The History of Buddhist Thought c14.35

c14.35

This does not seem to touch the question of explaining them as members of a series. Birth, old age, and death belong to that part of the Formula which is most easily explained as describing the temporal career of an individual, and they do not occur in the ontological Sāṅkhya formula at all. Nor does the terminology make it more probable that one is dependent on the other. Viññāṇa is said to correspond with buddhi, nāma-rūpa with ahaṃkāra, saḷāyatana with the ten indriyas, the manas, and the five tanmātras, tṛṣṇā with abhiniveśa or āśis, upādāna is analogous to dharmādharmau.¹ Prakṛti² and the guṇas, the most fundamental principles of the Sāṅkhya construction, are nowhere found in Buddhism. How far such parallels are convincing may be left to the reader. In any case the Sāṅkhya scheme does not explain how the Buddhists understood their own formula, even if it may have given hints to the elaborator of the twelvefold Chain.