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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12: Chapter VII. The Place of Buddhism in Early Indian Thought

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12

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Contents

Chapter VII. The Place of Buddhism in Early Indian Thought

1. Early Indian Materialism, Fatalism, and Agnosticism

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FROM the Pali Canon we gather the clear impression that the systems which caused most interest and evoked most serious opposition from the Buddha dealt with life either purely materialistically, or were fatalistic, or denied the possibility of any knowledge. The glimpses we have of these doctrines is tantalizingly slight, and give no appreciation of the arguments by which they were supported. But there is sufficient evidence of the power of these beliefs in the history of Indian thought to show that the schools attacked by the Buddha were not visionary foes, but holders of doctrines popular and widespread among thinking men.

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The simplest, and most hopeless from the Buddhist point of view, was presumably the creed of Ajita of the garment of hair (kesakambalin). It was a pure materialism; man is built up of the four elements, which at death are resolved into their native earth, water, fire, and air, while the senses, conceived apparently as in the classical form of the Cārvāka doctrine as the product of the commixture of the elements, pass into space, whose existence is also accepted. Hence, there is no true birth, whether from father and mother or fortuitous; there is no fruit of gift or sacrifice in this world or the next; wisdom avails not to prevent annihilation in the grave. An essentially similar doctrine doubtless that of the Lokāyatas, who held that the soul was identical with the body, in the sense that it died with it, a doctrine evidently very popular in early India and persisting later, for the Arthaśāstra ranks the system with Sāṃkhya and Yoga as prevalent doctrines.¹

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¹ DN. i. 55; cf. SN. iii. 307; MN. i. 515; DS., §§ 1215, 1362, 1361; Hillebrandt, KF., pp. 12 f., 25.; SBE. xlv. 237; SN. iii. 71; refers to casualists, deniers of the deed and deniers of existence; KV. i. 6. 60; DN., p. 56, n. 3.

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Not much further advanced is the creed of Pakudha Kaccāyana; in it seven permanent substances, uncreated and without change, are admitted, which do not interact; the four elements, pleasure, pain, and the soul. There is, therefore, neither slayer nor causer of slaying, hearer or speaker, knower, or explainer; there is, in effect, a complete fatalism, a soul, pleasure and pain being merely thrown in to avoid the obvious difficulties of evolving them from matter.

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Both these theories thus reject transmigration utterly, but Makkhali Gosāla, head of the Ājīvakas or Ājīvikas, a man well known to the Jains also, and who was once in close contact with their leader Mahāvīra, is credited with accepting transmigration, both fools and wise alike being condemned to wander for 8,400,000 periods before achieving an end of their pain. But he is entirely fatalistic in dogma; there is no cause of rectitude or depravity; men become pure or impure without reason or cause. There is no such thing as power, energy, human strength or human vigour. All is determined; it is idle by duty, penance, or righteousness to think that one can counteract the force of destiny. The pessimism of the doctrine can hardly have been diminished by the asceticism of the believers in it; we learn from the Jain scriptures of the utterly repugnant and painful practices to which they resorted, and which it seems impossible to bring into any very logical connexion with their tenets.²

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² DN. i. 53; MN. i. 31, 198, 238, 250, 483, 512, 524; SN. i. 66, 68; iii. 69, 211; iv. 398; AN. i. 33, 286; iii. 276, 384; VP. i. 8, 291 &c; Hoernle, Uvāsagadasāo, pp. 108 ff.; SBB. ii. 71, n. 1; Franke, DN., p. 56; Jacobi, SBE. XLV. xxix; Mil., p. 5; Ui, VP., pp. 19, 22.

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A similarly disquieting doctrine is ascribed to Pūraṇa Kassapa; on what metaphysical basis he rested does not appear. But his view is clearly fatalistic; the committing of crime, even the making of all the creatures on earth one mass of flesh brings no guilt; in generosity, in self-mastery, in control of the senses, in speaking truth, there is neither merit nor increase of merit. The prince who in his realm north of the Ganges gives alms and offers sacrifice reaps no reward of merit; when he slaughters and oppresses his foes to the south he acquires no guilt.¹

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¹ DN. i. 53; SN. iii. 69; v. 126 and AN. iii. 383 attribute to him doctrines of Makkhali.

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These doctrines were at least definite; but Sañjaya of the Belaṭṭha clan, or son of Belaṭṭhī was agnostic pure and simple, refusing in effect to assert or deny any form of the four possible modes of framing a proposition: A is B, ; A is not B; A is both B and not B; A is neither B nor not B.²

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² DN. i. 58 f.; 27; Jacobi, SBE. XLV. xxvi; a scepticism and primitive stage of criticism of knowledge, Ui, VP., p. 23. That this Sañjaya’s followers passed over to Buddhism (SBE. XLV. xxix) is implausible; Franke, DN., p. 50, n. 6.

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It is easy to see how deeply these doctrines affected the Buddha’s teaching; he opposed to them the conviction within limits of definite knowledge, while he adopted and developed a doctrine of agnosticism on a wide range of fundamental topics in the eyes of other thinkers, which in his view did not concern the essential fact of salvation. Salvation and the means of attaining it by human effort, by conduct and wisdom, he asserted as absolutely real against schemes of fatalism; he did not deny the material world, but he emphasized the essential element in life as psychic process. It was conviction of this process and its necessity, if effort were to be admitted, that produces the negation of the self regarded as something fixed and immutable as in Pakudha’s doctrine.

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In one point all these sages agreed; there were Samaṇas, ascetic in some degree, and they shared this peculiarity with the Jains whose leader Nigaṇṭha of the Ñāta (Nātha or Nāta) clan was evidently regarded with hostile eyes by the Buddha.³ The Buddha himself had been a great ascetic; India admires ascetics and later Buddhist art portrays with horrible realism the emaciation of his sufferings; but, at the expense of some obloquy, he had risen superior to the excesses of asceticism and held rather that excessive asceticism was a hindrance, not an aid to the conquest of truth. The Jains reproached the Buddhists with a life of pleasure, and Buddhists often continued to admire penance, but the sanity of the founder of the school is undeniable.

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³ SBB. ii. 74; Franke, DN., p. 61; SBE. XLV. xxi ff.; Sūtrakṛtāṅga, i. 1. 1. 17; Ui, VP., pp. 19, 22. The original form was perhaps Jñātṛ.

2. Buddhism and the Beginnings of the Sāmkhya

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Clear as is the position adopted by the Buddha towards these aspects of thought, it is much less easy to determine the nature of his relation to the great philosophical systems then in the making, the metaphysics of the Vedānta and the Sāmkhya. There can be no serious doubt as to the priority of the older Upaniṣads, the Aitareya, Bṛhadāraṇyaka, or Chāndogya to our Buddhist texts, nor need we exaggerate¹ their dates to accept this result, since we have seen no ground to place our Pali Canon in the fourth century B. C. But it is not easy precisely to determine the doctrine of the Upaniṣads; there are traces in it of an insight which gives us later the famous distinction of two forms of knowledge, the empiric, and the real, corresponding to the world of phenomena and the absolute, whose relations to the former are beyond all possibility of knowledge or expression by empirical determinations. But to accept² this as the oldest and fundamental Upaniṣad doctrine, of which other views are later corruptions is impossible. The main doctrine of the Upaniṣads is clearly the belief in the existence of an absolute; in the main this absolute is admitted to exist pantheistically in the world, while the destiny of the seeming individual is to be reabsorbed in release through the attainment of the saving knowledge in this absolute. It is only in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, which is probably older than any Buddhist text we have, that we find a real attempt to think out the existence of the world and the self in relation to the absolute. The absolute, conceived as the person or spirit, a conception closely connected with the idea of the Rigveda that the world is created by the sacrifice of the primeval person (puruṣa) gives rise to the unevolved (avyakta), into which it enters as the great self (mahān *ātmā*), and thus individualized, in a manner common in the Brahmanical speculation, develops as intellect (*buddhi*), mind, senses, and objects of sense. Beyond this speculation, elaborated in the later *Çvetāçvatara* and *Maitrāyaṇī Upanisads*, no progress is made in the Upanisads.¹

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¹ As does Oldenberg, LUAB., p. 357, n. 185. A reference to the Aitareya Upaniṣad, Chāndogya and Taittirīya in Tevijja Sutta (Walleser, PGAB., p. 67) is most improbable.

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² As do Deussen, Philosophy of the Upaniṣads and Schrader, JPTS. 1904-05, pp 161 f.

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¹ Keith, *Sāṃkhya System*, chs. i and ii; Oldenberg, *LUAB*. ch. iii.

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In the classical form of the Sāṃkhya revealed in the *Sāṃkhya Kārikā* of Īçvarakṛṣṇa we find a system which differs vitally from the plan of the *Katha Upanisad* by abolishing the universal person or spirit, and opposing to the unmanifested or nature (*prakṛti*) an infinite number of individual spirits, which, it is essential to note, are no longer conceived as in any sense enveloped in matter; from primitive matter intellect, individuation, unknown to the *Katha*, mind, the senses and objects arise, but all is unconscious save through reflection in some degree² in the spirit, which nonetheless is a mere idle spectator of a process which concerns it not, and which will cease to be such a spectator for good, when it is realized that there is an eternal distinction and separateness (*viveka*) between spirit and matter. So artificial a structure cannot possibly be an outcome of primitive thought, and a bridge is provided in the Sāṃkhya known to the epic, where, though the later form of the doctrine begins to appear, we find also the spirit as universal, an attitude whose priority to the later idea is shown effectively by its harmony with the conception of nature as one.

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² cf. Garbe, *Sāṃkhya-Philosophie*,² pp. 368 f., 374 ff. with Dasgupta, *Ind. Phil.* i. 224 f.

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That this was a form of thought existing in the period of early Buddhism cannot seriously be questioned; the precise view of the Buddha himself we cannot hope to gather, but it is interesting to examine how far the growth of the school was affected by these doctrines. There would, of course, be proof positive of influence of the Sāṃkhya on Buddhism did we take seriously the account in the *Buddhacarita* of the meeting of the Buddha with the teacher Arāḍa Kālāma and the Sāṃkhya doctrines—which have epic parallels—attributed by Açvaghoṣa to the latter.³ But the Canon is silent and Aṣvaghoṣa a poet who would have us believe the Vaiçeṣika pre-Buddhist, so we may leave the argument aside. Less plausible still is the conjecture that the name of the Buddha’s town, Kapilavatthu, retains a record of the sage Kapila, founder of the classical Sāṃkhya. The only proof available must be internal evidence.

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³ Jacobi, *ZDMG*. lii. 4 f.; Oldenberg, ibid. 681 ff.; *GN*. 1917, pp. 241 f.; Strauss, *VOJ*. xxvii. 257 ff. Garbe's views (*SP*., pp. 6 ff.) are clearly untenable; Keith, *SS*., pp. 22 f. (His views on Pythagoras' borrowings in Greek

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The matter is complicated by the aversion of the Buddha to metaphysical speculations on topics deemed by him unnecessary, which explains why we have no examination of the conception of the Aupaniṣada absolute. The schematic handling of all possible theories of the continuance of consciousness after death is too formal to help, but in the Majjhima Nikāya¹ we do meet a passage which denounces in set terms as folly the conception of the existence of the self after death as identical with the absolute, the nearest approach—and that not in the earliest part of the Canon—to a formal attack on the absolute. This does not, however, take us necessarily to any connexion with the Sāṃkhya, and it is doubtful whether any aid is given by the attack² on philosophers who assert the eternity of the self and the world, bringing forth nothing new, steadfast as a mountain peak, firmly fixed as a pillar; the metaphor of the mountain top is found in epic and classical Sāṃkhya, but it applies to the spirit alone. Equally unconvincing is a Sāṃkhya origin for the distinction made by some teachers between the impermanent eye, ear, nose, tongue and body and the permanent consciousness, for the Sāṃkhya regards consciousness as equally impermanent.

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¹ i. 138; cf. KV. i. 1. 242.

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² DN. i. 14, 21; cf. Garbe, Sāṃkhya-Philosophie pp. 15 ff. That the idea of matter in Buddhism is borrowed from the Sāṃkhya, it is clearly (despite Geiger, PB., p. 81) wholly needless to assume. On materialistic tendencies in the Upaniṣad period cf. Jacobi, KF., pp. 37 ff. with Oldenberg’s corrections (GN. 1917, pp. 268 ff.).

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It remains, therefore, to consider whether indirectly we can trace Sāṃkhya influence in its pre-classical form. More fruitful results here present themselves. There is an unmistakable similarity between the Sāṃkhya conception of the constant process of nature and the general Buddhist conception of the world as in

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philosophy (pp. 126 ff.) are vitiated inter alia by his having overlooked Kaye, JRAS. 1910, pp. 753 ff. and are refuted by Oldenberg, GN. 1917, p. 253.)

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a perpetual condition of becoming. There is, moreover, a clear similarity in both systems in regard to the idea that the process is ruled by causality. True, the comparison of the Sāṃkhya system of the development of the twenty-four principles from nature downwards is a metaphysical explanation of empirical being, and therefore differs seriously from the Buddhist chain of causation of misery; hence the efforts of Professor Jacobi¹ and Pischel to work out a parallelism between the two has led to untenable comparisons, such as that of name and form with the individuation of the Sāṃkhya or of grasping with good and evil (*dharmādharmau*). But there is a real element of truth in the comparison; the idea of orderly development, which is already in the *Katha*, is the source of the seeking of causal order in the Buddhist formula. But the connexion goes further than that; the vital element in the chain is the conception that ignorance of truth in the individual—not a cosmic force—produces in the substitute for a self impressions which until counteracted by knowledge, result in producing ignorance in a future birth and so on *ad infinitum*, and in the Sāṃkhya and Yoga, where the doctrine is more fully expounded, we have the same idea of ignorance—here of the non-connexion of spirit and matter—producing impressions; both systems likewise recognize the importance of the factor of desire. In both systems of thought, therefore, we have the same picture of a world of process as in a sense a self-contained and closed system; there are two differences of importance, which we may judge Buddhist innovations. The first is the disappearance of nature as an ultimate reality when evolution takes place; this obviously would have countered too violently Buddhist insistence on becoming. With it fall the Guṇas,² or constituents of being; indeed, the inclusion among them of the element of goodness (*sattva*) would have prevented Buddhism incorporating the conception in a system which asserted the misery of empirical reality as a ground for seeking release. Secondly, to the Sāṃkhya the whole process is unconscious save through reflection or other contact with spirit;

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¹ GN. 1896, pp. 43 ff; ZDMG. lii. 1 ff.; Pischel, *Buddha*,² pp. 65 ff.

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² A Sāṃkhya without Guṇas is very dubious; Keith, SS., p. 23; Oldenberg, GN. 1917, p. 242, n. 4.

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this is impossible for a doctrine which denies the implication of a self in empirical reality, so that phenomena themselves appear as psychic no less than material.

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There is some evidence also that Buddhism developed under the influence of the early Sāmkhya conception of the spirit as indeed one, but not as intimately concerned with empiric reality. The doctrine expounded in the sermon on the characteristics of the not-self implies, as we have seen, the idea of a self as something utterly remote from experience, and a similar motive is seen in the sermon of Gayā on the world as enveloped in flames;¹ we seem here at the standpoint of a self which stands apart as a mere spectator of the misery of psychic existence, and the struggle for release takes the form, not of an effort within the causal series of the psychic happenings to stay its course of pain, but to realize the distinction between the self and this psychic complex. This idea, akin to the Sāmkhya recurs quite clearly in the doctrine which makes the enlightened Buddhist say that nature is not his, he is not it, it is not his self, in terms which are a precise parallel of the recognition in the Sāmkhya by the spirit of its distinction from nature which is the source of release from connexion with it.² The conclusion of borrowing is aided by a verbal similarity—rare otherwise as between Sāmkhya and Buddhism; the conception of Nirvāṇa without residue of support (*upadhi*) is inexplicable, unless we remember the doctrine of both Vedānta and Sāmkhya by which the spirit appears to belong to the world of becoming because of Upādhis; the transcendental in some way obtains a support and becomes transmuted into the empiric reality.

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¹ MV. i. 6. 38 ff.; i. 21.

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² Oldenberg's suggestion (LUAB., p. 319), based on MU. vi. 30, that in this proto-Sāmkhya the spirit itself was regarded as really bound and suffering does not accord well with the Buddhist evidence, as he himself indeed admits, and is in itself improbable.

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The proof of Sāmkhya influence is obviously indirect, and not in itself complete. It is possible to argue that it is enough to assume influence of the doctrine of the absolute without the Sāmkhya developments or to assign these developments to early Buddhism, though neither suggestion is perfectly satisfactory. But the case for influence is enormously strengthened by the consideration that the Yoga shows with Buddhism remarkable similarities, not merely in doctrine but also in terminology, which suggest irresistibly borrowing, and render indebtedness to the kindred Sāṃkhya system extremely probable. The alternative, of Yoga borrowing from Buddhism, need not, as a factor of early development, be seriously considered; it is enough to note that Buddhists make no claim to originality in the trances which they employed, and these trances, though a popular and important feature of the discipline, favoured personally by the Buddha himself, do not in the oldest doctrine as well as later claim to be the absolutely essential elements of the process of salvation.

3. Buddhism and Yoga

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That Yoga, that discipline, physical and mental, which procures its adepts magic powers as well as the highest reward of release or beatification,¹ is old in India is unquestioned. It is a development and rationalization of the asceticism, Tapas, which is acclaimed in the Veda as all powerful, and it stands clearly in close relation with the metaphysics both of the Upaniṣads and the early Sāṃkhya. The effort of the thinkers of the Upaniṣads to realize the absolute resulted in aiming at the divorce of the self from the things of empiric life; in such a result as was attained in deep dreamless sleep we have a condition suggesting union with the absolute, and the motive is given to adopt practices which will produce artificially a trance wherein realization of the absolute may become real. But the end is adaptable; the seeking of trance is too valuable and attractive to the Indian spirit to fail to be accommodated to any system of philosophy, and Yoga persists in close union with Sāṃkhya through the changes of that doctrine. Its first definite appearance in the Upaniṣads is, consistently enough, contemporaneous with the emergence of Sāṃkhya ideas in the Katha Upaniṣad. By the time of early Buddhism the ascetics had perfected Yoga practices more and more energetically, and the Buddhists took them over with more than good will, regardless of the fact that the Yogin was a firm believer in the self which was denied by the Buddhist.

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¹ Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, p. 361. See Senart, RHR. xlii. 345 f.; Oldenberg, LUAB., pp. 257 ff., 319 ff.; Beckh, *Buddhismus*, ii. 10 ff, 72 f.

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It is, however, an error to exaggerate the situation or to treat Buddhism as a branch of Yoga. True, the master attained the saving enlightenment by trance; the four noble truths mention trance as the last of the members of the noble eightfold path to the destruction of misery; the texts contemplate frequent use of trance. But it does not appear in the chain of causation; ignorance and intuition as the cause of misery, and of its removal are not essentially bound up with trance; and many narratives reveal the attainment of enlightenment without recourse to this means. The importance of Buddhism does not rest in its Yoga aspect, but that is not to deny the powerful influence which Yoga had upon its theory and practice.

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The four ordinary meditations or trances of Buddhism correspond in general with the four stages of conscious concentration (*samādhi*) of the classical Yoga,¹ and, what is important, we have in the *Mahābhārata* a description of the first stage of concentration which expressly mentions the Buddhist features of initial and sustained application and of the separation (*viveka*) of the mind, doubtless from desire and impurity, for we cannot here read in the technical Sāmkhya-Yoga terminology of distinction between spirit and matter. In the four or five matterless or formless meditations we have the Yoga² parallel of the achievement of infinity, and the Buddhist conceptions of the attainment of the infinity of intelligence and infinity of space. Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka, two teachers of the Buddha, attained also the realms of nothingness and neither ideation nor non-ideation; the Buddha who could surpass them in this regard claims to be able to do so through the possession of the five qualities of faith, energy, thought, concentration and wisdom, and these five qualities appear in the Yoga as the necessary conditions for trance.³ There is a precise parallel in the Yoga⁴ for the series of four Brahma-vihāras of friendship, sympathy with sorrow, sympathy with happiness, and indifference, and the term Brahmavihāra is sufficient to prove Brahmanical, and perhaps Yoga origin. Significant also is the use of the terminology Citta and Nirodha of thought and its suppression in either system.

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¹ YS. i. 17; MBh. xii. 195. 15; Hopkins, JAOS. xxii. 357.

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² YS. ii. 47.

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³ MN. i. 164.

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⁴ YS. i. 33; Kern, *Ind. Buddh.*, p. 54.

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It is possible also that from the Yoga Buddhism borrowed the conception of a carefully planned regulation of psychical life in order to attain the desired end, and it is certainly interesting to recognize that the Yoga, at least in its later representatives, is conscious of the necessity of avoiding inflicting needless pain on the body. The rule to choose a pleasant spot of rest for meditation is in the Çvetāçvatara Upanisad as well as in Buddhism, and we hear of the feeling of lightness and gladness of the Buddhist monk as well as of the Yogin.

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Much more doubtful is the question whether the Yoga influenced the development of Buddhist theory, since we do not know with any precision the form of Yoga in the centuries when Buddhism was forming its Canon. It is possible, in view of the frequency with which the epic connects the conception of Nirvāṇa with Yoga, that the term was borrowed hence by Buddhism. It is certainly remarkable that the Yoga should use of the nature of existence the terms ‘impermanent, impure, misery, not-self’, and the presence of ignorance at the head of the chain of causation can hardly stand apart from the fact that the Yoga with the Sāmkhya makes ignorance the cause of the misery of the connexion of the spirit and matter, and ranks it also as the first of the five infections or defilements (kleça), a term taken over by Buddhism, and the ground of the others. It is far more doubtful if we can accept the idea that it is from the Yoga that Buddhism borrows the system of four noble truths; apart from the possibility of a common borrowing from medical science, the Yoga division is far too late and unimportant in the system to be accepted as the origin of the Buddhist.¹

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¹ The chain of causation may conceivably be connected with YS. iv. 11 (RHR. xlii. 359). The magic power of a Buddhist is akin to YS. iii. 27. It is less likely that the four stages of Arahantship are connected with the four degrees of Yogins, YS. iii. 51. That, in the Jhānas, Vitarka and Vicāra refer to cognition of the sensible and super-sensible (YS. i. 44 f.) is implausible, despite Beckh, *Buddhismus*, ii. 46; Geiger, PD., p. 82, n. 1.

4. The Original Element in Buddhism

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The research of origins must not blind us to the essential fact that there was something new in Buddhism, though it must serve to warn us against too hasty conclusions as to what that new element was. We cannot, it must be admitted, claim for Buddhism the conception of causation as something new; the Sāṃkhya-Yoga had clearly mastered this conception, and had developed also the idea of the world as a process of becoming applicable to what we regard as psychic happenings; the Yoga also had reached the conception of all nature as impermanent, misery, subject to change, not-self. The further development of the idea by Buddhism was accompanied by the refusal to regard as within the sphere of legitimate inquiry the nature of what, if anything, lay behind the world we know. This agnostic element, not in itself original, leaves the way open to the mystery of Nirvāṇa, which some accept as covering nothingness, while others can treat as something ineffable, and an idea whose mere existence is enough to satisfy all desires.

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Unquestionably, however, the moral training of the Buddhist system is marked by superiority to that of the Yoga, however deeply penetrated it may be by influences of the latter. The conviction of misery in Buddhism is real; it demands and receives serious treatment; both conduct and intuition are requisite for its removal, and conduct and intuition alike are aided by the development of the order in which one succours another by aid and advice. Whatever the defects of monastic organization, the root idea was valuable, and even for the laity something was done, though the Buddha had no such faith as would render it possible to lay down a doctrine applicable to all aspects of life. In the Yoga, on the other hand, the misery of spirit is after all an idle misconception; in truth there is no misery, and spirit is not bound in matter. Its philosophy remains, therefore, far less real in its influence on life and thought than Buddhism. The contrast is sufficiently seen in the missionary enterprise of Buddhism, a conception for which the cold intellectualism of the Sāṃkhya and Yoga has no place.

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Yet it would be idle to suppose that these merits would have secured Buddhism its vast success and popularity save for the personality of its founder. He appeared, we must recognize, in an age when individuality had become recognized, when in India as in other lands powerful personalities were appearing and attracting respect and creating schools. Did he preach and practice love to mankind with a fervour which is almost wholly lost in the mechanical exercises of the production of the feeling of universal love which later Buddhism inculcates? Was he conscious of a mission beyond human power, and did he claim a divinity which Indian thought would readily concede to spiritual earnestness beyond normal measure? Our answer must vary with our individuality; one thing at least we must admit; despite its philosophical weaknesses and its incoherences, the founder of Buddhism must rank as one of the most commanding personalities ever produced by the eastern world.

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