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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c7.s2: 2. Agnosticism

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c7.s2

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2. Agnosticism

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Of the individual traits of the teaching of the Buddha none is really more assured than his definite insistence on the limits to the investigation of reality which are imposed on his disciples. The one aim which he sets himself is to make an end of pain or ill for the individual who is willing to accept his teaching, and he reserves to himself the absolute right to decide what matters are profitable to the attaining of this end. He makes no promise to a disciple to teach him anything save what tends to the final end; he is a physician to heal a wound, who has no need and no time to answer such foolish questions as those affecting the personality of him who inflicted the injury or the kind of missile with which he worked his evil will.² The Brahmajāla Sutta³ gives, under the fallacious guise of an enumeration of existing doctrines which the Buddha rejects as of final authority, a list of sixty-two views which are laid aside as matters beyond the limits of legitimate research.

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² MN. i. 426.

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³ DN. i. 17 ff.; cf. below, ch. vii.

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The first groups of these consist of eternalists,⁴ teachers who believe in the eternity of the soul and of the world, induced to this conviction in the first three cases by memories of former births, extending for periods reaching in the last case forty Aeons, and in the fourth case by reasoning and sophistry. The next four groups are represented by those who maintain that the soul and the world are partly eternal and partly not; the first of these groups arises through the delusion of memory of one who has come to life again after a world period in the retinue of Brahmā; like Brahmā himself he thinks that Brahmā is absolutely the first of beings, and he thinks that he is created by Brahmā, and, when he is reborn in the fullness of time as a teacher on earth, he deems that Brahmā is eternal, while others are impermanent. The second and third groups have their origin in the memories of those teachers who were once gods in heaven, but by moral defects, love of pleasure or envy towards one another, fall from their high estate, and erroneously compare themselves as impermanent with the permanent deities who shared not their defects. The fourth group rely on reasoning; the body and the organs pass away, but the soul as heart, or mind, or consciousness, is abiding amid the impermanence. A third set of four groups includes those who by application of intuitive thought convince themselves that the world is finite, or infinite, or finite vertically and infinite horizontally, or by reasoning conclude that it is neither finite nor infinite.

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⁴ Cf. DN. i. 56; Sūtrakṛtāṅga, i. 1. 1, 15, 16; ii. 1. 21 f.; Ui, VP., p. 20.

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Other four groups are formed by equivocators, who are agnostics of the most pronounced sort, and not merely, like the Buddha, unwilling to speculate on certain topics. Their motives differ; some fear error, and the remorse arising from thus hindering their development; others fear to create the grasping spirit which causes rebirth and produces remorse; others feel conscious that they know neither good nor evil and that they could not explain them, so that they might be rebuked, if they tried, by others, and feel remorse; while yet others are simply too stupid. All agree in such answers to any question as these: ‘I don’t take it thus. I don’t take it the other way. But I advance no different opinion. And I don’t deny your position. And I don’t say it is neither the one nor the other.’ These fascinating views they are represented as applying impartiality to the propositions: There is another world. There is not another world. There both is and is not another world. There neither is nor is not another world. Similarly they reason on the interesting question of the existence, &c., of chance beings, those that come into existence through former merit without the tedious intervention of human parents; of the fruit of good deeds and, last not least, of the continued existence of the Tathāgata, the perfect saint, after death. Amusing as the position is, it has the merit of every appearance of historical reality; Sañjaya of the Belaṭṭha clan, appears in Sāmaññaphala Sutta¹ as expounding these precise views, and the love of the fourfold exposition of possible views is prominent in Buddhism itself.

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¹ DN. i. 59; Franke, DN., p. 50, n. 6.

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Then come two groups who believe in the fortuitous origin of the world and the soul. Memory again accounts for the first; these teachers were once gods in the form of unconscious beings, who fell from that state in the course of time, when an idea occurred to them. The second consists of teachers who reason, and on the ground of their reasonings conclude that the soul and the world came without cause into being.

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These eighteen views concern the past; the remaining deal with the future. The first sixteen maintain that the soul, after death, does not suffer decay but is conscious, and their divergence of view depends on the point of the actual condition of the soul; thus some hold that it has form, is formless, is both, is neither; some maintain it is finite, is infinite, both, or neither; some that it has one mode of consciousness, or various modes, or limited consciousness, or unlimited consciousness; some that it is altogether happy, altogether miserable, both or neither; a curious opportunity of further enumeration is lost in the failure to specify the results attained by combining these sixteen different views. Eight groups approve an unconscious existence after death for the soul, their divisions resting on the four possibilities regarding form, and finite character. Eight more groups accept the doctrine that the soul is neither conscious nor unconscious after death, with the same grounds of subdivision. The scholastic character of these divisions is apparent enough, but we are assured by Buddhaghosa that the Ājīvakas accepted the conscious survival of a soul possessing form, while the Nigaṇṭhas held that the soul was formless.

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Then follow seven doctrines preaching the annihilation out-and-out of the soul, the divergences depending on the state of the soul when it is annihilated. The simplest view is that the soul perishes with the body, the opinion of the Cārvākas who were probably represented by the Lokāyatas¹ in early Buddhist times.² In the next view the soul is more than human, but possesses form, belongs to the sensuous sphere and feeds on solid food, though it is not perceptible; this soul also dies with the body though it is different from it. The next is a divine soul, having form, made of mind, complete in all parts; the next one that has passed beyond all ideas of form into the realm of the infinity of space; the next one that has advanced still further to the infinity of consciousness; the next one that has attained the realm of no resistance or nothingness; and the last one that is in the realm where there is neither consciousness nor yet unconsciousness. The division here is again scholastic; the last four states are clearly taken from the four Jhānas or conditions of meditation which are a valuable aid on the path of Nirvāṇa;³ the first three remind us faintly of the first of the five divisions of the soul in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad,⁴ the material, the breath, and the mind souls, which in the Upaniṣad are followed by the soul whose essence is intelligence and the inmost soul, which is pure joy.

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¹ Rhys Davids' view to the contrary (SBB. ii. 166 f.) is clearly untenable; cf. below, ch. vii., § 1; Sūtrakṛtāṅga, ii. 1. 15; Hillebrandt, KF., p. 15.

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² Supported by experiments on criminals by Pāyāsi; DN. ii. 332 ff.

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³ Below, ch. vi., § 2; cf. the three in DN. i. 195: material (oḷārika), made of mind, immaterial; Beckh, Buddhismus, ii. 71 f.

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⁴ ii. 1 ff.

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The same scholasticism and desire to work in other parts of the Buddhist doctrine are seen in the next five views, which hold that in this present world the living being can attain complete salvation. The first of these views is the Cārvāka opinion that in the pleasures of the five senses is the highest and only good that man can claim; the remaining four place it in the four Jhānas which, with the four already mentioned, make up the eight perfections or attainments (samāpatti), which, if we may believe the Jātaka commentary, were constantly practised by pre-Buddhist recluses. In the first of these there is investigation and reflection accompanied by zest and pleasure; in the second zest and pleasure; in the third pleasure; and in the fourth complete indifference, a state which suggests the Nirvāṇa, but is deliberately distinguished from it, however evanescent such a distinction may seem to us be.

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Such are the views in which these speculators are hopelessly enmeshed; but the Tathāgata knows that these views thus insisted upon will have such and such an effect on the future condition of those that trust in them. But he knows far better things than these; he understands the rising and passing away of the sensations which create the craving whence arises the basis of becoming, the harbinger of rebirth with its attendant results of death and grief, lamentation, pain, sorrow, and despair. It is in the knowledge of the origin and end, the attraction, the danger, and the way of escape from the six realms of the senses that liberation is attained. These are the things, profound, difficult to realize, hard to understand, tranquillizing, sweet, not to be grasped by mere logic, subtle, comprehensible only by the wise, which the Tathāgata, having himself realized and seen face to face, has set forth, and it is concerning these that they who would rightly praise the Tathāgata in accordance with the truth should speak. The Tathāgata, we are bidden to understand, has complete intuitive knowledge, and he is aware that speculation on these other matters is definitely hostile to the attainment of liberation.

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In the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta¹ again we have a list of ten important questions which are left undetermined by the Buddha. They raise the eternity or the reverse of the world; its finiteness or infinity; the identity or difference between the body and the soul; and the questions whether the enlightened man lives after bodily death, does not live, both lives and does not live, and neither lives nor does not live. These questions are included in those of the Brahmajāla save those concerning the identity of the soul and the body. Knowledge of these things, it is insisted, does not tend to tranquillization of heart or purification from lusts or to Nirvāṇa. Such an attitude, it is obvious, must raise controversy and provoke ridicule, and in the Pāsādika Suttanta¹ the Tathāgata expounds, with special emphasis and fervour, his own position in response to such attacks, which are treated as taking in part the form of astonishment that the Tathāgata, omniscient as to the past, is less well informed as to the future. On the contrary, the Tathāgata, while able to remember all the past, has enlightenment as to the future to the effect: ‘This is the last birth; there is no more coming to be.’ Nor does the Tathāgata reveal all that is past; what is not true, what is not fact, what does not redound to the good of mankind, he leaves alone; nor does he reveal what is true, what is fact, but what does not redound to good; but he reveals what redounds to the benefit of man desirous of salvation, both as regards the past, the present, and the future. He knows whatever throughout the world is discerned, striven for, accomplished, or devised, by gods or men; all that he spoke between his enlightenment and his passing away was true; as he does according to his word, and his word is according to his going, he is styled Tathāgata.² We must accept, therefore, from him the decision that no explanation is to be given to a long series of issues: Is the enlightened one existent after death, non-existent, both or neither? Are the soul and the world eternal, not eternal, both, neither? Are they self-made, made by another, both, or neither, having come into existence fortuitously? Do these descriptions apply to pleasure and pain? Does the soul possess after death visible form, or is it invisible, both, or neither? Is it conscious, unconscious, both, or neither? An important new reason is given for the reticence of the Buddha on these issues. He is silent,³ not merely because knowledge of these matters does not tend to Nirvāṇa, but because men hold various opinions regarding them. What perhaps is more important is that we find that the Buddha admits that he does not reveal the past even when true and in accordance with fact, when it does not tend to edification, and we are driven to admit that these doctrines may, in his view, actually represent the truth without being worthy of exposition. This leads clearly to the conclusion that agnosticism in these matters is not based on any reasoned conviction of the limits of knowledge; it rests on the two-fold ground that the Buddha has not himself a clear conclusion on the truth on these issues, but is convinced that disputation on them will not lead to the frame of mind which is essential for the attainment of Nirvāṇa.

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¹ DN. i. 187 f. The scholastic takes the world as the self, clearly wrongly. Soul here is Jīva, vital principle.

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¹ DN. iii. 134 ff.

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² Cf. JRAS. 1898, pp. 103 ff.; 865 ff.; AJP. xxxii. 205 ff.; Franke, DN. p. 287; Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism, i. 133, n. 2.

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³ Udāna, p. 11; SN. v. 437; DN. i. 179.

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The originality of such a position is obvious; it is artificial in a high degree at the same time as it is ingenious, and it is legitimate to accept this fact as evidence of the reference of the doctrine to the Buddha himself. On any logical basis, of course, his position was easily assailable; he accepted the impermanence of all reality which results in the negation of self, and later in the utter negativism of the Madhyamaka; on the other hand, he believed in the doctrine of the act with its abiding power potent to bring about transmigration, without, it is true, the apparatus of a soul, and this doctrine, by insistence on the mental aspect of action as alone real, leads us directly to the idealism of the Vijñānavāda. Both his doctrines are emphatically metaphysical, involving as difficult and fundamental issues as any of those which he laid aside as not tending to edification, and it was inevitable that the free play of reason which he had not effectively discouraged would result in the building up of metaphysical speculation of the very kind he had deprecated. But his own doctrine is clear, and we have not the slightest ground to seek to determine what were his views on any of the issues which he declined to explain. If indeed he had formed any conclusions on them at all, and we have no reason to suppose this to be the case and have his dying assurance to the contrary,¹ it is certain that he deliberately withdrew them from publicity. This fact alone explains how early in the history of Buddhism conflicting views of great divergence could arise on points which he had left untouched; the authority of the master forbade effective speculation on many issues, but it left the indeterminates (*avyākata*) open, and it was too much to expect that the self-denying ordinance of the master would be respected by monks whose mental activity and independence he had restricted seriously in other regards.

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¹ DN. ii. 100; cf. Mil., p. 144 ; J. ii. 221, 250. Schrader's opinion (JPTS. 1904-5, p. 158) to the contrary seems unreasonable; cf. Jacobi, GN. 1896, pp. 43 ff. ; contra, Oldenberg, *Buddha*⁵, p. 240 ; Beckh, *Buddhismus*, i. 115, 120 who compares rather too seriously the Kantian antinomies. See Oltramare, *Muséon*, 1916, p. 10.

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