27.  And thus (on that doctrine) there would be an accomplishment (of ends) in the case of non-active people also.

If it were admitted that entity issues from non-entity, lazy inactive people also would obtain their purposes, since ‘non-existence’ is a thing to be had without much trouble.  Rice would grow for the husbandman even if he did not cultivate his field; 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].