Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c9.s2.8

c9.s2.8

The contention of the personalists is supported by arguments of a dialectical character; they appeal, of course, to the obvious difficulty of any real action of Karman if it is held that the individual who suffers is not he who sinned; but they use also the contention¹ that the Buddha would not have condemned the proposition that the Tathāgata does not exist in Nirvāṇa, unless the Nirvāṇa were existence, and they contend, of course, that Nirvāṇa is real, which doubtless accords with the general tone of the Canon itself. Another scholastic contention is based on the refusal of the Buddha to answer the questions: ‘Is the Jīva the same as the body? Is the Jīva different from the body?’ In its original sense the questions may have referred to the issue of the identity of the vital principle (jivitendriya) and the body; but the argument of the personalists treats it as applying to the person (pudgala) and the five aggregates, and they contend that, if the person were really no more than an insecure method of describing the five aggregates, the Buddha must have accepted as correct the identification of the Jīva and the body. They can appeal also to such declarations as the doctrine that the doer of the deed is neither the same as, nor different from the sufferer of the penalty; the person who has a sensation is neither the same as nor different from the sensation.² Similarly the person is neither identical with the aggregates, nor yet is he distinct from them; the relationship is properly described as ineffable (avācya), a position which forms the subject of attack by the Madhyamaka as well as by Vasubandhu.³ Its merits, however, are obvious; it mediates, in the best Buddhist manner, between phenomena with a basis and the permanent unchanging self of the Brahmanic tradition. It accords also, though the point seems not to have been noted, with the position asserted by Sāriputta in his discussions with Sāti,¹ for there we find that the Tathāgata is declared neither to be the five aggregates nor to be different from them. In truth the doctrine of the purely phenomenal self was one which presented interminable difficulties, and it is characteristic of the lack of serious attempt to deal with these difficulties in the orthodox school that the Canon makes no effort on its own doctrine to explain the phenomena of memory, leaving the problem for later definition.