Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s4.1

c8.s4.1

It is now possible to appreciate the precise significance to be attached to the view of Normalism, conceived as the reign of impersonal law, as the essential doctrine of Buddhism.³ Dhamma enters Buddhist thought with an interesting history: the Vedic period shows us in the Brāhmaṇas the development, to the detriment of the older term Dharman, of Dharma conceived not so much as relating to physical order, but as the moral order of the world, including in that term all matters pertaining to spheres later discriminated as law, custom, and etiquette. The conception is admirably illustrated by a passage in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad¹ which tells of the absolute, Brahman, creating the lordly class, the commonalty, and the servile class. But still the creation was imperfect: ‘he created further a better class, the law. This is the power of the lordly class, the law. There is nothing higher than the law. So a weak man controls a strong man by the law, just as if by a king. Verily, that which is the law is truth. Therefore they say of a man who speaks the truth, “He speaks the law,” or of a man who speaks the law, “He speaks the truth.” Verily, both these are the same thing.’ Or again²: ‘the waters are the law; hence, whenever the waters come down to the world, everything here is in accord with the law. But whenever there is drought, then the stronger seizes upon the weaker, for the waters are the law.’ The conception of regularity in the physical and the moral sphere is thus as effectively brought out as the parallelism between the two aspects of order. The conception is as old as the Rigveda, for it is embodied in the conception of Ṛta as moral and physical order, and the parallelism of the Avestan counterpart of Ṛta even suggests that the idea is Indo-Iranian. Nor in the Rigveda is the moral order the creation of a god, even of Varuṇa; Ṛta itself is divine and independent of the gods even if Varuṇa and the Ādityas are its guardians par excellence.³ Normalism is, therefore, present in the earliest Indian thought known to us, just as the gods of Homer are faced with Anagke; the Tao of Chinese thought presents another obvious parallel.⁴