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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s3: 3. The Links of the Chain

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s3

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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.

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