Sort of. The dhammas exist forever as substances. What we see as impermanence, as their arising and ceasing, is merely their effects being discharged across time. As far as I understand their system, even if everyone in the whole of the 3 realms were to be liberated the dhammas would always still persist. As I say, Pudgalavāda also accepted this tri-temporal realism and in a sense, they can be thought of as being Sarvāstivādins but with the "person" too as a real concept. What is commonly known as Sarvāstivāda is really Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika, with the Vaibhāṣika being those who adhere to their school's great commentary on the Abhidharma, the Abhidharma Mahāvibhāṣa Śāstra.Brus963 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 15, 2022 8:37 pmCeisiwr wrote: ↑Sat Oct 15, 2022 8:20 pm
For Sarvāstivādins, everything exists (hence the name of "all exists school)". All dhammas exist and always exist in the past, present and future. They do so because they have substantial existence (dravya-sat). As they are substances, they always are. Liberation then in that school is a process of "decoupling" from these eternal dhammas.
The way I understand Sarvastivada is that they are kind of like Platonists. They're trying to make sense of the fact that we have things like memory and conceptualization, and so everythings exists, but when it manifests it is impermanent. Something like that, I could be wrong though.
On tri-temporal realism it seems this view of the dhammas arose as a means to address the question of how dhammas can have effects across time, particularly kamma. The question was how kamma can lead to an effect that was potentially millions of years in the future if it had already ceased. One solution to this problem was to say it occurs because in a sense, the initial kamma never actually ceased. The past still exists and has effects in the future as that exists too. Another solution was that there was some root conciousness which in some way carries the kamma until the conditions are right for it to come into fruition. Those who preferred the former became Sarvāstivādins. Those that preferred the latter became Theravāda, Mahīśāsaka, Dharmaguptaka and so on. Further arguments were then offered on both sides to argue their point. For the Sarvāstivādins, they argued that in order for us to remember the past the past must still exist since conciousness can only cognise something if it presents to conciousness. The past then exists, and those who disagree are guilty of proposing a cognition of nothing when they say we can remember something which has ceased (the past). In their Abhidharma texts, they even talk of Theravāda's very own Moggaliputtatissa as being a monk who proposes a "cognition of nothing". In reply the other schools accused the Sarvāstivādins of violating the law of impermanence.
