Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s2.18

c12.s2.18

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.