Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s1.45

c8.s1.45

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.