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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c20.s2: 2. The Doctrine of Negativism and the Void

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c20.s2

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English

2. The Doctrine of Negativism and the Void

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As the doctrine of knowledge of the Hīnayāna presented a fatal temptation to further depreciation of our powers of knowing, so the Sautrāntika conception of the doctrine of the momentary series of states in lieu of the self, encouraged the Madhyamaka to proceed to further dissection. To reduce the self to such a series, to assert the act but not the agent,¹ was to produce something essentially obscure and doubtful, and to open the way to the suggestion of an absolute self underlying the series such as the person (puruṣa) of the Sāṃkhya; and, even if the momentariness of each state were insisted on, that would merely mean the imagination of a series of substantial though momentary selves, a re-introduction of the hateful doctrine of the self. Yet the orthodox alternative, to insist on the absence of any thing save a causal series, is fatal to the essential doctrine of action. There can be no true act if there is no freedom of the will, and without a true act there can be no enjoyment of fruits. To assert the act and deny the agent is therefore impossible; you must admit both, in that case merely from the standpoint of common sense (vyavahāratas),² or deny both from the standpoint of absolute reality. There is no room for a moral agent or responsibility in the mere potency into which the Sautrāntika doctrine in effect reduces existence.

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¹ Ṣ., p. 262; BCAP. ix. 73; AKV. (MS. Burn. f. 475ᵃ) in JA. 1902, ii. 255, n. 2; against Sāṃkhya views, BCA. ix. 60-8.

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² Kartā svatantraḥ karmāpi tvayoktaṃ vyavahārataḥ, BCAP. l.c.; cf. BCA. viii. 97 ff.

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The idea of consciousness and knowledge is equally unable to bear serious examination; it is as unreal as the belief of a man with ophthalmia that there are hairs floating before his vision.³ Knowledge is impossible, and therefore⁴ cannot exist; examined, it proves out of the question to know anything external or even internal; the point of the sword cannot pierce itself or the finger touch itself. Consciousness cannot know anything either antecedent, simultaneous, nor subsequent to itself.¹ But the matter can be carried further; there is no such thing as causation of consciousness or of anything else. The Pali Canon² already recognizes that the chain of causation is opposed to the doctrine that anything is produced either by itself, by another, by both or neither, and this is confirmed by reasoning. If a thing already exists, it cannot come into being through itself. To say that it is originated by others implies the production of something already existing, or we should have the absurdity of darkness producing light. Since neither itself nor other things can produce anything, it cannot be the effect of both, and to deny any cause would mean that any thing could come into being at any time. The doctrine of causation, therefore, must be taken as referring only to the world of ignorance. How again can that which is momentary have any effect? Is it anterior, simultaneous, or posterior? The two latter views are absurd, but so is the former which makes out the disappearance of one moment the cause of the appearance of another. Moreover, the very idea of production by another contradicts the fundamental doctrine of the non-existence of the self, since there can be another only when a self is admitted. More generally there is no such thing as the true independent nature of any object; heat is not the nature of fire, for each depends on a variety of conditions and so indefinitely; we cannot attain any idea which can be said to be the true nature of any object, and therefore we are equally unable to assert the essence or existence of other things which have meaning only when we grasp the nature of any object.³ Similar difficulties affect every recognized conception; the characteristics cannot exist before the thing characterized, since without them it has no existence and cannot therefore come into being, while the thing characterized cannot take on the characteristics.⁴ Movement is impossible; he who has gone is not going, nor is he who will go; while the goer does not go, since that would need two forms of action, one to give him the style of goer, and one to be attributed to him in saying that he goes. The goer does not stand, but neither does the non-goer, since he is vi termini not connected with going, and he who stands is connected negatively with going.¹ Every conceivable relation yields to such dialectic; subject and object; actor and action; fire and fuel; existence and non-existence; extension or matter; sensation and perception; origination, duration, and disappearance; unity and plurality; whole and part; time; the aggregates; the six elements; the dispositions; the senses; as well as all the deepest doctrines of Buddhism, including misery, the Tathāgata, the noble truths, the chain of causation, bondage, and release itself, prove incapable of sustaining the searching examination or reductio ad absurdum (prasaṅga) which establishes that they neither exist of themselves, nor by others, nor by both, nor by neither.²

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³ MKV., p. 58.

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⁴ MKV., p. 210 (x. 12). See Ṣaṅkara’s critique, BS. ii, 2. 28; ch. xv. § 3.

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¹ Cf. the Vijñānavāda argument in SDS., pp. 12 ff. against external reality with MK. xiv; against self-consciousness, MKV., pp. 61, 62 (Ratnakūṭa); BCAP. ix. 18; Ç., p. 235; Bhāmatī, p. 379; NVT., pp. 255, 466; against perception, Āryadeva, MKV., p. 71 (inference, p. 75); BCA. ix. 94 f.

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² SN. ii. 113; cf. MKV., p. 77 (i. 2).

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³ MK., p. 78; ch. xv; i. 10; xiii.

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⁴ MK. v.

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¹ MK. ii.

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² MKV., pp. 23, 36; cf. Ṣridhara, NK., p. 198; NVT., p. 407. On time see MK. xix.; on whole and part BCA. ix. 79-88.

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It follows, therefore, that we cannot really make any affirmation regarding anything; all is merely appearance, the result of ignorance of the truth. Absolute reality, Ṣāntideva³ points out, does not fall within the domain of the intellect (buddhi), for that moves in the realm of relativity and error. Nāgārjuna⁴ denies consistently that he has any thesis of his own, for to uphold one would be wholly erroneous; the truth is silence, which is neither affirmation nor negation, for negation in itself is essentially positive in implying a reality. He confines himself to reducing every positive assertion to absurdity, thus showing that the intellect condemns itself as inadequate just as it finds hopeless antinomies in the world of experience. Whence, however, comes this illusion which appears in the form of the world of spirit and matter? There are two replies possible; in the first place, it is pure unreality, and it is needless to explain the unreal. Secondly, it has its origin in a previous state of illusion, and so on ad infinitum, rendering any further explanation needless.

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³ BCA. ix. 2.

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⁴ Vigrahavyāvartanī in MKV., p. 16.

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The conception thus presented is difficult and obscure; on the one hand, we have the constant insistence on the vacuity of every conception, reiterated *ad nauseam* in the *Prajñāpāramitā*;¹ the self is in reality the not-self; the sensation is void of sensation, and thence is called sensation; Nirvāṇa is without origination or cessation, neither one nor many, without motion or absence of motion, neither eternal nor ceasing; it is identical with the round of existence (*saṃsāra*)² since both are unreal, and the clearing away of illusion (*vyavadāna*) in the same way is identical with the infections of illusion (*kleśa*). On the other hand there is accepted the existence of the possibility of release through the removal of the obscuration of Nirvāṇa, which in reality is eternally realized by means of the destruction of the veil of illusion. Were it not that the veil was illusion pure and simple, such release would be impossible; it is a fault of the Sautrāntikas that they imagine the possibility of the utter destruction of a series really existing. There is, however, here a difficulty hardly disposed of by the school; if illusion persist in its generation of things that are void, how can it be made to desist from this evil habit?³ There is no obvious reply; granted that the states are recognized as void, still there is no conceivable reason in that why they should not continue their unreal existence. Even more fatal, of course, is the obvious difficulty of the introduction of the conception of the intelligence which recognizes the unreality of all the categories of the intellect, including the Tathāgata himself; but it finds its origin in the conception of early Buddhism, which discriminates the ordinary work of the intellect and the intuition (*prajñā*) of the Buddha.⁴

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¹ ‘Even the smallest thing is not known or perceived there, therefore it is called the highest perfect knowledge’; SBE. XLIX. ii. 138.

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² MK. xxv. 19 ff.

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³ Cf. BCA. ix. 77 f.

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⁴ Candrakīrti’s relation to Buddhapālita is recognized by Tāranātha, *Bouddhisme*, pp. 137, 148.

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There is, however, an obvious difficulty in pressing to the uttermost the doctrine of the unreality of the empiric world of illusion. If we accept the strict doctrine of Nāgārjuna, as interpreted by Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti, and accepted by Çāntideva, we must admit that the phenomenal world has not merely no existence in absolute truth, but has even no phenomenal existence, difficult as this conception is, and numerous as are the failures of its holders exactly to express it. In Bhāvaviveka’s exposition of Nāgārjuna we find a more reasonable view; just as he rejected the view that silence was the only proper attitude of the Madhyamaka,¹ so he held that the world of phenomena was phenomenally valid, though from the point of view of absolute truth unreal.² The views of his rivals thus are closely parallel to the Vedānta of Caṅkara, while his own show traces of realism comparable to the more directly realistic attitude of Rāmānuja as foreshadowed in Bādarāyaṇa.

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¹ Hence he attempted to establish by positive arguments the views of the school, and hence he and his followers are Svātantrikas as against the Prāsaṅgikas; MKV., p. 23, n. 3; cf. Wassilieff, *Bouddhisme*, p. 320 who gives (pp. 330 ff.) eleven points of importance in the views of the latter, but these add nothing of philosophic importance.

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² Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, p. 198, n. 1. Bhāvaviveka is attacked by name in MKV., pp. 36, 190, 351; see also pp. 16, 25, and for this point the reality of paratantra, p. 76; *Bouddhisme* (1898), pp. 111, n. 3. For his polemic against Gauḍapāda or some predecessor, see Walleser, *Der ältere Vedānta*, pp. 16 ff., who calls him Bhava°; for his date cf. PP., pp. 3, 18.

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Illusion absolute or illusion relative, the world has an enormous importance for the Madhyamaka and for the Mahāyāna generally; whatever it be in ultimate analysis, it must be practically treated as if it were real, and the narrow conception of an individual struggle for release gives place to a grandiose conception of efforts to bring salvation to the world and an elaborate theology worthy to rival the best products of Indian sectarian belief.

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