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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s1: 1. Early Indian Materialism, Fatalism, and Agnosticism

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s1

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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.

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