Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s4.23

c8.s4.23

It is less easy to trace in the early Brahmanic literature the conception of Dharmas as objects or things, a sense which unquestionably is common in the extreme in Buddhism. We have, however, the idea clearly in two passages of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad;¹ the man who regards objects (dharmān) separately, who sees no unity, pursues after them, and the wise man is urged to lay aside what is material (dharmya) and seek what is subtle (aṇu). It is quite impossible to accept the view² that the primary sense of Dhamma is idea, for there is no conceivable ground, etymological or otherwise, whence this meaning could emerge, and it is obviously not found in the Upaniṣadic use of the term. Equally impossible is the suggestion³ that the term denotes the regularities which are the relations for the mind of the super-sensuous reality of change, which is the absolute truth for Buddhism. More tenable is the suggestion⁴ that the plural use of the term, which is presumably the older, as it is by far the most frequent, arises from things being regarded as manifestations of the natural and spiritual law which underlies reality. Yet this is perhaps too deliberately metaphysical a conception, and it is more plausible that the origin should be looked for in Dharma, considered as the fundamental or regular nature of a thing; in Buddhism⁵ we have the conception of the Dhammatā, or essential characteristic of a Buddha, e. g. that he decides to preach on the invitation of the god Brahmā, of a Bodhisattva, or of a disciple; the same conception appears in the case of a stone. Dharma then would mean simply object or thing,¹ without any metaphysical implication of a far-reaching nature. With this accords perfectly the fact that in Buddhism we find an express distinction made between Dhammas as internal (*ajjhattika*) and external (*bāhira*);² the former term applies to the mental presentation, the latter to the object which is conceived as the source of the mental presentation. It can hardly be supposed that Buddhism first appreciated things as mental, and then assigned them to an external cause; the obvious interpretation of usage is that the external thing (*dhamma*) was later analysed into the thing proper, and the mental image, an obvious and common step in the history of psychological analysis. The existence of external reality is, history testifies, a primitive view, which was widely spread in the Buddha’s time as the activity of materialists³ testifies, and psychological investigation is a later stage in which existing terms are reconsidered and given new significations.