The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c6.6

c6.6

The causal series of Buddhism, in which the idea of cause is only an inaccurate or popular expression, applicable in its strictness to some alone of the members, traces the miseries of existence from ignorance, through the Saṃskāras, Vijñāna, name and form, the six organs of sense, contact, feeling, desire, clinging, becoming, birth, to old age and death. The series is of very curious appearance; it has variously been declared to be one of the first of the Buddha’s discoveries, and to be a late conglomerate, nor in any case is it a masterwork of expression or thought. In the view of Jacobi the whole refers but to one birth and life. The last element takes us into the midst of the sorrow of existence, which is explained by birth. The first ten members serve to explain the origin of birth, and are derived in part from the Sāmkhya and in part from the Yoga, which Buddha well knew and which had the Sāmkhya as the basis of its philosophic system. Avidyā, ignorance, is in the Sāmkhya and the Yoga alike the cause of the binding of the spirit. It consists in the failure to realize the external distinction of spirit and nature. In Buddhism it means the failure to realize the four great truths concerning misery. The Saṃskāras are terms of Sāmkhya and Yoga, expressing the impressions made upon the intellect by such activities as thinking, feeling, willing and action, from which in due course other phenomena of the life of the soul spring forth. The Buddhist conception of the Saṃskāras is a varying one, but it is sometimes clearly analogous in character. Name and form are to be considered as really equivalent to the principle of individuation, and they naturally grow out of Vijñāna, which is nothing else than the intellect of the Sāṃkhya, which has Vijñāna as one of its functions. Moreover, the derivate character of the Buddhist system shows itself very clearly in the fact that both for ignorance and for the Saṃskāras an intellect must be assumed, which it merely admits after the Saṃskāras in the form of Vijñāna. From individuation the Sāṃkhya allows, on the one hand, the organs of sense and the fine elements, from which are developed the gross elements, to arise. This is rendered plausible by the cosmic principle of individuation for each world period, but in the Buddhist series from individuation, as name and form, the senses and their objects are derived simply and without any justification as regards the derivation of the gross world from the individual. The next element in the Buddhist series, contact, is the contact of the senses and their objects which is recognized in the Sāṃkhya-Yoga: from it results the feeling of pleasure or the reverse, which is the same as the feeling of the Buddhist series. From feeling arises desire according to both theories: from desire the motive to rebirth or becoming, which in the Sāṃkhya-Yoga is termed Adṛṣṭa, or Dharmādharmau, and in the Buddhist Upādāna, clinging.