Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s2.8

c8.s2.8

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.