a. The second
category consists of that habit of the 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.]

149

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 t