Saṅghabhadra takes a detour to arrive at the same conclusion already made by Harivarman:
Vedic seers are not free from the three poisons and Vedic sacrifice that their literary work espouses is a karmically negative action. These two ideas have been there from the earliest Buddhist literature. We have seen that these two critiques of the Veda and Vedic sacrifice, which circulated independently in the Nikāya/Āgama literature and the Mahāvibhāṣā, came to be connected in the Tattvasiddhi. We also observed that the connection is not a combination of the
teaching alone?” (且如仁等所敬大師所證至聖, 亦非仁等現量所得. 而許至聖, 彼所說敎是至敎攝.
餘亦應然. 何獨不許?)
106 This is amount to the establishment of the reason (hetu) part of the above syllogism, that is, “what has been said is not empty.”
107 This is a summary of NA 531a21-531b16.
two but rather the inclusion of the critique of the Veda within the framework of the critique of Vedic sacrifice. This latter theme of killing also frames Saṅghabhadra’s section; he opens and closes it by making references to Vedic sacrifice. Within this framework, he discusses the problems of ritual killing accompanied by mantra recitation (Part 1), the eternal and authorless Veda that legitimizes Vedic sacrifice (Part 2), and the validity of the Veda as the transmission of Vedic seers’ vision (Part 3). What he does with this three-part argumentation is to confirm the same familiar two conclusions.
However, Saṅghabhadra’s presentation of these two ideas is more complex. It is not the length of the discussion. It is the style of his argumentation, especially in terms of the
sophisticated philosophical terms that he uses and the systematic approach that he takes. What, then, makes his discussion different from those of his predecessors?
First, it is the increased specificity of the opponent’s identity. In earlier sources, the opponents’ arguments are not introduced and, even if they are represented, their assertions are so general as to be attributed to any generic, or more precisely, orthopraxic Vedic ritualist regardless of his philosophical affiliation. In contrast, Saṅghabhadra’s anonymous opponent puts forward specific arguments strongly reminiscent of Mīmāṃsā. Indeed, the assertions that the sound of the Veda is eternal and the Veda is without an author are the hallmarks of the Mīmāṃsakas. We have also seen, however, that those arguments do not fit squarely into the standard positions of the Mīmāṃsakas. Nonetheless, I would tentatively posit him as a Mīmāṃsaka until an attempt to more accurately identify this opponent can be made in a separate study.
The immediate change caused by the emergence of this Mīmāmsaka opponent in the context of Buddhist critiques of the Veda and Vedic sacrifice, most evident in Part 2, is that Saṅghabhadra, unlike his predecessors, had to devote more space to the discussion of the Veda in order to criticize Vedic sacrifice. It was necessitated by the opponent, whose the defense of Vedic
sacrifice was based on the ideologies formed around the nature of the Veda. Accordingly, the focus of Saṅghabhadra’s refutation shifted from the act of killing to the eternal and authorless Veda. And this movement of the critique from the practice to the text seems to be confusion caused by the Mīmāṃsaka arguments. From Part 1 to Part 2, the opponent changes the focus from the efficacy of Vedic mantras to the authority of the Veda. Saṅghabhadra refutes these one by one. Yet, what Saṅghabhadra misses is the unseen but powerful idea behind the opponent’s thinking: that text can legitimate practice.
This unnoticed idea continues to characterize, albeit beneath the surface, the discussion in Part 3 where Saṅghabhadra explicitly speaks the language of pramāṇic discourse. This is another feature that adds complexity as well as sophistication to his argumentation.
Saṅghabhadra even appears to agree with the idea, when he actively argues for the validity of the Buddha’s words upon the opponent’s request. However, this was not total submission to
Mīmāṃsaka reasoning. Just before he argues in this way, he resets the relationship between text and practice. Saṅghabhadra argues that, insofar as a text can be verified by means available to a human, that is, by perception and inference, the text is considered to be a scripture that can have authority over human practice. The approach of Saṅghabhadra to this problem is well-reasoned.
Yet, however rational it might seem, one cannot avoid the impression that the discussion over scriptural authority could be unnecessary, since the topic at hand is Brahmin ritual killing, not the authority of the Veda.
Just as Harivarman connected the two disparate critiques following his opponent’s lead, Saṅghabhadra came to discuss the relationship between text and practice as the Mīmāṃsaka arguments pushed him in that direction. He could have questioned the innate relationship
between the Veda and Vedic sacrifice presupposed in the Mīmāṃsaka arguments. In doing so, he would have pointed out the irrelevance of textual authority over an action and reemphasized the
old Buddhist argument that the act of killing is karmically negative under any circumstance.
Instead, Saṅghabhadra follows the opponent’s argument as he refutes it, and, by doing so, he lets the Mīmāṃsaka set the agenda for the whole discussion. This deference to the Mīmāṃsaka structure of argumentation made it difficult for him to directly make reference to Brahmins’
actual act of killing. With Saṅghabhadra’s willingness to discuss practice in relation to text, Buddhist critique of Vedic sacrifice became a critique of text rather than of practice. The textual tone of the critique grows thicker after Saṅghabhadra. From Saṅghabhadra’s time on, the Buddhist critique of Vedic sacrifice cannot be made without reference to the authority of the Veda, as molded by the Mīmaṃsāka project of viewing Vedic sacrifice, not as a mere act of killing, but as a textually sanctioned activity. The Mīmāṃsaka schema captured Buddhist critique of Vedic sacrifice.
Chapter Two: How Mīmāṃsaka is MHK 9?
An Overview of MHK 9 and a Review of Opinions on the Identity of the Opponent in MHK 9
2.1 Introduction
Bhāviveka’s MHK 9 is the first extensive Buddhist confrontation with the Mīmāṃsakas,
although it was not the first mention and critique of them in a Buddhist text. MHK 9 is the ninth chapter of Bhāviveka’s independent magnum opus, the Madhyamakahṛdaya consisting of the root verses (kārikā; MHK) and the prose commentary titled Tarkajvālā (TJ) divided into eleven chapters. Six chapters (chapters 4-9) are designed to refute the doctrines of other schools, two of which are Buddhist and four of which are non-Buddhist. MHK 9 is devoted to a review of the doctrines of the Mīmāṃsā school and has the largest number (167) of verses among such polemical chapters. Yet, although MHK 9 is extensive and rich, a number of scholars have denied that Bhāviveka’s opponent in MHK 9 is the Mīmāṃsakas. As a consequence, the significance of MHK 9 in the history of Buddhist-Mīmāṃsaka polemics has not received sufficient attention.
The major problem in identifying Bhāviveka’s opponent in MHK 9 with the
Mīmāṃsakas is that Bhāviveka often seems to introduce and refute claims that are not associated with the Mīmāṃsā school or individual Mīmāṃsakas known from extant sources, a problem noted in Chapter One as we review Saṅghabhadra’s section on the Mīmāṃsakas. Saṅghabhadra’s opponent puts forward two hallmark Mīmāṃsaka doctrines—the authorlessness of the Veda
(vedāpauruṣeyatva) and the eternality of the words of the Veda (śabdanityatva)—which enabled us to characterize the section as the first Buddhist encounter with the Mīmāṃsakas. The position of the opponent, however, fluctuates. As we have seen, Saṅghabhadra’s opponent first attempts to defend animal sacrifice by presenting the Veda as an authorless text. Then, in response to Saṅghabhadra’s critique, he presents the Veda as the record of the ancient seers’ vision.
Moreover, the opponent’s prioritization of the mantra portion over other sections of the Veda does not correspond to our knowledge of the Mīmāṃsakas, who invest absolute authority in Vedic injunctions (vidhi)—often found in the Brāhmaṇas—and subordinate other elements of the Veda, including mantras.
If we expect Bhāviveka to exclusively discuss the Mīmāṃsaka doctrines in MHK 9, we encounter a similar problem, despite its title, “Introduction to the Determination of the Truth of Mīmāṃsā” (mīmāṃsātattvanirṇayāvatāra). But the potential for confusion is greater here than in Saṅghabhadra’s section since Bhāviveka introduces more opinions foreign to Mīmāṃsā as we know it and discusses them more extensively than Saṅghabhadra. Those seemingly
non-Mīmāṃsaka elements prompted scholars to doubt the non-Mīmāṃsaka identity of the opponent and to discredit Bhāviveka for not faithfully representing the views of the Mīmāṃsakas as attested in the Mīmāṃsaka sources.
The questionable portions of MHK 9 do not overlap with the portion where Bhāviveka presents his versions of the two traditional Buddhist anti-Vedic critiques. Thus, it is not my primary aim to analyze those “heterogeneously non-Mīmāṃsaka” portions of MHK 9. However, scholars who doubt the identity of Bhaviveka’s opponent in MHK 9 do so as if their views relate to the chapter as a whole, despite being based on a small portion of the text. It is thus necessary to review them to see if MHK 9 is really not about the Mīmāṃsakas.
Before undertaking this task, however, I will present an overview of the structure and
contents of MHK 9 as a “chapter” (pariccheda; le’u) as it presents itself.