Aspects of Mahayana Buddhism and its Relation to Hinayana c7.s3.t6: Existence of Soul is Denied but Nirvāṇa is not Annihilation

Aspects of Mahāyāna Buddhism and its Relation to Hīnayāna c7.s3.t6

Language: English

Existence of Soul is Denied but Nirvāṇa is not Annihilation

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Of late, many scholars have tried to elicit from the various passages of the Nikāyas dealing with Nirvāṇa the sense which Buddha had in his mind, or at least the sense with which the earliest Buddhism started. Most of the earlier scholars, who did the pioneering work in the field of Buddhism, namely, Childers, Burnouf, Hardy were inclined to interpret Nirvāṇa as annihilation or to use the common Indian term Ucchedavāda, a dogma which was opposed to the view of the early Buddhists.¹ Professor La Vallée Poussin suggests that this conclusion of the scholars was an inevitable consequence of the denial of soul by the early Buddhists.²

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¹ Cf. Saṃyutta, iii, p. 109: Yamaka harboured the wrong view that Buddha taught that a khīṇāsavo bhikkhu kāyassa bhedā bhijjatti vinassati na hoti param maraṇā.

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² Nirvāṇa, pp. vii f.

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The conception of soul and the denial of its existence in the early Buddhist literature constitute as complicated a problem as the interpretation of Nirvāṇa. As the conception of one largely depends on the other, we shall state here briefly the position of the early Buddhists as to their conception of Pudgala (soul). The Theravādins are explicit in their statement that the five khandhas, viz., rūpa (material aggregates), vedanā (feeling), saññā (perception), saṅkhārā (impressions) and viññāṇa (consciousness) are the ultimates,

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Māṇḍukya, ii. 31, 32: Svapnamāye yathā dṛṣṭe gandharvanagaram yathā, tathā viśvam idaṃ dṛṣṭam vedānteṣu vicakṣaṇaiḥ. Na nirodho na cotpattir na baddho na ca sādhakaḥ, na mumukṣur na vai mukta ity eṣā paramārthatā.
Māṇḍukya, iv. 68: Yathā svapnamayo (māyāmayo or nirmitako) jīvo jāyate mriyate' pi ca, tathā jīvā amī sarve bhavanti na bhavanti ca.

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to which the composition of the world can be reduced. The mass (khandha or saṅgaha) of material aggregates, feeling, etc., would have remained in their original state dissociated from each other if avijjā (ignorance) had not stepped in and constituted (saṅkhata) out of them a being (sattā) with the sense of ‘I’. When and how this avijjā of the truth—that the five khandhas remain ever dissociated¹ from each other and do not form an individual—came into existence and brought endless miseries has not been told by any teacher not even by Buddha (purimā koṭi na paññāyati avijjāya).² Evidently, the five khandhas alone constitute a being and there is nothing as the sixth, which can be regarded as Attā or soul. But still one cannot deny the fact that of the five khandhas viññāṇa³ (perception) is the most active constituent and is mainly instrumental in the formation of a being (nāma-rūpa). It is produced from Saṅkhārā,⁴ which again issue out of avijjā.⁵ According to Buddhaghosa, the belief in a self arises with the ninth link (viz., upādāna)⁶ of the chain of causation. Hence, on upādāna hinge the origin and cessation of worldly existence. The belief in a self (ahaṅkāra) is nothing but the false notion of the undisciplined men of the world⁷ that one of the five khandhas is soul (attā). It corresponds to the false notion of Ahaṅkāra as conceived by the teachers of the Sāṃkhya and Vedānta. The Buddhist conception of self (attā) is therefore as much imaginary as the notion of ahaṅkāra in the Brāhmanic systems of philosophy.

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¹ Usually the Pāli texts speak of Avijjā as ignorance of the four ariyasaccas. In the Vis. M., (pp. 198, 525) it is equated to bhavataṇhā (desire for existence) and in another place (p. 526) it is explained as “khandhānam rāsaṭṭham, āyatanānam āyatanattham, dhātūnam suññattham, indriyānam adhipatiyattham, saccānam tathattham aviditam karotī ti avijjā. Paramatthato avijjamānesu itthipurisādīsu javati, vijjamānesu pi khandhādisu na javati ti avijjā. Api ca cakkhuviññāṇādīnam vatthārammanam paṭiccasamuppāda-paṭiccasamupannā ca dhammānam chādanato pi avijjā.

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² Vis. M., p. 525.

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³ Viññāṇa=six forms of perception through the six organs of sense, viz., cakkhu, sota, ghāṇa, jivhā, kāya and mano.

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⁴ Viz., puññābhisaṅkhāro apuññābhisaṅkhāro āneñjabhisaṅkhāro, kāyasaṅkhāro vacisaṅkhāro cittasaṅkhāro. Vibhaṅga, p. 135.

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⁵ For a full explanation of Avijjā, see Vis. M., p. 526.

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⁶ Vis. M., p. 569: Upādāna is of four kinds: kāmupādānam, diṭṭhupā°, sīlabbatupā°, and attavādupā°.

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⁷ Dh. S. 1217; Vibh., p. 375.

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Vasubandhu’s appendix to the eighth chapter of the Abhidharmakośa¹ and the first section of the Kathāvatthu throw a flood of light upon the early Buddhist theory of soul. In fact, in the Nikāyas the existence of soul is not categorically denied in answer to direct questions on that point.² What the early Buddhists held was that there is no such thing as soul in the sense which had come to be widely accepted previous to the advent of Buddhism, viz., as a persisting, unchangeable entity. "In Buddhism", says Mr. Shwe Zan Aung, "there is no actor apart from action, no percipient apart from perception. In other words there is no conscious subject behind consciousness...Subject, in Buddhism, is not the self-same permanent conscious object but merely a transitory state of consciousness".³ This conception is identical with Bergson’s conception of mind or soul, spirit or ego. Mind or soul, according to Bergson, is not "some sort of permanent substantial reality on which the various states of consciousness are beaded as on a string.... The states of consciousness are each of them the entire mind in one of the phases of its continuous movement... They are not parts or fragments of the mind, members in an endless series which, for no reason, we choose to regard as a unity and call by a single name".⁴ In Buddhism, the conception of soul as a permanent entity is not only wrong but works as an obstacle to the comprehension of the unreality and transitoriness of things of this world. When Buddhism arose, the term ātman had become so very common, and so much associated with the attributes ascribed to it by the teachers of the early Upaniṣads that the Buddhists had no other alternative than to deny its existence as far as possible in order to wipe out from the minds of the people all the deep-rooted ideas. Besides, Buddhism started with the premises that everything whatsoever except Nirvāṇa is unreal;¹ so there could not be any real soul. But it could not do away with the word ātman, for the Buddhist texts tell us that the early expositors could not help using the current expressions in propounding their doctrines. They wanted to impress on the minds of the people that there is a continuity of the skandhas kept up by action (karma) but there is no persisting, unchangeable and indestructible entity to keep up that continuity. Professor Stcherbatsky puts it thus: “A personality (pudgala), in which other systems imagine the presence of a permanent spiritual principle, a soul (ātman), is in reality a bundle of elements or forces (saṃskārasamūha) and a stream of thought (santāna). It contains nothing permanent or substantial, it is anātma”.² This definition of soul struck at the root of the supposition of any permanent entity and served fully the purpose of Buddhism, viz., to show that there is nothing in the world to which one can cling as real and permanent and so he must develop a state of mind in which he must drift to the ultimate, real state called Nirvāṇa, without having anything to cling to in the intermediate process.

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¹ Stcherbatsky, Soul Theory of the Buddhists (published by the Royal Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg); La Vallée Poussin, Fr. translation of the Kośa, ch. ix.

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² E.g., Dīgha, I, pp. 185 ff; Stcherbatsky, Soul Theory of the Buddhists, (p. 846) shows that Buddha would have said ‘tam jīvam tam sarīram’ if the questioner had not meant by Jīva a soul “as a real living unit, controlling our actions from within”. As an answer in the positive or negative about such a soul would be like the discussion about the hardness or softness of the hair of a tortoise, Buddha had to be silent on the point (avyākata).

Linked texts (5)

Tissasutta — Pāli
Vibhaṅga — Pāli
Dhammasaṅgaṇī — Pāli
Āgamaśāstra — Gauḍapāda, Sanskrit
Dīghanikāya — Pāli