Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c19.s2.49

c19.s2.49

Of the later history of Buddhism as a philosophy in India comparatively little is important. The commentators on the Madhyamaka and the Vijñānavāda contended against one another, without either school ousting the other; the Mīmānsā, Vedānta, and Nyāya-Vaiçeṣika criticized severely Buddhist views. It is, however, significant that, while Kumārila makes strong play against the Madhyamaka, Caṅkara who refutes elaborately the Sarvāstivādins and the Vijñānavāda disposes summarily of the Madhyamaka. The polemics of Uddyotakara and Vācaspati Miçra are of special interest as showing the lively controversies of the schools. The Buddhists, for their part, were keen controversialists, invading the field of their enemies; we have fortunately good specimens of their controversial style in the treatises of Aço-ka and Ratnakīrti, both about the close of the ninth century A. D. In the Avayavinirākaraṇa the former makes an onslaught on the Nyaya thesis that the whole is something over and above the parts to which it stands in the peculiar relation of inherence (samavāya); in truth the whole is nothing apart from the parts and the relation is a myth. In the Sāmānyadūṣaṇadikprasāritā equal havoc is made with the conception that we experience generals or universals as real; we see the five fingers of the hand, not a sixth universal, which is as unreal as a horn on one’s head. Ratnakīrti established by two treatises, both positively and negatively, the doctrine of momentariness. The general decay of Buddhism from internal causes was accelerated by the havoc wrought by Mahomedan invaders, whose destruction of the monasteries and their inmates uprooted a faith in which the laity were only loosely attached to the Church, and from the twelfth century onwards Buddhist theories cease to attract much living attention in the schools.