Trying to eat the air: Vasubandhu’s Objections to Vaibhāṣika Gender Metaphysics

In the current literature, it is often assumed that Abhidharma Buddhists held the same essentialist view of gender. In Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism, for example, José Cabezón draws on passages in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (AKBh) to describe a generalized Abhidharma Buddhist account of gender. In this interpretation, Vasubandhu and his Vaibhāṣika interlocutors only disagree about the specific reasons why genitals do not exist in the form-realm, and are otherwise in agreement that material sex faculties ‘are responsible for everything that makes people male and female’, including their sex characteristics and gendered natures. This, then, would mean that both Vasubandhu and the Vaibhāṣikas are gender essentialists.

In my paper, I agree that the above is an accurate representation of the Vaibhāṣika view, and affirm the characterisation of Vasubandhu and the Vaibhāṣikas as being in general agreement about what these sex indriyas are. As AKBh I.43cd explains of the Vaibhāṣika position and Vasubandhu reaffirms in his own account of the sex indriyas in AKBh II.2, the sex indriyas refer to an arrangement of material atoms found on the surface of each individual’s genitals. However, I argue by drawing on passages in AKBh I, II, and VI that Vasubandhu disagreed about what these sex indriyas could do. The Vaibhāṣikas argued that these material atoms were able to collectively hold causal power over the arising of sex characteristics and gendered behaviours, but Vasubandhu found that statement problematic, attacking it on three different fronts and limiting what the sex indriyas could reasonably be said to have power over.

The first line of attack involves the materiality of these atoms. At AKBh 1.42, he draws on arguments that he attributes to the Vijñānavādins, adding his own observation that since the sensory indriyas – including the sex indriyas – are material, they are not actually capable of being indriya over their professed domains – that of seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. As he argues in the case of the material indriyas that the Vaibhāṣikas claim to be responsible over seeing, ‘what is it that sees? When even form is concealed, there is no obstruction of seeing; here it is only consciousness related to the eye which produces seeing’ (AKBh I.42). Applying this to the case of the sex indriyas, even the arising of sexual sensation should not be attributed to them, and would more appropriately be the domain of consciousness instead. And this appears to apply to the other things that the Vaibhāṣikas claim to be caused by the sex indriyas. While the Vaibhāṣikas claim that the sex indriyas cause differences in gendered behaviour, causing and justifying the conceptual distinction we make between women and men (AKBh II.1), Vasubandhu removes references to gendered behaviour from his own definition of the sex indriyas at AKBh II.2, and removes conceptual distinguishing as something that the sex indriyas are powerful over.

The second line of attack involves the causal powers that the Vaibhāṣikas attribute to the sex indriyas. At AKBh II.41a, Vasubandhu takes issue with the Vaibhāṣika claim that there are fundamentally real causes of similarity (sabhāgatā) that have the quality (-tā) of being the cause (bhāga) of similarity (sa) within sentient beings or a subset of sentient beings. In the case of gender, these causes of similarity explain the uniformity in the sex indriyas found in the sentient beings that are then accurately conceived of as ‘women’, and likewise for the case of men. However, Vasubandhu, rejects that there is any such thing as causes of similarity, and argues that there is no fundamental entity capable of performing such a task. Thus, for Vasubandhu, there is nothing that guarantees uniformity in the sex indriyas that we identify in different individuals. Not only that, the refutation of causes of similarity involves Vasubandhu rejecting the Vaibhāṣika claim that our concepts of ‘sentient being’, ‘woman’, and ‘man’ would only arise if there was something fundamentally real grounding and justifying it. Coupled with Vasubandhu’s earlier claim that this kind of conceptual distinguishing was the domain of consciousness and had little to nothing to do with the material indriyas, it becomes more evident that there is no fundamentally real basis or justification to the conceptual distinctions that our mind has elected to make regarding gender.

Finally, I point to his attempts to clarify his definition of an indriya, which involve a reframing of what it means for something to be a gateway of arising. While the Vaibhāṣikas attribute causal power to the collections of atoms that make up each of the material indriyas, Vasubandhu rejects that collections of atoms count as foundational entities (dravya), and insists that it is only the individual dharmas – which we conventionally group together and call ‘indriya’ – that are able to act as gateways of arising. Here, Vasubandhu identifies ādhipatya as a synonym of indriya, and then provides a definition of ādhipatya that simply means ‘being produced before what is subsequent’. Rather than pointing to some innate causal power held by each dharma, Vasubandhu simply identifies a pattern in our causal attributions. Drawing on a Sautrāntikas objection that analogises the Vaibhāṣikas as ‘trying to eat the air’ when they attribute causal power to conceptual imputations like indriyas, Vasubandhu concludes that ‘there are only dharmas and only cause and effect’. He adds that it is inaccurate to characterise indriyas as performing an activity or function – that is only a figurative expression that arises from the desire for a customary designation. Ultimately, ‘one should not cling to “the eye indriya sees” or “the consciousness cognises”’ (AKBh I.42). Thus, one should not cling to the false view that the sex indriyas perform any real activity or causal role that would provide justification for the kind of gender essentialism that the Vaibhāṣikas endorse.