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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s3: 3. The Ego as a Series

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s3

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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.

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