Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c24.s4.6

c24.s4.6

But, whatever the origin of the sentiment, it can be recognized only if accommodated to the system, and, if this forbids egoism, it equally forbids altruism, and sees no merit in the simple pity of the human heart for distress.⁴ Altruism implies existence and is therefore fatal; there is no perfection, compassion, morality, patience (kṣānti), energy, concentration (sāmādhi), unless it be permeated by the essential intuition of nothingness; otherwise these virtues are blind and unavailing.⁵ The gift, therefore, to be useful must be accompanied by the threefold purity—recognition of the non-existence of the gift itself, of the giver, and of the recipient; it must be born of compassion, indeed, but also of vacuity.⁶ There is obvious difficulty in such a prescription; if there is no object to receive the gift, how can there be any giving? The answer⁷ is that the recipient is imagined (parikalpita) by an error which is admitted in view of an end to be obtained (kārya-moha). The true end, of course, is Buddhahood, exempt from all form of imagination, all obscuration; but this is impossible without abstention from all phenomena on the part of the mind. This can be realized only by a long course of perfection of intuition, and the origin of the course lies in compassion, which at first accepts the relative reality of the existence of a suffering being, then dwells on the suffering alone, without accepting the existence of a sufferer, and finally has no object whatever. There are, we must admit, the two realms of truth, absolute and relative; the Buddha as intuition is well aware that there is no reality in the world, but, when moved by compassion, his love for the world is that of a father for his sick child. In the Buddha there is no idea of existence, but his pity is overflowing for beings troubled by the misery of life. There is an object for compassion, in the shape of the empirical individual composed of the aggregates (skandhas), even if that individual has no absolute reality.