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Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s2.t1: Sophistic

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s2.t1

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English

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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.

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