Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s1.11

c8.s1.11

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