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Early Monastic Buddhism v1.c5.s5: The Upanisads

Early Monastic Buddhism v1.c5.s5

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The Upanisads

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Strangely enough the Pāli texts as also the Buddhist-Sanskrit literature do not breathe a word about the Upanisads or the Upanisadic teachers. Now that it has been definitely settled that some of the Upanisads like the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Aitareya, Kauśitakī, Taittirīya, Chāndogya, Kena are pre-Buddhistic,¹ the silence of the Buddhist texts needs some words of explanation. One explanation that may be offered is ‘that the Buddhists accepted the principal philosophic viewpoints of the Upanisads with certain modifications, and hence had nothing to say against them.

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¹ Radhakrishnan, Philosophy of the Upanisads, pp. 17-18.

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The Upanisads and the Buddhist texts, in fact, are at one about the highest reality with this vital difference that according to the Upanisads the highest reality is ātman, the self par excellence, the soul of the universe, and it is manomaya while according to the Buddhists, excepting the Vijñānavādins, the highest reality is anātman, indescribable, and is absolutely without any attributes (suññatā) and it is not even manomaya and also not vijñaptimātra as the Vijñānavādins would have us accept. The Chā. Up. (vi. 7) is emphatic in its assertion that there is a very subtle substance (sa ya eṣo’ṇimā) which becomes apparent to us as diverse objects which therefore exist only in appearance not in reality. With the help of several similes the underlying oneness of all objects has been explained to Śvetaketu by his father.

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² मनोमयः प्राणशरीरो भा-रूपः सत्यसंकल्पः आकाश-आत्मा सर्वकर्मा सर्वकामः सर्वगन्धः सर्वरसं सर्वमिदं अभ्यत्तोऽवाक्य अनादरः । For refs. to Chā., see Indian Culture, IV. i, p. 155. For parallel thoughts see Br. Up. V, 6; Muṇḍ. III, i, 7; Śvet. III, 20. IV, 4, etc.

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The Mūlapariyāya Sutta of the Majjhima Nikāya attempts also to establish that the so-called objects are not really what they appear to be, that even the so-called Nirvāṇa is unreal, but the Sutta does not drop any hint about the nature of the reality as the Upaniṣads do. The similes of saline taste of all waters, the same water having different names in different places, clay as a common material for different earthen objects and so forth are utilised alike in the Upaniṣads and in the Buddhist texts.

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In the early Pāli texts, any attempt to give an idea of the reality has been avoided as far as possible. The only hints thrown out are that the Reality, the Tathāgata, is outside the four-fold probabilities, that is, it cannot be said to exist, or not exist, or both exist and not exist, or neither exist nor not exist.¹ It is by silence that the definition of Nirvāṇa has been given and the only positive account available in the early Pāli texts is that it is *nipuṇo paṇḍitavedanīyo atakkāvacaro paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhi* (subtle, comprehensible by the wise, indescribable and realisable only within one's own self). In the course of criticism of the Brāhmaṇic conception of soul, the Pāli texts distinctly maintain that the real soul, if any, can never exist in the body and that the soul of the body can only be an empirical self. In the words of Prof. Radhakrishnan, we may say that the Pāli texts like "the Upaniṣads refuse to identify the self with the body or the series of mental states or the presentation continuum or the stream of consciousness."² It is a fact that the Buddhists maintain that a being is *skandhasantāna*, a continuous series of mental and physical states but it is without any persisting entity.

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¹ (i) Hoti Tathāgato paraṃ maraṇā?
(ii) Na hoti Tathāgato paraṃ maraṇā?
(iii) Hoti ca na hoti Tathāgato paraṃ maraṇā.
(iv) Na hoti ca na na hoti Tathāgato paraṃ maraṇā?

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² Radhakrishnan, *Philosophy of the Upaniṣads*, p. 35 See Stcherbatsky's *Soul Theory of the Buddhists*.

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