To explain that past potential likewise cannot be, it was said:
If it comes from a ceased potential’s ripening,
A separate potential then brings forth something.
If it is so that, as a result of a produced consciousness having ceased a particular potential is left in the substrate consciousness, and through the ripening of this ceased consciousness’s potential a consciousness arises, this would be an instance of something other arising from an extraneous potential. How so? Because:
As parts of a continuum must be distinct …,
‘Tan- means to extend’.1
Accordingly, a continuum (saṃtāna) implies a succession, like the continuum of a river, and means that there is a continuous flow, a continuous transmission, with a connection between cause and result. In its usage in the case of the succession of birth and death, there is a sense of a sustaining of the conditioned moments of the three times in a continuous and unbroken sequential state, and as the parts of this continuum exist in substantial instances, the branches of the continuum being instances of substance are what is spoken of as the continuity. These are mutually other and separate things, and our opponents accept their otherness. Hence, when caused by these imprints a latter resultant moment occurs, it is different from the causal moment during which the imprints were set in place, and as such this will be a case of something distinct coming from a separate potential. If they think, ‘This is what we assert, and it is unmistaken,’ that is not so. What one is in fact saying by this assertion is that anything can be produced from anything, as explained in the line:
One could have everything come from just anything. (6.59)
The refutation of other-production has already been covered, and will not be reiterated here.2
Title
Chapter 1: Pramuditā
