Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s5.7

c10.s5.7

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