Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s2: Chapter III. Asceticism—Monastic Orders

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s2

Language: English

c7.s2.t1 Sophistic — 3 parts

Chapter III. Asceticism—Monastic Orders

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WE now proceed to describe the forms of religious, monastic life which have sprung up in close connection with the already discussed speculations regarding the universal One and deliverance. As in those philosophical ideas the way was prepared for the dogmatics of Buddhism, so in those beginnings of monastic life the foundation of the outward forms of the Buddhist Church was laid.

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The two lines of development, that of the inner side and that of the outer side of religious life, run—how could it be otherwise?—in close harmony.

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Those speculations which represented the phenomenal world to be unstable and worthless as compared with the world's base, the Âtman, had at one blow deprived of their value all those aims of life which appear important to the natural consciousness of ordinary men. Sacrifice and external observance are unable to raise the spirit to the Âtman, to disclose to the individual ego his identity with the universal ego. Man must separate himself from all that is earthly, must fly from love and hate, from hope and fear; man must live as though he lived not. The Brahmans, it is said, "the intelligent and wise desire not posterity : what are descendants to us, whose home is the Âtman? They relinquish the desire for children, the struggle for wealth, the pursuit of worldly weal, and go forth as mendicants.”

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Many content themselves with a less strict renunciation; they go forth, it is true, from their houses, and give up their property and all the comforts and enjoyments of their customary mode of living, but they do not wander about homeless; they build themselves half-covered huts in the forest and live there, alone or with their women, on the roots and berries of the forest; their sacred fire also accompanies them, and they continue as before to perform at least a part of the duties of the sacrificial cult.

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It is probable that there were from the beginning persons, chiefly Brahmans, who as beggars or forest hermits sought their deliverance in retirement from worldly concerns. But an exclusive right of Brahmans only to those spiritual treasures, to obtain which men parted with all earthly treasure, was not asserted in early times; we have no trace that before Buddha’s time, or in Buddha’s own time, the Brahman caste had come forward with claims of such a kind, or that there was need of any struggle whatever to win for prince and peasant, as well as Brahman, the right to leave wife and child, goods and chattels, in order to seek, as mendicant monks, in poverty and purity of life, the deliverance of their souls. Side by side with the Brahmans, who appear in the old philosophical dialogues speaking of the mysteries of the Âtman, we find in more than one place princes, and even wise women are not wanting in these circles; why should men desire to forbid those, whose discourses on deliverance they listened to and applauded, an entry on that life of holy renunciation, which leads man to this deliverance?

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A point which seems highly characteristic of the religious tone of this Vedic monasticism, is the strongly maintained esoteric character of the faith. There was a consciousness of possessing a knowledge which could and must belong to but a few, to chosen persons, a sort of select doctrine, which was not intended to penetrate the national life. The father might impart the secret to his son, and the teacher to his pupil, but, in the circle of the believers in the Âtman, there was wholly wanting that warm-hearted enthusiasm which holds that it then, and then only, properly enjoys the possession of its own goods, when it has summoned all the world to participate in their possession.

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Our sources of information are quite too incomplete for us to be able, while resting on the sure ground of transmitted facts, to trace even the most prominent only of the landmarks in the further development of Indian monasticism. Conjectural constructions must here come to our aid, which, even where they show with tolerable certainty something like what must have taken place, yet utterly fail us if we seek for those touches, which could impart to the picture of this evolution an appearance of life.

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Two events, which stand apparently in close connection with each other, must have played a prominent part in the development of this monasticism from its beginning up to the stage in which Buddha found it: the cohesion of monks and ascetics into organized fraternities, and therewith the emancipation of numbers, or even of a majority and the paramount, among these fraternities, from the authority of the Vedas.

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It appears that these two important occurrences, were materially influenced by a change of geographical scene. We spoke in the beginning of this sketch of the difference of culture in the western and eastern parts of the Gangetic tract: the holy land of the Veda, the home of Vedic poetry and Vedic speculation lies in the west: the east has acquired the Veda and the Brahmanical system from the intellectually more advanced west, but this foreign element was not wholly assimilated, converted into flesh and blood. A different air blows in the east; like the language which gives a preference to the weak *l* above the rough *r* of the west, the whole being is more relaxed; the Brahman is here less, the king and the people more. The movement, which had its origin in the west, here loses much of the fantastically abstruse which was in it, probably also something of the bold vastness and clear sequence of ideas, and thereby gains in popularity; questions, which it was chiefly the schools and the intellectual aristocracy of the nation had touched in the west, change in the east into vital questions for the people. Here men trouble themselves but little about the mystic universal One of Brahmanical speculation;* so much the more decidedly into the foreground come the ideas of the sorrow of every state of being, of moral retribution, of purification of the soul, of deliverance.

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It cannot be ascertained whether any political convulsions or social revolutions were also in play at that time, to direct people's minds with particular earnestness and energy to thoughts and questions such as these. Christianity founded its kingdom in times of the keenest suffering, amid the death struggles of a collapsing world. India lived in more settled peace; if the government of its small states was the evil despotism of the Oriental, men knew of no other government and made no complaint; 'was the gulf between poverty and wealth, between knight and yeoman, a wide one—and it has always been so in that land by natural necessity—still it was by no means the poor and oppressed alone, or even chiefly, who sought in monastic robes freedom from the burdens of the world.

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∗ It is significant that, although the speculations of the Upanishads regarding the Âtman and the Brahma must, in Buddha's time, have been long since propounded, and must have become part of the standing property of the students of the Vedas, the Buddhist texts never enter into them, not even polemically. The Brahma, as the universal One, is not alluded to by the Buddhists, either as an element of an alien or of their own creed, though they very frequently mention the god Brahma.

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Voices are raised full of bitter lamentations over the degeneracy of the age, the insatiable greed of men, which knows no limit, until death comes and makes rich and poor alike: "I behold the rich in this world," says a Buddhist Sutra;* "of the goods which they have acquired, in their folly they give nothing to others; they eagerly heap riches together and farther and still farther they go in their pursuit of enjoyment. The king, although he may have conquered the kingdoms of the earth, although he may be ruler of all land this side the sea, up to the ocean's shore, would, still insatiate, covet that which is beyond the sea. The king and many other men, with desires unsatisfied, fall a prey to death; . . . neither relatives nor friends, nor acquaintances, save the dying man; the heirs take his property; but he receives the reward of his deeds; no treasures accompany him who dies, nor wife nor child, nor property nor kingdom." And in another Sutra it is said:† "the princes, who rule kingdoms, rich in treasures and wealth, turn their greed against one another, pandering insatiably to their desires. If these act thus restlessly, swimming in the stream of impermanence, carried along by greed and carnal desire, who then can walk on the earth in peace?"

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But from passages like these, current as they are among the moral preceptors of all ages and all lands, we cannot infer that at that time there was an atmosphere prevalent something like that prevailing at Rome in the sultry period of the early days of the empire. No such period was necessary for the Indian to strike him with sudden terror at the picture of life which surrounded him, to bring to his notice the traces of death in that picture. From the unprofitableness of a state of being to which they had not learned to give stability by labours and struggles for ends worthy of labour and struggle, men fly to seek peace for the soul in a renunciation of the world. The rich and the noble still more than the poor and humble; the young, wearied of life before life had well begun, rather than the old, who have nothing more to hope from life; women and maidens, abandon their homes and don the garb of monks and nuns. Everywhere we meet pictures of those struggles, which every day must have brought in that period, between those who make this resolution, and the parents, the wife, the children, who detain those eager for renunciation; acts of invincible determination are narrated of those who, in spite of all opposition, have managed to burst the bonds which bound them to a home-life.

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∗ Ratthapâla-Suttanta in the "Majjhima-Nikâya," fol. nṛ of the Turnour MS. † "Samyuttaka-Nikâya," vol. i, fol. ku of the Phayre MS.

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Soon teachers appeared in more than one place who professed to have discovered independently of Vedic tradition a new, and the only true path of deliverance, and such teachers failed not to attract scholars, who attached themselves to them in their wanderings through the land. Under the protection of the most absolute liberty of conscience which has ever existed, sects were added to sects, the Niggantha “those freed from fetters,”* the Acelaka “the naked,” and by whatever other name those communities of monks and nuns named themselves, into whose midst the young brotherhood of Buddha entered. The name which people gave to these persons of self-constituted religious standing in contradistinction to the Brahmans, whose dignity rested on their birth, was "Samana," i.e., Ascetic; thus Buddha was called the Samana Gotama; people called his disciples "the Samanas who follow the son of the Sakya house." It is probable also that already one and another among the older Samana-sects had gone so far as to attribute to the teacher round whom they gathered, dogmatic attributes in a way similar to that in which the Buddhists acted at a later time with reference to the founder of their Church; the man of the Sakya race is not the only, and probably not even the first, who has been honoured in India as "the enlightened one" (Buddha) or as "the conqueror" (Jina); he was only one among the numerous saviours of the world and teachers of gods and men who then travelled through the country, preaching in monastic garb.

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∗ This sect, founded by one of the older contemporaries of Buddha, has maintained its ground to this day under the name of Jaina, especially in the south and west of the Indian peninsula. The view of it, which we

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The paths of deliverance, by which these masters led their believers in quest of salvation, were legion; for us, who possess on this subject only the hardly impartial reports of the Buddhists and Jainas, their serious thought is, it must be allowed, covered deeply over with dull or abstruse conceits. There were Ascetics who lived in self-mortification, denied themselves nourishment for long periods, did not wash themselves, did not sit down, rested on beds of thorns; there were adherents of the faith in the purifying efficacy of water, who were intent on purging by continued ablutions all guilt which clung to them; others aimed at conditions of spiritual

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get from its otherwise comparatively modern sacred literature, corresponds in many essential points with Buddhism. One point of difference lay in the great importance which the Niggantha attached to penances.

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abstraction, and sought, while separating themselves from all perception of external realities, to imbue themselves with the feeling of the "eternity of space," or of the "eternity of reason," or of "not-anything-whatever-ness," and whatever else these conditions were called. It may easily be imagined that, among this multiplicity of holy men, the whimsical were not unrepresented: we are told of a "hen-saint," whose vow consisted in picking up his food from the ground like a hen and, as far as possible, in all matters acting like a hen; another saint of a similar type lived as a "cow-saint," and thus the Buddhist accounts give a by no means short list of different kinds of holy men in those days, few among whom seem to have always been lucky enough to preserve their holiness from the fate of ridicule and from dangers more serious than ridicule.

Sophistic

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Certain phenomena which developed themselves in the busy bustle of these ascetic and philosophizing circles, may be described as a species of Indian sophistic; wherever a Socrates appears, sophists cannot fail to follow. The conditions under which this sophistic arose are in fact quite similar to those which gave birth to their Greek counterpart. In the footsteps of those men, such as the Eleatics and the enigmatic Ephesian, who opened up the highways of thought with their simple and large ideas, there followed Gorgiases and Protagorases, and a whole host of ingenious, specious, somewhat frivolous virtuosi, dealers in dialetic and rhetoric. In exactly the same way in India there came after the earnest thinkers of the masculine, classical period of Brahmanical speculation, a younger generation of dialecticians, professed controversialists with an overweening materialist or sceptical air, who were not deficient in either the readiness or the ability to show up all sides of the ideas of their great predecessors, to modify them, and to turn them into their opposites. System after system was constructed, it seems, with tolerably light building material.

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We know little more than a series of war-cries: discussions were raised about eternity or transitoriness of the world and the ego, or a reconciliation of these opposites, eternity in the one direction or transitoriness in the other, or about infiniteness and finiteness of the world, or about the assertion of infiniteness and finiteness at the same time, or about the negation of infiniteness as well as finiteness. Then spring up the beginnings of a logical scepticism, the two doctrines, of which the fundamental propositions run, "everything appears to me true," and "everything appears to me untrue," and here obviously the dialectician, who declares everything to be untrue, is met forthwith by the question whether he looks upon this theory of his own also, that everything is untrue, as likewise untrue. Men wrangle over the existence of a world beyond, over the continuance after death, over the freedom of the human will, over the existence of moral retribution. To Makkhali Gosâla, whom Buddha is represented as having declared to be the worst of all erroneous teachers,[*] is ascribed the negation of free will: "there is no power (of action), there is no ability; man has no strength, man has no control: all beings, everything that breathes, everything that is, everything that has life is powerless, without power or ability to control (its own actions);

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it is hurried on to its goal by fate, decree, nature;”—every being passes through a fixed series of re-births, at the end of which the fool as well as the wise “puts a period to pain.” And the existence of a moral government is also denied; Pûrana Kassapa teaches: “If a man makes a raid on the south bank of the Ganges, kills and lets kill, lays waste and lets lay waste, burns and lets burn, he imputes no guilt to himself; there is no punishment of guilt. If a man crosses to the north bank of the Ganges, distributes and causes to be distributed charity, offers and causes to be offered sacrifices, he does not thereby perform a good work; there is no reward for good works.” And another expression of similar doctrines: “the wise and the fool, when the body is dissolved, are subject to destruction and to annihilation; they are not beyond death.” In disputations before adherents, opponents, and great masses of people, these professional wranglers and “hair-splitters”—this word was even then in use in India—made propaganda for their theories; like their Greek counterparts, though a good deal coarser, they caused swaggering reports of their dialectic invincibility to go before them. Saccaka says: “I know no Samana, and no Brahman, no teacher, no master, no head of a school, even though he calls himself the holy supreme Buddha, who, if he face me in debate, would not totter, tremble, quake, and from whom the sweat would not exude.

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And if I attacked a lifeless pillar with my language, it would totter, tremble, quake; how much more a human being!” Possibly, the Buddhists, on whose reports we are here dependent, may in their animosity against this class of dialecticians have drawn them in darker colours than was fair; the picture of such a sophistic is certainly not all a fabrication.

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∗ "As, O ye disciples, of all woven garments which there are, a garment of hair is deemed the worst—a garment of hair, my disciples, is in cold weather cold, in heat hot, of a dirty colour, has a bad smell, is rough to the touch—so, my disciples, of all doctrines of other ascetics and Brahmans the doctrine of Makkhali is deemed the worst."—Anguttara Nikâya.

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At this time of deep and many-sided intellectual movements, which had extended from the circles of Brahmanical thinkers far into the people at large, when amateur studies of the dialectic routine had already grown up out of the arduous struggles of the past age over its simple profound thoughts, when dialectic scepticism began to attack moral ideas—at this time, when a painful longing for deliverance from the burden of being was met by the first signs of moral decay, Gotama Buddha appears upon the scene.