Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s2.25

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.