Hi Stephen, good to have you back, & i hope the domestic dukkha is
not too overwhelming. i have enough trouble coping with the
pabbajita-dukkha!

> The Mahayana-samgraha (ad 1.11), which is earlier than

Vasubandhu's works,

> mentions the "muula-vij~naana" of Mahasanghikas and the
> "aasa.msaarika-skandha" of the Mahisasakas. For his part,

Vasubandhu

Thanks for this interesting reference. Please help my Skt:
does 'aasa.msaarika' mean 'not-sa.msaara-ish'? (with the initial a
lengthened due to the ending '-ika'). If so, then this would seem to
be a startling term to use in this context. It reminds one of the
Puggalavadins, and of the warning i included in my last message,
quoted by Vasubandhu from the Samdhinirmocana Sutra: watch out for
the Self!

Whatever we think of these doctrines, they address a genuine
problem: having diced the world with momentariness, how are
Buddhists to explain continuity? I think an approach to this problem
should at least start with the recognition that the doctrine of
momentariness is not found in the Agama/Nikaya literature, nor in
the canonical Abhidhammas (at least not in the Theravada, and i have
not yet come across it in my incomplete studies of the Sarvastivada
and Dharmaguptaka abhidharmas.) It seems to have emerged around the
close of the canonical abhidharmas, in the post-canonical treatises;
i'm not sure where first, but i suspect the Sarvastivadins.

For the suttas, impermanence means that conditioned things don't
last; the suttas do not lock us into a particular conception of the
nature of time, but stress the existential problem of the frailty of
life.

All the above conceptions developed by the schools emerged at a time
when the doctrine of momentariness had become the standard
explanation of impermanence in the 'ultimate' sense. Thus arose the
need for a principle of continuity, some moisture to glue together
the mass of dry sand. And this glue of continuity, no matter how
carefully we formulate it, somehow always seems to drift towards
that most dastardly of heresies, the Self.

It all rather does make me wonder whether there is something wrong
with the details of formulation of such theories, or are they noble
attempts to solve a false problem?

in Dhamma

Bhante Sujato