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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s2: 2. The Impermanence and Misery of Existence

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s2

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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).

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