Revealing Forms of the Body in Vaibhashika

Review

In the discussion of the mental factor of an urge, in which we have borrowed and adapted to the Vaibhashika view the distinction between a performer and exertional impulse that Sautrantika draws, we have seen that urges that affect and drive a consciousness and its accompanying mental factions in the cognition of an object are performer impulses and not karmic. 

In the Sautrantika system, exertional impulses are the compelling urges that drive the consciousness and its accompanying mental factors during the course of committing a karmic action of the body, speech or mind. Vaibhashika disagrees and asserts that only the urges that drive the mental consciousness and its accompanying mental factors during the course of committing a karmic action of the mind are compelling karmic impulses. The urges that drive a sensory consciousness and its accompanying mental factors during the course of committing a karmic action of the body and speech are not considered as being karmic impulses. Rather, the karmic impulses in actions of the body and speech are the compelled, compulsive revealing and nonrevealing forms of the actions.

Further, during a karmic action of the body or speech, the urge that drives, in its exertional role, the sensory consciousness and its accompanying mental factors to engage the body or speech – namely, the revealing form of the body or speech – in committing the karmic action does this while simultaneously driving, in its performer role, that sensory consciousness to cognize the basis toward or with which the karmic action is being committed. Both roles of such an urge are non-karmic. 

But what exactly is a revealing form?    

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