Pramāṇa · Search · About · API

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s1: 1. Realism

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s1

Language
English

1. Realism

c15.s1.1

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.

c15.s1.2

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.

c15.s1.3

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

c15.s1.4

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.

c15.s1.5

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.

c15.s1.6

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

c15.s1.7

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

Cites (6)