Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośabhāṣya: there is no motion, because the conditioned is momentary

Companion source

Source: GRETIL plain-text transformation of sa_vasubandhu-abhidharmakozabhASya.xml, based on P. Pradhan’s edition, whose [page|line] references the file carries; local verbatim excerpt .txt; retrieved and verified 2026-09-18. Metadata: Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, c. 350–450 CE on the usual range. The “two Vasubandhus” question raised by Frauwallner leaves the author’s identity and date contested, though the work sits inside the fifth century on every dating in use. Extraction: two passages copied verbatim with their Pradhan references, plus a working translation marked as such. Rights: the treatise is ancient and public domain; the electronic edition is GRETIL’s, under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0, recorded here and in the excerpt.

What it supplies

The Buddhist counterpart of Zeno’s arrow, argued and accepted rather than posed as a paradox. Refuting the view that bodily action is motion, Vasubandhu writes (ad IV.2, Pradhan 193.1–4):

na gatir yasmāt saṃskṛtaṃ kṣaṇikaṃ — there is no motion, because the conditioned is momentary … sarvaṃ hi saṃskṛtam ātmalābhād ūrdhvaṃ na bhavatīti yatraiva jātaṃ tatraiva dhvasyate — everything conditioned does not exist beyond its acquisition of being, so it is destroyed in the very place where it arose … tasyāyuktā deśāntarasaṃkrāntiḥ — its passage to another place is therefore impossible.

The definition of the moment is given in the same breath: ātmalābho ’nantaravināśī, acquisition of being that perishes immediately after. Zeno’s arrow concludes that motion is impossible and treats that as absurd; this concludes the same and accepts it, so that what looks like travel is a succession of arisings, each in its own place. Against the Vaiśeṣika arrow, which makes flight many motions carried by an impression, this makes it no motion at all. The collection now holds both Indian answers.

A second use of propagation, inside the atom debate (ad I.43, Pradhan 33.2–7). Vasumitra: if atoms touched, they would persist into a later moment. The Bhadanta: they do not touch, and “touching” names the case of no interval. Vasubandhu’s reason for accepting that is a propagation argument — anyathā hi sāntarāṇāṃ paramāṇūnāṃ śūnyeṣv antareṣu gatiḥ kena pratibadhyeta, otherwise, atoms having intervals, by what would motion through the empty intervals be obstructed? The passage closes with the directional-parts reductio: if the atom is given parts by direction, it has parts, touched or not. That is the Buddhist form of the stopping rule for division, beside the Nyāya paramāṇu and Democritus’s cone.

Passage anchors

The file prints ātmalābho 'nantravināśī where the expected reading is 'nantaravināśī, and ātmalābhā dūrdhvaṃ for ātmalābhād ūrdhvaṃ; the excerpt keeps the edition as served and flags both as verification targets.

Coverage and limits

Reading level passage for the two locations, verified character by character against the GRETIL file; metadata for the rest of the work. No commentary and no Chinese or Tibetan witness is stored here. Xuanzang’s 阿毘達磨倶舍論 (T1558) and Paramārtha’s earlier version are the obvious comparison texts and are not covered.