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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s5: 5. The Significance of the Chain

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s5

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5. The Significance of the Chain

c10.s5.1

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.

c10.s5.2

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.

c10.s5.5

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.

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