mind by virtue of which it constructs diversities and arranges them (created in their turn by its own constructive activity—­parikalpa) in a logical order of diverse relations of subject and predicate, causal and other relations.  He who knows the nature of these two categories of the mind knows that there is no external world of matter and that they are all experienced only in the mind.  There is no water, but it is the sense construction of smoothness (sneha) that constructs the water as an external substance; it is the sense construction of activity or energy that constructs the external substance of fire; it is the sense construction of movement that constructs the external substance of air.  In this way through the false habit of taking the unreal as the real (mithyasatyabhinives’a) five skandhas appear.  If these were to appear all together, we could not speak of any kind of causal relations, and if they appeared in succession there could be no connection between them, as there is nothing to bind them together.  In reality there is nothing which is produced or destroyed, it is only our constructive imagination that builds up things as perceived with all their relations, and ourselves as perceivers.  It is simply a convention (vyavahara) to speak of things as known [Footnote ref 2].  Whatever we designate by speech is mere speech-construction (vagvikalpa) and unreal.  In speech one could not speak of anything without relating things in some kind of causal

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[Footnote 1:  La@nkavatarasutra, p. 85.]

[Footnote 2:  Lankavatarasutra, p. 87, compare the term “vyavaharika” as used of the phenomenal and the conventional world in almost the same sense by S’a@nkara.]

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relation, but none of these characters may be said to be true; the real truth (paramartha) can never be referred to by such speech-construction.

The nothingness (s’unyata) of things may be viewed from seven aspects—­(1) that they are always interdependent, and hence have no special characteristics by themselves, and as they cannot be determined in themselves they cannot be determined in terms of others, for, their own nature being undetermined, a reference to an “other” is also undetermined, and hence they are all indefinable (laksanas’unyata); (2) that they have no positive essence (bhavasvabhavas’unyata), since they spring up from a natural non-existence (svabhavabhavotpatti); (3) that they are of an unknown type of non-existence (apracaritas’unyata), since all the skandhas vanish in the nirvana; (4) that they appear phenomenally as connected though non-existent (pracaritas’unyata), for their skandhas have no reality in themselves nor are they related to others, but yet they appear to be somehow causally connected; (5) that none of the things can be described as having any definite nature, they are all undemonstrable by language (nirabhilapyas’unyata); (6) that there cannot be any knowledge about them except that which is brought about by the long-standing defects of desires which pollute all our vision; (7) that things are also non-existent in the sense that we affirm them to be in a particular place and time in which they are not (itaretaras’unyata).