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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s1: 1. Idealism, Negativism, or Realism

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s1

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English

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.

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