Aspects of Mahayana Buddhism and its Relation to Hinayana c7.s3.t6.6

c7.s3.t6.6

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.