Sautrāntika

Sautrāntika is a tradition in Buddhist thought that arose from, and in opposition to, Sarvāstivāda, an Abhidharma school of thought that represented the dominant form of Buddhist scholasticism in north India from the early centuries after the Buddha's passing through most of the first millennium CE. This tradition is taken to have been founded either by Kumāralāta (first century CE?) or Vasubandhu (fourth century CE). Following the works of the latter, the term “Sautrāntika” was associated primarily with a denial of the authority of treatises taken as canonical by the Sarvāstivāda school, and also with the rejection of Sarvāstivāda views of causality in favor of a “seed-to-sprout” metaphor. Sautrāntika is further associated with the claim that all elements (dharmas) are momentary, as against the Sarvāstivāda view of the reality of past and future (as well as unconditioned) dharmas. Also characteristic is the claim that perception affords access not to momentary objects themselves, but only to temporally subsequent representations thereof. As a tradition of Abhidharma thought, Sautrāntika is a non-Mahāyāna philosophical system with no independent monastic rule. The school - preeminently associated with Vasubandhu, but also associated with teachers like Śrīlāta, Dignāga, and Dharmakīrti - is sometimes equated with traditions named Dārṣṭāntika, Saṃkrāntivāda, or Uttarīya.