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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10: Chapter V. The Doctrine of Causation and the Act

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10

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English

Contents

Chapter V. The Doctrine of Causation and the Act

1. Causation

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IN striking conflict with the modern suggestion that the real emphasis of the Buddha’s teaching lay in the doctrine of causality as pervading all the things of experience, and that his normalism was a new and Copernican revolution of thought, is the meagre and inadequate examination accorded to causation in the Canon. The idea is repeatedly expressed, regularly in the form: ‘That being, this becomes; from the appearance of that, this appears; that is to say, by reason of ignorance &c. (*imasmim sati idam hoti*; *imass’ uppādā idam uppajjati*; *yadidam avijjāpaccayā*).¹ The duplicate character of the formula is explained variously by later scholasticism; it serves at any rate to make clear that the intervention of a substrate in the form of a self is negated. But in any event the extraordinarily imperfect character of the definition is obvious; the first member expresses the idea of an essential condition; the next a coefficient; and the last, the cause of a generation. If, as we are assured, the Buddhist chain of causation was inculcated at least as much for the sake of the idea as for the sake of the conclusion, the explanation of misery, it is incredible that no further analysis should have been attempted. In truth the case is clear; the origin of evil evoked the chain, and interest in causation was wholly subordinate, and this explains the variations and omissions found in the chain. The lover of causation would have insisted on each link; for the practical Buddhist all that was necessary was to show that evil was caused, and the minor details could be left vague.

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¹ *Udāna*, i. 1; MN. i. 1. 2; SN. ii. 28, 65; MN. i. 262; ii. 32; iii. 63; MKV. p. 9.

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The vagueness of the conception is reflected in the language which uses without attempt at differentiation a whole series of terms¹ (*hetu*, *paccaya*, *nidāna*, *samudaya*, *jātika*, *pabhava*, *kāraṇa*, *nimitta*, *liṅga*). The point is essential, for it explains how in the chain of causation the idea of cause is applied in varying aspects without consciousness of inappropriateness.

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¹ DN. ii. 57; SN. ii. 37, 81; MN. i. 261; *upanisā*, SN. ii. 30; cf. TCD., p. 51, n. 1; it may be for *Upaniṣad*; cf. AKV. (MS. Burn. f. 133ᵇ) in MKV., p. 76, n. 7.

2. The Development of the Chain of Causation

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The insistence on the doctrine of the causation of misery was doubtless in Buddhism inspired by opposition to the pessimism of the Ājīvakas under Makkhali Gosāla, who insisted that purity and depravity arose without cause or condition, that the fate of men depended neither on their own nor others’ action or effort; that no human power was efficient, and that all things with life were without inherent force. Ajita also held that there was no fruit of good or evil deeds nor result of the deeds of others or previous lives. Such doctrines² were, it is plain, destructive of any orderly conception of existence, and the Buddha’s message of deliverance is based on the conviction that misery exists because it is produced and will continue to exist until its process of production can be stopped.

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² Below, ch. vii. § 1.

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The essence of the doctrine of the causation of misery is expressed in the second noble truth; the cause of the origin of misery is thirst—that is, desire—leading to rebirth, accompanied by pleasure in the object and attachment, taking pleasure here and there, the thirst of lust, the thirst of becoming, the thirst of non-becoming. This brings misery, for it produces, whether directly aimed at rebirth or not, the fact of such rebirth, and, as the first truth assures us, birth, age, death, all the incidents of life, are misery.

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This in effect is the kernel of the doctrine, and we may doubt the emphatic assurance of the texts that the Buddha’s attainment of enlightenment was closely involved with the gaining of knowledge of this further elaboration in the chain of causation in its stereotyped set of twelve links.³ The doubt is strengthened when we find the germs of the twelve contained in a text of the Suttanipāta¹ in which other ancient doctrines are preserved. There we find a set of eleven couples which illustrate the principle of causation: ‘That being, this becomes.’ In each case misery is the second element; the first are, in order, action which, based on ignorance, leads man to constant rebirth; ignorance; dispositions (*saṃkhāra*), allied to perception (*saññā*); consciousness; contact; feeling; thirst, which leads to grasping (*upādāna*); grasping which leads to becoming (*bhava*), rebirth, death, and misery; efforts; aliments (*āhāra*); and movements. There is here no attempt to erect an elaborate series, but the chain is already largely present in germ. Another text² of the same collection traces discord back to desire (*chanda*), based on feeling, based on contact, based on name and form, the empiric individual.

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³ MV. i. 1; SN. ii. 10.

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¹ 724 ff.; SBE. x. 129. The work exists in Sanskrit, JRAS. 1916, pp. 709 ff.

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² 862 ff.; SBE. x. 159.

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These suggest a simple enough idea; misery as rebirth might have been explained by the individual consciousness under the influence of ignorance and impressions or dispositions, the result of past deeds, entering into contact with the world, receiving thence feelings of pleasure or pain, conceiving thirst or desire leading to action or grasping producing a new becoming. But the classical formula is less simple; it runs in twelve members:³ ‘By reason of ignorance dispositions; by reason of dispositions consciousness (*viññāṇa*); by reason of consciousness name and form; by reason of name and form contact; by reason of contact feeling; by reason of feeling thirst; by reason of thirst grasping; by reason of grasping becoming; by reason of becoming birth; by reason of birth old age, death, grief, mourning, pain, sorrow, and despair.’ The reverse order also applies; the destruction of ignorance serves to set about a chain of destruction as effective as the creation. This is the formula of dependent (literally going-towards) production (*paṭicca-samuppāda*), a term which moves scholasticism¹ to ask whether the effect goes towards the cause, or the cause to the effect. Frequently as the formula occurs, there are variants from the normal twelve; sometimes the first two elements disappear; in one case the third, fourth, second, and the last two appear in that order, and there are minor variants. The psychological reasons which prompted its development as it stands are uncertain, but there must be taken into account the chain of derivation which is given from the absolute in the Katha Upaniṣad, and of which a later development presents itself in the Sāṃkhya system, or the possibility of Yoga influence.²

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³ DN. ii. 55 ff.; 32 ff. (the first two links are omitted in DN.); MN. i. 49 ff., 261; AN. i. 177; Nidāna S., esp. v. 388; Poussin, TDC. : Oltramare, FBDC.; Beckh, Buddhismus, ii. 94 ff.

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¹ MKV., pp. 5 f.; TDC., pp. 48 f.

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² Below, ch. vii. § 3.

3. The Links of the Chain

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Ignorance in the chain has, it is certain, a purely limited sense, and no cosmic significance, similar to that of ignorance in the Vedānta, through which the absolute passes into the empirical. It is repeatedly defined, and is always the individual's ignorance of the four noble truths, or an equivalent: the origin and disappearance of the aggregates making up individuality, or the delusion which recognizes a self. Ignorance is traced in the Canon³ to diverse causes, the five hindrances (nīvaraṇas), hankering after the world, the desire to injure, torpor, flurry and worry, and wavering; these are nourished by sins of body, speech and thought; failure to subdue the senses, to note precisely disagreeable impressions, imperfect attention, failure to listen to the law and, to frequent the saints. More briefly, it is desire or thirst which produces ignorance, and thirst in turn arises because the feelings which evoke it are permeated by ignorance.⁴ Thus we have as long as the one lasts the other; there can be no question of finding a beginning for ignorance, just as in the Sāṃkhya the failure to discriminate between soul and nature leaves an impression on the internal organs which produces in the next birth the same fatal ignorance. Yet, though the cycle is normally unending, ignorance has a right to the title of 'root' given in the Milindapañha, for it is the link which can be destroyed by the gaining of intuition.

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³ AN. v. 113 f.

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⁴ Cf MN. i. 54 f.; ignorance and the defilements (āsava) as reciprocal causes; AN. v. 116; NP., pp. 86, 199; VM. in HOS., iii. 171; FBDC., p. 34.

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The dispositions which ignorance produces can hardly be misunderstood; they must be interpreted in the same sense as the Saṃskāras of the Sāṃkhya system, in which ignorance creates impressions on the inner organ, which in a future life result in continued ignorance, while the attainment of the saving knowledge prevents the further growth of the seeds of future misery sown in the Saṃskāras or impressions of acts done in ignorance. This leads inevitably to the conclusion that ignorance generates acts which leave impressions on the individual, which result in determining his future existence. This accords well with the position of the dispositions as one of the aggregates of the individual, and with the doctrine that thought takes its stand on the dispositions to last and develop itself, and in so doing it renews them and brings them to fruition in act, word, or deed. Yet it is certain that, although the dispositions are classed as good, bad, or neutral, or in six classes according to the object which evokes them, the regular explanation of their occurrence in the chain is that they are the dispositions of the body, expiration and inspiration; of speech, initial and continued application, as the preliminary conditions of speech; and of thought, ideation or perception (saññā),¹ and feeling. To accept this view as valid is impossible; the creation of two such curious bodily complexes alone by ignorance is as amazing as the selection of two elements of thought which in the individual form aggregates side by side with the dispositions, while feeling appears in a position of its own in the chain. Nonetheless, the confusion is significant of the lack of skill of the interpreters of the Canon; the Tibetan translators of the chain have anticipated modern investigators in equating dispositions with action (karman), and the Sanskrit scholasticism agrees in this view.

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¹ MN. i. 301; SN. iv. 293; Vibhaṅga, p. 135; JPTS. 1886, p. 29; MKV., p. 543; Warren, HOS. iii. 84.

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The relation of consciousness to name and form is expressly made out in the Dīgha Nikāya;² if consciousness did not enter the womb, there would be no living embryo; if it did not continue there, the embryo would die. The evidence is clear; the action is real; consciousness is even classed with the four elements and ether as an element (*dhātu*);¹ it passes from death to life whether we regard it as quasi-corporeal in itself—for it is visible—or as accompanied by a subtle body, a question which vexed the schools.² But it does in no sense create the matter of the body, and it is essentially dependent for its development, rebirth, death, &c., on matter, as it is only in the compound of name and form that it exists. Hence the doctrine that the two stand to each other in the position of two bundles of reeds;³ consciousness cannot exist save with name and form, and name and form cannot exist without consciousness, the third and fourth links in the chain thus being mutually dependent, a serious enough logical objection to such a chain. Name and form must here, it is clear, represent the individual in whom consciousness is involved with matter; the term is old, taken over from a more primitive thought when the name was treated as if it were a possession and part of the individual. The logical interpretation of the term must be that of later scholasticism;⁴ the form is matter, the name is the other four aggregates, feeling, perception or ideation, dispositions, and consciousness itself, but, doubtless to make the causal series more logical, an early text takes name as feeling, ideation, will, contact, and attention, and later authorities equate it with the three aggregates other than consciousness itself. The vital fact remains that it essentially represents the union of consciousness with matter to form the individual; whence, if one causes the other, it nonetheless is dependent upon it; but the causal relation is expressed as it is because matter cannot be said to evoke consciousness; there is matter without connexion with consciousness and when they coexist the initiative lies with consciousness. The chain, it must be added, must not be understood as asserting here an invariable relation, for at a high stage of development consciousness is reborn in the formless or immaterial sphere where matter is not.

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² ii. 63; MKV., p. 552.

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¹ AN. i. 176; MN. iii. 239; cf. ch. vii. § 1.

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² Below, ch. xi. § 2. Cf. SN. ii. 66, 90, 101 as to name and form in transmigration; iii. 46, 56, the senses.

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³ SN. ii. 104; DN. ii. 63.

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⁴ AK. iii. 30; Ç., p. 222; DS. § 1309; *Vibhaṅga*, p. 136. See SN. ii. 3; MN. i. 33.

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The power which drives the consciousness to its new birth and determines its form is that of action; on this topic the Canon is emphatic and as clear as the nature of the subject permits; the force of action cannot be evaded by any device; excuses are vain; punishment is certain and inevitable, save only if the necessary intuition is found to break the chain of existence; then, though the law of action is broken for the future, the deeds of the past must be worked out in a form in which their seriousness is lost; the man guilty of many murders is repaid by a few blows. This suggests that between consciousness and dispositions there is a transition from the old to a new life.

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The six sense organs are viewed in a double light; the first five, eye, ear, smell, taste, touch, are material but invisible, thus being distinguished from the fleshy organ in which they reside; they function by resistance contact (paṭigha); the same term (āyatana) is used for the objects as spheres or fields of sense in another aspect of the word; these objects are material and external.¹ The mind is immaterial, invisible, not affected by resistance contact; it is composed of a mind element of obscure character and has a physical basis of some sort; its objects are both exterior objects mediated by the other senses and ideas.² The relation of the six senses to name and form is simple; they really represent them in another formulation, as the texts³ show which omit from the list either the six senses or both consciousness and name and form.

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¹ MKV., p. 126, n. 1 ; Ç., p. 250, n. 3 ; Psych. Eth., p. 173 ; TDC., pp. 18 f. ; SN. iv. 175.

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² The mind element seems indistinguishable from the consciousness element, mind being essentially consciousness; cf. Buddh. Psych., p. 19. Cf. SN. iv. 1 ff. ; Yamaka, i. 52 ff. ; PD., pp. 80 ff.

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³ Suttanipāta, 870 ; DN. ii. 62 ; SN. ii, 13 ; iii. 46, 94.

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Contact is the mediation between the senses and their objects, and is of high importance in the theory of cognition; the fairest rendering is that it denotes the collision or co-operation of the attention aspect of consciousness directed to the organ in connexion with an object; the scholastics interpret it as denoting the consciousness resulting from the contact, and not the contact itself.

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Feeling, as pleasant, painful, or neutral, is the outcome of contact, simultaneous to it in the canonical view, though later thought distinguishes the moments of contact, sensation production, and feeling. Though distinguished from cognition it must have a cognitive aspect, for contact is the application of consciousness to the knowledge of an object, and in harmony with this the *Milindapañha* makes contemporaneous with feeling perception, conceived intention, initial and sustained application and consciousness, while their intermixture is asserted in the Canon itself.

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Thirst is born of feeling, but only in the case of the unenlightened man whose ignorance renders his feeling a danger; the saint has feelings but not thirst. Thirst in its turn nourishes ignorance, for it produces the delusive conception of being. It is of six kinds, according to the sense organs and objects; triple as thirst for union with pleasant feeling, for severance from painful feeling, and as desire not to be parted from that neutral feeling which marks states of meditation in which there is no pleasure or pain but which tend to Nirvāṇa. In the formula of the second noble truth it is thirst for the things of sense, for existence, or even for non-existence, also a mistaken craving, since it implies the reality of existence. Thirst is characterized by attachment, and thus forms the starting-point for grasping, though according to the scholastic it arises simultaneously with it.

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Grasping is thus an aspect of rather than distinct from thirst;¹ it is hyper-thirst, demanding never to leave the pleasure possessed and asking more. It is also thirst for existence; thirst generates the false idea of a self, and hence we have a fourfold division of grasping into the contaminations (*kleça*) of attachment to the pleasures of sense, to heretical views, to moral and ascetic practices regarded as adequate to salvation, and to the belief in the self; the first is pure thirst, the others ignorance. But the term denotes also the object of attachment or grasping; thus thirst is the Upādāna when consciousness passes to a new existence, and in this sense we have the doctrine that the five aggregates constituting the individual are the objects grasped. Akin is the idea that the Upādāna serves as support in the sense of aliment, in the shape of the assimilation of food for the body and of psychic matter for the spirit; thus grasping is treated as taking upon oneself the five aggregates, material and psychic, and making them one's own by assimilation. Some such idea seems to explain the term aggregates of grasping (upādāna-kkhandha) which often replaces the aggregates in the Canon.¹

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¹ SN. iii. 14, 101, 167; iv. 89, 400; MKV., p. 565.

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¹ MN. i. 511; iii. 240; SN. iii. 94; MKV. xvi. 3; xxvii. 6.

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Becoming or existence (bhava) is in the scholastic definitely treated as the act which produces future birth, the term then indicating the effect in lieu of the causes. In the Canon it normally denotes rebirth, passing from one existence to another, or three sorts of existence are distinguished, in the sphere of desire, in that of matter, in that of non-matter. In the Sanskrit scholasticism we have originating existence (upapatti-bhava), the continuation of the preceding death existence in the constant flow of consciousness, each part of which is conditioned by all the past and conditions the future. But the term is also applied to the condition of a being in a state intermediate between death and rebirth.²

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² Vibhaṅga, p. 137; VM. in Warren, p. 201; MKV., p. 556; DN. ii. 57; AK. iii. 37.

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Birth denotes strictly the union of consciousness and matter in the womb, which is the commencement of the new life, not the ejection of the foetus.

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The last member of the chain is obviously popular rather than scientifically conceived; old age and death are not in the Canon causes of the rest of the series, which possibly was omitted in some forms of the chain. Old age was doubtless meant literally, though the Canon³ already has the doctrine that even in youth age, that is change, is setting in, the prototype of the doctrine of death at every moment, which is made clear in the later scholastic. That scholastic makes it also clear that at death the subliminal consciousness (bhavanga), the foundation of life, disappears in a thought of departure (*cyuti-citta*) or of death, to reappear after the thought which heralds the new existence (*pratisandhi-citta*).

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³ SN. v. 217; gods die without ageing, NP., p. 23. See comm. SN. i. 122.

4. The Interpretation of the Chain

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Pali scholasticism¹ presents us with a perfectly definite picture of the significance as a whole of the chain whose links we have examined. Misery arises from action and it from passion or infection; the chain must be distributed among these three aspects. Infection is either ignorance or passion or thirst, which mutually act as cause without beginning or end; this section includes ignorance, thirst, and grasping. Action again is not *co nomine* in the list, but it must cover the dispositions, as they have moral qualifications, and, more artificially, becoming or existence treated as the act producing this result. All the other members fall to the realm of misery. The chain also must be divided in point of time; the first two members belong to the past, the next eight to the present, the last two to the future life.

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¹ Aung, *Compendium*, pp. 259 ff.; cf. AK. iii. 18 ff.; MKV., p. 522.

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The construction is ingenious, but the objection that the three lives are so diversely presented is serious; even in the present life we must imply ignorance and the dispositions, for they explain why feeling creates thirst in the normal man but not in the saint; the third life must be regarded merely as set out to illustrate the nature of misery, and the first must be supplemented by adding thirst, grasping, and existence taken as volition. Orthodox, therefore, as it is, the doctrine, though accepted in some degree by Oldenberg and de la Vallée Poussin, does not impose itself as necessarily representing the intention of its creators. But the conception presents us with the possibility of pictorial representation, for it gives a wheel of existence with three spokes, and it may have attracted general acceptance in that it recalled memories of the rolling of the wheel of the law by the Blessed One as well as more philosophic conceptions such as the renewal of death, the inter-relation of thirst and ignorance.

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No other traditional interpretation has any chance of being original, and among European interpreters divergence is great.

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Childers¹ would solve the riddle by denying any real chain: each item explains existence in some aspect; the order then is indifferent. Burnouf² regarded it as the evolution of a concrete entity from non-existence. Kern³ holds it to be based on a cosmogonic myth, describing the creation and destruction of the world, showing the phases observed in the phenomena of life and nature; man awakes from sleep; his vague impressions become clear knowledge; sense produces feeling, desire, action; a transition period is followed by birth and death. Kirste⁴ treats it as an evolution of successive phases which are not changes which appear in an organism, but independent temporary existences which disappear to make room for others. Thus vague tendencies, clarified by intelligence, yield to the idea which by contact with the external world leads to desire for self-realization, effected in conception; ignorance is prefixed as a concession to popular Indian thought; it denotes the dreamless sleep between death and life.

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¹ Colebrooke, *Essays*[^2], ii. 454.

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² *Introduction*, pp. 486 f.

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³ *Ind. Buddh.*, pp. 47 f.

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⁴ *Album Kern*, pp. 75 ff.

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Other interpretations insist more on the incoherence and derivative character of the chain. Jacobi,⁵ and in further detail Pischel,⁶ derive it from the Sāṃkhya; the parallel is close; ignorance in both is not cosmic; it produces dispositions which determine the next life; the intellect (buddhi) is akin to consciousness; the former produces individuality (ahaṃkāra), which is much the same as name and form; the six organs are the same in each; thirst is a Yoga term though its emphasis is Buddhist; grasping is the good and evil (dharmādharmau) of the Sāṃkhya, and existence is the cycle of being (saṃsṛṣṭi). There is too much insistence in this suggestion on completeness; the fact of Sāṃkhya influence in itself is patent. Senart⁷ claims that the first two terms are borrowed from the Sāṃkhya, for, if ignorance is, as in Buddhism, empiric, it has no claim to head the list of terms. The construction is late, an amalgamation, without strict order, of independent categories, in which we must not seek ‘une theorie autonome sortant tout armée d’une speculation maîtresse d’elle-même.’ The aggregates are twice present, in terms two-eight and again in the ninth. Warren¹ also holds that there is contamination, and that to make any sense we must admit that the connexion is not always causal, but may take the form of the relation of general and particular. There are two new births between the second and third and the tenth and eleventh terms, and the Buddha probably himself added the first two members, ignorance being the evil he aimed to destroy by his science of knowledge, while the rest was older material, originally not combined into one chain. Franke² also uses the method of denying causality in the same sense between the links; all is really timeless misery, and the chain must be made entirely ideal. The complex is arbitrary; while most of the links are to be treated as giving results, this is strained as between ignorance and presentations, as he takes Saṃkhāra; name and form are the content, not the product, of consciousness; existence is the logical consequence of grasping in its nature as mental assumption, there being no real birth whatever.

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⁵ GN. 1896, pp. 1 ff.; ZDMG. lii. 1 ff.

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⁶ *Buddha*[^2], pp. 65 ff.

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⁷ *Mélanges de Harlez*, pp. 281 ff.

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¹ HOS. iii. 115.

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² ZDMG. lxix. 470 ff.

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Oltramare³ offers a divergent explanation, based on the view that the Buddha aimed at explaining misery, not the origin of life, and at doing so without a self, as if misery were evolving in abstracto by the sole force of ignorance. He wishes his disciples to say: ‘I live a life of misery, because I am born; I am born because I belong to the world of becoming; I become because I incessantly nourish existence in myself; I do so because I have thirst, appetites; I have thirst because I have feelings; I feel because I enter into contact with the external world; I enter into contact because I have senses; my senses act because I oppose myself as individual to the not-self; I am an individual because my consciousness is imbued with the idea of personality; this consciousness has been so made by my previous experiences; these have infected my consciousness by reason of my ignorance.’ The suggestion is ingenious, but too coherent and logical to be primitive.

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³ FBDC., pp. 28 f. Deussen (Gesch. d. Phil. I. iii. 133 ff.) exaggerates the confusion by asserting a contamination of a doctrine of desire as the root of being with the Vedānta doctrine of ignorance and the Skandha theory.

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Beckh¹ suggests a theory, based on his conception of Buddhism as denying the existence of matter in any form, and as holding that all that is real is becoming, which is purely ideal in character, and on the view that the theory of early Buddhism was strongly affected by the doctrines of the Sāṃkhya and Yoga. Moreover, he rejects absolutely the idea that the chain can be spread over three lives; it was discovered by the Buddha as a solution of the question how physical existence comes into being and with it, inevitably, misery. The senses, contact, feeling, thirst, do not apply to an existing individual; they are inherent in the mysterious being, Gandhabba of the Canon, which is necessary along with the union of the parents to bring into being the individual, and becoming (bhava) has the definite sense of conception. The idea is parallel to that of the subtle body of the Sāṃkhya, but, unlike the Sāṃkhya, the Buddhist view denies matter; the process in the Sāṃkhya is one of the gradual development of gross matter from subtle super-sensible matter; in Buddhism we begin with a process of psychic becoming, in lieu of subtle matter, and end with misery, which is the reality in what we call physical matter. With this accords the fact that to the Sāṃkhya also the senses are super-sensible. Name and form as the prius of the senses correspond with the egoism (ahaṃkāra) of the Sāṃkhya, which is a mere illusion, the principle by which we erroneously believe ourselves to act and suffer, while the true self (puruṣa) is exempt from action or passion. In Buddhism name and form cover this imaginary personality, which is really nothing save a process of becoming. The earlier members of the chain are wholly prior to personality; the relation of consciousness to the dispositions is parallel with the Yoga doctrine² of the working of unconscious tendencies which reveal themselves ultimately in consciousness, while ignorance, though psychic, and therefore different from the material Prakṛti of the Sāṃkhya, is cosmic, since it arises before personality and gives rise to the false belief in personality. Thus through ignorance of the truth of suffering in a spiritual essence arises the whole process, which results in the misery of the apparent individual. In addition to this psychological chain of causation we have the cosmological side in the Aggañña Suttanta with its tale of the decline of beings from happiness to a life of misery on earth essentially through the evil effects of desire, which led them to taste the earth, and thus gradually to acquire material qualities and sex distinctions. This is the Buddhist parallel to the doctrine of the Fall, not into sin, but into misery. The suggestion is ingenious, but it assumes erroneously the disbelief of early Buddhism in matter, it exaggerates its conception of becoming, and it reduces the chain too largely into pre-personal, super-sensible personal, and sensible personal elements, rendering it more complicated than the traditional version of the scholiasts and much less easily intelligible.

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¹ Buddhismus, ii. 94 ff.

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² YS. ii. 4, 12.

5. The Significance of the Chain

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We can see now the limited character of the chain of causation; it is intended to explain the coming into being of misery, but the coherence of the whole is not effective, and we can hardly suppose that even to its compilers the construction had much demonstrative force. Certainly they cannot have believed that they were announcing a programme for universal causation, an idea wholly foreign to the Canon. Moreover, it must be remembered that the chain does not explain fully the working of action (karman); that is essentially one of those reserved issues on which the Buddha gives no enlightenment.¹ The reason is simple enough; to assert the operation of action was one thing, to show its actual working something very different, and nothing was farther from the Buddhist mind than to envisage the whole world and every happening in it as the result of action.² The question is attacked effectively in the Milindapañha³ in connexion with the objection to the sinlessness of the Buddha that he suffered pain from disease and when a splinter of rock struck him when Devadatta hurled a rock against him. But it is emphatically laid down that the fruit of action is much less than the pain arising from other causes and that none but a Buddha can discern the extent of the working of action. The sufferings of the Buddha were as little due to his past deeds as the impact of a clod of earth upon its surface is the outcome of such an act by the earth.

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¹ Cf. AN. ii. 80; DN. iii. 138.

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² Cf. KV. xii. 2-4; xvii. 3; xxi. 8 and xi. 7, 8 repudiate determinism of action and generally. See also Mil., p. 271.

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³ pp. 134 ff.; cf. p. 271.

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On the other hand, as Buddhaghosa¹ puts it, the chain of causation serves to negative the existence of any permanent self, the passive recipient of pleasure and of pain; the process is possible without the idea of a self, even if it does not absolutely exclude such an underlying reality. It excludes also the idea that rebirth is due to the intervention of a personal deity, such as Brahmā, who from the exoteric point of view appears in the Vedānta as allotting fresh lives to souls according to their merit, for the process works mechanically. The fact of the essential dependence of misery also opens the possibility at least of its destruction, which would be inconceivable if there were a thing in itself. On the other hand, to make misery dependent on the chain of causes avoids the danger of asserting that it is caused by another, which would import the doctrine of annihilation (ucchedavāda) of the destruction of action without the fruit being realized.

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¹ Warren, HOS. iii. 169. Cf. SN. ii. 20; FBDC., p. 31.

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The system is incoherent enough even so, but it was meant, it is plain, for practical edification, and it would be foolish to criticize it too closely, remembering always that the issue whether pleasure and pain are self-caused or caused by another is one of the indeterminates. But the doctrine is placed in a very difficult position by a passage in the Samyutta Nikāya, where the chain is opposed not merely to fortuitous origin (adhicca), but also to production by self, by another, by both combined. This is precisely the doctrine of Buddhapālita in his disproof of the possibility of any production at all and the resulting proof of vacuity; but we need not assume that any such idea was present to the Samyutta; we have only one of these characteristic exaggerations of the importance of the chain, parallel to the declaration of the Anguttara that the retribution of action is incomprehensible.²

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² ii. 113; cf. Ç., p. 225; MKV., p. 76.

6. The Breaking of the Chain

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As the chain itself represents, and sometimes replaces or is woven into, the second noble truth, so the chain in reverse action is occasionally substituted for the third noble truth, the suppression of misery by complete detachment. It differs from it in that, while the noble truth concentrates on the removal of desire, the chain begins with the suppression of ignorance, a distinction of form rather than of essence. But we have, of course, the simpler view of the direct action of the destruction of ignorance on thirst; even after feeling has arisen, the tendency to create grasping can be destroyed by the suppression of the nascent thirst.¹ But the ordinary course of suppression rests on the effect of misery, which, by the terror it inspires, destroys thirst; the process is: from birth comes suffering; thence faith, that is in the Buddha, the law, and the order; thence lightheartedness, thence zest, thence confidence, thence pleasure or contentment, thence concentration, thence the intuition of the truth.² Again, we are told that it is possible to abandon thirst by thirst, the delusion or pride of self by pride; there is a good thirst, a good pride, the desire to be delivered from passions as are the saints.³

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¹ SN. iv. 87.

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² SN. ii. 31; cf. NP., p. 66.

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³ AN. i. 145; cf. NP., p. 87.

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The serious difficulty of conceiving the cessation of the chain is faced in the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya⁴ where in connexion with trance the doctrine of the suppression of consciousness is discussed; the views alleged include the act of magicians in infusing consciousness into a man and withdrawing it; the presence and absence of the soul; and the suggestion that ideas come to a man without cause or reason and pass away likewise, consciousness existing or disappearing accordingly. This last assertion is categorically denied by the Buddha, who insists, that it is for a reason and a cause that ideas arise, namely, by training (sikkhā), by which he means the whole scheme of salvation beginning with faith in the Buddha as a teacher. But it is clear that the fundamental difficulty remains; how is the training possible? How can ignorance existing from all time be brought to a cessation?

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⁴ i. 280.

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The Canon cuts the knot by ignoring it; denying any intervention of a deity, it could not adopt the system of divine grace which is found in the *Kaṭha Upaniṣad*, and it was too honestly convinced of the phenomenality of the individual to ascribe to that transient aggregate of factors a power of directing itself to the desired goal. In the Abhidhamma¹ we find a negation of the doctrine of pre-determination, ascribed to the Andhakas, on the score that thus Nirvāṇa would become impossible of attainment by the exclusion of the possibility of breaking the chain of existence. The later doctrine² is equally unable to solve the problem, save by the hint, which cannot be made consistent with the doctrine of impermanency and not-self, that there is an inherent tendency in the individual to attain release.

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¹ KV. xi. 7, 8.

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² See cit. in *Bhāmatī* (1891), p. 25; Pathak, JBRAS. xviii. 343.

7. Causation in Nature

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The chain of causation is essentially an explanation of misery; it tells us nothing regarding physical causes, and, as we have seen, the Abhidhamma expressly denies as heretical the idea of action as determining events in the physical world. How far was the conception attained that there was causation active in the world of nature? The idea of absolute regularity of causation was excluded for the world of human action by the necessity of recognizing free will and the possibility of release, and in these circumstances it would have been impossible to develop the idea of a natural causality prevailing in the physical sphere. We obtain, therefore, nothing more than the vague general assertion³ that things as compound come into being under the effect of causes, but we have to put beside this the doctrine that we do not know anything definite as to their operation; we must not inquire whether the world is self-made, made by another, both, or neither, that is, fortuitous, since all these issues belong to the realm of the indeterminates.⁴ Indeed, if we were so unkind as to press this doctrine strictly, it would be fatal even to the idea of any material causation at all, as the Madhyamaka readily shows.

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³ SN. ii. 25; AN. i. 286 : so of all Dhammas, *Dhammapada*, 279.

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⁴ Above, ch. ii. § 2.

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The vagueness of the canonical view is confirmed by the *Milindapañha*,¹ where we find the threefold divisions of beings born of action as conscious; of fire and other things growing out of seed, as cause-born, the result, that is, of a previously existing material cause; and the earth, hills, water, wind, as season-born, depending for existence on reasons connected with the weather, while space and Nirvāṇa exist independently of all three forms of cause. In the face of this to assign to Buddhism faith in the uniformity of the causal process or of nature is absurd.

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¹ p. 271.

8. The Doctrine of the Act

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The insistence of the Buddha on the doctrine of the act (*karman*) can clearly be explained as an outcome of his revolt against the pure materialism of teachers like Ajita or the negation of any true human activity as insisted upon by Pūraṇa Kassapa, Pakudha Kaccāyana, and Makkhali Gosāla, despite their divergent views on other points. It is more difficult to ascertain the degree of originality in this assertion of the doctrine of the rewards and penalties of action, for the references to the doctrine in the Upaniṣads are scanty, enlightenment being the main object of these treatises.² But we know that the Jaṭilas were authorized to be admitted to the Buddhist order without the normal novitiate of three months because of their belief in the doctrine, and the success of the teaching of the Buddha in this regard is infinitely more probable if it were already a widely accepted doctrine of the ascetics and nobles than if the conception were wholly new. Nor is the presentation of the doctrine in our texts favourable to the view that it was new; the stress laid on the chain of causation rather than on the mere fact of Karman hints at the originality, such as it is, of the chain, not of the fact of Karman.

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² Cf. Oldenberg, LUAB., pp. 108 ff.

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But if we may judge from the case of the Jain doctrine of Karman, which is frankly materialistic and imagines that bodily or verbal action creates a subtle matter to envelop the soul and produce retribution, it was possible for the Buddha to make an important step in advance, and to sever the idea from connexion with the old Vedic conception of sin as a sort of physical contamination which might be removed by fire or water, to whose influence the Jains succumbed. Action for the Buddha seems to have been volition (cetanā), and what is done after volition whether in the form of action or of speech. To resolve to kill is one thing, to act another, to approve the act after it has been performed a third, and all three elements must coincide to make an act complete. A gift should be accompanied by intention, and to regret the generosity is to ruin its effect; a sin, on the other hand, is in part counteracted by confession, which is also the accomplishment of the duty of truthfulness, and this fact explains the importance laid by the community on the formal confession of sins.¹

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¹ SN. ii. 99; cf. MKV., p. 306; Poussin, Nirvāṇa, ch. iii.

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A further and important result is derived from this rationalizing of the conception of action. The morality of action predominates in the Buddhist view, and ritual practices such as sacrifice² and purification, nay even offerings to the dead, become merely surplusage, superstitious usages (sīlabbata), which have no value. But it must be admitted that there is no attempt to demonstrate the principles which render an act moral or immoral; it is not until late that we have the suggestion that an act is good or bad according as it benefits one’s neighbour or injures him, and even then there is no more far-reaching criterion than the mere idea of goodness as pleasure and evil as pain. Moreover, the true Buddhist essentially seeks release, and that has nothing in itself to do with either goodness or badness. The monk, indeed, is compelled to attain his end to concentrate his interest on himself alone;³ his actions like those of the sage of the Upaniṣads are essentially for the sake of the self; and the path of salvation requires that he should lay aside, as did the Buddha, all the human class of duty towards wife or children, since family life is a barrier to the attainment of release.

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² Yet it is allowed, DN. ii. 88; MV. vi. 28. 11; on ritual bathing see Therīgāthā, 239, and later Āryadeva’s Cittaviçuddhiprakaraṇa (JASB. lxvii. 2); Vasubandhu, Gāthāsaṃgraha (Mél. asiat. viii. 559 ff.); on offerings to the dead Petavatthu, (PTS. 1888).

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³ Cf. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up., i. 4. 8; ii. 4; iv. 5.

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