Manual of Indian Buddhism c3.s3.4

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.