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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8: Chapter III. The Fundamental Character of Being

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8

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Contents

Chapter III. The Fundamental Character of Being

1. Idealism, Negativism, or Realism

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It is a natural tendency to read the past in the light of later developments, and to seek to find in the later stages of a doctrine nothing that was not, at least implicitly, contained in it from the first.

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To this temptation, often fatal to historical accuracy, Professor Franke has fallen a victim in his able and fascinating attempt¹ to prove that the early Buddhist view was, like that of the Mahāyāna, negativist, though his argument rather establishes, even taken on itsown claims, that the view was idealistic, with a tendency, not wholly conscious or articulate, to negativism. But the issue is vital, and there is the authority also of Kern² for the view that from the outset Buddhism was an idealistic nihilism; there is nothing internal nor external for him with true discernment, and a realization of non-existence is the means to secure a safe crossing of the tumult of life.

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¹ KF., pp. 336 ff. ; cf. ZDMG. lxix. 467 ff. ; DN., pp. 307 ff.

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² Ind. Buddh., p. 50, following Waddell, Buddh. of Tib., p. 384 ; cf. JRAS. 1908, p. 886, n. 1 ; Suttanipāta, pp. 203, 194.

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All the world of appearance, and this is the only world recognized by the Buddha, the argument runs, is summed up by him in the phrase the five groups of assumption (*upādāna-kkhandha*), that is, our coming into relation with the apparent things of this world; this very phrase shows conclusively that only psychical value was attributed to the world, and this conclusion is confirmed by the use of the world of the term Saṃkhāras, denoting ideas or presentations. Had the Buddha believed that there was anything real behind the presentations, he could never have committed himself to the doctrine of the Kevaddha Sutta³ that all the great elements and name and form are comprehended in the intellect of the Arahant, dying out when it does. Name and form again, denoting the whole of the apparent world, are made in the formula of causation¹ to be dependent on intellect, from which they are produced, and the same formula asserts that existence depends on assumption, while the body elsewhere is expressly declared to be nothing but the groups of assumption.² But the case is even stronger; if anything is to exist, it must exist for a subject, and the Buddha, by denying the existence of any self, deprives the appearance of any possibility of reality; the self is a mere idle name, and one of the modes of furthering liberation is the consciousness that no self exists (*an-atta-saññā*); nay more, we have the assertion that even in pain, the most real of all things for the Buddha, there is no self, and more generally all objects of our perception are declared to be without a self (*sabbe dhammā anattā*).³ The belief, ‘I am’, is a delusion which must be laid aside, and he who has entered on the path to salvation is already freed from the false belief in the existence of a real body (*sakkāya-diṭṭhi*). Form is nothing but bounded space. The Buddhist is bidden to be guarded as to the doors of sense; when he sees a colour with the eye, hears a sound with the ear, smells an odour with the nose, he is not to assume an object corresponding to the sensation (*na nimittaggāhī hoti*).⁴ The changing, painful character of existence is correctly held by the Buddhists to be inconsistent with true reality, and it is significant that the Buddha declines to discuss the question, from the nihilistic point of view absurd, of the continued existence after death of the soul, or the eternity of the world. An essential part of the discipline to attain Nirvāṇa consists in the overcoming of the delusion of the existence of forms; in the Jhānas the expert attains the conviction of utter non-existence (*ākiñcañña*).

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³ DN. i. 222 f.

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¹ Below, ch. v.

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² MN. i. 299.

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³ DN. iii. 243; MN. i. 228, 435.

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⁴ DN. i. 70.

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Even more clearly the idea of negativism is claimed to exist in the *Majjhima Nikāya*; the every day man, we are told, who knows nothing of the law, takes earth for earth (*saṃjānāti*) and believes in it as earth (*maññati*), and so on with a wide range of terms, including the four Buddhist Jhānas, unity, plurality, and, last but not least, Nirvāṇa itself. But the man with true enlightenment thinks very differently; he accepts (abhijānāti) earth as earth, Nirvāṇa as Nirvāṇa, but in them and in all else he does not believe (sa nibbānaṃ na maññati).¹ Or again, the Buddha declares that though he first appreciated the earth as earth, yet when he recognized that it was without the essence of earth it ceased to exist for him; and the essential condition of release is freedom from the delusion ‘I am’, ‘I shall be’, or ‘I shall not be’ and ideas regarding the eternity of the world. Belief in the existence of ideas is merely a raft to enable men to cross the ocean of existence; this accomplished, it should be cast away for the useless thing it is.² It is significant that the desires are called empty, hinting at the non-existence of the objects of desire, and the Majjhima freely contains the idea of voidness;³ more important still, the Saṅgīti Suttanta of the Dīgha recognizes concentration described by three epithets, recognized in the Mahāyāna, which may be rendered as concentration which interprets things as void (suññato), which recognizes no objects of perception (animitto), and which is without desire for such objects (appaṇihito); the suggestion that these three significant termini have been interpolated from the Mahāyāna in the Dīgha may safely be dismissed as wholly implausible.⁴

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¹ MN. i. 4 f.; cf. APP., p. 9; KV. ix. 2; trs., p. 233, n. 1.

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² MN. i. 329; iii. 246; i. 134 (Vajracchedikā, 6).

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³ ii. 261; i. 297: suññaṃ idaṃ attena.

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⁴ DN. iii. 219; cf. Walleser, PP., p. 12; Dhammapada, 92 has suññato animitto ca.

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The negativism of the Buddha, therefore, appears in effect as the belief that all that exists is unabiding presentation, deprived of any true reality through the absence of any self, so that the Buddha decidedly casts Berkeley in the shade by the fervour of his scepticism. We cannot deny a priori the possibility of so advanced a view, but we are equally not compelled to accept it because it is that of the Mahāyāna; the evidence must be scrutinized impartially and without prejudice for or against.

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Here at once we meet with difficulties in the way of the suggested interpretation; the five Upādānakkhandha may more easily be rendered as referring to the five physical and mental constituents, which make up the individual such as Buddhism recognizes it, and which arise from grasping, from desire of life; nothing is thus determined as to the nature of the objects grasped; or in a slightly different sense it may be rendered as groups (of objects) after which there is grasping, equally in conflict with the suggested rendering; grasping, in fact, is not the subjective creation of ideas, but the effort of the individual to seize what he foolishly desires. This is the precise sense of the doctrine that becoming depends on grasping; there is nothing here to suggest that becoming is a mere fiction of the mind.¹

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¹ Cf. Rhys Davids, SBB. iii. 24; Oldenberg, *Buddha*⁶, p. 271 n.; GGA. 1917, p. 153; below, ch. v., § 3.

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As little can we accept the doctrine that Saṃkhāras denote ideas or perceptions, which is supported by the remarkable doctrine that in the first member of the formula of causation we have an assertion that our ideas all rest upon ignorance, interpreted as ignorance of the illusory nature of the world; the last view is wholly without authority in the Canon; ignorance which produces the Saṃkhāras is ignorance of the four noble truths of pain or misery, its origin, its destruction, and the path for that end.² Saṃkhāra, like the Sanskrit Saṃskāra, is a term of varying, but consistent and intelligible meaning; it denotes the making ready or complete something for an end—an idea emphasized in the compound Abhisaṃkhāra, and also the result of the activity when achieved. Hence it has no exclusive application to the psychical sphere; the movement given to a potter's wheel is styled an Abhisaṃkhāra;³ the wheel rolls on so long as the impression thus communicated lasts. Hence Saṃkhāras may be divided, as often, between those of the body, speech, or thought; expiration and inspiration are Saṃkhāras;⁴ when the Buddha decides to enter Nirvāṇa he lets go his Āyusaṃkhāra,⁵ his disposition to live, the motive force which but for his decision would have continued to keep alive his mortal frame; it is inconceivable that nothing more is meant than that the Buddha laid aside merely a subjective process. The same point arises regarding the Saṃkhāras which affect the form of rebirth of the dead; a monk who forms a resolve to be reborn in a noble family achieves this result from the Saṃkhāra thus framed;¹ here again we cannot believe that the rebirth is a pure figment of the creative imagination, just as little as it is credible that a man who has the disposition to pay a visit (gamikābhisamkhāro) has merely the idea of himself as on a journey.² Such a conception is clearly far from the texts, which frankly tell us that a man forms the Saṃkhāra of the body when a body exists, and it is incredible that the body, which is described as the ancient deed made ready (abhisamkhatam) and made real by mental activity (abhisamcetayitam), is really to be understood as merely the ancient act conceived or presented to consciousness as existing.³ The difficulty of Franke’s view appears still more clearly when it is remembered that the Saṃkhāras are one of the five Khandas which constitute the individual of Buddhism; they rank alongside of material form (rūpa) or body, feeling (vedanā), perception (saññā), and intellect or consciousness (viññāṇa), and there is clearly no room here for the concept of ideas; rather they are the dispositions which lead to rebirth, precisely parallel to the Saṃskāras, which in the Sāṃkhya system represent the predispositions of the individual resulting from the impressions left by former thoughts and deeds. In the chain of causation the Saṃkhāras play the same rôle; they are not the creation of ignorance of the illusory character of the world; something much simpler is meant; by reason of his ignorance of the doctrine of misery as taught by the Buddha, the unfortunate man commits actions and so produces dispositions which lead on to fresh birth.

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² SN. ii. 4; MN. iii. 17 in no wise support Franke. Nor is ignorance cosmic as Beckh (*Buddhismus*, ii. 105) contends.

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³ AN. i. 112; cf. ch. iv., § 3.

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⁴ MN. i. 301; SN. iv. 293; Vibh. 135.

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⁵ DN. ii. 106; cf. MN. i. 295 f.; SN. ii. 266; J. iv. 215; SBB. iii. 113; Beckh, *Buddhismus*, i. 70, n. 2.

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¹ MN. iii. 100; DN., p. 310.

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² MV. vi. 31. 2.

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³ SN. ii. 64 f.

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Nor is there any possibility of giving an idealistic interpretation to the derivation in the chain of causality of name and form from intellect or consciousness. Here again we are confronted with the excessive desire to read idealist tendencies into our sources. Taken in themselves, the words might be interpreted as an objective idealism; the intellect as absolute might create the whole universe; such an interpretation is impossible for Buddhism, but a subjective idealism is equally and ludicrously out of place; the Mahānidāna Sutta gives us the simple sense: ‘Were cognition not to descend into the mother’s womb, would name and form become constituted therein?’ Moreover it is the continuance of this element in the womb which leads to the growth of the embryo, and its final birth. We have here a crude enough idea, but it is perfectly plain in sense, and the idealistic interpretation of Franke is wholly impossible.¹

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¹ DN. ii. 63; Walleser (PGAB., pp. 53 ff.) converts this into metaphysics with the aid of Schopenhauer.

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There is no more substance in his other contentions; to watch over the senses conveys the reality and danger of sense impressions, not their non-existence. The man who perceives forms does not pay attention to their specific peculiarities (nimitta);² that is a very different thing from not recognizing the existence of objects of sense, regarded as the cause of our sensations, a meaning unknown to nimitta in the Canon.³ The enlightened man is not so unwise as to disbelieve in Nirvāṇa, the final truth; but he is not to engage in idle thought regarding it, and, if one learns to disregard the earth, it is only because one realizes how little of a permanent all embracing entity it is, not that it is void of earth character. It is perfectly in keeping with Buddhist views to deny that the predicate self can apply to pain or misery, which is the true sense of the phrase dukkhe anattasaññā. The third Jhāna gives no aid to the theory; it is not an expression of the truth of reality, but merely a phase of meditation in which the spirit attains a condition of nothingness, preparatory to entering into a further state which is neither conscious nor unconscious. Nothing can contradict more effectively the idea of the mention of meditation on the void, as meaning the unreality of existence, than the Cūlasuññata Sutta of the Majjhima;⁴ the process consists of meditation, first on the conceptions man and village, thence to the more abstract idea of the wild, then to the more abstract earth as such, then to the boundlessness of space, then to the infinity of consciousness, thence to the sphere of nothingness, then to that of neither consciousness nor unconsciousness, then to a concentration which is without specific characteristic (animitto), and thence to liberation; in this state there is voidness of the defilements (āsava) of desire, becoming and ignorance, but non-voidness regarding the corporeal body, whose reality thus stands out in the clearest way.

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² Cf. KV. x. 3, p. 388.

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³ As cause even it is rare (Therag. 1100, MN. iii. 137 may be cases); Aung, CP., pp. 67, 211; Oldenberg, GGA. 1917, p. 161. On the transl. of MN. i. 329, see Oldenberg, Altind. Prosa, p. 44, n. 1.

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⁴ No. 121; cf. also DN. ii. 156.

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The same frank realism meets us once more in the doctrine of perception. Already in the Canon¹ the process of sensation is compared with the rubbing of two sticks to produce fire, the simile clearly applying to the contact of the organ of sense and the object. Nor was this view abandoned even in the late Milindapañha, where the contact of the eye and the object is likened to the butting of two rams or the clashing against each other of cymbals. Naïve realism no doubt, but unmistakable, and the genuineness of the feeling is shown by the effect it has on the doctrine of the act. The Canon² no less than the Milindapañha admits that accidental happenings are possible; disease and the forces of nature may overwhelm with misfortune a man who has deserved no such ills, a dogma which is frankly destructive of the full efficacy of the doctrine, and whose acceptance shows how little early Buddhism was able to rise above the simple and natural realism of early thought throughout the world.³

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¹ MN. iii. 242; Mil., p. 60; ch. x. § 3.

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² Cf. KV. xvii. 3; xvi. 8; Mil., pp. 135 ff., 180. KV. xvi. 8 is indeed perhaps a direct denial of an idealism of the Andhakas and Sammitiyas.

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³ For other arguments for negativism, see below, § 3, ad fin.

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It is, further, a misunderstanding of early Buddhism to treat it as regarding everything as phenomenal, whatever its real reference, on the score of the use of the term Dhamma to cover all objects. The contention appears to be that, because Dhamma is sometimes used to denote the objects of mind as opposed to the objects of the senses, therefore, when it appears used to cover all objects or things, the meaning is that all things are primarily at any rate mental data, states, or phenomena. The conclusion is wholly impossible; it is true that Dhamma is used of the data with which the mind, as opposed to the senses, works, but it is emphatically not used of the material on which the senses work, and its general application is not to be explained by any theory of phenomenalism; as will be seen, it may be either the result of the natural extension of a term in meaning, mental conditions obviously having a special importance in the eyes of teachers whose aim was mental training, or the use may be inherited by Buddhism from Brahmanism, in which the way for it was certainly paved in the Upaniṣads, but more probably it is simply due to the fact that it is mind that really knows and discriminates sense objects. The generality of the use is sufficiently indicated by the synonimity with Saṃkhāra, a term which includes all sides of existence, material and spiritual.¹ It is significant that in the first work, where the term Dhamma appears used systematically, the Dhammas as objects are distinguished as material (rūpino) and immaterial (arūpino). There is not a trace of a suggestion that the different kinds of matter are merely ideal, or that ‘we only know of the elements and their derivatives as reflected in, constructed by, human intelligence.’²

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¹ DP. 277 ff.; AN. iii. 134; vi. 102 ff.; Oldenberg, ZDMG. lii. 687, n. 2; MN. i. 228, 230; SN. iii. 132; PD., p. 86.

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² Psych. Ethics, pp. xxxii. ff.; Buddhism, pp. 51 ff. give Mrs. Rhys Davids’ view; cf. JRAS. 1914, p. 465.

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Curiously enough Professor Walleser,³ who recognizes that the subjective character claimed for Dhamma is erroneous, himself believes that early Buddhism accepted the doctrine that the whole world, whatever its transcendental character, as known by our senses is a product of consciousness. This doctrine is derived from a very ingenious, but extremely improbable, explanation of the doctrine in the chain of causation that name and form depend on consciousness (viññāṇa). Name and form, it is claimed, denote the phenomenal being in its entirety, as possessed of qualitative discriminations which are appreciated by consciousness through resistance contact (paṭigha-samphassa), and of different descriptions which are gathered by designative contact (adhivacana-samphassa).⁴ The converse doctrine, also canonical, that consciousness depends on name and form⁵ is explained as the other side of the relation; the empirical consciousness is impossible save in relation to an object. The explanation is highly ingenious; but it is clearly contrary to the obvious meaning of the terms, and the rôle regularly played by consciousness and name and form in the chain of causation. The distinction of the two kinds of contact mentioned in the passage of the Dīgha relied on is explained for us by the Vibhaṅga, and Buddhaghosa, whose evidence on the sense of technical terms such as these may be safely regarded as valid. In that text perception (saññā) is distinguished as perception of resistance (paṭigha), which is the case of ordinary sense impressions of external objects, and mental as perception by name as when one asks a question and learns the thought of another by speech. These two kinds of contact, says our passage in the Dīgha, can be explained only if both name, i. e. the spiritual aspect of the individual, and form, the material aspect, exist. Were there matter alone, there could be no designative cognition; if spiritual elements alone, no resistance cognition. There is, therefore, nothing whatever here to suggest that early Buddhism accepted the doctrine that ‘die Welt ist meine Vorstellung’, a doctrine which it is probable they would have found it far from easy to comprehend:¹

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³ PGAB., pp. 33 ff., 51 ff., 97 ff. His deduction of idealism from DS., §§ 1044 f. ignores the realism of § 1050.

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⁴ DN. ii. 62.

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⁵ SN. iii. 114.

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¹ A different version, based on AKB. 50, is suggested by Poussin, TDC., pp. 19, n. 2. 22. Denominative contact simply refers to mind activity in assigning names. But the canonical tradition may be correct; SBB. iii. 59, n. 1; DS., § 4; trs., p. 7, n. 2.

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A similar misunderstanding of a passage in the Aṅguttara and Saṃyutta Nikāyas has led Professor Rhys Davids² to give credit to the doctrine that ‘the world, as we know it, is within each of us’, being attributed to early Buddhism. The Buddha is represented as saying: ‘Verily, I declare to you, my friend, that within this very body, mortal as it is and only a fathom high, but conscious and endowed with mind, is the world and the waxing thereof, and the waning thereof, and the way that leads to the passing away thereof.’ We are asked to accept as parallel with this Schopenhauer’s³ saying: ‘One can also say that Kant’s teaching leads to the view that the beginning and end of the world are not to be sought without but within us.' Professor Walleser¹ is content to accept this assertion as another statement of the doctrine of the fact that the world can exist for a man merely in his presentation of it, while he justly denies that it is intended to be a statement regarding transcendental reality. But we must go further; the statement, in fact, is not intended to be a deliverance on metaphysics; it is merely an assertion of the simple truth, from the Buddhist point of view, that the essential fact of existence is the misery which affects the individual and from which it is the individual, who by his own effort in following the true path of salvation, must work out his own destiny.

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² SBB. ii. 274. Beckh (Buddhismus, ii. 99, 102, 110, 119) also denies the recognition of any material reality by Buddhism; cf. Hardy, JRAS. 1901, p. 133; Aung, Compendium, pp. 223, 255 admits an underlying reality.

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³ WWV. i. 538.

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¹ PGAB., pp. 63 ff.; cf. Psych. Ethics, p. xcv.

2. The Impermanence and Misery of Existence

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Such measure of validity as may seem to belong to Professor Franke's theory lies precisely in the fact that the value ascribed by the Buddha to the things of the world of experience was extremely low. It is perhaps a natural and easy step to be led hence to the belief in the unreality of existence, but it is a step which the Buddha, it is clear, never took. For him the reality of existence was unquestioned; it was the deplorable fact of the misery prevailing, which led to his elaboration of the doctrine of salvation; and to have adopted the view of the unreality of the misery which he sought to teach men to escape would have been to destroy the basis of his teaching, and to deprive men of every incentive for adopting the course of self discipline which he inculcated with a fervour which leaves no doubt, even through the formality of the Canon, of his sincerity in his belief in his mission of healing the wounds of humanity.

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We may, indeed, for once believe that we have reached a doctrine which goes back in form to the Buddha himself, in the fact that his central teaching is always represented as the exposition of the four noble truths of misery, its origin, its cessation, and the path leading thereto. The parallelism with the Sāmkhya and Yoga division of topics regarding liberation is striking, but more interesting is the comparison with the division of medical topics into disease, origin of disease, health and healing, though we are still without proof that the medical is the older application.¹ Birth, old age, disease, death, union with what is disliked, separation from what is dear, unsatisfied desire, and all the elements that make up the individual are misery. The ground of this judgement is plainly expressed in the great sermon at Benares² when he expounded to his first disciples the doctrine of the distinguishing marks of the non-self. The five constituents of the empirical individual, material form, perception, feeling, dispositions, and intellect are each declared not to be the self; they are admitted to be unenduring, and therefore misery is predicated of them. Whatever is impermanent is misery; whatever is misery is not the self; whatever is not the self is not mine, I am not that, that is not myself.

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The essence of impermanence is misery, and the doctrine is held so strongly that it is impossible to ignore its intellectual antecedent in the doctrine of the Upaniṣads, which finds in the immutable one absolute the completeness of bliss, and contrasts with it, and therefore casts a pessimistic atmosphere over, the changing manifold of the world of experience. But the doctrine is not a conclusion on metaphysical grounds; it is supported as an observation of fact³ made by the omniscient. The waters of the four great oceans are less than the tears shed by man in the interminable course of existence for the loss of father, mother, brother, sister, children, relatives, and goods. The mother who at the burning place calls in sorrow to her daughter Jīvā, is answered that eighty-four thousand maidens of this name have been burned at the spot. The pains of birth, of old age, of death, of disease, and decay are omnipresent; the merchant strives hard amid difficulties of climate to win wealth, which he then must anxiously guard against the greed of the sovereign and the danger of fire and water. To gain their desires men commit theft and murder; they pay penalties of cruel torture on earth, and even more horrible is their fate in hells to come. The gods share in the common lack of permanence; doubtless they possess length of life, like the gods of Empedokles, but they like men must bow to the law of the act;

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the merit which has won them their places will be exhausted and a new existence will begin for them. It is difficult to resist the impression created by the endless repetition of the idea of misery as dominant, expressed, frequently in beautiful form, in the stanzas of the Dhammapada and the Thera- and Therīgāthā, that the belief in the misery of existence was no product of dialectic, but was founded on the physical and social conditions of the time, acting on minds of special intellectual acumen and sensibility. Another factor, however, must be allowed for; the opposite side of the picture is the happiness which is the lot even in this earth of the disciples who follow the path laid down by the Buddha, and it is but natural that the dark side of life without this consolation and assurance should be depicted in vivid colours; it was natural for those who had abandoned the lusts of the senses to regard the world without them as blazing with fire and enveloped in the smoke of the burning. But it would nonetheless be contrary to all probability to minimize the reality of the empirical basis of the pessimism, which is an undeniable and essential feature of the world view of the Canon, although its darkness is mitigated by the fact that the teaching of the Buddha offers release from it. In the ultimate issue, it is true, the view of existence as a whole¹ cannot be deemed to be pessimistic, but all empirical existence falls under this ban.

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¹ YS. comm. ii. 15 ; cf. Oldenberg, LUAB., p. 329.

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² MV. i. 6. 38 ff. ; cf. MN. no. 35; LUAB., pp. 115 ff., 238 ff. ; Keith, SS., pp. 13, 15 f.

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³ See e.g. SN. ii. 179; iii. 151; i. 133; MN. i. 85 ff.; AN. v. 144; Oldenberg, *Buddha*, Pt. II, ch. i.

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¹ See DP. 94, 197 ff., 373; DN. i. 69 ff.; Udāna, ii. 1; SN. iv. 126. So in the Yoga; cf. Beckh, Buddhismus, ii. 90 f., who justly contrasts the views of Schopenhauer or Hartmann. The doctrine of pessimism is unorthodox; KV. ii. 8.

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It will be seen that the whole discussion of the issue of misery is based either on the preconception regarding the possibility of happiness for the absolute only, or on empiric observation of the actual misery of existence. There is nothing in the Canon to show a full appreciation of the fundamental issue whether in itself desire is pleasurable or painful; the idea that the normal exercise of activity is actually pleasurable, so that in any individual case the ordinary life of man is made up in the main of pleasure, not pain, is one which seems not to have occurred, doubtless because the psychological analysis of the Buddhists contented itself in the general run with verbal investigations. We have no guarantee from the Buddhist attitude that the normal judgement of the average Indian of the time, in the region where Buddhism arose, found life on the whole unpleasant, and the empirical basis of the Buddhist view may well be denied serious validity. The philosophical preconception, however, would as often be sufficient to meet any questions which might have been raised on this score, and doubtless to him who was predisposed on logical grounds to take a pessimistic view of the world, there was much to justify the conclusion that the life and aims of the ordinary unenlightened man were rather a pitiful thing.

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The impermanence of the world, which causes its misery, is asserted with as much emphasis as by Herakleitos, and, as we have seen, with as little sense of its unreality, despite the constant process of change which never ceases. There is no attempt to prove the impermanence of the universe, and the Canon does not attempt to define carefully what the term means; we are here in the realm of ordinary common sense; the things of the world are obviously evanescent, though they abide more or less constant for various periods; the body is far longer enduring than the actions of the mind, and hence is to that extent more like the true conception of a self than any mental functions.¹ Here again it is probable that the point of view of the Buddha was strongly influenced by considerations of a philosophical character; the doctrine of the Upaniṣads had found the true reality in an absolute without change of any sort, which all the empirical world was relegated at the best to a secondary and quasi-unreal form of existence, and its very being by some bold spirits held to be doubtful. The Buddhist view is again a middle way, a mediation between the extremes of ‘All is’ and ‘All is not’. The world is rather a constant stream of change, an oscillation between existence and non-existence, according as regards the matter of the spirit to a causal law, but in other matters largely accidental. We cannot hold that the essence of the world process was the law of causality,² not merely because, as Professor Oldenberg has recognized, such a concept is not in accord with Buddhist tendencies of thought, but because the Canon does not extend the rule of the formula of causation beyond the sphere of psychic events. What is asserted¹ as a universal law is that all forms of existence are impermanent; the Saṃkhāras or the Dhammas,—the terms come to be used practically as identical—covering the material no less than the psychical world, are without self, perishing, and full of misery.

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¹ SN. ii. 94; cf. KV. xxii. 8. See below, ch. ix, § 2.

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² Walleser, PGAB., p. 60, n. 1. Rhys Davids, (SBB. ii. 1) makes the chain of causation pre-Buddhist.

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¹ AN. i. 286; SN. ii. 25; DN. ii. 198. A philosophy must be judged by what it asserts, not by what it implies to modern thought. That Buddhism accepts uniformity of nature even in the psychic sphere is absolutely denied in KV. xxi. 7, 8, against Andhakas and Uttarāpathakas. Magic potency is allowed to thwart natural law; xi. 5; xxi. 4.

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The process of impermanence is eternal, one might expect the Canon to say, but on this point we are confronted with the doctrine that it is not a matter for us to inquire into whether there is any beginning in time of the world or again any end, just as we may not know whether there are limits in space to the extension of the universe. We are reminded once more of the narrow and severely practical basis of the Buddhist outlook on existence; all that we know or are to be allowed to know is that we live in an existence of constant change which essentially brings with it misery, and the one path of liberation is to obtain freedom from any part or share in this existence of unrestful change. If ‘ultimate reality and “our supreme and vital need” is no fixed basis, nor moveless central stand, but throbbing energies whirling in ordered rhythm, whether of solar systems or of our own hearts and intelligences, the consciousness of a dynamical order replacing that of a statical order; a Way of life which like the spinning globe, bears us forward on its bosom, more swiftly than we can journey on it; so that beyond our best there ever rises a better hope’, then surely there is no greater travesty of facts than to say² that such seems to be the end and outcome of Buddhist philosophy.

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² Mrs. Rhys Davids, *Buddhism*, pp. 246, 247. The relevancy of the comparison of Buddhist views of cause with those of Demokritos (pp. 46 f., 99, 101) appears wholly lacking; the latter believed in material, not psychic causes, the former deals with the latter. Buddhism has no interest in science or the world of nature; it aims at effacing natural desire by a narrow mental culture, which stigmatizes the essential bond of family life as a base hindrance (*Udāna*, i. 8).

3. The Absolute and Nirvāṇa

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The emphasis laid by Buddhism on the impermanence and non-substantiality of the world is plainly in harmony with the depreciation of all empirical existence by the thinkers of the Upaniṣads who exalted the permanence of the one absolute. The question, therefore, inevitably presents itself whether the Buddhist condemnation of the world of experience stands on the same basis or whether, as at first sight appears the case, the condemnation survived, and was even emphasized from the period of earlier thought,¹ but the ground of that depreciation was abandoned, presumably as a matter incapable of proof, and therefore a mere idle speculation of constructive imagination.

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¹ Cf. below, ch. vii., § 2.

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It is noteworthy on examination to find that in the great sermon at Benares on the characteristics of that which is not the self, the doctrine extends emphatically to deny the permanence as existent of all empirical things; it does not, in point of fact, deny in express terms that there may exist another realm of existence which is exempt from empirical determination, and which therefore might be regarded as absolutely real. Whether such a realm does exist arises in a concrete form for Buddhism in the shape of the issue as to the fate of the enlightened man on the passing away of his physical life. Nirvāṇa, there is no doubt, can be attained and normally is attained before the bodily death of the sage; it brings with it happiness of the highest order,² and inspires the poetry of many of the stanzas of the Theru- and Therīgāthās. But, when the bodily apparatus ceases to operate, what is the condition of the enlightened one? Are we to believe that at this stage the existence of the enlightened one ceases, as is the view which appeals to modern rationalism? Or does the Parinirvāṇa mean the final severance of connexion with the world of experience, and the enjoyment of another sphere of existence which is true reality, and accordingly exempt from possibility of explanation by empirical descriptions? The problem of the continued existence of the Tathāgata after death is in the ultimate issue the same as the problem of the existence of a true self; if such exists, then the enlightened one must necessarily, as the highest product of the world, be the possessor of such a self.

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² It is accompanied by consciousness of the destruction of existence and rebirth; DN. i. 84; Beckh, *Buddhismus*, ii. 112 ff.

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The answer given by the Buddha in the Canon is clear enough; it is a definite relegation of the issue to the sphere of the indeterminates, marking the issue as one on which the master has not thought right to declare any doctrine. When Vacchagotta¹ asks the Buddha if the self exists, the latter remains silent and, questioned by Ānanda as to the cause of this reticence, explains his reasons convincingly enough. To assert the existence of the self would be understood as acceptance of the adherents of the permanent self of the Upaniṣad type; to deny the self would be to approve the doctrine of those who believe that the self, without purification to ensure liberation, does not on death transmigrate but is utterly destroyed. Again, to assert the existence of the self would certainly not have lead Vacchagotta to accept the essential doctrine that all the empirical world is essentially not-self, while to deny it would have thrown him into confusion: ‘My self, did it not previously exist? Now it exists no more.’ The reasons are essentially pragmatic, but, even if we may feel that in such a passage the idea is hinted at that the true answer implies the negation of an absolute, it is perfectly obvious that we have no right to go beyond the plain assertion of the text as to the doctrine of the Buddha. We have the same doctrine expressed with much force in the Māluṅkyāputta dialogue of the Majjhima Nikāya,² where the disciple very energetically presses the Buddha to answer the puzzles of the limits of the world in space and time and the continued existence of the enlightened man after death. The Buddha’s refusal is perfectly categoric; he insists that he made no undertaking to instruct his disciples in these matters. He is instead a physician who gives such instruction as leads to the freeing of man from bondage, and information on the points in question tends in no way to the desired end, and therefore is not imparted by the master.

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¹ SN. iv. 400.

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² i. 426; cf. AN. iv. 67 ff.

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To deny that the teaching of the Buddha himself stopped at this attitude of agnosticism appears contrary to every sound principle of criticism. It is true that it has been suggested that it is impossible to conceive that the master would be contented with offering nothing more positive in the way of a hope for the future, but this is obviously to beg the question. By leaving the matter unexplained the Buddha allowed men to frame their own conceptions of the future of the enlightened man after death; those who entertained strong desires for some permanent form of life, even after liberation, were as entitled to cherish the hope, as were others to accept utter annihilation as the due result, and we really have no means of saying to what proportion of the disciples either prospect would appeal; western analogies show sufficiently that there are many earnest thinkers who believe in the reality and purpose of the universe—which the Buddha did not—and yet accept the destruction of the individual on death with satisfaction or resignation. It has, however, been urged¹ that we cannot suppose that so able a thinker as the Buddha was without personal convictions on such a vital issue, even though he may have deemed on good grounds that it was neither advantageous nor necessary to explain his opinions to his disciples. Here again we are confronted with bare possibilities; it is quite legitimate to hold that the Buddha was a genuine agnostic, that he had studied the various systems of ideas prevalent in his day without deriving any greater satisfaction from them than any of us to-day do from the study of modern systems, and that he had no reasoned or other conviction on the matter. From the general poverty of philosophical constructive power exhibited by such parts of the system as appear essentially Buddha's, one is inclined to prefer this explanation.

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¹ Schrader, JPTS. 1904-5, p. 158. The etymology of Nirvāṇa ('without craving (vāna)' according to ADS. vi. 14), 'blowing out,' does not help (cf. JPTS. 1919, pp. 53 ff.; ZDMG. lxix. 477).

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The case² for a positive answer to the existence of an absolute reality, as entertained by a section at any rate of the early disciples, is a totally different question and admits of serious support. Some of the contentions in favour of this view will certainly not bear scrutiny; neither the Buddha nor his disciples strike one as necessarily possessed of sufficient philosophical capacity to be incapable of entertaining a negative view on this topic, even if it be granted as true that philosophy is forced to accept the metaphysical conception of the absolute one, although, if this idea be realized in perfect sharpness, we are as unable to think as to deny that the absolute one is either identical with, or different from, the world. But it may be possible that the fair interpretation of some passages in the Canon supports the belief that the teachers of these doctrines did accept an absolute reality as the basis of their depreciation of the world.

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² Schrader, JPTS. 1904-5, pp. 160 ff., whose views greatly exaggerate the philosophical insight of the Buddha. Equally dubious is Walleser's counter-argument (PP., pp. 8 f.) that denial of a self inevitably carried with it the denial of an absolute.

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The doctrine of non-self (*anattā*) clearly asserts that there are no eternal substances in the world nor yet substances which perish utterly, but that the whole world is a process of becoming; anything in time could not be the true reality. Again the universe in time includes and is equivalent to the five constituents of nature (*khandhas*), namely the four or including ether (*ākāsa*) five material elements and whatever consists of them, and every kind of consciousness or spiritual existence, extending to that of sensual beings like ourselves (*kāmaloka*), of the Great Brahmās and other gods (*rūpabrahmaloka*), and even of the most etherial unlimited consciousness existing in the very highest spheres of nature (*arūpabrahmaloka*). But it does not embrace a being which cannot be called corporeal or spiritual or both (*nāmarūpa*) in any sense, which would be a true absolute. Now in the Alagaddūpama Sutta of the *Majjhima*¹ there is a striking denial by the Buddha, following on an exposition of the doctrine of the not-self and a declaration of the nature of the enlightened one as beyond nature and inconceivable already in this life. The accusation is made that the Buddha holds the destruction of a real entity (*sato satassa*). This he denies absolutely; what he bids men throw off is the non-ego consisting of the five constituents, bodily form, perception, feeling, the dispositions, and intellect; as the owner of a wood, the argument seems to run, is not injured by the taking away of the grass, boughs &c. so the real entity is not destroyed by the laying aside of the constituents. This view may be strengthened by the observation that the Buddhist formula applied to everything in nature: ‘This is not mine; I am not this; this is not myself (n’ etaṁ mama; n’ eso ’ham asmi; na m’ eso attā)’ is applied by the Sāṁkhya¹ school in almost exactly the same form (nāsmi; na me; nāham) to exactly the same object, the whole of material and spiritual nature, but with the single aim of expressing the absolute otherness of the self (puruṣa) from nature. Nor is it inconsistent with this view that the same Sutta contains a very emphatic denial of the reality of a permanent self identical with the world, a view which we must understand in the sense of the self of the Upaniṣads: ‘World and the self are one; that shall I be after death; eternal, firm, everlasting, not subject to change, like the everlasting one; thus shall I stay:’ is not that, O monks, a mere complete doctrine of fools? This doctrine may quite legitimately be interpreted as an emphatic denial of the pantheistic view which appears in certain of the Upaniṣads and which would certainly be wholly repugnant to the Buddha. We may, therefore, see in this passsage a clear recognition that the absolute must be regarded as standing wholly aside from empirical determinations, as being without even the attribute of consciousness (vijñāna) admitted in the Upaniṣads.

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¹ i. 140 ff.

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¹ Sāṁkhyakārikā, 64; Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 289, n. 1.

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A further argument can be derived from the simile of the flame applied early and frequently to the passing away of the enlightened one. ‘As the flame’, the Suttanipāta² tells us, ‘blown down by the vehemence of the wind goes out, and can be named no more, even so the sage, liberated from individuality, goes out and can be named no more.’ In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta of the Majjhima Nikāya³ we have a complete working out of the idea; the flame ceases to appear when the fuel is consumed; similarly, when the different constituents of the enlightened one disappear, the fuel of the Tathāgata’s fire is consumed. But the Tathāgata, liberated from these constituents of spirit and material form, is deep, unmeasurable, difficult to fathom, like the great ocean. The comparison is indeed significant, for there is no doubt that the Indian idea of the extinction of fire was not that which occurs to us of utter annihilation, but rather that the flame returns to the primitive, pure, invisible state of fire in which it existed prior to its manifestation in the form of visible fire. This view is expressly attested in the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad,¹ which can reasonably be regarded as good evidence for the period of the coming into existence of the Canon. The same Upaniṣad contains, also, the comparison of the supreme self with a fire, the fuel of which has been consumed, showing emphatically that the extinction of the fuel has nothing to do with the destruction of the fire, though it ceases to be visible, and the Maitreyī Upaniṣad,² a text of the Yoga philosophy, with which Buddhism has much in common, applies the simile to the action of the thinking principle: ‘As fire for want of fuel comes to rest in its own place of birth, so, through the cessation of its motions, the thinking principle comes to rest in its own birthplace.’

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² 1074.

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³ i. 487.

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¹ i. 13 (cf. Mil., p. 327); vi. 19.

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² Older than Maitr. Up.

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In an interesting conversation³ between King Pasenadi of Kosala and the nun Khemā we find again the refusal to answer the question as to the continued existence of the Tathāgata after death, and an emphatic assertion of the deep nature of the Tathāgata, illustrated by the impossibility of reckoning the sands of the Ganges or the water drops in the ocean. Is this not to argue that the Tathāgata apart from the mortal constituents is something real but ineffable? True, it is possible to explain the doctrine in the light of the negativism of the Madhyamaka; if all be void (śūnya), the nature of the Tathāgata is a specially deep void, and especially ineffable. But it is unwise to insist on seeing negativism in passages where another explanation is not merely possible, but probably more in accordance with the ideas of the teachers of the early Canon.

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³ SN. iv. 374 ff.; cf. Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 246; Bouddhisme, pp. 172, 415; Oldenberg, Buddha⁹, p. 324.

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A similar difficulty arises in the case of the discussion of the view of an heretical monk, Yamaka,⁴ who formed the not unnatural conception that the master taught that the enlightened one, who had purified himself from all sin, when his body ceased to harbour life, was utterly annihilated. Sāriputta confronts Yamaka with the question whether the true self of the Tathāgata is his material form, and receives a negative reply. Similar replies are given to the questions whether he is in the material form, or it in him, or different from it, and so on with the four other constituents which make up the apparent individual. Yamaka also admits that the five constituents all taken together do not make up the Tathāgata, nor again is he without the five constituents taken together. Sāriputta then confronts Yamaka with the conclusion that even in life he cannot comprehend in truth and essence the Tathāgata, and that *a fortiori* it is absurd to make assertions of him after his death. Does this mean that even in life Yamaka cannot show the Tathāgata really to exist, and still less of course in death can his nature be stated? The interpretation is possible, and in entire harmony with the Madhyamaka view, but it certainly does not suggest itself here as natural. We have far better reason to assume that we have once more an agnosticism coupled with an indication that there is much more than the mere constituents in the composition of the Tathāgata. Insufficient weight perhaps has been given in the discussion to this aspect of the question; if in life the Tathāgata is ineffable, and not to be regarded as merely made up of the constituents, there is every reason to realize that he is still more ineffable in death.

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⁴ SN. iii. 109 ff. Cf. Paṭisambhidāmagga, i. 143-5.

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We have, however, more positive assurances of the reality of something over and above the empirical world. The end of misery is conceived as a place where there is neither earth nor water, light nor air, neither the infinity of space, nor the infinity of intellect, nor the absence of everything, nor the laying aside both of consciousness and unconsciousness, neither this world nor yonder world, where there is neither movement nor rest, neither birth nor death.¹ Moreover, there is something not born, not having become, not made, not formed; were there not such a thing, there would be no escape for that which is born, has become, been made, been formed. The same text² alludes to the fate of the enlightened who have attained Nirvāṇa; as the path of the fire when extinguished cannot be traced, so we cannot trace the path of those who have been completely set free, who have escaped the fetters of desire, and have attained unchanging happiness (*sukha*). But it is not unimportant to remember that these utterances are from the *Udāna* and that we must not press unduly isolated assertions. Moreover, we must remember that in all likelihood the term Nirvāṇa as indicating the final end was taken over by the Buddhists from existing speculation, for the term is freely found in the philosophic parts of the *Mahābhārata*, which, though late in their present form, represent earlier doctrine, and the Jains also accept it as an apt description of it as the safe, happy, and quiet place which the great sages reach, putting an end to the stream of existence.¹ Associations strictly speaking not characteristic of Buddhism might easily cluster around such a term, and we have in fact proof of this in the term Nirvāṇa, element free from determinations (*anupādi-* or *anupadhi-sesā nibbāna-dhātu*).² Such terminology may be traced back to the distinction between Brahman as the absolute without determinations (*upādhi*), through which the absolute appears as the universe, but on the faith of such an argument to claim that, to the Buddhist, Nirvāṇa is essentially the absolute parallel with the Brahman would be to ignore the fact that Buddhism, like every new belief, was largely compelled to put its wine into old bottles.

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