กะถาวัตถุ means points of controversy, and alone among the seven this book is a record of disputes. The extract is a fragment of an actual exchange and is printed with both voices in it, question and answer.

No Thai translation is printed, so the English here is a working translation made for this edition — which matters more than usual in this chant, because its argument turns on a distinction that is hard to carry into English at all.

The exchange runs in four moves. Is the person apprehended as a real and ultimate fact? Yes. Is the person apprehended in the same way as that which is a real and ultimate fact? It should not be said so. And then the refutation: acknowledge it — if the first was granted, the second follows, and to deny it is to be wrong.

The whole argument turns on the difference between speaking of a person and finding one. The tradition allows the first freely and denies the second, and the opponent here is caught trying to hold both at once.

That this sits inside a funeral service is remarkable and worth sitting with. It is the one place in the set where the question of whether there is a person at all is put directly, and what is recited is not a consoling answer but a refutation — a text that declines, at exactly the moment one would expect it, to say the obvious thing.