Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s3.18

c15.s3.18

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.