Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s1.37

c8.s1.37

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