra mind-only school—one that can help elucidate the transformation of the former into the latter apropos Dharmakīrti’s ‘sliding scales’ of analysis.[ii] In particular, I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theoretical slide from ‘external realism’ to ‘epistemic idealism’ partly stems from the nominalist assumption that the objective reality of both causal and semantic relations hinges on the a priori deconstruction of a single relational form: necessary dyadic dependence. Thus, in the SP, the absolute self-standing nature of particular moments vitiates, not only existential modes of dependence between causal factors, but also conceptual states like ‘requirement,’ ‘expectation,’ ‘reliance,’ ‘desire for another’ etc.—that is, intentional relations whose mode of ‘dependence’ consists in the fact that to describe them, one needs to ‘refer’ to things extrinsic to the actual nature of the state itself. So, although Dharmakīrti nominally addresses both existential and referential modes of ‘dependence’ in the SP—i.e., pāratantrya and parāpekṣā—he deploys almost identical arguments against both forms (indeed, in the PV, Dharmakīrti does not even distinguish between them (Eltschinger 2021: 116; f.18)).

The philosophical upshot is that Dharmakīrti’s nominalist commitments force him to regard all necessary, or internal relations as bearing the same logical form, and thus he does not treat the relational structure of existential causation differently than semantic forms of referential dependence.[iii] To this extent, Yogācāra thinkers like Śaṅkaranandana certainly get something right about Dharmakīrti’s relational eliminativist project: It precludes both causal and intentional relations because there simply are no necessary forms of dyadic dependence in a universe of momentary entities. Hence, while Śaṅkaranandana does present a “novel” interpretation of the SP (Eltschinger 2021: 108), it still signifies the fruit of certain idealistic seeds planted in the ground of Abhidharma nominalism.

At the same time, just insofar as Dharmakīrti can be said to conflate existential and semantic forms of necessary dependence, he lies open to certain pragmatic critiques of later Hindu relational realists like Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta. As I see it, these Śaivites maintain that the Buddhist eliminativists are not sufficiently careful in distinguishing between concrete and abstract forms of necessary relatedness. From this perspective, the Bauddha mistakenly reduces the synthetic form of recognitive judgment itself to a kind of dyadic concept (vikalpa), rather than a triadic mode of relational action (śakti)—one whose reflexive, diachronic unity cannot logically supervene on a sequence of wholly insentient, atemporal constituents. This paper could therefore also contribute to discussions apropos metaphysical vs. epistemic strains of idealism in Yogācāra and Pratyabhijñā.[iv]

[i]  One transcription of the text is from Jha (1990), which extracts and translates the SP from a Jain commentary. But Steinkellner (2022) has recently edited a critical edition of the original Sanskrit text based on a newly discovered manuscript that also includes its last three strophes.

[ii] Cf. Dunne (2004: 53-69), Dreyfus (1997: 99-104), and McClintock (2002: 68-76).

[iii] See Hayes (1994), Taber (1998), Westerhoff (2009), and Arnold (2021) for similar considerations in light of perceived fallacies of equivocation (Hayes), or lack thereof (Taber and Arnold) in Nāgārjuna’s argumentation in the MMK 1.1–3, which isolates a set of verses bound up with issues of symmetrical independence.

[iv] Cf. Arnold (2008) and Ratié (2014) for details.