Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c19.s1.10

c19.s1.10

It is clear, indeed, that the doctrine of vacuity or in the Vijñānavāda of empty thought is a development, natural and perhaps inevitable of the insistence of primitive Buddhism on the transitory character and non-substantiality of all things, and of the Buddha's long list of indeterminates. Granted that early Buddhism was realistic in a naïve way, it contained within itself the seeds of negativism; if the chain of causation, as the *Saṃyutta Nikāya*¹ boasts, overthrows the doctrine that the misery of existence is made by self, by another, by both or by neither, it is not a difficult step to assert the invalidity or vacuity² of every possible idea, as does the *Prajñāpāramitā*, with an elaboration of repetition which suggests the fascination of the theorem for philosophically immature intellects. There was a sense also in which this negativism has more affinity to early Buddhism that the Sautrāntika doctrine, which doubtless most nearly affected the growth of the Mahāyāna. The Sautrāntika and Sarvāstivādin theory accepted the world as the product of the unstable combinations of seventy-five stable elements; they had thus indirectly assailed the true doctrine of impermanence, for, though they admitted constant change, they recognized the changing forms as having beneath them something real and permanent.