Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s2.2

Language: English

c8.s2.2.1

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.