The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s13.22

v2.c40.s13.22

It might indeed seem at first sight that the doctrine of Yājñavalkya which ascribes results to the action of Karman, would supply us with a ground for morality, and the Buddhist system has indeed been praised³ as an ingenious effort to establish a rigid rule of moral order in the world and to negate selfishness by maintaining the doctrines that there is no real self on the one hand, and that every action is causally determined by some previous action on the other. Even, however, in the case of Buddhism the theory is by no means satisfactory or convincing. The conception of Karman serves indeed in an excellent way to defend and protect the established order of things, but it is essentially fatalistic, and fatalism is not for a normal mind a good incentive to moral progress. If, on the one hand, the doing of an evil deed is restrained by the thought that it will be punished in another life,⁴ it is equally true that reflection shows that the actor has really no option in his acts and is an absolutely predetermined person, whose former acts produce his present motives and reasonings without the possibility of intervention of any kind on his part. This fatalism haunts the Vedānta and the Sāṁkhya no less than the Buddhist system and practically every modern system of absolute idealism,⁵ and it is noteworthy that in the doctrine of Rāmānuja there is a real effort to find some place for independence on the part of the individual soul, just as in Buddhism and Jainism alike free will is often tacitly assumed as existing. Again, while in the occidental systems of absolute idealism there is ever an effort to find real value for the individual by seeing in him the conscious working of the absolute which realizes itself in some degree of reality in him, in Buddhism no such satisfaction is possible. We are indeed sometimes¹ invited to see in the Buddhists of the Pāli texts lovers of empirical pyschology and hedonists who believed that life of a certain kind, the full and perfect efflorescence of mind and character on earth, was fair and lovely beyond all non-being, beyond all after-being. Unhappily in this view we have merely the ascription to Buddhism of ideals cherished by a modern sect, in flagrant defiance of the obvious fact that the *summum bonum* of the system envisaged by these writers was precisely non-being, for in death alone have unhealthy moral conditions completely passed away for ever from a sage. From such an end the only deduction bearing upon action must obviously be the rule of avoiding passion and emotion and action of every kind, and it is significant that the development of the doctrine of active compassion in the Buddhist faith is coincident with the development of the religious aspect of that belief, which in effect overthrows entirely the old ideal and which in large measure was accomplished during foreign dominion in India under the stress of spreading the Buddhist gospel beyond the narrow bounds of India proper.