Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s3.5

c8.s3.5

The answer given by the Buddha in the Canon is clear enough; it is a definite relegation of the issue to the sphere of the indeterminates, marking the issue as one on which the master has not thought right to declare any doctrine. When Vacchagotta¹ asks the Buddha if the self exists, the latter remains silent and, questioned by Ānanda as to the cause of this reticence, explains his reasons convincingly enough. To assert the existence of the self would be understood as acceptance of the adherents of the permanent self of the Upaniṣad type; to deny the self would be to approve the doctrine of those who believe that the self, without purification to ensure liberation, does not on death transmigrate but is utterly destroyed. Again, to assert the existence of the self would certainly not have lead Vacchagotta to accept the essential doctrine that all the empirical world is essentially not-self, while to deny it would have thrown him into confusion: ‘My self, did it not previously exist? Now it exists no more.’ The reasons are essentially pragmatic, but, even if we may feel that in such a passage the idea is hinted at that the true answer implies the negation of an absolute, it is perfectly obvious that we have no right to go beyond the plain assertion of the text as to the doctrine of the Buddha. We have the same doctrine expressed with much force in the Māluṅkyāputta dialogue of the Majjhima Nikāya,² where the disciple very energetically presses the Buddha to answer the puzzles of the limits of the world in space and time and the continued existence of the enlightened man after death. The Buddha’s refusal is perfectly categoric; he insists that he made no undertaking to instruct his disciples in these matters. He is instead a physician who gives such instruction as leads to the freeing of man from bondage, and information on the points in question tends in no way to the desired end, and therefore is not imparted by the master.