The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s8.109

v2.c40.s8.109

Imperfect, however, as are the views of the Upaniṣads on these points, the defects of their theories must not be exaggerated. The amount of progress made in developing speculation on these questions for many centuries after was very slight, as can be seen from even a brief glance at the Buddhist theory of sense as developed in the Pāli Nikāyas. In that theory the chief difference is unquestionably the effort to do without a self at all, which was clearly one aspect of the Buddhist faith, though by no means the only aspect and certainly in the long run not the most important. But apart from the *odium theologicum*⁶ it is impossible to grant this attempt any real validity at all:⁷ it would have been easy to show that the conception of the Ātman attained by the Brahmans was inadequate, but it was merely a retrogression to solve the problem by ignoring its existence: there is nothing in the Nikāyas to suggest the most moderate competence in treating of the matter, the whole Buddhist position being rendered easy by the illegitimate assumption, whenever necessary, of the subject which is denied. It is an elementary fact that a sensation is nothing if not an experience for an individual being, and, while for a definite scientific purpose we are doubtless free, if we will, to ignore the subjective factor, if we carry this ignoring into the field of philosophy, we deal with a false abstraction; nor is it less false because it has appealed to the enthusiastic, but confused mind of William James.¹ The Upaniṣads frankly do not face the question of memory, but leave it a possibility. But even in the Abhidhamma the problem of reinstatement and the conditions of reinstatement are not raised as matters calling for definition.² If even we go to a far later period, a formula³ like ‘the upspringing of potential *cittas*, not empty and mutually disconnected, but each fraught with the informing *satti* of this or that among former *citta continua*’, appears both clumsy and question-begging as a substitute for the conception of a real unity in multiplicity, since a *citta continuum* is clearly impossible without such a unity.