Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c9.s1.t4: The Fourth to the Eleventh Link in the Chain of Causality

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c9.s1.t4

Language: English

The Fourth to the Eleventh Link in the Chain of Causality

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When the spirit has found its body and the body found the spirit and united itself to it, this being compounded of spirit and body, provides itself with organs to put itself into communication with the external world. “From name and material form,” runs the fourth term of the formula, “come the six fields”*—the “six fields of the subject” (ajjhattika âyatana), eye, ear, nose, tongue, body (as organ for sensations of touch), understanding,† and the six corresponding fields of the object world, corporeal forms as the object of the eye, and so on—sounds, odours, taste, tangibility, and last, as the object of the understanding, thoughts (or ideas, notions, “dhammâ”), which are represented evidently as something standing present before the thinking faculty in quite an objective existence and realized by it, in the same way as visible bodies before the eyes.

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∗ The version contained in the “Mahânidânasutta” (Dialogue between Buddha and Ânanda) skips the categories of the “six fields,” and goes on from “name and material form” straight to the next following category of contact. (Vide infra.)

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† “Understanding” (mano) and “consciousness” (viññâṇa) are always quite distinct in the sacred texts, wherever they express themselves strictly. Turns such as these: “What people are accustomed to call thought (citta) or understanding (mano) or consciousness (viññâṇa)” occur, as far as I know, only in such a connection that they may be described as an intentional accommodation to customary modes of speech.

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The organs of the subject now step into communication with the objective world. "From the six fields comes contact. From contact comes sensation." We meet also with a certainly not very clearly expressed, and at the same time scarcely well-thought-out, attempt, to still further analyze these processes. Before the organ of sense grasps the object, an operation of the central organ, consciousness, on the organ of sense in requisition, gives it the command to join communication with the object, apparently in such a way that the former sets the latter in a certain manner to work. And when this communication follows, then by means of it, besides the two elements primarily concerned, the organ of sense and the object, the third element, consciousness, the author and supervisor of this communication, is at the same time in play. It is somewhat in this way, I believe, that we must understand the following proposition which recurs not unfrequently in the sacred texts: "From the eye and visible bodies comes consciousness, directed to the eye (cakkhuviññāṇa), the conjunction of the three, the contact." And similarly in that address of Buddha's already quoted (p. 185 seq.), the series of ideas and processes treated of in this connection, is expressed in the following fashion: "Eye—body—consciousness directed to the eye—contact of the eye (with the objects)—the sensation, which arises from the contact of the eye (with the objects), be it pleasure be it pain, be it neither pain nor pleasure."* Of course similar processes take place in the case of the other organs of sense to those which occur in the case of the eye.

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∗ Pleasure, pain, and what is neither pleasure nor pain: a classification of sensations under three heads found frequently repeated in the sacred texts.

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The formula goes on: “From sensation arises thirst.” Here the point is reached, which the tenets of the origin and the extinction of suffering had made a starting-point, “the thirst which leads from re-birth to re-birth,” not the ultimate but the most powerful cause of suffering. We be, because we thirst for being; we suffer, because we thirst for pleasure. “Whomsoever it holds in subjection, that thirst, that contemptible thing, which pours its venom through the world, his suffering grows as the grass grows. Whosoever holds it in subjection, that thirst, that contemptible thing, which it is difficult to escape in this world, suffering falls off from him as the water-drops from the lotus flowers.”* “As, if the root be uninjured, even a hewn tree grows up anew mightily, so, if the excitement of thirst be not wholly dead, suffering ever and anon breaks out again.” “The gift of the truth transcends all other gifts; the sweetness of the truth transcends all other sweetness; joy in the truth surpasses all other joy; the extermination of thirst, this subdues all suffering.”

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The idea of thirst, usually divided by scholastic teaching into six heads, according to whichever one or other of the six senses it is that has caused the sensation which generates the thirst, is usually met in close connection with the category, which follows next in the formula of causality, that of clinging, to wit, clinging to the external world, to existence.† “From thirst,” says the formula, “comes clinging.” The Pâli word for “clinging” (upâdâna) involves a metaphor which is highly descriptive of the idea which is here underlying. The flame which, as a scarcely material existence, freely urges its way on, spreading and rising, “clings” still to the fuel (upâdâna): it cannot be contemplated without fuel. Even if the flame be carried into the distance by the wind, there is still a fuel there to which it clings, the wind. The existence of every being is like the flame; like the flame, our being is to a certain extent a continuous process of burning. Deliverance is the extinction (nirvâna) of the flame; but the flame is not extinguished so long as it is supplied with fuel to which it “clings.” And as the flame clinging to the wind presses on into far off distance, so also the flame of our existence is not laid on the spot, but presses on in transmigration to far off distances, from heaven to hell, from hells to heaven. What is it, to which the flame-resembling process of our being clings in the moment of such transmigration, like the flame to the wind? “Then, say I, (the being of the existent) has thirst as the substratum to which it clings; for this thirst, O Vaccha, is at that time (at the moment of transmigration) its (the being’s) clinging.”*

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∗ “Dhammapada,” v. 335 seq. The following quotations are taken from the same text, v. 338, 354.

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† Scholastic terminology specially distinguishes four classes of clinging: clinging by desire, clinging by (mistaken) intentions, clinging by building on virtue and monastic observances (as though these were alone sufficient to obtain salvation), and clinging by thinking of the ego. We shall not be able to explain the last point, the attitude of Buddhist teaching as to the idea of the ego, until we reach a later stage.

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Even the slightest residue of clinging prevents deliverance. Whosoever separates from everything that is transitory, whosoever attains the most perfect quietude, but clings with his thought even to this very quietude and is glad of this quietude, he is still in bondage. The best, but still the minimum of clinging is the clinging to the condition of deepest self-suppression where consciousness and non-consciousness are alike overcome; complete deliverance has overcome even this last clinging.* “By the cessation of clinging his soul was delivered from all sinful existence”—this is the standing phrase with which the texts intimate that a disciple of Buddha has become a partaker of holiness, of deliverance.

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∗ From a dialogue between Buddha and a monk of another persuasion named Vaccha (“Saṃyutta Nikâya,” vol. ii, fol. tau). Here may be seen an illustration of the disconnectedness of the sacred texts already animadverted on, as regards the succession of the categories appearing in the formula of causality. We pointed out, that the proposition “from consciousness come name and material form” refers to the moment of conception, that is of transmigration of the soul. And here the categories of thirst and clinging, which appear much later in the formula, are carried back to the very same moment.

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Up to this point the connection of the causes and effects in our chain of categories was tolerably clear. The impression will have been formed that the being whose conception (“from consciousness come name and material form”) was the starting-point of the series, has long since, in the later terms of the formula, entered on real life, struggles with the outer world, the clinging to its goods. In this light also the oft-mentioned dialogue between Buddha and Ānanda puts it; to the proposition; “from sensation comes thirst,” it appends a picture of human toil and struggles for pleasure and gain: there are met the words seek, obtain, possession, guard, envy, quarrel, strife, backbiting, lying. It is therefore very surprising, when the formula of causality, which in its theory of the world seemed to have already arrived at the dealings of social life, at the struggle of egoism against egoism, suddenly turns back and causes that being whom we have already seen taking part in the transactions of the world to be born. The formula runs thus in its three last terms: “From clinging (to existence) comes becoming (bhava); from becoming comes birth; from birth come old age, and death, pain and lamentation, sorrow, anxiety and despair.”

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∗ “Anañjasappâya Suttanta” (Majjh. N.).

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It seems to me evident that there is here a gap in the train of thought which our efforts of elucidation cannot, and are not even permitted to bridge over. What was more ready than to recognize in birth the sources from which come old age and death? "If three things were not in the world, my disciples, the Perfect One, the holy, supreme Buddha, would not appear in the world, the Law and the Doctrine, which the Perfect One propounds, would not shine in the world. What three things are they? Birth and old age and death."* Thus these so closely associated ideas were thrown together in the two last terms of the causal-chain, but it was omitted to weld these new groups of categories with those preceding, so as to form a harmonious whole. The idea of "becoming," which was thrust into the middle, inevitably creates by its very vagueness†—which you may regard as you like, as either of very little or of very great import—the impression as if it were intended for a shift or sleight to get over the break in continuity.

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We close with some proverbs of the "Dhammapada,"‡ which translate these last terms of the formula of causality from the language of ideas into that of emotion and poetry.

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"Behold this painted picture, the frail, scarred form of corporeity, wherein many an aspiration dwells, which has no happiness and no stability."

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"To age comes as its lot this form, frail, a nest of diseases : the perishable body fails : life in it is death."

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∗ *Vide* supra, p. 217. † This is not removed by the explanation frequently occurring in the sacred texts, that there is a triple becoming : the becoming in desire, the becoming in form, the becoming in formlessness, according as a being is born again in the lower worlds ruled by desire, or in the higher states, the worlds of form and formlessness. ‡ Vers 147-149, 46.

Cites (4)

Dhammapada — Pāli
Mahānidānasutta — Pāli
Majjhimanikāya — Pāli
Saṃyuttanikāya — Pāli