Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s3.12

c8.s3.12

The doctrine of non-self (*anattā*) clearly asserts that there are no eternal substances in the world nor yet substances which perish utterly, but that the whole world is a process of becoming; anything in time could not be the true reality. Again the universe in time includes and is equivalent to the five constituents of nature (*khandhas*), namely the four or including ether (*ākāsa*) five material elements and whatever consists of them, and every kind of consciousness or spiritual existence, extending to that of sensual beings like ourselves (*kāmaloka*), of the Great Brahmās and other gods (*rūpabrahmaloka*), and even of the most etherial unlimited consciousness existing in the very highest spheres of nature (*arūpabrahmaloka*). But it does not embrace a being which cannot be called corporeal or spiritual or both (*nāmarūpa*) in any sense, which would be a true absolute. Now in the Alagaddūpama Sutta of the *Majjhima*¹ there is a striking denial by the Buddha, following on an exposition of the doctrine of the not-self and a declaration of the nature of the enlightened one as beyond nature and inconceivable already in this life. The accusation is made that the Buddha holds the destruction of a real entity (*sato satassa*). This he denies absolutely; what he bids men throw off is the non-ego consisting of the five constituents, bodily form, perception, feeling, the dispositions, and intellect; as the owner of a wood, the argument seems to run, is not injured by the taking away of the grass, boughs &c. so the real entity is not destroyed by the laying aside of the constituents. This view may be strengthened by the observation that the Buddhist formula applied to everything in nature: ‘This is not mine; I am not this; this is not myself (n’ etaṁ mama; n’ eso ’ham asmi; na m’ eso attā)’ is applied by the Sāṁkhya¹ school in almost exactly the same form (nāsmi; na me; nāham) to exactly the same object, the whole of material and spiritual nature, but with the single aim of expressing the absolute otherness of the self (puruṣa) from nature. Nor is it inconsistent with this view that the same Sutta contains a very emphatic denial of the reality of a permanent self identical with the world, a view which we must understand in the sense of the self of the Upaniṣads: ‘World and the self are one; that shall I be after death; eternal, firm, everlasting, not subject to change, like the everlasting one; thus shall I stay:’ is not that, O monks, a mere complete doctrine of fools? This doctrine may quite legitimately be interpreted as an emphatic denial of the pantheistic view which appears in certain of the Upaniṣads and which would certainly be wholly repugnant to the Buddha. We may, therefore, see in this passsage a clear recognition that the absolute must be regarded as standing wholly aside from empirical determinations, as being without even the attribute of consciousness (vijñāna) admitted in the Upaniṣads.