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Manual of Indian Buddhism c3.s3: 3. Time of Rise of Buddhism. Indian Thought and Ideals at That Time

Manual of Indian Buddhism c3.s3

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English

3. Time of Rise of Buddhism. Indian Thought and Ideals at That Time

c3.s3.1

Owing to the unsettled state of Indian chronology we cannot with full certainty fix the absolute date of the Nirvāṇa⁴; yet we may confidently assert that the rise of Buddhism nearly coincides with the close of the Upaniṣad period. From the very tenets of Buddhism it is evident that the theories of the Vedānta had reached their full development, albeit not in the scholastic form of the Brahma-Sūtras. The practices of the Yoga, which though dogmatically no integral part of the Vedānta are not repudiated or disapproved by the Vedāntins, were scarcely less developed in the days of Buddha than later in the time of Patañjali, the author of the manual titled Yoga-sūtra. The doctrine of Karman, of metempsychosis, was already so deeply rooted in the popular conscience that Buddhism has retained it notwithstanding its standing in the most glaring conflict with Buddhist psychology, which denies the existence of soul altogether⁵.

c3.s3.2

⁴ The knotty questions connected with Buddhist chronology will be dealt with hereafter, in Part V.

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⁵ Digha-N. I, p. 34; Pugg.-P. p. 38. More about this in the sequel.

c3.s3.4

The spiritual aspirations and the views of human life as entertained by the more serious Indians at the rise of Buddhism are, at first sight, extremely gloomy. What strikes us most, is the emphatically pronounced dread — *saṃvega*, as the Buddhists like to call it — of the miseries of life, of old age and death; a dread intensified by the belief in perpetual rebirth, and consequently of repeated misery. All sects — barring the Sadducees of the epoch — agree in the persuasion that life is a burden, an unmixed evil. All accordingly strive to get liberated from worldly existence, from rebirth, from Saṃsāra. All are convinced that there are means to escape rebirth, that there is a path of salvation, that path consisting in conquering innate ignorance and in attaining the highest truth. But what is the highest truth? Here the views go asunder. Some, as the Vedāntins, affirm that truth in the highest sense⁶ of the word is the essential unity of the highest soul, *paramātman*, with the individual soul, *pratyagātman* or *jīvātman*. Others, as the Sāṅkhyas, proclaim that the soul is essentially different from matter, by which it is clogged, though it remains essentially undefiled and eternal¹. The Buddhists, denying the existence of any thing like a soul, necessarily reject the notion of paramātman, and see the highest truth in the formula of the Ārya-satyāni.

c3.s3.5

⁶ We avoid using the term "real truth", because reality for the majority of Indian sects is the reverse of truth in the highest sense, of *sat*, τὸ ὄντως ὄν; it being only a relative, practical truth, and passing into a more illusionary appearance, *māyā*.

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¹ For more particulars, here out of place, concerning the speculations of the Upaniṣads and the Sāṅkhya, we refer the reader to the exposition in BARTH'S Religions of India, p. 64—86. Cp. OLDENBERG, Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus, in Deutsche Rundschau of Nov. 1895; JACOBI, Der Ursprung des Buddhismus, GGA. 1896.

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The Indian view of life, in the mystical and transcendental systems of the Vedānta and Buddhism, as well as in the rationalistic Sāṅkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, is not seldom considered pessimistic. That qualification is true in a restricted sense, the Indians being pessimists only halfway. Just as they have no objection to the most tragic situations in their dramas, provided the final be a happy one, so they admit of all sorts of dreariness in human life, but at the same time they believe that it is possible, and that by a comparatively easy method, to get rid of the nuisance called existence and rebirth: they have only to follow some one of the infallible teachers of the path to salvation, of whom there was no lack in India. There, too, the rule holds good that the supply is proportionate to the demand.

Cites (4)