difficulty which is felt with regard to the Tathata doctrine that
there must be some reality which is generating all these ideas
appearing as phenomena, is the same as that in the Vijnanavada
doctrine. The Vijnanavadins could not admit the existence of such
a reality, but yet their doctrines led them to it. They could not
properly solve the difficulty, and admitted that their doctrine was
some sort of a compromise with the Brahminical doctrines of
heresy, but they said that this was a compromise to make the
doctrine intelligible to the heretics; in truth however the reality
assumed in the doctrine was also non-essential. The Vijnanavada
literature that is available to us is very scanty and from that we
are not in a position to judge what answers Vijnanavada could give
on the point. These three doctrines developed almost about the
same time and the difficulty of conceiving s'unya (void), tathata,
(thatness) and the alayavijnana of Vijnanavada is more or less
the same.

The Tathata doctrine of As'vagho@sa practically ceased with
him. But the S'unyavada and the Vijnanavada doctrines which
originated probably about 200 B.C. continued to develop probably
till the eighth century A.D. Vigorous disputes with S'unyavada
doctrines are rarely made in any independent work of Hindu
philosophy, after Kumarila and S'a@nkara. From the third or
the fourth century A.D. some Buddhists took to the study of
systematic logic and began to criticize the doctrine of the Hindu
logicians. Di@nnaga the Buddhist logician (500 A.D.) probably
started these hostile criticisms by trying to refute the doctrines
of the great Hindu logician Vatsyayana, in his Prama@nasamuccaya.
In association with this logical activity we find the
activity of two other schools of Buddhism, viz. the Sarvastivadins
(known also as Vaibha@sikas) and the Sautrantikas. Both the
Vaibha@sikas and the Sautrantikas accepted the existence of the
external world, and they were generally in conflict with the
Hindu schools of thought Nyaya-Vais'e@sika and Sa@mkhya which
also admitted the existence of the external world. Vasubandhu
(420-500 A.D.) was one of the most illustrious names of this school.
We have from this time forth a number of great Buddhist
thinkers such as Yas'omitra (commentator of Vasubandhu's work),

168

Dharmmakirtti (writer of Nyayabindu 635 A.D.), Vinitadeva and
S'antabhadra (commentators of Nyayabindu), Dharmmottara
(commentator of Nyayabindu 847 A.D.), Ratna