Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c20.s2.16

c20.s2.16

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