Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c16.s3.8

c16.s3.8

Interest attaches to the suggestion that by Buddhaghosa an idealistic interpretation was given to aspects of sensation and feeling, in which earlier views saw the interaction of material and psychical factors; the Sautrāntikas as well as the Vaibhāṣikas, as we have seen, accepted the real interaction of matter and spirit. Is it possible that Buddhaghosa, who was, we know, trained in the traditions of India before he came to Ceylon, adopted a more idealistic position, and accepted in effect the Vijñānavāda doctrine of the object of perception as wholly ideal? It has been suggested ⁴ that this is the sense in which we are to read his exposition of the old formula: ‘Because of the eye and visible matter there arises visual consciousness; the collision of the two is contact; conditioned by contact arises feeling; what one feels, one perceives, &c.’ In Buddhaghosa ⁵ we have the explanation that in the phrase ‘matter strikes on form’ the latter words are ‘a term for the eye (i. e. the visual sense) being receptive of the object of consciousness.’ This is held to be ‘a clear attempt to resolve the old metaphor, or, it may be, the old physical concept into terms of subjective experience.’ Again in dealing with the simile of the Milindapañha, which compares the clash of object and organ with the impact of two cymbals and the butting of two goats, ‘we are told by Buddhaghosa to interpret eye by visual cognition and to take the concussion in the sense of function (kiccaṭṭhen’ eva)’, and he tells us that when feeling arises through contact the real causal antecedent is mental, though apparently external.¹