The History of Buddhist Thought c27.37

c27.37

It is, however, possible to recognize in Mahāyāna two theories which are philosophical systems, Weltanschauungen in the true sense. They have parallels with Western systems, and they deserve investigation. Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of the Void may be said to strike on the same rock as the Vedānta of Śankara. They both explain experience in such a way that the experience to be explained has no longer any reality. Then it has to be denied explicitly, and yet the experience itself is the basis of the negative conclusion. Hence the doctrine of relative and absolute truth. But even there is the recognition, even if inadequate, of a universally admitted principle. Experience only becomes real when interpreted, and every philosophical system is a reinterpretation more or less adequate. Every interpretation and every system becomes false in the light of a more complete co-ordination. The relative truth which was rejected by Nāgārjuna was that of the everyday conception of the world expressed in the traditional terms of language. Everyone knows that this is false. The sun does not rise, thunderbolts do not fall. Is it possible to restate this conception so as to reach an exact statement of the truth of experience? It has not been done yet in a final sense, and Nāgārjuna did not stop to ask. He was so sure of absolute reality and of a means of attaining it by direct intuition that he swept away every interpretation as relative and hence false. To the mystic the exact nature of the structure of the world or the atom was of no more importance then than it is now. That is why the Mahāyānists accepted the Sarvāstivāda cosmology as we find it in the *Abhidharmakośa*. It was a scientific presentation of everyday experience. In the third chapter of that work we have the elements of a system of natural science, including psychology. One of its most characteristic features is its reduction of time as well as matter to a series of atomic elements, and hence the existence of the individual to a sequence of moments. It had no importance for metaphysics, for the individual, even if reduced to a flow of time atoms, still remained a flow.