Aspects of Mahayana Buddhism and its Relation to Hinayana c7.s3.t6.14

c7.s3.t6.14

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.