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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15: Chapter IX. The Doctrine of Reality

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15

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Contents

Chapter IX. The Doctrine of Reality

1. Realism

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WE have seen that there is no adequate ground for attributing to early Buddhism any conviction of the ideality of the world, and the conviction that no such belief prevailed certainly gathers support from the out-and-out realism of the Sarvāstivādins, whose name is derived from their assertion: ‘Everything exists’.¹ The whole of reality is comprehended under a division into seventy-five kinds of existence or Dharmas, of which three alone are uncompounded (asaṃskṛta), neither being produced nor dissolving. These are the ether (ākāśa),² the essence of which is freedom from obstruction, and which therefore is regarded as a permanent omnipresent material substance; in other words it may be treated as space regarded as absolutely real. The second form of uncompounded existence, unplanned destruction (apratisaṃkhyā-nirodha), is of relatively slight importance; it is merely in one view the non-perception of objects owing to the absence of the necessary conditions as when in attending to one thing others are left unnoticed, or rather it denotes the essential character of things as ever perishing without cause. The third, deliberate destruction (pratisaṃkhyā-nirodha), is final deliverance from bondage which endures for ever, and which is attained by following the eightfold path as laid down in the Canon.

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¹ Cf. KV. i. 6, 7. An elaborate account of the school, based on the *Abhidharmakoça*, *Mahāvibhāṣāçāstra*, &c., is given by Y. Sogen, *Systems of Buddhistic Thought*. Atomism is found in Dharmottara's *Abhidharmahṛdayaçāstra*, but the date is dubious; it is not found in the *Jñānaprasthāna* but in the *Mahāvibhāṣā*; Ui, VP., p. 26 f. Both Vaibhāṣikas and Sautrāntikas have it; SSS. IV. iii. 4; iv. 4, 13 f; the Madhyamaka rejects it; IV. i. 4; see AKB., pp. 111 ff; Ui, VP., pp. 48 f; Vasubandhu, ibid., pp. 72 f; Wassilieff, *Bouddhisme*, pp. 279 f 245 ff.

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² Or space; see § 2; and on the three non-compounds § 7; MKV., p. 176; *Album Kern*, p. 111.

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The rest of existence is made up of eleven material compounds; one compound, mind; forty-six mental compounds; and fourteen non-mental compounds. The essential character of matter is its power of obstruction to the organs of sense, a fact which contrasts it absolutely with the ether. The unit of matter is the atom (*paramāṇu*), which is composite, as it rests on a fourfold substratum of colour, smell, taste, and touch. It is invisible, inaudible, intangible, without taste, indivisible, and unanalysable. But it is not permanent, but flashes into being; its essential feature is its action or function, and therefore may be compared to a focus of energy. Seven of these units, clustered around one as the centre, create the visible atom (*aṇu*) out of which matter, including the organs of sense, is composed. The distinctions of the elements; earth as rough, water as viscous, fire as hot, wind as movable; are due to the predominance in each of its own special characteristics and the inactivity of the others which are also present, for the unit has in itself the qualities of all the elements. The mutual attraction of material things is explained by the presence of the quality of water in each, their resistance by that of earth and so on; their collocations in nature are explicable by attraction, cohesion, heating, clustering, &c. As real, the cause never actually perishes; what happens is a change of state, when it becomes an effect, involving an alteration of name; thus the clay becomes the pot, without any real change of nature.

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The relation between mental and material things is a case of causation but of a special kind since it may be said to be simultaneous, in lieu of subsequent. This raises a difficulty as suggesting the Vijñānavāda theory that there is no real externality in things, but a mistaken and illusory attribution of externality to that which is internal, as can be shown from the fact that we always experience an object and its cognition together. The Sautrāntikas reject this view; the facts are, they argue, clearly that what we see are objects, as external, not merely internal modifications of consciousness, to which in point of fact we do not in everyday life attend at all as such. The idealist admission that things appear as if external undermines their whole position, for the conception of externality could not rise without real ground. There is no real difficulty as to simultaneity between the object and the perception of it; we do not, as the objection to this possibility seems to imply, first know the object and then know the perception, but the object by contact with the sense organ impresses its form on the cognition, and then from the form we conclude by inference the existence of an external object which causes it, just as we infer nourishment from a thriving appearance, nationality from language, and love from emotion. The object moulds our knowledge without ceasing to be itself. Cognition cannot explain our objects; in itself it is the same and there would be no differentiation of objects if objects were derived from it. The diversity of cognitions in an observer, himself remaining the same, is explicable only by the operation on him of external things, a fact which gives us the realization of the self as the conscious subject (*ālaya-vijñāna*) in whom individual cognitions (*pravṛtti-vijñāna*), caused by external things, appear from time to time.

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The Vaibhāṣikas, though realists, object to this doctrine of the Sautrāntikas—indeed a fanciful etymology gives them their name because of their habit of styling the doctrine of inferability ‘contradictory chatter (*viruddhā bhāṣā* )’. If knowledge is thus reduced to inferability, then there is no object of perception, and, this being so, there is no basis for the observation of the invariable concomitance, which is the essential ground of inference, and we shall have a complete contradiction with all actual experience. Knowledge, in fact, is of two kinds; perception as indeterminate, that is free from the operation of imagination, which is authoritative, and determinate perception which is worked up by imagination and so is not directly authoritative, although what is inferred serves as a basis for action and common acceptance; we can verify by action the truth of inferences, and we can accept statements on authority as resting ultimately on perception.¹

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¹ SDS., pp. 14 ff. ; cf. TRD., pp. 40 f., 47; SSS. IV. iii. 1 ff. ; iv. 1 ; below, ch. xviii, §§ 2, 3. The Vaibhāṣikas appear to be credited (Wassilieff, *Bouddhisme*, pp. 280, 282) with the Mahāsāṅghika view (KV. xviii. 9) that the eye sees colour and so on, not consciousness based on the eye; cf. MKV., p. 33; Asl., p. 400; Sumaṅ. i. 183; TDC., p. 22, n. 1. The Sautrāntikas are credited

2. The Nature of Time and Space

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Though the Canon recognizes the impermanent character of existence it is devoid of any serious consideration of the meaning of impermanency. Any effective handling of the question of time is certainly missing from the Upaniṣads; the indivisible non-time of the *Maitrāyaṇi Upaniṣad* is merely a time before the actual normal time, and in the *Atharvaveda* and the *Mahābhārata*, where time appears in the light of a creator, we have nothing seriously philosophical. The explanation of the doctrine is simple enough; in the Brāhmaṇa speculation Prajāpati, the creator, is also regarded as the year; creation in time leads to the simple conception of creation by time, and there is certainly no trace even in the more advanced speculation of the *Mahābhārata* of any distinction between time as real or transcendent and time as subjective. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that early Buddhism with its clear dislike for problems not immediately tending to salvation should have left the issue severely alone; the eternity or other condition of the world is expressly included among the indeterminates.¹

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¹ Walleser, PGAB., pp. 123 ff. ; Schrader, *Über den Stand der ind. Phil.*, pp. 19 f. ; AV. xix. 53, 54; MBh. xii. 227. 29.

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The *Milindapañha*² shows us a clear advance of interest in the question of time. Milinda questions Nāgasena in detail on this point, and is informed that there is past, present, and future time; time which exists and time which does not exist. This is explained in the sense that there are dispositions (*saṃkhāra*), which are past in the sense of having ceased to be, or having been dissolved, or altogether changed; to them time is not. But there are also conditions which are now producing their effect, or have in them the potentiality of producing effect, or which will otherwise lead to re-individualization; to them time is. When there with three different views of the nature of the perception of an object. (1) All its characteristics are represented in thought form and so apprehended; (2) thought form is of the total actual presentation only, e. g. of variegated colour as such; (3) all aspects of the object are presented in thought, but it synthesizes them in one view, e. g. the different colours are made one; Wassilieff, *Bouddhisme*, pp. 275 f.

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² pp. 50 ff. Cf. KV. i. 8, doctrine of Kassapikas.

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are beings who when dead will be reborn, there is time; when there are beings who when dead will not be reborn, there is no time; and, when beings have been altogether set free by the attainment of Nirvāṇa and bodily death, there time is essentially not. The king inquires also as to the root of past, present, and future time, and is informed that it is in ignorance; the meaning of the reply is clear when the answer proceeds to enumerate the chain of causation beginning with the dispositions, for we have seen that the idea of time is illustrated by the condition of the dispositions. Were it not for ignorance, there would be no dispositions, and therefore no time; the enlightened one is exempt from connexion with time. Further, it is made clear that there is no possibility of finding a beginning to time, or ultimate point in the past; the position is made clear by the analogy of the seed, fruit, seed; egg, hen, egg; and the circle of eye, colours, sight, contact, feeling, longing, action, and, as the outcome of action, an eye in a future birth. Finally, the sage insists as against the suggestion of the king that there may be discontinuity between the present and the past and the future that there is constant continuity. That which has not been becomes, that which has begun to become vanishes away; past, that is to say, passes over to the present, and the present passes over to the future.

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Prof. Walleser has deduced from these passages the conclusion that, while the existence of transcendent time is not denied, it is made clear that time is reduced to the momentary present, and that time is an ideal phenomenon, a result which follows necessarily from the reduction of time to the momentary present; past and future time, if not real, must either be absolutely nothing or phenomenal, and the latter decision is the natural one to adopt to accord with the facts. These conclusions, however, seem rather to over-estimate the degree of philosophical competence of the composer of the *Milindapañha*. There is, it must be added, no clear or probable understanding in the text of a true momentary present; indeed the true version rather emphasizes the continuity of time; the idea that the present is sharply cut off from the past and future, which appeals to the king, is rebuked by Nāgasena. A distinction between phenomenal and transcendental time is not present to the composer; his point is different, but quite clear and satisfactory; time is essentially a thing of the world of experience alone; the world exists in it, and the time is ever in motion; but in true enlightenment there is as little room for time as for anything else empirical. Of time as a mental creation of any sort there is no suggestion; the text takes it as it is found in experience, and makes no effort to analyse or explain its nature.

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The ideas of the *Milindapañha* appear in a varied form in the *Abhidharmakoça*.¹ The Sarvāstivādins are there credited with maintaining the existence of everything past, present or future, while the Vibhajyavādins distinguish in their usual mode between (1) the present elements and those among the past which have not yet produced their fruition, which are existent and (2) future elements and those among the past which have produced their fruition, which are non-existent. Of the first view there are variant aspects. Dharmatrāta maintained that the essence of an element remains unchanged throughout various times, its existence alone altering, an idea made intelligible by the change of milk into curds or the breaking of a vessel of gold. The view is obviously closely akin to the Sāmkhya in which all change is merely alteration of an existent without fundamental change of substance, and is rejected by the Vaibhāṣikas on that account, for it implies a permanent substance. In Ghoṣaka's view, when an element appears at different times, the past element retains its past aspects without being severed from its present and future aspects, and the present retains its present aspect without completely losing its past and future aspects, a view which the Vaibhāṣikas very sensibly reject on the ground that it simply destroys distinctions of time, since all the aspects are to coexist. Buddhadeva adopts the view that, just as a woman can be regarded as mother, wife, or daughter, so the same entity may be described as present, future, or past in accordance with its relation to the preceding or succeeding moment; this view also the Vaibhāṣikas reject on the ground that it treats all three times as found together in one.

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¹ Cf. Poussin, TDC., pp. 57 f.; AK. v. 24 ff.; Stcherbatskoi in Dasgupta, *Ind. Phil.* i. 115 f. For Sāmkhya views, see SS., p. 73.

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The view of Vasumitra, on the other hand, is accepted by the Vaibhāṣika school. It holds that difference in time is dependent on difference in efficiency; when an entity has performed its function and has ceased to act, it is past; when it is producing it, it is present; when it has not yet produced it, it is future. In all three cases there is real existence; this is obvious as regards present and future, and can be proved as regards the past by the considerations that, if the past were not real, i. e. did not exercise efficiency—this being the crucial test of reality—it could not be the object of knowledge nor could deeds done in the past produce effects in the present.

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The Vaibhāṣika position is not approved by the Sautrāntika on the decidedly legitimate ground that all forms of this view really involve belief in the existence of a permanent substance persisting throughout time, the time distinctions appearing in it. If, it is pointed out, the past exercises efficiency at present, it clearly cannot be distinguished from the present, an objection which no attempt to distinguish between efficiencies will enable us to remove. Secondly, we can as experience shows know non-existing entities just as well as we can know existing entities; now non-existing entities have *ex hypothesi* no efficiency, so that it is not necessary that the past should have efficiency to be known. Again, if a distinction is drawn between an efficiency and an entity, there is immediately raised the insoluble problem why the efficiency started at any particular time and stopped at another. The true doctrine is that there is no distinction between the entity, the efficiency, and the time of its appearance;¹ entities appear from non-existence;² they exist for a moment; then they cease to exist. Their existence activity and action are all one. This harmonizes with the fact that, when we remember a thing as the past we do not and cannot know it as existing in the past; we know it in the same way as we knew it when it was present;

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¹ Cf. the verse in BCAP. ix. 6; TV., p. 170; *Bhāmatī*, p. 361; *Upadeçasāhasrī*, p. 369; *Vedāntakalpataru*, p. 278; and see Çañkara, BS. ii. 2. 20 : Poussin, JA. 1903, ii. 377 : *Kṣaṇikāḥ sarvasaṃskārā; asthirāṇāṃ kutaḥ kriyā? bhūtir yaisāṃ kriyā saiva kārakam saiva cocyate*.

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² cf. Vācaspati on SK. 9. Past and future time are mere names, TRD., p. 46; MKV., p. 389; all are mere 'void; MK. xix; Ui, VP., p. 46. So as regards space; ibid., pp. 46 f.

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similarly it is not true, as on the Vaibhāṣika theory, that our past passions exercise causal efficiency upon us; in point of fact they have left residues impressed which become the antecedents of the passion of the present.

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The Vaibhāṣikas in their doctrine of time made a distinct change on the canonical simplicity, which recognizes merely origin and passing away¹ or the three stages of coming into being, decay, and annihilation;² it interpolates the moment of existence (sthiti), which, it asserts, was suppressed by the Buddha because of the danger which it involved to the doctrine of impermanence, but which is implicitly included in the last stage (sthityanyathātva).³ What is more obvious is that the discrimination is hardly exact. These four moments of existence were evidently taken by the school as four kinds of forces, which by coming into combination with the essence of an entity produced its impermanent manifestations in life. The idea is curious and interesting; it shows how deeply rooted was the realism which converted time into a potency possessing causative force of its own.

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¹ Defended in KV. ii. 7 which denies duration of consciousness. That the Buddha accepted some duration is possible; cf. MKV., p. 283, n. 1, MK. vii. discusses origination (utpāda), existence (sthiti) and destruction (bhaṅga).

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² Defended in KV. xxii. 8 against the momentary doctrine of Pubba-and Apara-seliyas. Continuity appears also in xv. 3. See AN. i. 152; KV. i, p. 61; Compendium, pp. 25 f., 125; the attempt to explain it away in Points of Discourse, pp. 374 f. is absurd. See MKV., pp. 145, 545 f., BSB. I. xvii. 15 (the characters apply to each moment; to the series, acc. AKV.) Momentariness is true of consciousness, however; KV. ii. 7; x. 1 (against the Andhakas). The Vaibhāṣikas (acc. to Wassilieff, Bouddhisme, p. 277) divide things as eternal and non-eternal, and ascribe all compounds to the latter category, but do not make them momentary. The Sautrāntikas reduce all to a series of moments of coming to be.

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³ The four are given in TRD., p. 46 as jāti, sthiti, jarā, vināça. Cf. DS., § 596.

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In the Kathāvatthu⁴ we find an elaborate, but as usual not very profitable, refutation of the Sarvāstivādin view that everything exists, understood in the sense that past, present, and future equally exist; the passages of the Suttas in favour of the former view are refuted effectively enough by other passages, without anything more than dialectical ingenuity. The conclusion arrived at is that the present alone exists, and the same doctrine is stoutly maintained against the Kassapikas, who are credited with asserting that some of the past, i. e. that which is to bear fruition exists, as well as some of the future, i. e. that which is inevitably to be, as distinct from that which is only contingent. The fact is extremely interesting and raises an obvious difficulty in the face of the doctrine which is attributed elsewhere to the Vibhajyavādins¹ and which certainly appears in the *Milindapañha*; that text certainly admits the existence of past potentialities of future action, though it denies the existence of the future and the past that has performed its activity. We have in fact in this point a suggestion that the *Kathāvatthu* as we have it cannot be regarded as representing always Vibhajyavādin views, and with this concurs the obvious consideration that in not a few cases the argument is very obviously much the better in the case of the opponent than of the Vibhajyavādin, and, for example in the case of the discussion of time itself, we find in the work two distinct doctrines. The true momentariness of all consciousness is on the one hand asserted, while on the other hand it is denounced as a heresy to hold that all existence is to be reduced to conscious moments, the case of the elements, trees, &c., being adduced against such an idea, and stress is laid on the fact that the Canon assumes the more or less permanent existence of external sense matter, of the sense organs as material, and objects to any attempt to identify either with actual consciousness.² We may derive from these views the conception that for the *Kathāvatthu* consciousness was momentary—this is asserted even of the consciousness of a god—but that material things had some endurance, though they were not permanent, and this view is in accord with the relative permanence of body admitted in the Canon. But the *Kathāvatthu* certainly does not make explicit the doctrine.

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⁴ i 6 ff.

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¹ AK. v. 25.

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² KV. ii. 7; xxii. 8; MN. i. 190.

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Of space we have in the *Milindapañha*³ two interesting notes. In the first place it is classified with Nirvāṇa as being uncaused by any of the three causes, action, seed-cause, or season-cause; apparently also, like Nirvāṇa, it is to be deemed unproduced, out of time, and imperceptible by any sense organ, except the mind. In the second passage, also late, it is described as impossible to be grasped; the resort of seers, ascetics, gods, and birds; infinite, boundless, immeasurable; not stopped by anything; and resting upon nothing. This is certainly a more philosophic view than is found in the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi* of the *Abhidhamma Piṭaka* where it is classified as a material derivative. The contrast between this view and that of the Sautrāntikas which treats ether or space as unconditioned and therefore on a parallel with Nirvāṇa itself is explained by the discussions in the *Kathāvatthu*. To the identity of the infinity of space, attained in meditation, with Nirvāṇa, it is objected that there is birth and death in that sphere, but not in Nirvāṇa. The more general view, of the Uttarāpathakas and Mahīṃsāsakas, that space is unconditioned, is met in a similar way; if so, it must be Nirvāṇa, since two unconditioned things must be identical; again, when a well is dug, there is creation of space, which is absurd if it is unconditioned, and similarly it is destroyed when a pitcher is filled, equally absurdly. The last word here is given to the heretics with some reason; Buddhaghosa helps out orthodoxy by distinguishing occupied space as conditioned, and empty space or space abstracted from objects as mere abstract ideas, which cannot be styled unconditioned. Finally, the *Kathāvatthu* rejects the Andhaka doctrine that void space is visible, because then it must be coloured matter, and visual consciousness according to scripture is not produced by the eye and space. The argument again leaves the last statement to the heretic; Buddhaghosa supplies the answer by asserting the mental comprehension of space, the doctrine probably intended in the *Milinda*.

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³ pp. 271, 388; DS., § 638; KV. vi. 4, 6, 7. That space is a mental construction without objective reality (Points of Controversy, p. 394) is clearly not meant; it is real and perceived by mind; so ADS. vi. 6. 4, contradicting the assertion in Compendium, p. 16. It is a mere name acc. TRD., p. 46.

3. The Ego as a Series

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It is in the Sautrāntika, to all appearance, that the doctrine of the self as a continuum first definitely takes shape, but the idea is certainly contained in germ in the *Milindapañha*.¹ The point is there quite explicitly raised; is the infant the same as the man? Is the mother of the child the same as the mother of the man? The boy before and after his course of school? The man who commits crime and he who has suffered punishment? The answer is given by the simile of the flame of a lamp which burns throughout the three watches of the night, and yet the lamp remains the same. Just so is the continuity of a person or thing maintained; one comes into being, another passes away, and the rebirth is, as it were, simultaneous. Thus neither as the same, nor as another does man go on to the last phase of his self-consciousness. So milk turns into curds, but the purchaser who has left it in the hand of the seller cannot next day repudiate the purchase; the thief of a mango cannot escape mutilation because the mango he stole was not the mango the owner planted; if a girl is given in marriage for a price when a child, and her husband goes abroad, he is entitled on his return to demand her back from another who has married her, nor will he be allowed to evade his obligation by pleading that the maiden is quite other than the girl.

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¹ pp 40 f.

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This idea of continuity (saṃtati) is to be found occasionally in the Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa, and in the Nettipakaraṇa;¹ it is freely found in the Sanskrit texts, the Śikṣāsamuccaya has svasaṃtāna and parasaṃtāna as equivalent to the self, and the self of others. Things in the Sautrāntika are reduced to mere moments (kṣaṇa), a refinement on the earlier conception of impermanence (anitya), and these moments are denied activity in the true sense of the term, though they are regarded as caused and causes, results and antecedents. ‘How can there be action on the part of that which is not enduring? The action and activity of the moments, that is their mere existence.’² The continuity involved is real; not only does it take place throughout life, which is easy to recognize, but it continues on death; the consciousness which appears at birth (aupapattyaṅcika) and the consciousness on death (māraṇantika) are in essential relation;³ the one is in a sense contemporaneous with the other, the idea being illumined by the comparison of the two with the movement of the scales of a balance. Hence we see at once how the last thought on death has an essential influence on the form of rebirth.¹ Moreover, the idea of the series of cause and effect presents a great advantage from the point of view of the explanation of the effect of the act (*karman*). Each moment is to be regarded as impressing itself on all that follows, perfuming it, as the phrase (*vāsanā*) specially affected indicates, just as the jasmine flower assumes various hues if it has, when in seed form, been imbued with a dye. Man, therefore, carries with him at every moment his future; his death and his fate are implicit within him; the fruit of some good deed done long ages ago may come to action, and reward even with the Tuṣita heaven the man whose sins have previously condemned him to the agonies of the peculiarly horrid hells imagined by Buddhist piety; or his sins may even carry him to hell in his life.² The theory affords, moreover, an easy explanation of memory;³ when any object has been experienced a seed of memory is implanted in the consciousness continuum, and in the course of time on the ripening of the seed memory comes causally into being without the intervention of any needless entity like a thinker, and so we can explain recognition. It is easy also to understand how such a series may be continued in a life even in the world without form.⁴ Nor is it difficult to appreciate that it is possible to bring this stream of consciousness to an end; or at any rate, if it is perhaps difficult, it does not require too great a strain on the faith of the believer. But the possibility is also open, to become of importance in the Mahāyāna, that the saint may impress on his series the determination to save all creatures, to be a Bodhisattva rather than become an Arhant. The theory has, moreover, the obvious benefit that it avoids the difficulties either of permanence or destruction; it follows a mean, for the series is in constant change and therefore there is no permanence, but it is a series, a line which is without beginning, though it may come to an end through liberation, and there is not, therefore, the fatal possibility of destruction by any other cause than liberation.

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¹ DS., §§ 585, 643, 734; KV. x. 1; xi. 6; xxi. 4, and comm.; ADS. v. 12, 15, 16; NP., p. 79; Ç., pp. 23, 126; NB., pp. 13 f.; AK. v; NBh. i. 1. 2; BCAP., pp. 237, 255, 307, 309, &c.; MKV., pp. 85, 281, 283, 310, 312 f., &c.; SSS. IV. iv. 5–8; Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 284; 1903, ii. 359; TRD, p. 39; Buddhaghosa, JRAS. 1904, pp. 370 f.

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² See § 2; Wassilieff, Bouddhisme, pp. 277 f.

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³ Mil., p. 47; cit. in MKV., p. 53; Çalistamba Sūtra, JA. 1902, ii. 272; Ç., p. 226; BCAP. ix. 73.

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¹ The Sabbatthivādins and Uttarāpathakas even hold that concentration (*Samādhi*) is continuity of consciousness (*citta-saṃtati*); KV. xi. 6.

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² Mil., pp. 101, 115.

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³ BCAP. ix. 24, 101; AKV. (Burn. MS. 477 a).

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⁴ AKV. (Burn. MS. 185 a); JA. 1902, ii. 278, n. 1.

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So far we seem to be on sufficiently assured ground; but is it possible to attribute to the school two further doctrines, each of great promise for the rendering logical and complete the Buddhist conception of the self? In the first place, it may be that the Sautrāntika deserves the credit of having determined to break away from the doctrine of the possibility of the intervention of external accident in the course of life.¹ The Canon, it must be remembered, has no such assertion; it certainly does not teach the universal reign of cosmic and psychic law, and the list of indeterminates includes the issues of the causation of pleasure and pain. Moreover, we have in the Kathāvatthu emphatic testimony to this effect; the Rājagirikas and the Siddhatthikas are credited with maintaining that all in the world is due to Karman, and this view is rejected in an argument which can hardly be called satisfying. The points raised seem to be, first that to say that Karman is the result of Karman is to confuse action with its effect, and, second, that the theory reduces the present to a mere effect, without initiative of any sort. The same idea occurs in a further polemic against the Andhakas and the Uttarāpathakas, who assert that things are by nature immutable, e.g. matter cannot become one of the spiritual aggregates or vice versa, and that all actions are inflexible. The answer given is an appeal to the fact that the master’s teaching provides for two uniformities in life; the one by which the worst offenders are assured of immediate retribution after death, and the other by which the pathwinner is assured of final salvation, while there is another group in which there is no such fixity. The opponent in these arguments is allowed to have the last word, and certainly the better of the contention.¹ Yet in the *Milindapañha* also there is no attempt to assert the all-pervading power of Karman in any consistent way; on the one hand, to its force is traced the fact that the hard things consumed by lions perish in digestion but the soft embryo survives; on the other hand, in a decidedly late passage, it is expressly asserted that the Arahant suffers bodily pain, over which he has no mastery, and the whole treatment makes it clear that the body, without regard to Karman, is considered as affecting the mind.² The Sautrāntikas, as we have seen, accepted the reality of an external world, as inferred from our sensations, but they seem, it has been suggested, to have adopted the view that the form of the world is the result of Karman; the sins we have done in the past provide the physical environment and circumstances of our punishment; the murderer by his action creates in due course the hell in which he suffers the penalties of the damned. But it must be admitted that on this point we have no certainty; the logical conclusion may not have been effectively drawn.

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¹ Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, p. 181, who admits that there is no decisive proof. Later see BCA. vi. 43; TRD., p. 26; Mrs. Rhys Davids’ objections (JRAS. 1903, p. 590) clearly carry us too far in the opposite sense, by reducing consciousness to an epiphenomenon of sense and object contact. There is, *per contra*, no ground to attribute the doctrine to the Canon (JA. 1903, ii. 371 notwithstanding). The Mahāsānghikas appear to have held this view as regards sounds and sense organs and generally (KV. xii. 2 ff.) Cf. p. 286.

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¹ KV. xvii. 3; xxi. 7, 8. There are *acts without fruit*, xii. 2; xvii. 1. But another cannot bestow happiness or the reverse, xvi. 3; JA. 1903, ii. 444. The orthodox view evidently desired to maintain the freedom of the will, however illogically and inconsistently with the doctrine of the non-self.

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² Mil., pp. 134 ff.; 180 f., which expressly asserts chance (*animitta*); 253, the Arahant cannot control his body. For interaction cf. KV. vii. 8; ADS. viii. 9, natural causes co-operate with moral; Buddhaghosa, KV. vii. 8.

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The second advance may be attributed more surely to a section of the school.³ It appears to have faced the problem of self-consciousness with more than usual boldness, and to have discarded the old and complicated effort to hold that in some manner, decidedly difficult to understand, the succeeding moment was conscious of the preceding moment and so generated a sort of self-consciousness.⁴ The arguments by which they established their view seem to have been based on similes, whence their style ‘masters of similes’ (*dārṣṭāntikas*). The fact of the experience of memory: ‘I have seen’ suggests the possibility of knowledge of the self; the lamp sheds light on the jar, but equally lights up itself; the word at one and the same moment conveys the sense, which it has, and the sounds, of which it is composed. Consciousness, therefore, can be and is self-conscious, and this fact explains the doctrine that perception of external things is only indirect. The naïve idea that consciousness is in direct contact with reality is discarded for the more complicated conception that the external reality is known because consciousness takes through the medium of the sense organism the form of the object, and then is conscious of itself; that objects are external is recognized because of the temporary and accidental character of the objects of consciousness, which shows that they are not essentially parts of consciousness itself.

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³ Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, p. 182, citing MA., p. 267; AKV. (Paris MS.) f. 309b. Not all are users of similes (AKV. Paris MS. 309b). Cf. Wassilieff, *Bouddhisme*, pp. 112, 277; Tāranātha, *Buddhismus*, p. 274.

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⁴ KV. xvi. 4 denies the view of Apara-and Pubba-seliyas that attention to consciousness is simultaneous. For the later doctrine see NB., p. 103; NBT., p. 14; TRD., p. 40; BCA. ix. 101, 15 ff.; Ç., pp. 234 f.; MKV., pp. 61 f., 114, vii. 9; *Vedāntakalpataru*, p. 293; the Vijñānavāda accepts, the Madhyamaka denies the doctrine. Some Sautrāntikas at least (Wassilieff, p. 285) accepted the relation of temporal succession. Cf. Wassilieff, *op. cit.*, p. 307.

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We have thus attained some measure of effective personality without departure from orthodoxy; indeed, the Saṃtāna seems to have achieved acceptance widely as the equivalent of personality. We hear phrases such as ‘Çākyamuni’s Saṃtāna was then Sunetra’; ‘the Saṃtāna of a multitude of people’; ‘when one speaks of consciousness as reincarnating, one means the series of thought’; and even in popular form ‘their Saṃtāna is feeble’. Indeed, the school seems to have gone so far as to treat the series as possessed of freedom of the will, for we are told of the difficulty of directing the intellectual series (cittasaṃtāna) against the current and of keeping it away from things of sense.¹ Here again we see how readily popular conceptions were accepted without investigation of their compatibility with the main tenets of the school. If, as seems to have been the case, the school was impressed with the conception of the rule of Karman, then it must have been obvious that in no true sense was any freedom of the will even conceivable. If there is a series, each of which is in the relation of cause, effect, cause and so on, then, while it can be said that the series as a whole is uncaused, it is equally clear that every single link in the chain is caused and without possibility of freedom.

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¹ AKV. (Paris MS. f. 372ᵃ) in Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, p. 183.

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The conception of a Saṃtāna was clearly not acceptable to all the Hīnayāna schools; we have a decidedly emphatic denunciation of it in a passage of the *Saṃyutta Nikāya*¹ where it is denounced as an illusion and idle talk, while in the Brahmanical texts energetic criticism is directed against the whole conception. Either, it is argued, the plan means that there is a Saṃtānin, or subject, under the moments, which means that the Buddhist is throwing aside his doctrine of non-ego and momentariness, or there is no real continuity at all and the Saṃtāna leaves us with nothing to solve the problem of individuality.

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¹ iii. 142; cited MKV., p. 41. Cf. Ç., p. 359; BCAP. ix. 73; Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 287. Mrs. Rhys Davids (Psych. Ethics, p. lxxxi) appears to attribute to Buddhism the denial of free will, but determinism is unorthodox, KV. xxi. 7, 8 : presumably in Buddhism, pp. 221 ff., the older view is abandoned.

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The new theory is used by Vasubandhu² to discredit the doctrine of the existence of a person (*pudgala*) as maintained by the Vātsīputrīyas against the more orthodox denial of any person. The denial of a soul is based on the absence of any cause which would lead us to accept the idea as necessary, just as for instance the sense organs are necessary to explain perception. Moreover, any self which really exists must be something over and above the impermanent factors of empiric individuality. But such a self, which must be uncaused, eternal, and without change, would be without activity or practical efficiency (*arthakriyākāritva*) which is the essential characteristic of reality. The Vātsīputrīyas object to this train of thought that the person is certainly implicated in the elements of empiric individuality or personal life, but though implicated is separate, and cannot be said either to be the same as, or different from, the personal elements, just as fire is neither the same as, nor different from, the burning stick, and yet is something more than it. They support this contention by the facts of action, e. g. of walking, which imply a personal agent, and of consciousness which imply an actor. Vasubandhu objects that the appearance of continuity in motion is a misleading result of analogy from one's own experience; what is true is that there is a series of new productions of motion in different places just as in the case of moving fire. Similarly there is in consciousness nothing more than the fact of a series of thought moments which are in causal relation. Memory is explained by this fact; it requires no agent, merely an earlier experience, and arises when suitable conditions of attention, freedom from pain, &c., are present.

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² See the Pudgalaviniścaya in the AK. viii, rendered by Stcherbatskoi (Bulletin de l'Academie des Sciences de Russie), in Dasgupta, Ind. Phil. i. 117 f. Cf. TRD., p. 46 where the Pudgala is attributed to the Vaibhāṣikas, alias Āryasamitīyas.

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The conclusion, therefore, is that there is no real self; the term is accordingly merely a convention; we never know the self as such, but merely have knowledge of psychic happenings, sensations, perceptions, feelings, and so on. The same consideration applies equally to material things; milk, for instance, is a designation given to certain momentary colours, tastes, &c., fictitiously unified under the term milk. But there is continuity in the individual¹ though not a self, and thus we understand why the Buddha did not lay down either the identity or difference of the soul (*jīva*) and the body, since the conception of a soul is a mistaken one.

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¹ This is expressed in the conception Jīvitindriya of the Pali Abhidhamma, applied both to immaterial and material series; see DS., §§ 19, 635; KV. viii. 10; *Vibhaṅga*, p. 123; *Compendium*, pp. 17, 156. The idea is not, however, worked out.

4. The Doctrine of Causation

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The later texts show a decided development in the investigation of the theory of causation generally. They make the important distinction between causes generally (*paccaya*) and the cause proper (*hetu*), which is the real producer of the result, the other causes being conditions, coefficients or auxiliaries. In the *Patthāna* of the *Abhidhamma Piṭaka* there occurs a very elaborate classification of conditions under twenty-four heads: position, object, dominance, contiguity, immediate contiguity, coexistence, reciprocity, dependence, sufficing condition, antecedent, consequence, succession, action (*karman*), effect, support, control, Jhāna, means, association, dissociation, presence, absence, abeyance, continuance. The modes of relation vary according to the things related; thus mind content bears to mind content the six relations of contiguity, immediate contiguity, absence, abeyance, succession, and association. But in all cases the conception is that the condition or cause renders service to the effect; each thought is influenced by those related to it, and in very late Buddhism the power of one idea to affect another becomes styled its ability (*satti*). The essence of the theory in its application to mental states is interesting; it is the parallel of the Sautrāntika view which sees a complete continuity of consciousness, in which each moment is charged with all the past, and it offers, if not an explanation, still the possibility of an explanation of the facts of memory. We need not assume that the doctrine is any older than the Sautrāntika school.¹

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But the elaboration of twenty-four with its obvious weaknesses as we can see them in their exposition in the *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* is opposed by others, who give four causes only, while one set of Sarvāstivādins made seven.¹ The four are the true cause (*hetu*), which engenders a thing, like the seed; the support (*ālambana*) which serves to engender thought and its sequels (*citta-caitta*) born of the true cause; the immediately contiguous (*samanantara*) cause, which is either the destruction of the cause,² as the seed is destroyed to produce the shoot, or the stream of thought which gives room for the presentation in question; and the dominant (*adhipati*), denoting that on whose existence the other depends. The last of these is styled also the means, and the second and third are classed as embracing (*parigrahaka*) causes, since they envelop the true cause, and further its maturity.

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¹ Duka, pp. 3 f.; KV. xv. 1 f.; NP., p. 78; VM. in JPTS. 1893, pp. 109, 138; *Vibhaṅga*; Poussin, TDC., p. 52; *Compendium*, pp. 42 f., 187 f., 259 f., 279 f. The attempt in *Points of Controversy* (pp. 294, n. 3, 390 f.) to see an important contribution in this doctrine is erroneous.

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² Mvy. 115; MK. i. 2; MKV., pp. 77 f.; MA., pp. 87 f.; AKV. in TDC., p. 54, n. 2; Bhavya (Rockhill, *Life*, p. 196); the extra three are Karman, Āhāra, Niçraya. Laṅk., p. 85 has six—*bhaviṣyat, sambandha, lakṣaṇa, kāraṇa, ryañjana*, and *upekṣā*.

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Simpler is the series also of four found in the *Nettipakaraṇa* in explaining sight perception in elaboration of the old canonical doctrine of the collision of organ, object, and attention; we have the act of attention as cause proper; the eye as dominant cause; coloured matter as the support or object; and light as a dependent (*sannissaya*) cause. The act of attention (*manasikāra*) is of the same character as the resulting visual consciousness; hence it is its true cause.³

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³ MKV., p. 85; NBh. iv. 1. 14; SDS., p.

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The Vaibhāṣikas have a sixfold division of causes which marks no special advance: they reckon the efficient (kāraṇa) cause, which does not impede the effect, e.g. the objects and other causes of vision; co-operative causes (sahabhū-hetu), e.g. in producing merit, correct views, &c.; causes of the same nature (sabhāga), merit producing merit; united (samprayukta) causes, e.g. faith and intelligence; omnipresent (sarvatraga) causes, like false views which affect every act; and causes of fruition (vipāka), distinguished as having effects, that is, feelings different in character from the cause which is an action.¹ There is more that is useful in the fivefold division of some schools which reckon efficient causes, e.g. seed; causes of knowledge, e.g. smoke showing flame; causes of manifestation (vyañjaka), the lamp, the jar; causes of destruction (dhvaṁsaka), denied by some as heretical as all things are momentary; and causes making one attain (prāpaka) such an object as Nirvāṇa.²

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¹⁶ See KV. x. 1, negating the Mahāsāṅghika view of continuity of the aggregates. See AKV. in MKV. p. 77; TRD., p. 39.

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¹ NP., p. 80; SDS., p. 16; cf. NBT., pp. 13, 18; Bhāmatī, ii. 2. 21; Vivaraṇaprameya, p. 34; TRD., p. 39.

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² Mvy. 114; AKV. (Burn. MS. f. 133); TDC., p. 55.

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There is more originality in a theory which expresses satisfactorily in one aspect the point of view of the Sautrāntikas; the nature of things is eternal causation, unsubstantial, momentary (kṣaṇika); things exist only in virtue of dependence (idaṁpratyayatāphala). Causation or the relation of cause and effect (kāryakāraṇa-bhāva) is not a process of the evolution of the cause into the effect, as in the Sāṁkhya doctrine (satkārya-vāda), nor of the creation by the cause of an effect differing from itself, but is the necessary succession of determined effects (niyāmatā); its dependence constitutes the whole nature (dharmatā), suchness (tathatā), of things; they have no other reality. Their production is in the nature of magic (māyā); no real causality can be attributed to the impermanent; their action and causality are merely their becoming and vice versa. Hence we cannot talk rationally of the destruction of things by a cause.³

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³ AKV. f. 156.

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³ Cālistamba Sūtra, TCD., pp. 62 f.; Bhāmatī, ii. 2. 19; Vedāntakalpataru, p. 273; MKV., p. 9; SDS., p. 17. Cf. KV. vi. 2; xi. 7; trs. pp. 386 f.

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The idea here expressed is not uncanonical, in so far as it deals with the conception of order (niyāmatā, dhammatā), and we find in Buddhaghosa⁴ an interesting fivefold division of the principle of order: the order of act and result; the physical order (utu-niyama), e. g. winds and rains; the order of seeds, physical organic order, e. g. sugary taste from the cane; the order of thought (citta), the relation of antecedent and subsequent states of consciousness; and the order of the Law, the phenomena which herald a Bodhisattva's advent to earth for the last time, cosmic conditions of production of the norm.

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⁴ Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 119 ff. See Mil., p. 268.

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5. The Chain of Causation, Internal and External

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It was in this period that the orthodox interpretation of the chain of causation, conceived as the wheel of the Law came into being. This view was confronted by, but easily triumphed over, in the scholasticism, though hardly in the popular idea, a variant which is preserved in pictorial form at Ajaṇṭā as well as in Tibet and has textual authority. The interpretation rests on the conception of the being in an intermediate state (antarābhava) which some schools regarded as existing between one birth and another: that is the consciousness, which, defiled by ignorance and previous dispositions, seizes on name and form and the six organs; observes a pair—human or animal according to his previous desert—in union, feels love for the mother, in desire enters the father's head, fixes itself on his thought, grasps the organ of enjoyment, becomes an embryo (bhava) and is duly born.¹ Even cruder is another theory known from Brahmanical sources only which places in the embryo the development from consciousness to grasping.²

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¹ Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa Tantra, ch. xvi (JRAS. 1897, p. 463); Waddell, JRAS. 1894, pp. 367 ff.; Lamaism, pp. 108 ff.; Poussin, TCD., p. 39.

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² Brahmavidyābharaṇa, ii. 2. 19 (SBE. xxxiv. 404 f).

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The Abhidharmakośa³ presents us with a scholastic view of the chain which has obvious merits. It is clear that the succession of the factors cannot be taken too seriously; contact, feeling, thirst, grasping, are ever renewed in our life; grasping arises from ignorance and dispositions, which must be ever present to make feeling lead to it; contact presupposes the existence of organs, name and form, and consciousness; the whole therefore are rather simultaneous coefficients of existence (*bhavaṅga*). The vital element, as is clear from the Canon where consciousness appears as sixth element, and where it clearly dominates matter in name and form, is consciousness, and accordingly it is existence (*bhavaṅga*) par excellence; it is the seed which grows, watered by thirst, opened up by ignorance in the field of action, which with thirst engenders it; these three, therefore, are coefficients to the cause as consciousness, an idea exactly in harmony with the revised estimate of causes. The chain, therefore, can now be regarded properly as a series of states (*avasthā*) of consciousness under the influence of these factors. Determined by previous dispositions produced by ignorance, it is incarnated as rebirth consciousness, or mind, confused however by the process of birth renewal. Then it assumes with matter the form of the five aggregates, possessing the senses of mind and body, that is touch.¹ Then the other four senses develop, and actual birth takes place. Then comes a period of contact, marked by feeling but without appreciation of the causes of feeling which is obtained in the next stage of feeling; then comes thirst viewed as especially sexual desire; then grasping in the shape of the four infections, desire, heresy, ritualism, belief in the self; then the act which produces a future birth, and ultimately that birth with death to follow.

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³ AK. iii. 21 ff. See also Ṣaḍāyatana Sūtra, in MKV., p. 566; Ç., p. 225; Oltramare, FBDC., pp. 42 f.; TCD., pp. 40 ff.

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¹ KV. xiv. 2 agrees with this view against the Pubba-and Apara-seliyas who accept all six senses in the embryo.

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The Sautrāntikas give four aspects of the cause of the production of misery as taught in the chain. They hold that things must be looked upon by one who understands them truly as caused (*hetutas*): it is false that there is no cause; as resulting from several coefficients : it is false that there is one cause, the Lord of the deists or the nature of the Sāṃkhya; as produced : it is false that things merely develop, and do not have a true beginning; and as arriving for this reason and that: things do not come to pass from a deliberate plan, there are many causes in the world.²

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