Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge c8.22

c8.22

(151) The sophisticated argument against the concept of omniscience appears to be too involved or complicated to belong to the early Sceptics but here again we need not doubt that they would have questioned the possibility of omniscience in an age when there was more than one claimant to omniscience. The leader of the Jains claimed omniscience according to the evidence of both the Buddhist as well as the Jain texts (*v. infra*, 311) and so did Pūrana Kassapa (*v. infra*, 196). Omniscience is claimed for Makkhali Gosāla in the later Tamil texts Civañānacittiyār and Nīlakēci as Prof. Basham has shown (*op. cit.*, p. 276), though there is no evidence that he himself claimed omniscience. It is not unlikely that since the Buddha argued against the claims to omniscience on the part of religious teachers (*v. infra*, 311), the Sceptics would likewise have done so. The sayings which state that with a limited knowledge no one can know that any person is omniscient, e.g. 'nāsarvajñaḥ sarvajñaṁ jānāti'; 'sarvajño' sāviti hyetattatkāle pi bubhutsubhiḥ tajjñānajñeyavijñānarahitair gamyate katham' are also quoted elsewhere¹ and may possibly have been old sayings of the Sceptics. Another saying bearing on this topic specifically attributed to the Sceptics and criticized, reads as follows: 'All teachings are like the utterances of barbarians since they have no (epistemic) basis' (chinnamūlatvāt mlecchānubhāṣaṇavat sarvaṁ upadeśādikam, *op. cit.*, Vol I, fol. 35 on Sū. 1.1.2.17). This was possibly directed mainly against those who claimed to speak with authority on the presumption of their omniscience. On the basis of these sayings we may perhaps surmise that they argued that since the human intellect was limited no one could claim to know everything with such a limited intellect. They may have even extended this argument to arrive at their Scepticism. None of the metaphysical theories claiming to be true, which are the products of such a limited intellect, can be known to be true, since they are mutually contradictory Now, no new theory can also be true since it is bound to contradict one or more of the existing theories. Therefore nothing can be known to be true. Thus the contradictions of metaphysics and the impossibility of omniscience may have led them to accept Scepticism. One thing we need not doubt and that is that these Sceptics more than any other thinkers of their age appear to have been struck by the fact that the conflicting theories not of one tradition but of all schools seemed to cancel each other out And in this respect the Sceptics were really the children of the age in which they lived.