Early Monastic Buddhism v1.c5.s5.6

v1.c5.s5.6

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.