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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s4: 4. The Interpretation of the Chain

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s4

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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.

Cites (3)