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The History of Buddhist Thought c16: Chapter VIII. Dogma and Philosophy: The Soul

The History of Buddhist Thought c16

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Chapter VIII. Dogma and Philosophy: The Soul

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RELIGION, said Schopenhauer, is the philosophy of the people. On the other hand, as La Vallée Poussin remarks, “ on ne doit confondre le dogme ou la religion avec le ‘ système ’ ou la philosophie.” ¹ In one respect there is certainly a great difference. Philosophy aims to be “ the complete interpretation of experience ”. Religion is not interested in completeness. It is interested in a few facts of experience to which it attributes an absolute truth and value. Its interpretations of these are called dogmas. Whether they can be interpreted in harmony with all the rest of experience is secondary. At first it is not even recognized that there may be contradictions. If the disciple is ever brought to see an apparent contradiction, he may say that what he holds is fundamental, whatever else is true. In that case he remains purely at the standpoint of religion. Or he may proceed to show that the contradictions are not real. He then assumes the standpoint of philosophy, and the final result of his thought is a natural theology or a philosophy of religion. It is still not quite what the philosophers call philosophy, for it retains those fundamentals which religion started with, but which philosophy could never have found out for itself.

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¹ *Le dogme et la philos. du Bouddhisme*, p. 205.

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Buddhism, in accordance with this distinction, began by being a religion. It is needless to dispute about the term religion. If it necessarily implies an intelligent and almighty entity as the ultimate explanation and the ultimate goal of things, then Buddhism is not a religion. We may prefer to say that the fundamental dogmas of Buddhism differ so much from the dogmas of religious systems that they cannot be brought under one definition. But Buddhism in one respect was at first rather on the side of religion than of philosophy in that it started with fundamental convictions, which only became a philosophical system when they had to be made consistent and defended against rival views.

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It is probable that every dogma when followed out in all its implications would be found to involve universal principles, and hence the question of its relation to other principles would sooner or later arise. This is what has happened in Buddhism. The distinct and formal expression of a principle has more than once brought to light a consequence, and the principle has had to be reformulated, or the consequence has become an additional principle.

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We have seen what the dogmatic position of the earliest ascertainable form of Buddhism was. There was a teacher revivifying the moral consciousness of his contemporaries, and with the insight of a prophet preaching an ethical doctrine that swept away much of the old ritualism. There was the new conception of the destiny of man, which promised a happiness not to be found in the weary round of earthly or heavenly existences, and there was the teaching of the Way, a definite course of life which, if followed out, led to escape, liberation. Not liberation in a distant future, but, as is said over and over again, a state to be realized diṭṭhe dhamme, in this actual life, by the disciple. Its fundamental dogma, the fact of pain, was put forward not as a theory to be considered, but as an actual fact, which only needed a right understanding to be accepted; and escape from pain was to be won by a method, the Noble Eightfold Way. This method does not seem to leave much room for theorizing, nor do we find any in the earliest description of the disciple's training. But theory lay dormant in the doctrines of the nature and destiny of man.

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The question of the nature of man centres in the doctrine of the soul. Soul has been defined as the principle of thought and action in man, or as that which thinks, wills, and feels, conceived as a perdurable entity and a subject of conscious spiritual experience. But definition is of little use. As that which thinks, wills, and feels it is the direct experience of everyone. But the term soul, or the corresponding word for *anima* in the West, has strong religious associations, and its use generally implies further theories, such as the existence of soul as a substance independent of the body, its immateriality and immortality, theories which reach far beyond the range of direct experience. The closest Indian term corresponding to soul is *ātman* (Pāli *attā*) yet the result of comparison is mere confusion unless the significance of the term is determined quite independently of the associations lying in the word soul. It is in the Upanishads where we find a new doctrine of the soul formulated which has ever since remained fundamental in Indian thought, and it is this which needs to be examined in considering the Buddhist doctrine of the self.

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The word ātman is found in the earliest Vedic hymns. The derivation of the word is uncertain. It is sometimes held to have meant " breath ", but it had already acquired a more special meaning. It is breath in the sense of " life ". The soma drink is said to be the ātman of the sacrifice. The sun is called the ātman of all that moves and stands. The commonest meaning is that of " self ", a use which is still found in the modern Indian languages. These meanings were probably not distinctly separated. This life or self was something which could leave the body and return. As such it is spoken of in the Rigveda as manas.¹ Such conceptions coming down from what are called primitive times are continued in the Upanishads. There is the self, the size of a thumb, which abides in the heart. From the heart pass a hundred and one channels, from which the ātman may issue. From one passage at the top of the head it may pass to immortality. It may leave the body in sleep. " Therefore let not one wake him suddenly, they say ; for hard is the healing of one to whom he does not return."² But a deeper conception is expressed, that the ātman is that which is most real. " This person consists of the essence of food. This is his head, this is his right side, this is his left side, this is his ātman, this is his lower part, the base."³ Here the body is being described, and the ātman appears to be the trunk of the body. But the passage goes on to say that besides this ātman consisting of food there is another ātman consisting of breath, and its ātman is space ; behind this is another consisting of mind, and its ātman is instruction (the Vedas) ; behind this is another consisting of knowledge, and its ātman is yoga ; behind this is another consisting of bliss, and its ātman is bliss.

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¹ E.g. RV., x, 58, which is a charm for bringing back the spirit of an unconscious person to the body ; cf. P. Tuxen, Forestillingen om Sjælen i Rigveda, Copenhagen, 1919.

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² Brhad. Up., iv, 3, 13.

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³ Taitt. Up., ii, 1–5.

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The Upanishads retain much of the early imagery and conceptions of the hymns and Brāhmaṇas, and they might have gone on refining these notions of the self as a small entity within the body, and of the world as generated by a primeval being, without reaching an essentially different standpoint. But new teaching came, which was looked upon as a revelation and taught as a secret. This was that the world not merely originated from one : it is one. It is Brahma, and Brahma is the self. When the pupil Śvetaketu had returned from twelve years’ study of the Vedas and thought himself learned, his father removed his conceit, and taught him the Great Utterance : *thou art that*. “The voice of a person, my dear, when dying goes to the mind; his mind to breath; his breath to heat; heat to the highest divinity. That which is the most minute, this universe has it as its ātman. That is the real. That is the ātman. That thou art, O Śvetaketu.” ¹ The doctrine of Śāṇḍilya is : “this my ātman within my heart, more minute than a grain of rice or barley or millet or the kernel of a grain of millet—this my ātman in my heart is greater than the earth, greater than the space of air, greater than the sky, greater than these worlds. Consisting of all actions, all desires, all odours, all tastes, embracing this all, this my ātman in my heart—this is Brahma.” ²

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¹ Chānd. Up., vi, 8, 6.

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² Ibid., 111, 143.

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We see here the difficulty of rising beyond the old conception which expressed everything in spatial terms. Plato having described the soul as something entirely different from anything perceptible to the senses was able to reach the concept of something to which spatial terms do not apply. To speak of the size of the soul is meaningless. The Upanishads are feeling after this, but have to express it in contradictory terms : “more minute than the minute, greater than the great, is the ātman placed in the cavity (of the heart) of the creature.” In the same way the imagery of going to the world of Brahma is continued. The emancipated one is a river entering the ocean :

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Like as rivers flowing into the ocean
Disappear, abandoning name and form,
So he that knows, being freed from name and form,
Attains to the divine person, beyond the beyond.³

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³ Muṇḍ. Up., iii, 2, 8.

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But to know Brahma and the ātman is to have attained release :

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The one controller, the inner ātman of all beings,
Who makes his one form to be manifold,
The wise who perceive him abiding in the self (ātman),
To them is eternal happiness not to others.¹

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¹ Katha Up., v, 12.

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Can we think that this doctrine was known to Buddha and that he rejected it ? Buddhism makes no mention of Brahma (neuter) as the one reality, or of any identity of this with the ātman. The Brahmā that we find so often mentioned in Buddhist writings is a personal god ruling over a separate region of the universe, and born and reborn as inevitably as any other being. But this Brahmā is never brought into relation with the Buddhist theory of the self.

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The Buddhist conception of the individual, the person consisting of a material and immaterial part, is a quite definite theory, which at first appears without any polemics. It is expressed in different ways but all essentially the same. In the four contemplations, as we have seen (p. 53), the individual meditates on himself as compounded of body, sensations, mind, and thought. Another form of expression occurs in the system of the four trances (p. 47) when the stage of full knowledge begins and the individual begins to perceive everything as it really is. He first directs his attention to his body. “With mind concentrated, purified, cleansed, spotless, with the defilements gone, supple, ready to act, firm and impassable, he turns and directs his mind to knowledge and insight. He thus understands : this is my body, possessing form (material shape), originating from the four great elements, produced by a mother and father, a collection of milk and gruel, subject to rubbing, pounding, breaking, and dissolution ; and this is my consciousness, on this body it rests, to this it is bound.” Here the individual consists of body and consciousness. Either we have here a more rudimentary analysis or the sensations and thoughts are taken as implicit in consciousness.²

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² The terms are not all identical in the different formulæ. Citta (thought), mano (mind), and viññāṇa (consciousness) are often equated, but they are not quite identical in meaning. Citta often implies feeling, and may mean heart. Viññāṇa may imply understanding. But when coupled with body all three express the same fact, the immaterial part of the individual. Similarly rūpa when applied to the body is the same as kāya.

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Besides these we have the more usual division according to the five khandhas or skandhas (masses, groups): body, feeling, perception, the aggregates, and consciousness. There is also the term nāma-rūpa, “ name and form,” occurring in the Causal Formula. It is equated to the khandhas by making nāma correspond to the four immaterial khandhas, but in the Sammādiṭṭhi-sutta (Majjh., i, 53), where there is an exposition of the terms of the Causal Formula, nāma is said to consist of feeling, perception, volition (cetanā), contact, and attention, and rūpa to consist of the four great elements and what is included in them. Here we have two more analyses of the individual. Nāma-rūpa is a term found in the Upanishads, but never in the specially Buddhist sense. It is used there with its absolutely literal meaning, as when the rivers are said to lose their name and form on entering the ocean,¹ and then it comes to mean individual existence. Both here and in Buddhism it appears to have been adopted from popular usage. It was the analysis into khandhas which became the established form for the analysis of the individual, and underwent further elaboration and comment. Can it be said to be primitive ? Did Buddha himself express himself in such a way ? Unless we are to suppose that Buddhism was indeed originally nothing more than “ vulgar magic and thaumaturgy coupled with hypnotic practices ”, we should expect to find it constructive on the intellectual as well as the moral side. We do in fact find schemes for practising a way of life. We also find as part of them three or more descriptions of the nature and constitution of man. We are not bound to say that the scheme of the five khandhas was the earliest or was primitive. But when we find several such schemes all agreeing in essentials, and no rival doctrines claiming a place, we are entitled to hold that this way of describing the individual by enumerating all the characteristic features was original. All the different modes may be due to Buddha for, as Mrs. Rhys Davids says, “ he would be simply unable to repeat himself.” This appears to be the case also with the Causal Formula. There are some half-dozen forms of the causal sequence, and it is not till we get to the much elaborated *Saṃyutta-nikāya* that we find the regular twelvefold form treated as a standard. Similarly the five khandhas have become a standard form. The forms which have survived in the description of the monk’s progress through the four trances (p. 47), and in the four contemplations (p. 53) are probably older. They became neglected when with the growth of Abhidhamma such standard lists became compiled and commented on.

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¹ Mund., 3, 2, 8 ; Praśna, 6, 5. It is curious that the same simile of the rivers entering the ocean occurs in Udāna, v, 5, but there the term used is nāma-gotra “ names and clans ”, and it refers there not to loss of individuality but to the literal loss of secular name and clan by one who abandons the world and becomes a son of the Sakyan.

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What is the relation of the individual constituted by the five khandhas to the ātman? In the oldest texts there is none. In the sense of self, and as opposed to another (*para-*), ātman is frequent enough.¹ But even in the *Brahmajāla-sutta*, where all the heresies are supposed to be included, there is no denial of an ātman. We are there told of some who say that the self is eternal, we are told of Brahmā, who thinks himself eternal and other beings not, of others who hold that thought (*citta*), or mind (*mano*), or consciousness (*viññāṇa*) is eternal, of the eel-wriggler who refuses to say whether a Tathāgata, an emancipated one, exists after death, of those who hold that the self possessing form or in some other mode exists after death, and of those who hold that the self, whether the bodily self consisting of the four elements or a finer mental self, perishes at death. No question is raised as to whether the ātman exists or not but whether in some way or other it is eternal.

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¹ Another late term is *attabhāva*, lit. self-existence, an actually existent individual; *Majjh.*, ii, 181; *Angut.*, i, 134; *Dhsang.*, 597. In Buddhist Sanskrit it means the self.

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The first place where we find the express denial of an ātman mentioned is in an analysis of *upādāna*, grasping. *Upādāna* is divided into four kinds, (1) the grasping of sensual desire (*kāma*), (2) of heresy (*diṭṭhi*), (3) of mere moral practice and rites (*sīlabbata*), and (4) of the doctrine of an ātman (*attavāda*).² This shows that when this formula was made, the doctrine of an ātman was expressly taught, but it tells us nothing about the school that held it, and as there is little trace of upanishadic doctrine it is unlikely this was being opposed. It is more likely to imply opposition to Mīmāṃsā as held by the descendants of the class of brahmins whom Buddha opposed. Their position later on is represented by Kumārila, who has a long section in defence of *ātmavāda*.³

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² *Dīgha*, iii, 230; *Majjh.*, i, 66; *Saṃy.*, ii, 3, etc.

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³ *Mīmāṃsaślokavārttika*, v. 18, transl. by G. Jha, Calcutta, 1907.

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There is a possible reference to upanishadic doctrine where self and world are identified (p. 102), but even here there is no reference to Brahma. The Mahāniddesa ¹ speaks of the “ heresy of ātman ” (attadiṭṭhi) and the “ misconception of ātman ” (attagāha). Both these are late terms and forms of expression which are quite unlike the formulation of the problem as we find it in the scheme of the five khandhas or in the parallel expressions for the union of mind and body.

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¹ Although this is a commentary on the Suttanipāta, there is no reference to attavāda in the Suttanipāta itself. The phrase attam pahāya (800) is being commented on. This means “ having rejected what has been seized ”, and so it is understood by the commentary Paramatthajotika, where attam (āptam) = gahītam. The Niddesa is against both sense and grammar, but it is evidence for the existence of the doctrine in its own period.

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But though the mere scheme of the khandhas as constituting the individual is implicitly the denial of something else called an ātman, there is nothing to make it probable that the doctrine was at first termed anattavāda. Aung and Walleser say, “ there can be no doubt that Buddha himself preached the doctrine of anattavāda as one of the most important doctrines, if one only recognizes that the doctrine laid down in the suttas was his own.” If only ! and yet after having posed this if, they leave it in the air and slip from the question as to what is in the suttas and what Buddha himself taught to the harmless statement that “ for Buddhism no acting subject besides action exists and nothing that perceives besides perception.” ²

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² Dogmatik des mod. süd. Buddhismus, p. 16.

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It is an illusion to suppose that we can prove that Buddha taught the doctrine of non-self in so many words, though it can be deduced, as the Buddhists themselves deduced it, from the doctrine of the khandhas and the other formulæ in which the individual is analysed into his elements. The term anattavāda has no meaning without stating what theory of the ātman was denied. It shows that some form of ātman-belief came to be rejected, and that this also included a belief in its eternity, but what philosophical system was opposed when the term was invented remains a mere supposition.

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The introduction of the terms attavāda, attadiṭṭhi, implies a new point of view : it was the self conceived as something more than the self of direct experience. Such a doctrine did arise among the Buddhists, but not by attempting to introduce ātmavāda. They never thought of calling this something the ātman, but started from a fresh point of view, and spoke of the individual (puggala, Skt. pudgala). This doctrine (pudgalavāda) is the first of the rejected doctrines in the Kathāvatthu : that the individual exists in the sense of being real or true in the highest sense. The commentator attributes the theory to the Vātsīputrīyas and the Sammitiyas, and to followers of non-Buddhist schools. The holders of the doctrine tried to be orthodox for, as it was explained, they held an ātman called pudgala, which was different and not different from the skandhas (Bodhicaryāv., ix, 60 com.). The Abhidharmakośa devotes a whole chapter to its refutation.

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There is a sutta called the Burden-sutta (Saṃy., iii, 25) which has been held to support the doctrine. “The burden, O monks, I will teach you, the taking of the burden, the grasping of the burden, and the laying down of the burden.” It is then explained that the five khandhas are the load. “The burden-taking is the individual; any elder of such a name and such a clan.” The grasping of the burden is “that craving which tends to re-birth, accompanied by delight and passion, taking delight here and there, namely the craving for sensual pleasure, for existence, for non-existence”. The laying down of the burden is the cessation of craving without a trace, its relinquishment, and release. Then follow two stanzas which are the real sutta, for the preceding prose is only a comment on it :

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The burdens verily are the five khandhas,
The burden-taking is the individual;
Grasping the khandhas is pain in the world,
Laying down the burden is happiness.
When he has laid the heavy burden down,
And has not taken up another burden,
And has drawn out craving with its root,
Free from hunger he has won Nirvāṇa.

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Here we have three parallel expressions : the taking of the burden (bhāra-hāra), the grasping after it, and the laying it down. There is no doubt that bhāra-hāra means “burden-taking”, but it has been translated “burden-bearer”. The point is not very important, for in any case it is interpreted as being the individual. The laying down of the burden is by rooting out craving and thus attaining Nirvāṇa. But we are as far off as ever from proving by this single text that the individual is to be understood as a permanent entity and real or true in the highest sense.

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The doctrine of pudgalavāda does not appear to have spread among the Buddhist schools, and the rejection of the doctrine of an ātman (ātmavāda) became more intense with the growth of controversy. Yet the attempt has been made to find an ātman doctrine directly taught by Buddha. In the Vinaya account of the first conversions made by Buddha we are told that he found a party of thirty wealthy young men who had been sporting with their wives in a grove. One of them who had no wife had brought a courtesan, and when they were not noticing she had taken their things and made off. While seeking her they came across Buddha, and asked if he had seen a woman. Buddha replied, “ What do you think, young men, which is better, for you to go in search of a woman, or to go in search of yourselves ? ” “ It is better, Lord, for us to go in search of ourselves (attānam).” The word for “ self ” is the same as the word for “ soul ”, and we are asked to believe that Buddha was advising them to go in search of their souls.

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This scarcely needs serious discussion, but there is a standing formula in describing the khandhas, which does not indeed teach an ātman directly, but which is supposed to leave a loophole that implies it. Usually it occurs as a mere formula, but there is a sutta where it is brought into connection with the general doctrine of the khandhas. It is attributed to Sāriputta, so that it may be taken as the form in which the developed doctrine had become established.¹

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¹ Majjh., i, 184.

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Body (rūpa) consists of the four great elements and what is included in them. Earth is either external (i.e. solid matter) or internal forming the parts of the body : hair, nails, teeth, and the rest of the individual. Water is either external or internal as the various liquids of the body. Internal heat is heat which produces digestion and so on. Internal air is the various breaths and winds of the body. After each of these comes the formula, “ this is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self ; even so, should it rightly be regarded and considered.” In the well-known Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta,² and repeatedly in other places, all the khandhas are treated in the same way, ending with consciousness. “ Is it fitting to consider what is impermanent, painful, and subject to change as ‘ this is mine, I am this, this is my self ’ ? No, Lord. Therefore, monks, whatever consciousness, past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, low or eminent, far or near, all this consciousness is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self.”

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² Samy., iii, 66. This is the sutta which, according to the Vinaya (i, 14), was the second discourse of Buddha preached to the first five disciples. Anattalakkhaṇa means “ not having the marks of a self or soul ”. As the sutta shows, it is merely a denial that the khandhas were ātman, whatever that term means.

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But if we translate na m’eso attā (this is not my self) as “ this is not my soul ”, there is the possibility of supposing that Buddha implied that there was a permanent soul somewhere else, even if not in the five khandhas. Such a translation is perfectly arbitrary, and that sense would only have plausibility if we could suppose that the later community had suppressed the ātman doctrine so effectually from the rest of his forty-five years of teaching that no one remembered anything of it. Yet although at his death his teaching was preserved in the minds of thousands of disciples (and indeed nowhere else) we find no trace of it even as a heresy among the Buddhists. If a trace had survived, we should have expected the Vātsīputrīyas to have appealed to it when they started their doctrine of an individual plus the five khandhas. But in fact they started from a quite independent point of view, and there is nothing to show that they thought they were contradicting the teaching about the self.¹

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¹ What there is that is permanent is stated in the Sarvāstivāda form of the Anattalakkhaṇa-sutta, which begins: “ Form has the nature of the destructible, and with its cessation is Nirvāṇa, which is of indestructible nature. Feeling, perception, the aggregates, consciousness, are of destructible nature, and with the cessation of each is Nirvāṇa, of indestructible nature.” Av. Śat., ii, 169.

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The sutta of the simile of the snake (Majjh, i, 133) repeats the argument against an ātman being found in the five khandhas, and also explicitly denies an ātman. It cannot be taken as a primitive expression of the Buddhist position, so that it does not do more than illustrate the attitude as it became finally formulated.

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An ignorant, untrained man considers body and the other khandhas, and thinks, “ this is mine, I am this, this is my self,” and forms the heresy, “ the world is the self. Hereafter I shall become permanent, stable, eternal, unchangeable, and so I shall stay for ever. This is mine, this am I, this is my self.” The enlightened disciple says, “ This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self,” and does not worry about what does not exist. A monk may hold this heresy, and then hear a Buddha or a disciple of his preaching the doctrine directed to the destruction of heresies, the quieting of all the aggregates, the giving up of all material of rebirth, the annihilation of craving, to cessation and Nirvāṇa. Then he thinks he will be cut off and annihilated. One who does not hold that heresy never thinks whether he will be annihilated or not, and does not lament. If there were an ātman, there would be something of mine belonging to an ātman; but as an ātman and something belonging to an ātman do not exist in truth and reality, this view that the world is the ātman is simply and entirely the doctrine of fools. Buddha is then represented as replying to the charge that his doctrine implies the annihilation, destruction, and non-existence of an existent being. “In the past and now I teach pain and the cessation of pain. If herein others abuse, revile, and annoy the Tathāgata, the Tathāgata does not feel anger, displeasure, or discontent of mind. And if others honour, revere, exalt, and worship the Tathāgata, he does not feel joy, happiness, and exultation of mind. He thinks, ‘it is on account of what I came to comprehend long ago that such things are done.’”

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This sutta appears to be a still later formulation of the argument against the ātman doctrine. Here the heresy usually stated as “the world and self are eternal” is converted into the doctrine that the world is the self and that both are eternal. There may be here some reference to upanishadic doctrine, though it is still not the identity of self and Brahma. The strongly polemical passages in which Buddha is made to defend himself against the falsehoods and misrepresentations of opponents appear like the wrangling of schools. The whole standpoint is different from that of the discussions in the Dīgha. There it is not the question of the existence of an ātman, but of its eternity or annihilation; here the doctrine of the assertion of an ātman is denied.

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Another way of finding a permanent substrate is to identify consciousness itself with the ātman. This is treated in the legend of the monk Sāti (Majjh., i, 256), who formed the evil view that consciousness is something which remains consciousness, and as such passes from birth to birth. The whole refutation rests upon the twelvefold Causal Formula. “Consciousness originates from a cause and without a cause there is no arising of consciousness.” It manifests itself through each of the six senses. “Through whatever cause consciousness arises it gets its name from that cause. Through the eye and visible forms consciousness arises, and is known as eye-consciousness.” Consciousness through the other senses is explained in the same way. Here it is not the birth-consciousness of the Causal Formula that is being explained, but the rise of a particular conscious state by stimulus of a sense-organ.

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The individual is then analysed according to the constituents of which he is compounded and which sustain him. There are said to be the four foods (*āhāra*): material food, contact, cogitation (*manosañcetana*), and consciousness. These are all produced by craving, craving by feeling, feeling by contact, contact by the six sense-organs, the six sense-organs by name and form, name and form by (birth-) consciousness, consciousness by the aggregates, and the aggregates by ignorance. Here the origin of the living individual as actually constituted of foods or sustenances is explained. It is followed by still another variant of the Causal Formula, in which the origin of the individual from the stage of birth-consciousness is traced as against the view that consciousness persists as such through all stages. Birth-consciousness is identified with the embryo (*gabbha*). When three conditions are present there is entry or descent of the embryo: when mother and father come together, when the mother is of child-bearing age, and when the gandhabba (the being to be reborn) is present. When the boy is born¹ he develops his faculties, he experiences feeling through each of the senses, he delights in them, and delight (*nandī*) arises. This delight in the senses is grasping, on account of grasping becoming, on account of becoming birth, on account of birth old age and death arise. Even so is the origin of all this mass of pain. This is still another form of the Causal Formula, and one which shows that it was understood as stages of the individual. Craving (*taṇhā*) is not mentioned, but delight (*nandī*), a word sometimes treated as a synonym of craving, takes its place. It is hardly likely that this could have arisen after the form with twelve links had become fixed.

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¹ It is expressly said that his mother gives birth to him and feeds him with milk, so that the view of Dr. Schayer that the stages down to grasping are pre-natal will not hold here. If that view could be adopted, we should have a more consistent description of one life from conception to death.

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Such is the way in which the difficulty of Sāti is explained—consciousness is not something permanent which persists unchanged from birth to birth, but one form which the individual assumes at one stage of his existence. Conception consists in “ the descent of the embryo ”. This statement is opposed to the view of Childers that it is only karma which transmigrates, but no evidence has ever been given for his view. The descent of the embryo is called the descent of consciousness or cognition in the *Mahānidāna-sutta* (above p. 67). Yet Rhys Davids when translating the very words of that sutta, *viññāṇaṃ va hi mātu kucchiṃ okkamitvā*, as “ were cognition after having descended into the mother’s womb ” (*Dial.*, ii, 60), adds a note to say, “ there is no conception of cognition, as a unity, descending from outside into the womb like a ball into a bag.” Even if it were only karma which were transmigrating, one would have thought that it must come from outside.

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In one sense karma transmigrates, because the individual which transmigrates is loaded with karma in every stage. The groups of which he consists are always changing, but it is because they are not wholly dispersed that he continues to be reborn. Freedom from re-birth is exactly the final dispersion of all the khandhas, and this takes place with the destruction of craving. But until this happens the individual is a being with a definite past, which with the proper training he can remember. This is not a mere concession to popular ideas, for apart from the fact that no other teaching is mentioned, we find the remembrance of former births continually referred to as one of the acquirements of the disciple under training.

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Although the Buddhist believed in the survival of the individual in the next existence as firmly as any Christian, it may be asked whether his theory of the khandhas justified him in doing so. No explanation is ever given why the khandhas should be always combined in separate personalities. There is no principle of individuation, nor even any recognition of what Kant called the synthetic unity of apperception. It is probable that the opponents of the theory of khandhas only were feeling after some such principle, and there is no doubt that the orthodox Hindu theories of the ātman depended on more than the instinctive rejection of the thought of personal annihilation. But this principle was never separated out from dogmatic concepts of the soul, and it was always possible to reject these and at the same time to neglect the principle of truth which they contained. In any case the doctrines of immortality (eternal life as distinct from mere survival after death), the existence of a permanent spiritual substance, and of a being thinking and feeling apart from material conditions, did not come within the range of evidence recognized by the Buddhists. The critical question for the Buddhists was not the survival of the individual at death, which they held and defended against the doctrine of annihilation (ucchedavāda), but the existence of the individual when the aggregation of the khandhas has finally ceased. That question depends upon the much disputed meaning of Nirvāṇa.

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