If you remove heat from fire, then there
is no such thing as fire, or if you remove surface from body, what body
can remain? Thus guna is as it were surface, remove this and there can
be no guni. So that this deliverance, spoken of before, must leave a
body yet in bonds. Again, you say that by clear knowledge you get rid of
body; there is then such a thing as knowledge or the contrary; if you
affirm the existence of clear knowledge, then there should be someone
who possesses it (i.e. possesses this knowledge); if there be a
possesor, how can there be deliverance from this personal 'I'? If you
say there is no 'knower,' then who is it that is spoken of as 'knowing'?
If there is knowledge and no person, then the subject of knowledge may
be a stone or a log; moreover, to have clear knowledge of these minute
causes of contamination and reject them thoroughly, these being so
rejected, there must be an end, then, of the 'doer.' What Arada has
declared cannot satisfy my heart. This clear knowledge is not universal
wisdom, I must go on and seek a better explanation."
Going on then to the place of Udra Rishi, he also expatiated on this
question of "I." But although he refined the matter to the utmost,
laying down a term of "thought" and "no thought" taking the position of
removing "thought" and "no thought," yet even so he came not out of the
mire; for supposing creatures attained that state, still (he said) there
is a possibility of returning to the coil, whilst Bodhisattva sought a
method of getting out of it.
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