Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s2.1

c12.s2.1

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