Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c7.s1.15

c7.s1.15

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.