Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c9.s1: 1. The Negation of the Self

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c9.s1

Language: English

1. The Negation of the Self

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THE strong divergence of views between the Buddhist schools on the doctrine of the self suggests inevitably the conclusion that the teaching of the master was deficient in clearness of expression, and that the way was left open for the development of divergence of opinion. We may readily believe that the Buddha’s chief aim was to teach men to end their misery, and that he laid stress on the negation of the self in the sense that he recognized that for man to aim directly at the welfare of his self is the surest means of defeating the end of attaining that absence of desire which means, in the Buddhist view, happiness. The most effective therapeutic against the folly of seeking to gratify longings was the realization that there was no truth in the doctrine of a permanent self.

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However this may be, the Pali Canon treats the doctrine earnestly and seriously, making no concession, voluntarily at least, to the doctrine of the self, for we may, of course, dismiss mere popular expressions, which it would have been impossible to eradicate from the language. It is impossible to understand the arguments to prove this result without realizing that the conception of a self accepted from older speculation by the Buddhists treated it as permanent, possessed of bliss, and autonomous; the Buddhist contention is that nothing empirical can possibly be endowed with these characteristics, and that, therefore, nothing empirical is the self. In another form the argument takes the shape of a contention that, whatever is permanent, cannot be subject to modification, and stress is laid also on the moral argument; all misery arises from the delusion of self which causes man to strive to profit himself and to injure others.

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The doctrine of the characteristics of the non-ego are effectively set out in the sermon at Benares;¹ matter cannot be the self, for if it were, then the body would not be subject to disease and one would be able to control one’s body at pleasure, the self being assumed as autonomous. The same argument is applied to the other four aggregates constituting the spiritual nature of man, the feelings, perceptions, dispositions, and intellect; in each case they cannot be equated with the self. Then it is pointed out that the body is shifting and ever in change, and that it therefore is ever accompanied by misery; accordingly it cannot be the self, and the same argument is then repeated of the other aggregates. Then, it is added, when a man realizes that all these things are not the self he turns away from them and by the extinction of desire he attains release. An interesting form of the argument is given in the Mahānidāna Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya,² where three hypotheses are selected for investigation. The first is that the soul is feeling; to this it is replied that feelings are threefold pleasant, painful, and neutral; that they are impermanent, succeeding one another; and that they are products and certain to pass away. If then, when a pleasant feeling is experienced, the conclusion is arrived at: ‘This is my soul;’ then when a painful feeling supersedes it one must conclude: ‘My soul has passed away’. To call, therefore, feeling the self is to make out as self a thing which is impermanent, blended of happiness and pain, and liable to begin and end. Secondly, the hypothesis is made that the soul is neither feeling nor is insentient—that is, doubtless, the soul and the body are identical. But this contention is defeated by the simple consideration that where there is no feeling it is impossible to say: ‘I am’; that is, a soul without self-reference has no meaning. Thirdly, the soul is regarded as not identical with feeling but as possessing feeling; but this doctrine is also rejected, on the ground that, were feeling of every kind to cease absolutely, then, there being, owing to the cessation, no feeling whatever, no one could say: ‘I myself am.’ Therefore, the conclusion is drawn, one should lay aside these false views of the self, and thus save oneself from desire and attain complete rest. The same doctrine appears in a tedious scholastic form in the other Nikāyas,¹ where, by the use of permutations and combinations, twenty theories of the possible identification of the soul with one or more or all the five aggregates are enunciated and disapproved. A dialogue between Sāriputta and Yamaka in the Samyutta Nikāya develops the same theme; the self is not to be found in any of the aggregates or in their combination, and the realization of this has the usual practical effect of leading a man to final peace. The doctrine is consistently carried out; when the Buddha is asked who has feeling or other sensation, his answer is to point out that he does not assert that any one feels, but that there is feeling, which is a totally different proposition. Similarly it is not correct to ask who undergoes old age and rebirth.² Indeed, if one is to assert that anything is the self, it is really more correct to give the name to the body, for that may endure for as much as a hundred years, while consciousness in all its forms is impermanent, in constant flux, comparable to the ape in the forest which seizes one branch, only to let it go and grasp another.³ The constant change is illustrated by the metaphors of the fire or the movement of water.⁴

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¹ MV. i. 6. 38 ff.

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² ii. 66 ff.

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¹ MN. i. 138, 300; SN. iii. 66; iv. 34; Vin. i. 13.

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² SN. ii. 13; 62.

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³ SN. ii. 94 f.

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⁴ Cf. MV. i. 21; SN. i. 133; iv. 392 f.; and iv. 157. So in Herakleitos.

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Interesting and drastic form is given to the idea in a saying of the nun Vajirā, who was approached by the tempter Māra and asked: ‘By whom is the person (satta) produced? Who is the creator of the person? Where is the person who comes into being? Where is the person who disappears?’ The nun is too wise to be misled by the tempter; she points out firmly that there is no such thing as a person, but merely a collection of changing aggregates, and she illustrates her meaning by the simile of the chariot, which is merely the name for a collection of various parts. The doctrine forms the subject of deliberate elaboration in the Milindapañha, where the king is instructed by Nāgasena by means of the parallel of the chariot, and shows that the name Nāgasena denotes no soul, but is merely an appellation of the five aggregates which constitute the empirical individual.⁵

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⁵ SN. i. 135; Mil., pp. 25 ff., where Walleser's re-arrangement of rôles (PGAB., p. 120) is clearly wrong.

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There is, indeed, no doubt that for the Canon the position is essential and fundamental, though we cannot say that it was really so for the Buddha himself. But it was obviously difficult even for the early teachers of the orthodox doctrine to make the tenet which denies any soul fit effectively the doctrine that there is recompense of deeds; such recompense no empirical observer could dream of placing normally in this world, but the reward or punishment must come later. The early Buddhists accepted this idea of the continuance of existence in some sense or another; they denied energetically the doctrine of utter destruction, which was evidently current in their day, and the chain of causation is a theoretical explanation of the mode in which the continuance of existence is carried on. But, granting the truth of the doctrine of the act (karman), are we to reconcile it with the absence of a self? Naturally it was not left to western scholarship ‘to attempt to find a loop-hole through which at least a covert or esoteric belief in the soul and in future life (that is, of course, of a soul) can be recognized, in some sort of way, as part of so widely accepted a religious system’.¹ Honest disciples were evidently perplexed, and no wonder, at the discrepancy of the two teachings; if there were no self, was this not equivalent to destroying effectively the whole basis of the doctrine of action?

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¹ Rhys Davids, SBB. ii. 189.

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It cannot be said that the attitude adopted in reply by the Buddha of the Canon is precisely satisfying. He is asked: ‘If the body is not the self; if feeling, perception, dispositions, and intellect are not the self, then who is affected by the works which the not-self has performed?’ The Buddha reproves the questioner: ‘Shall one who is under the dominion of desire think to go beyond the mind of the master?’² A little more definite is the result achieved in the case of the monk Sāti, who³ though an adherent of the faith, ‘went so far as to tell the Buddha that he must, as he admitted transmigration, have meant that the Viññāṇa did not really depend upon, was not really bound up with, the body, but that it formed the link in transmigration. In perhaps the most earnest and emphatic of all the Dialogues, the Buddha meets and refutes at length this erroneous representation of his view.¹ But there are defects in the refutation, which is certainly earnest enough. Sāti maintains that consciousness or intellect (viññāṇa) transmigrates without alteration (anañña), while the Buddha argues that consciousness comes, e. g., from the eye and coloured matter in the case of visual cognition (cakkhu-viññāṇa), and similarly in other cases. Now, if we are to understand, as does Professor Rhys Davids, this argument as disposing of the idea of some permanent or continuing element in transmigration, we are compelled to assume that the Buddha adopts the doctrine that from the eye and coloured matter there is produced consciousness without any previous consciousness existing. Such a doctrine, it is clear, if pressed, inevitably leads us to the conclusion of Ajita Kesakambalin which asserts the destruction of the self at death, or to the heresy of Makkhali Gosāla, which denies the existence of the act.¹

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² SN. iii. 103.

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³ MN. i. 256 ff. ; SBB. ii. 87, n. 3. ; Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddh. Psych., pp. 15 f.

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¹ For these schools see ch. vii, § 1; for the doctrine of consciousness, ch. x, § 3. Cf. Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 262, 281, n. 2.

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It will not do to rescue the Buddha at such a cost, and the true solution appears to lie in recognizing that the error of Sāti was not in asserting that consciousness transmigrated, but in asserting that it transmigrated unchanged (anañña). This accords in fact excellently with certain other passages which are evidently orthodox. In the Saṃyutta Nikāya ² the Buddha denies equally the doctrines: ‘He who feels is identical with the feeling’ or the reverse; ‘The soul is identical with the body’ or the reverse; ‘All exists’ or the reverse; ‘He who acts reaps the result’ and ‘One acts; another reaps’, declaring that his doctrine is a mean, and enunciating as the solution the well-worn chain of causation. Now the chain of causation explains clearly enough the possibility of change in the consciousness, for it does not contemplate an autonomous consciousness persisting unchanged, but allows the determination of its content by extraneous objects of consciousness, which, of course, adequately show that there is alteration. To what extent, of course, this argument was realized fully in the Canon is uncertain; but, if this view be accepted, it has the great merit of explaining the assertion in the Mahānidāna Sutta¹ that there is descent of the consciousness into the womb of the mother preparatory to rebirth. ‘The animistic implication adhering to this term (i. e. descent : okkamissatha) would, of course, have no significance for Buddhist doctrine,’ we are assured, but the assurance appears to beg the question, and is certainly not effectively supported by the fact that Buddhaghosa adds the qualification ‘so to speak’. There are in fact two different points involved, and, even accepting Buddhaghosa’s addition, only one of them is affected. The phrase ‘descent of the consciousness’ certainly implies a continuity of consciousness between the old and the new lives, and it may imply that this consciousness was accompanied by some form of body, if we take the word ‘descent’ literally; in fact the schools differed on this point,² and Buddhaghosa is consistent with his own view in negating the question of a corporeal accompaniment of the consciousness. But this has nothing to do with the far more important animistic implication, namely, that there is a continuity of consciousness, which the Buddha seems frankly to admit. The conclusion gathers strength from the amusing tale of the worthy Godhika,³ whose suicide is approved in the Canon because disease prevented his successful maintenance of trance. The evil Māra is represented in the form of smoke as searching for the rebirth consciousness of the sage, but as failing to find it, since it has utterly disappeared with his attainment of Nirvāṇa. Here again, if we press the idea, we have a visible consciousness that is—one with some sort of material body—but, letting this point pass as fanciful, we still have absolutely clearly the assertion of some measure of continuity, and nothing but an absolute disinclination to depart from a cherished theory can explain the attempts to get rid of the incident as a form of Buddhist humour, a device which has been seriously overworked. The truth is that there is a consistent body of evidence proving that even in the early school there was a recognition of the necessity of finding some means of continuity if the doctrine of the act were not to fall into disrepute, and if remembrance of former births were to be possible.

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² ii. 75 f.; 17, 20, 23, 60; iii. 135; TDC., p. 60. Cf. also AN. iv. no. 77; MA. i. 6; MKV., p. 269.

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¹ DN. ii. 63; SBB. iii. 60, n. 1; cf. SN. ii. 13, 91, 101.

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² See below, ch. xi, § 2.

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³ SN. i. 120 ff. ; cf. ii. 66; iii. 124 ; Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddh. Psych., p. 21; JRAS. 1903, p. 590. Cf. DN. iii. 332 ff. On former births, cf. DN. i. 81; Itivuttaka, p. 99.

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There is, indeed, strong proof of this in the *Milindapañha*,¹ a text of unblemished orthodoxy, in which the question of continuity and moral responsibility is energetically put. The text asserts with extreme precision the doctrine that the only individual is the collection of changing aggregates, but it recognizes the necessity of continuity, and for this it provides by the doctrine of the continuity of consciousness in change throughout life and on to the next life, the death and the new life being made simultaneous. The idea is helped out by a wealth of illustration; the milk turns to curds, butter, ghee; the being transmigrates neither as the same nor as another. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the point; the most orthodox of texts finds it necessary to supply a real link of connexion and does so with fair effect, a result later more completely achieved in the Sautrāntika school.²