Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s2.t1.1.2

c7.s2.t1.1.2

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);