d; vessels would shape themselves
even if the potter did not fashion the clay; and the weaver too lazy to
weave the threads into a whole, would nevertheless have in the end
finished pieces of cloth just as if he had been weaving. And nobody
would have to exert himself in the least either for going to the
heavenly world or for obtaining final release. All which of course is
absurd and not maintained by anybody.--Thus the doctrine of the
origination of entity from non-entity again shows itself to be futile.

28. The non-existence (of external things) cannot be maintained, on
account of (our) consciousness (of them).

There having been brought forward, in what precedes, the various
objections which lie against the doctrine of the reality of the external
world (in the Bauddha sense), such as the impossibility of accounting
for the existence of aggregates, &c., we are now confronted by those
Bauddhas who maintain that only cognitions (or ideas, vij/n/ana)
exist.--The doctrine of the reality of the external world was indeed
propounded by Buddha conforming himself to the mental state of some of
his disciples whom he perceived to be attached to external things; but
it does not represent his own true view according to which cognitions
alone are real.

According to this latter doctrine the process, whose constituting
members are the act of knowledge, the object of knowledge, and the
result of knowledge[405], is an altogether internal one, existing in so
far only as it is connected with the mind (buddhi). Even if external
things existed, that process could not take place but in connexion with
the mind. If, the Bauddhas say, you ask how it is known that that entire
process is internal and that no outward things exist apart from
consciousness, we reply that we base our doctrine on the impossibility
of external things. For if external things are admitted, they must be
either atoms or aggregates of atoms such as posts and the like. But
atoms cannot be comprehended under the ideas of posts and the like, it
being impossible for cognition to represent (things as minute as) atoms.
Nor, again, can the outward things be aggregates of atoms such as
pillars and the like, because those aggregates can neither be defined as
different nor as non-different from the atoms[406].--In the same way we
can show that the external things are not universals and so on[407].

Moreover, the cognitions--which are of a uniform nature only in so far
as they