SAUTRĀNTIKA

Sautrāntika is one of the sub-sects of Theravāda school, emerged around the time of 3rd century BC. The Sautrāntika school is so named because it gave pre-eminence to the Sutta portion of the canon. Its followers trace their school back to Ānanda, a close disciple of the Buddha. For them, the karmic factors are insubstantial and momentary; disappearing as soon as they have been manifested only to reappear again to give rise to a new aggregate. There is continual motion by virtue of which a person passes from one condition to another. Every thought or act is pervaded by a very subtle impregnation that in
turn is capable of impregnating the subconsciousness so as to generate new correlated psychic situations. The school is of great importance, because its tenets were precursors of the Vijñāṇavāda. Sautrāntikas don't accept Abhidhamma as the Buddha's teaching. The rejection of Abhidhamma by Sautrāntikas was a great challenge to Sarvāstivda who strongly believed in Vibhasas(?). As the theory of dharmā, Sautrāntikas developed Kṣanavāda, by this they refuted all other theories which were made by other schools. According to them, everything changes at every moment with reference to the existence of Dhamma. Only two things can be considered, they are utpāda (uppāda) and vyaya (vaya). Based on this theory of moments, Sautrāntikas say that we cannot know the existnece of physical world in its ultimate sense, the only way we can know the world is inference. The Vaibhāsika doctrine of eternal elements is believed to be in consistence with the fundamental teaching of the Buddha. The Sautrāntikas insist on the non-eternality of the dharmā as well. The past and future dharmā do not exist, and only those present do. The so-called unconditioned dharmās are mere absences, not positive entities. Thus, the Sutrāntikas seem to be the only major school of Buddhist philosophy that comes near to regarding Nirvāna as entirely negative in their epistemology. Whereas Vaibhāsikas are direct realists, the Sautrāntikas hold a sort of interpretations, according to which the external world is only inferred from the mental conceptions that alone are directly apprehended. This school produced no independent literature; instead they ahve translated early discourses into Sanskrit. It is believed that there was Harivarman, who established an independent tradition called 'Satyasidhi'. The Satyasiddhi school probably derived from the earlier Sautrāntika school, based on the Satyasiddhi Śāstra, a work attributed to Harivarman, a 3rd - 4th century Indian writer and known only in its Chinese version (4th - 5th century). It gave birth to a school in China called Cheng-Shi, which maintained that all things were merely designations devoid of reality. Human beings were enveloped in the illusion that either the ego (puggala) or the world (dharmā) were real, whereas in fact nether was. The past does not exist, the future has not yet come to be and the present as soon as it comes into being it disappears. Hence, the sense of continuity is illusory. Harivarman like the Lokottaravādins postulated voidness, both of the dharma and of the ego – no dharma of any sort exists. Thought from the point of view of relative truth dharma may appear to exist. In China this doctrine was sharply attacked by its opponents as destructive nihilism.
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