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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c7.s1: 1. Authority, Intuition, and Reason

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c7.s1

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English

1. Authority, Intuition, and Reason

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WHEN we are asked to treat Buddhism as a rationalism, it is well to remember that in the words of Kern,¹ ‘Buddhism is professedly no rationalistic system, it being a superhuman (*uttarimanussa*) Law, founded upon the decrees of an omniscient and infallible Master.’ It is characteristic that in the Bhābrū edict Asoka commits himself to the assertion that whatever has been said by the Blessed Buddha is well said; the same sentiment is preserved in a passage of the Aṅguttara Nikāya² where the Buddha appears as the granary whence men bring every good word. The Kevaddha Sutta neatly emphasizes the supreme authority of the Buddha; the searcher after the truth appeals successively to the various ranks of gods to learn the answer to his inquiry where the four great elements cease; the Great Brahmā himself censures his folly in seeking him, ignoring the Buddha, and the Buddha himself gently rebukes the penitent inquirer. Yet again the Buddha contrasts himself in his embracing wisdom with other teachers, who are likened to the blind men whom a king bade describe an elephant, and who gave accounts of the monster based on the partial knowledge attained by contact with a portion only of the quadruped.³ The Blessed One can never lie, though the sky fall and the earth mount to the heaven.⁴

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¹ *Ind. Buddh.*, p. 50. See Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, pp. 130 ff. ; JRAS. 1902, pp. 363 ff. ; JA. 1902, ii. 252 f.

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² iv. 163 f. ; Smith, *Asoka*, p. 154.

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³ *Udāna*, p. 68 ; SBB. ii 187.

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⁴ *Divyāvadāna*, p. 272 ; Ç., p. 174.

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The Buddha is the ultimate source of all true knowledge and of salvation, for his doctrine, we must remember, is not delivered for the sake of imparting knowledge on its own account, but as a remedy against the pain of life, which is inevitably miserable.

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Hence the importance attached in the Canon to the decision of the Buddha, tardily arrived at, on the direct intercession of Brahmā himself, to make known his doctrine to the world instead of passing into Nirvāṇa, and leaving the world without a saviour. From the Buddha and his succession of disciples the essential knowledge comes;¹ the doctors of the school carry weight, not on their own merits, but because they expound the words of the Buddha; even in the later school of the Mahāyāna the doctrine persists: their greatest teacher Nāgārjuna² claims our respect because the Buddha, five centuries before, prophesied his advent and his ability to teach, and all that is true in our age can be traced to the utterances of the Buddha, as in other ages to the words of other Buddhas. It is in harmony with this that the later texts³ at any rate recognize that the individual Buddhas, who appear at the time when the law of the Buddha is not preached and the community is dissolved, obtain their knowledge, not by their own unaided intuition, but through recollection of the teaching of a Buddha heard by them in a previous birth when a Buddha was in existence.

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¹ BCAP., p. 431; MKV., p. 268.

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² MA., p. 76; Watters On Yuan Chwang, ii. 204; Ui, VP., p. 48, n. 3.

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³ MA. in Poussin, p. 135, n. 1.

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A disciple, therefore, who seeks to become a Buddhist cannot attain his end, unless he has the necessary faith as an indispensable preliminary. He must believe that the Buddha is indeed fully enlightened, the teacher of gods and men, the exalted and awakened one; that the truth has been proclaimed by the Buddha, of advantage in this world, passing not away, welcoming all, and to be attained by the wise each for himself; and that the Order of the Buddha is worthy of honour, gifts, and reverence, is the sowing ground of merit for the world, and is possessed of the virtues praised by the wise, untarnished by desire of future life or by belief in the efficacy of outward acts and conducive to concentration of the heart.⁴ Faith is the root of correct knowledge; man does not think out the doctrines of the Buddha by the independent light of reason; he must hear them taught and explained. Faith is the means by which a man may cross the depths of the river of existence to the safety of Nirvāṇa;¹ the teaching of the Buddha saves him who has faith, but destroys the faithless,² a reflection which may have strengthened the Buddha in his hesitation to preach the truth to a world which would probably be unable to comprehend it.

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⁴ DN. ii. 93.

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¹ Mil., p. 36; it ranks in AN. iii. 21 with intuition (contra SBE. xxxv. 56, n. 1); Beckh, Buddhismus, ii. 22 ff.

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² Cited in Sumaṅg., p. 31.

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There is indeed some place for the operations of reason; Kumārila³ asserts with perfect truth that the teaching of the Buddha is supported by reasoning. The Buddha’s miracles are rather an adornment of his discourses than an essential method of proselytism; the logicians found or invented a Sūtra bidding men test the law as gold by fire. In point of fact the Suttas are not couched in the form of an apocalypse; the Buddha is represented often as reasoning in a more or less Socratic manner, and in inducing his interlocutor insensibly to adopt a view essentially different from the starting-point of ordinary belief, yet attained without any violent breach of continuity;⁴ indeed the Buddha seems at times perilously complacent to vulgar error in his teaching. He insists that his disciples should acknowledge that they have not accepted views from respect for him, but have by themselves attained full understanding of the topic;⁵ the Buddha’s teaching, therefore, appears as the occasion, but not as the cause of the knowledge, which develops within each hearer, brought into efficacy by the suggestion of the master’s discourse. Thus, happily enough, is a bridge built between the final authority of the Buddha and the demand of the individual for respect to his intellectual independence. The individual again has another mode of testing the value of the Buddha’s teaching; its end is freedom from desire; the Buddha himself in the night when he gained enlightenment experienced, with his development of insight into the truths of pain, its cause, its end, and the means to its cessation, the realization of freedom from the bonds of desire. He is omniscient and he himself claims to be completely free from fault, one in whom no blemish can be found.⁶ The disciple has the same means of testing the value of the Buddha’s teaching;¹ he realizes, as he appreciates and accepts it, assimilating it as part of his own stock of ideas, that he is attaining the freedom from desire which is the means to the final cessation of pain.

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³ TV., p. 117.

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⁴ Cf. SBB. iv. 168; Beckh, Buddhismus, i. 103 ff.

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⁵ MN. i. 265.

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⁶ AN. iv. 82.

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¹ MN. ii. 173.

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It must, however, be admitted that the possibility of human knowledge by no means equals that of the knowledge of the Buddha. ‘If there are depths which his wit cannot sound’, the Ratnakūṭa² tells us, ‘he does not in this case deny; for he feels, “Here the Tathāgata alone is my witness, the Tathāgata knows, I do not know; boundless is the enlightenment of the Buddhas.”’ It is no disgrace to say that one admits something by faith;³ if it is one’s duty to understand and appreciate the intelligible parts of the doctrine taught, it is equally incumbent to accept the other portions, recognizing that they fall within the domain of the Buddha and not of the individual.⁴ There are, it must be added, vast tracts on which investigation is forbidden by the Buddha, on the score that it does not lead to salvation, including no less a question than the nature of the action of Karman itself.⁵ Nor is it permissible for any one to interpret at pleasure the sacred texts; their interpretation is handed down in the authoritative tradition of the teachers of the school.

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² Ҫ., p. 55.

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³ AN. iv. 82.

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⁴ BSB. I. xviii; MSA. i. 12.

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⁵ Cf. AN. ii. 80; DN. iii. 138; Mil., p. 189; MA. vi. 42.

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Strictly speaking, therefore, the way seems closed to independence of thought, and authority dominates the field. Needless to say, the Buddhists were as little willing as other Churchmen to permit their thought to remain in effective bondage, and diverse methods of circumvention were available. Granted that, strictly speaking, the word of the Buddha must be found in the Sūtra and the Vinaya and be in accord with the law or norm, it is possible to extend its comprehension. A good word may be defined as possessing four characteristics;⁶ it is well said, conforms to salvation, pleasant and true as opposed to the opposites of these, and such a word by its intrinsic merit may be assumed to be spoken by the Buddha, despite the fact that no text containing it is available. Hence we read¹ that anything that is well said is a word of the Buddha, and its characteristics are given as four; it refers to truth, not to untruth; to the law, not to the non-law; it lessens sin, not increases it; it shows the advantages of Nirvāṇa, and does not indicate those of continued rebirth. The change of view is characteristic; originally the word of the Buddha was the norm, and hell the fate of him who, when the lion voice uttered its decrees, had the temerity to disbelieve the Buddha’s superhuman knowledge, and to think that his norm was founded on dialectic, accompanied by reasoning or experience, made of individual intuition.² The new attitude does not contradict the old; the word of the Buddha remains authoritative, but we are entitled to treat as the word of the Buddha every teaching which conforms to the essential characteristics of his teaching. The logic is sound enough; granted that the Buddha’s word has the extraordinary virtue of leading to salvation, and that this is a unique quality, it does follow that, if we can ascertain the characteristics of his utterances, such other sayings as possess these characteristics must be his, though not contained in the canonical records. Obviously these records neither are, nor pretend to be, complete accounts of all the declarations of a generation of active instruction to very diverse audiences. Again, we must allow for the fact that the Buddha even in the Suttas shows a clear willingness to accommodate his views to the opinions of his interlocutors; he is the physician, whose aim is to heal, and who, accordingly, is most anxious to find the best means of effecting this result, and does not concentrate his attention on the precise and absolute value of the means in themselves, a conception which later in the Mahāyāna appears in full development in the doctrine of the two forms of truth.³

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⁶ Suttanipāta, p. 78.

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¹ Ç., p. 15; BCAP. ix. 43.

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² MN. i. 71; cf. SN. iii. 103.

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³ Cf. Çaṅkara, BS. ii. 2, 18; SDS. ch. ii; below, ch. ix. § 1.

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The texts themselves clearly demand the exercise of reason; it is necessary doubtless to regard the letter, nor must a teacher be hastily accused of subordinating the sense to the literal meaning.⁴ But mere reading of the text is far from sufficient; the law is a doctrine which must be understood, just as a serpent must be handled with skill lest it slay the holder. To dispute on words is an error and a waste of energy, and it is essential to distinguish between those pronouncements which are complete and explicit, and those which are made for a special occasion, and cannot be taken as adequate unless understood in regard to the special subject matter involved.¹ The context of passages must be considered as well as the mere words. Even then doubt may arise, and there is scriptural authority to make it clear, as is asserted in the Mahāyāna in categoric terms, that there is no binding value in the interpretation of any teacher; the Buddha in his own time had to complain that there were those who cherished texts composed by poets and other men of letters to the neglect of the profound doctrines of the Buddha, superhuman, and consecrated to the doctrine of the void.² But, if no teacher is authoritative, there must still be some final authority, and that authority must lie in the law or norm itself, or, regarded from another point of view, in reason which alone under these circumstances can decide what the law is. There are of course narrow limits to the autonomy of the reason; the Buddha tolerates no heresy; ‘can a man, dominated by passion, go beyond the teaching of the master?’ is his crushing rebuke to the monk who sought to penetrate a veil which he had declined to lift.³ The reasoner must, therefore, see that his views conform to the law, or he will be guilty of the crime of the arch-traitor Devadatta. But this does not exclude expert interpretation of the law, nor even the assertion that such and such texts, which are inconvenient, are lacking in authenticity,⁴ though such a contention is rare, doubtless because of the rule governing Buddhist controversy, which aims at achieving results on the ground of arguments based on beliefs accepted by both parties to the controversy.

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⁴ Ç., p. 96.

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¹ MN. ii. 240; MKV., pp. 41, n. 1; 44, 276, 597 : nītārtha and neyārtha.

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² BSB. I. xvii; SN. ii. 267.

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³ SN. iii. 103.

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⁴ Cf. Minayeff, *Recherches*, pp. 221 f.; Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 251.

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But the place available for the exercise of discursive reasoning is also limited by a further consideration. The Buddha in the Suttas reasons indeed, and instructs by analogy and parable and simple inductive argument, but it is not claimed that he attained his saving insight by this means, and still less that the insight itself consists of any such reasoning. The Buddha attains enlightenment in a complete intuition, the fruit of a long process in which he has overcome all form of empiric knowledge, and the way of intuition lies open for the disciple, and indeed must¹ be followed if the end is to be attained. Hence it is essential and proper to develop the capacity for winning such visions, and this is and must be a matter for individual experience, and in it the autonomy of the individual successfully emerges from the constraint of authority in an experience which is essentially ineffable, however real it may be to him who experiences it.

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¹ We hear of persons delivered by faith alone (AN. i. 118; PP. iii. 3), but this is abnormal. Intuition is possible in early Buddhism without trance; below, ch. vii., § 3.

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