Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s5.1

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.