Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s2: 2. The Conclusions attainable

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s2

Language: English

2. The Conclusions attainable

c6.s2.1

If we adopt, as we must if not precluded by obligations of faith, the conclusion that the Pali Canon came into its present shape long after the death of the Buddha, the question presents itself whether any effective result can be achieved in selecting parts of the Canon as earlier and more authentic than others. The results attainable⁶ in this regard are from our point of view of negligible importance; the fifth Nikāya contains miscellaneous

c6.s2.2

⁶ See references in Winternitz, Ind. Litt. ii. 51, 53, 365; Rhys Davids, Buddh. Ind., pp. 165 ff.

c6.s2.3

Cf. Grammont, Mél. Lévi, pp. 65 ff. Rhys Davids (SBE. xxxvi. 269) suggests a Ceylonese origin of the Parivāra.

c6.s2.4

matter, some old in part at least, like the Suttanipāta, Udāna, Thera- and Therī-gāthās, Dhammapada, and Itivuttaka, some new like the Peta and Vimāna-vatthu, the Buddhavansa, Apadāna, and Cariyāpiṭaka; the Abhidhamma is clearly a late and deliberate working over of the Dhamma in its technical aspect. But the bulk of the Sutta Piṭaka and the Vinaya Piṭaka represents the same stage of ideas; they may have been redacted contemporaneously, and any attempt to trace strata of diverse ages involves a determination on other grounds of what elements should be early and what should be late. On the theory of Buddhist rationalism, we can decide that all the supernatural element is secondary, but we are faced with the insistent question whether we have any right thus to proceed. Granted that a preacher of a gospel of pure reason may be deified by some accident, it is at least certain that it is much more easy to deify an inspired seer who deems himself to be an embodiment of the divine, and that India in particular has been specially prone to accept as real such embodiments. If we reason a priori, and lay aside our natural desire to modernize and to find reason prevailing in a barbarous age, we should rather expect to find that the Buddha was one who was indeed human, but who at the same time felt himself to be, and was regarded by his followers as, something far superior to humanity, a great divinity in the eyes of his followers, a deity even to those who were not of the chosen circle. The conclusion is doubtless embarrassing to rationalism, but, if we are content to seek historical truth, we must be prepared to shed our personal predilections and to accept the conclusion which evidence indicates. The case for this view is greatly strengthened by the nature of the texts of the Pali Canon. The Vibhajyavādins were plainly prepared to rationalize as far as practicable;¹ as opposed to other schools they minimize the supernatural element in Buddhism, and the salient fact is that even in the records of these would-be rationalists we find abundant proof that the orthodox and prevalent view of the Buddha made him far removed from ordinary humanity.

c6.s2.5

¹ Cf. Barth, RHR. xlii. 57; Poussin, Bouddhisme, Études et Matériaux (1898), p. 42; Bouddhisme, pp. 216 ff; cf. ERE. i. 95.

c6.s2.6

In the Mahāpadāna Suttanta¹ of the Dīgha Nikāya we have in the fullest and most categorical form the declaration of the transcendental character of the Buddha. He is no mere mortal reformer, but a sage whose divine insight enables him to pierce back to the ninety-first Aeon ago when the Buddha Vipassin came to earth to be followed in the thirty-first Aeon by Sikhin and Vessabhu, and in this Aeon by Kakusandha, Koṇāgamana,² and Kassapa, and finally by Gotama himself. Theirs is no mortal birth; they descend in full consciousness amid surpassing radiance throughout the universe into their mother's womb, in which they abide in happiness, completely visible to their mothers for ten months before birth. At birth gods receive them, streams of water fall to bathe them, they stride seven paces proclaiming their pre-eminence, the worlds are illuminated; their mothers bear them standing and without defilement, but die on the seventh day. The infants bear already the marvellous marks, thirty-two in number, which mark them out as Great Males, destined either to become Emperors of the World or Buddhas, the flat feet, the dustless skin, the long tongue, the mole between the eyebrows, and the turban-like protuberance on the head. Each passes through the same stages of worldly life, of enlightenment, of teaching and attainment of Nirvāṇa. No two Buddhas can coexist, and it is the privilege of the Buddha to extend his life to the full length of an Aeon; shame on Ānanda who in heedlessness failed to accept the hint repeatedly pressed upon him by Gotama, and to beg his master to exercise this power, instead of passing away at the age of eighty, like a mere man.³ Gotama's adversaries are much more than human; the legend of the varied temptations by Māra,⁴ the god of death or the desire which leads to death, is not to be explained away as metaphorical or the fruit of a poetic fancy; to the Buddha himself as to his followers we may easily believe the experience was as real as anything else in the world; does not our own age suffer from the puerilities of spiritualistic phenomena of far inferior order? The divine nature reveals itself again in the transfiguration of the Buddha’s colour on the night in which he attains supreme insight and on that on which he passes away, and in the earthquakes which mark the various stages in a Buddha’s career.¹ His powers include that of assuming diverse forms at pleasure; he can discourse to assemblies of nobles, Brahmins, householders, and wanderers and to the hosts of the Guardian Gods, the Thirty-Three Gods, of the Māras, and the Brahmās, and none of these can say who indeed he was.² The Buddha is the first of beings, lord and controller of the whole world and those that are within it, Māra, Brahmā, men and gods, ascetics and Brahmins.³ At his mere word the demon of the eclipse, Rāhu, slinks away, releasing the moon which had appealed to the Buddha for safety.⁴ The great voice of the Buddha penetrates countless universes, and he rebukes the graceless Udāyin when he mocks Ānanda for the awe which this peculiarity in the master inspired.⁵ The Milindapañha⁶ frankly styles him the sovereign god of gods (devātideva), and the Canon makes a simple Arhant above the gods (atidevapatta). Significant is the Buddha’s reply to the Brahmin Doṇa, who had viewed with amazement the thousand-spoked wheels which adorn the feet of the Blessed One. Questioned as to his identity he denies that he is god, or Gandharva or Yakṣa⁷ or man; like a lotus born in the water which rears its head above the water and is no longer defiled by the water, he has left the world and its defilements, and is a Buddha.⁸ Gotama in fact neither has the appearance of a man, nor will he admit that he is a man. If he dies, he does so voluntarily, laying aside the possibility of prolonging his life; miracles mark his death and his funeral, and his relics form forthwith the object of eager veneration.

c6.s2.7

¹ Waddell's reading, Mahāpadhāna, i. e. Buddha as supreme being (JRAS. 1914, p. 674), is implausible.

c6.s2.8

² His human reality is not proved by Asoka's reference. Smith, Asoka, p. 224.

c6.s2.9

³ DN. ii. 115 ff.

c6.s2.10

⁴ Windisch, Māra und Buddha; Burlingame, HOS. xxviii. 11 ff.

c6.s2.11

¹ DN. ii. 134 (cf. SBB. iii. 223, n. 1); 109.

c6.s2.12

² DN. ii. 109.

c6.s2.13

³ AN. ii. 23; SN. i. 67.

c6.s2.14

⁴ SN. i. 50.

c6.s2.15

⁵ AN. i. 227 f.

c6.s2.16

⁶ p. 381; SBE. xxxvi. 305, n. 1.

c6.s2.17

⁷ He is so styled; MN. i. 386.

c6.s2.18

⁸ AN. ii. 37; Kern, Ind. Buddh., p. 64.

c6.s2.19

The evidence might be accumulated, but it is sufficient to remark that there is nothing to set against it; the Pali Canon contains no hint that even the greatest of Buddhist rationalists questioned the supernatural character of the Buddha. The intellectual standard of the milieu in which the Dīgha Nikāya was compiled is sufficiently proved by the admission into the Canon of the Pāṭika Suttanta, in which the Buddha appears as a magician of a trivial and vulgar kind.¹ The Mahāsudassana and Cakkavatti-sīhanāda Suttantas among others indicate how full the minds of the Buddhists were with the legend of the sun god, and the solar disk is the obvious source of the later doctrine of the wheel of the law or norm; the concept of the Great Male reminds us of Nārāyaṇa, who is identical, or identified, with Viṣṇu,² and, more distantly, of the primeval male by whose dismemberment in sacrifice the gods created the world.³ It is significant that the Jaṭilas, or fire-worshippers, were among those early converted, by the aid of a series of miracles of moderate interest;⁴ they had, it is clear, no fundamental difficulty in transferring their adoration to another form of divinity, but it is idle to suppose that they would have abandoned their faith for a cold rationalism. It was the age of the growth of the great gods, Çiva and Viṣṇu in their various forms,⁵ and the Buddha’s success was due to the fact that he either had claims to divinity, or his followers attributed it to him and won general acceptance for the view. It is conceivable that divinity was thrust upon him against his will, but every ground of probability supports the plain evidence of the texts that he himself had claims which necessarily conferred upon him a place as high as the rank of the greatest of gods. The Buddha treats Brahmā, regarded as the highest of the gods, and all the hosts of heaven, with a cool superciliousness which is explicable more easily on the ground of his conscious divinity than as an outcome of a rationalism, which certainly his disciples did not understand. Given the psychological conditions of the times, it would have been a miracle had the Buddha been capable of the rationalism imputed to him, and it is unhistorical to neglect the clear testimony of the Canon of the least supernaturalist of all the schools.

c6.s2.20

¹ SBB. iv. 1 ff.

c6.s2.21

² Hopkins, Epic Mythology, pp. 206, 208.

c6.s2.22

³ RV. x. 90.

c6.s2.23

⁴ MV. i. 15 ff. The Ājīvakas, once counted as adorers of Nārāyaṇa, cannot so be reckoned; Bhandarkar, IA. xli. 286 ff.

c6.s2.24

⁵ The scant mention of either (Veṇhu in DN. ii. 259; SN. i. 52; Siva, i. 55) is no proof to the contrary.

c6.s2.25

How far is it possible to ascribe to the Buddha the philosophical views which we find in the Sutta Piṭaka? The elaborations of the Abhidhamma are obviously not his, but the Suttas themselves are far from presenting a single coherent doctrine. They exhibit many streams of thought, here and there welded into a fairly effective whole, but sometimes merely put together roughly without serious attempt at harmonization. We realize that the Buddhist doctrine as we have it has passed through a long period of development,¹ and the Canon represents a compromise of contending views; the eight Jhānas, for instance, are compounded of two sets, diverse in origin and in moral tone.² Yet there are certain features of Buddhism which are so emphatically presented in the Sutta Piṭaka and later as to impress upon us the view that they represent the views of the great sage himself.³ He believed, we cannot doubt, in the reality of what the vulgar called metempsychosis, but which he transformed to suit another belief, the non-existence of a substantial permanent soul such as that accepted by the teachers of the Upaniṣads. He held, as did the thinkers of the Upaniṣads, a faith in the mysterious power of the act which automatically determined man's life from moment to moment, without divine intervention. He believed, much more decidedly than did the thinkers of the Upaniṣads, that life in whatever form was a striving which inevitably involved pain, but release from it he found, not in the realization of the unity of the self and the absolute, the doctrine of the Upaniṣads, but in the appreciation of the truth of pain, its causation, its cessation, and the means of attaining freedom from it. The path to this freedom lay neither in asceticism or in worldly striving, but in a middle way, involving self culture, the restraint of the passions, and the practice of intense meditation. On the positive content, if any, of the state attained by these means the master must have been silent, whatever his personal view; for the texts present us with abundant evidence to this effect and his reticence harmonizes well with the other assured fact that he declined himself to engage in, or permit to others, speculations on metaphysical questions, which did not tend directly to the welfare of the individual seeking truth. He was, we may be assured, dogmatic in his utterances; his insight enabled him, with the aid of his power to recollect the past, to explain the structure of reality to his disciples in such measure as was profitable for their salvation. Doubtless it was this consciousness of insight and memory which impressed on the Buddha himself and on his disciples the conception that he was far above humanity; this is the simple psychological explanation of a claim which seems more bizarre and unreal to the western world than it ever has seemed in India. The popular appeal of his teaching lay doubtless largely in this fact; the disciples were not compelled to change their mentality, but only to accept a new object of reverence, and to follow in some measure the dictates of a new creed, on the whole sane and free from the excess of asceticism which has always had attractions for Indian opinion. Hence we may explain the permanence of the fraternity which he founded, in comparison with the evanescence of most of the other groups, formed by teachers who, to judge from the Buddhist texts, made no claim whatever to more than normal humanity. It is characteristic of the Indian thought of the period that the other contemporary movement which succeeded in maintaining itself was Jainism, whose founder likewise had claims to supernatural nature.

c6.s2.26

¹ Cf. Franke, ZDMG. lxiii. 1 ff.; lxix. 455 ff.; DN., pp. ix. ff.; VOJ. xxix. 134 ff.

c6.s2.27

² See below, ch. vi, § 2.

c6.s2.28

³ Poussin, Bouddhisme, ch. i; Beckh, Buddhismus, i. 100 ff.

c6.s2.29

But, while we may accept these broad outlines as representing with approximate truth, on the strength of the available evidence, the teachings of the Buddha, it is clearly impossible with the materials at our disposal to develop in detail his position, or to consider how he strove to combine views, far from according, at least when closely probed. We can follow in many points the disputes of the schools, but it is impossible to say how far in each aspect they represent the opinions of the master. The point is important, when we recognize how late our texts really are, as contrasted with the view that they are authoritative for the century after Buddhism,¹ when they would probably represent the teachings of the Buddha himself.

c6.s2.30

¹ So still Rhys Davids, CHI. i. 192 ff. On the illiteracy of early Buddhism, see Windisch, KF. pp. 2 ff.; Oldenberg, GGA. 1917, pp. 143 ff.

c6.s2.31

Moreover, it must be added, that a certain doubt still exists, not indeed as to the historical existence of the Buddha,¹ but as to his date. The normally accepted date, placing his death in the decade 487-77 B. C., depends on a correction of the Sinhalese tradition, which strictly interpreted would give rather the date 544-3 B. C. for the Parinirvāṇa of the Blessed One.² A singularly unhappy attempt has, indeed, recently been made to resuscitate the traditional date, based on the absurd suggestion that there exist actual portrait statues of the Caiçunāga dynasty and an implausible interpretation of an inscription of Khāravela of Kaliṅga.³ But a more serious difficulty inevitably suggests itself; to what extent can we trust the tradition of the Pali Canon which makes the Buddha contemporaneous with Ajātasattu, apart from the question of the true date of that monarch? Is it not possible that the synchronism is fictitious, a view which would rid us of the unpleasant spectacle of the Buddha conversing amicably with a parricide? We have, of course in the Upaniṣads the name of Yājñavalkya associated with that of Janaka of Videha, and no one probably would care to insist on the contemporaneity. We have, moreover, some positive evidence of confusion in the records, for the history of Jainism renders it probable that Mahāvīra died in 468 B. C.,⁴ that is, after the death of the Buddha, while the Canon⁵ is absolutely clear in asserting that Mahāvīra died in the Buddha's lifetime. This is one of many inconsistencies and errors in the canonical statements,⁶ and there is thus justification for the doubt expressed by inquirers so different as Franke and de la Vallée Poussin as to the date of the Buddha, though the case against the traditional date is insufficient to justify its rejection out and out.⁷

Linked texts (22)

Mahāparinibbānasutta — Pāli
Mahāvagga — Pāli
Saṅgītisutta — Pāli
Pāsādikasutta — Pāli
Upālisutta — Pāli
Mahāsamayasutta — Pāli
Kintisutta — Pāli
Vassakārasutta — Pāli
Cūḷanikāsutta — Pāli
Dutiyauruvelasutta — Pāli
Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
Apadāna — Pāli
Milindapañha — Pāli
Suttanipāta — Pāli
Buddhavaṃsa — Pāli
Vimānavatthu — Pāli
Petavatthu — Pāli
Udāna — Pāli
Itivuttaka — Pāli
Cariyāpiṭaka — Pāli
Dhammapada — Pāli
Saṃyuttanikāya — Pāli