Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s3.11

c15.s3.11

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.