BUDDHISM
INTRODUCTION:
It was in the sixth century B.C. that the world saw the Light of Asia, that perfect embodiment of knowledge, courage, love and sacrifice whose heart overflowed with purest emotion on seeing that human life was essentially fraught with misery and pain, that a shallow optimism was rooted in a deep pessimism, that behind the superficial momentary glow of sensual pleasure there lay the misery of old age, sickness and death; who, moved by that spectacle to seek a remedy for men’s ills, at the age of twenty-nine, boldly left not only the material luxuries of the Shākya kingdom but also his beloved wife, whose exquisite beauty and lovely nature were renowned far and wide, and still more beloved new-born son, who had cemented the tie of love between his parents; who in short, kicked away gold, women and fame, the three universal fetters for man; and who, after six years’ rigorous religious austerities, at last found enlightenment as he lay emaciated under a tree near Gaya, dispelling the dark clouds of ignorance and conquering Māra, the Prince of Evil; who then preached the truth he had discovered, without distinction of caste, creed or colour. Thus Buddha taught. And Buddhism was embraced by the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the intellectual and the dull alike. It spread like wild fire far and wide from the lofty Himalayas to Cape Camorin and ranged beyond the frontiers of its homeland to Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Malaya, Java, Sumatra and then again to Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, China and Japan. It became a world-religion and a great cultural force at least in Asia.
Prince Siddhārtha has gone, but the Buddha remains. The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path have a meaning for us even today. The Enlightenment which dawned upon the mortal Siddhārth and transformed him into the immortal Buddha, serves us even today. The Dharma-chakra, the Wheel of the Law, first turned by the Buddha at the deer park in Sarnath still revolves. The Great Decease of the Buddha at Kushīnārā (modern Kasaya, District Gorakhpur) at the ripe old age of eighty-two, so vividly described in the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, proves it beyond doubt that every one of us is a potential Buddha.
LITERATURE
Buddhism is divided into many philosophical schools and has a vast literature. It is very difficult to say what exactly are the teachings of Buddha himself and what are the interpretations, amplifications and collaborations put upon them by the disciples. The teachings of Buddha were oral and were recorded much later by his disciples. Buddha was primarily an ethical teacher and a social reformer than a theoretical philosopher. He referred to a number of metaphysical views prevalent in his times and condemned them as futile. Whenever metaphysical questions were put to him, he avoided them saying that they were neither profitable nor conductive to the highest good. ‘Philosophy purifies none, peace alone does.’ He is reported to have said in one of the Suttas: ‘Surely do I know much more than what I have told you. And wherefore, my disciples, I not told you that? Because, my disciples, it bring you no profit, it does not conduce to progress in holiness, because it does not lead to the turning from the earthly, to the subjection of all desire, to the cessation of the transitory, to peace, to knowledge, to illumination, to Nirvāṇa.’ He repeatedly told his disciples: ‘Two things only, my disciples, do I teach – misery and the cessation of misery.’ Human existence is full of misery and pain. If instead we bother about barren metaphysical speculations, we behave like that foolish man whose heart is pierced by a poisonous arrow and who, instead of taking it out whiles away his time on idle speculation about the origin, the size, the metal, the maker and the shooter of the arrow.
A few weeks after Buddha’s death (circa 483 B.C.) the first Buddhist Council was held at Rāja-gṛha to establish the canon of the Vinaya, the Discipline of the Order. After about a century there arose a violent controversy on certain points of the Vinaya, which led to a schism and divided the Buddhists into Sthaviravādins and Mahāsāṇghikas. The Second Buddhist Council was held at Vaishālī to do away with the ten controversial points of the Vinaya. The Third Buddhist Council was summoned by Ashoka, the Great, at Pātaliputra (circa 249 B.C.) in which about one thousand monks participated. Its object was to compile a canon of the Doctrine of the Elders (Sthaviravāda). The present Pāli Canon was probably compiled by this Council. Gradually Sthaviravāda was divided into eleven and the other into nine schools, thus making the twenty schools of Hīnayāna mentioned by Vasumitra. The most important school of Hīnayāna was Sarvāstivāda. The Fourth Buddhist Council was held in the first or second century A.D. under King Kaniṣka to reconsider and compile the tenets of the Sarvāstivāda School.
The Pāli Canon is called ‘Tipiṭaka’ or the Three Baskets. The first Basket is the Vinaya-Piṭaka which deals with the discipline of the Order. The second is the Sutta- Piṭaka which is said to be a compilation of the utterances of the Master himself and consists of five collections called Nikāyas – Dīgha, Majjhima, Anguttara, Samyutta and Khuddaka. The third is called Abhidhamma- Piṭaka which deals with philosophical discussions. Besides these, there is a vast non-canonical Pāli literature including Milinda-Pañho, Dīpavamsa, Mahāvamsa, Visuddhi-magga and a rich commentary literature on the Tipiṭaka.
The above is the literature of the Hīnayāna sect which is compiled long after the death of Buddha. Some Buddhists who felt that it did not present the real teachings of the Master and contained many horrible misinterpretations of Buddha’s teachings, called themselves Mahāyānīs, dubbing the others as Hīnayānīs and had a separate literature in Sanskrit.
TEACHINGS OF THE BUDDHA
Under these circumstances, it is difficult to say what exactly are the teachings of the Buddha who was mainly an ethical teacher and a mystic rather than a metaphysician and who preached only orally. Yet, a fairly good account of his teachings can be gleaned. It may be said to be threefold – The Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path and the Doctrine of Dependent Origination.
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTH
The Four Noble Truths (ārya satya) are:-
There is suffering (duḥkha): Life is full of misery and pain. Even the so-called pleasures are really fraught with pain. There is always fear lest we may lose the so-called pleasures and their loss involves pain. Indulgence also results in pain. That there is suffering in this world is a fact of common experience. Poverty, disease, old age, death, selfishness, meanness, greed, anger, hatred, quarrels, bickering, conflicts, exploitation are rampant in this world. That life is full of suffering none can deny.
There is a cause of suffering (duḥkha-samudaya): Everything has a cause. Nothing comes out of nothing – ex nihilo nihil fit. The existence of every event depends upon its causes and conditions. Everything in this world is conditional, relative, limited. Suffering being a fact, it must have a cause. It must depend on some conditions. ‘This being, that arises’, ‘the cause being present, the effect arises’, is the causal law of Dependent Origination.
There is a cessation of suffering (duḥkha-nirodha): Because everything arises depending on some causes and conditions, therefore if these causes and conditions are removed the effect ceases to exist. Everything being conditional and relative is necessarily momentary and what is momentary must perish. That which is born must die. Production implies destruction.
There is a way leading to this cessation of suffering (duḥkha-nirodha-gāminī pratipat): There is an ethical and spiritual path by following which misery may be removed and liberation attained. This is the Noble Eight-fold Path.
The Noble Eight-fold Path consists of eight steps which are:
(1) Right faith (samyag dṛṣṭi),
(2) right resolve (saṅkalpa),
(3) right speech (vāk),
(4) right action (karmānta),
(5) right living (ājīva),
(6) right effort (vyāyāma),
(7) right thought (smṛti)
(8) right concentration (samādhi).
This is open to the clergy and the laity alike.
In the old books we also find mention of a triple path consisting of Shīla or right conduct, Samādhi or right concentration and Prajñā or right knowledge. They roughly correspond to Darshana, Jñāna and Chāritra of Jainism. Shīla and Samādhi lead to Prajñā which is the direct cause of liberation.
Buddha’s ethical ‘middle path’ is like the ‘golden mean’ of Aristotle. Self-indulgence and self-mortification are equally ruled out. In his very first Sermon at Sāranātha he said: ‘There are two extremes, O monks, from which he who leads a religious life must abstain. One is a life of pleasure, devoted to desire and enjoyment: that is base, ignoble, unspiritual, unworthy, unreal. The other is a life of mortification: it is gloomy, unworthy, unreal. The Perfect One, O monks, is removed from both these extremes and has discovered the way which lies between them, the middle way which enlightens the eyes, enlightens the mind, which leads to rest, to knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nirvāna.’
This is the Noble Eight-fold Path contained in the Fourth Noble Truths.
PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA
The doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda or Dependent Origination is the foundation of all the teachings of the Buddha. It is contained in the Second Noble Truth which gives us the cause of suffering, and in the Third Noble Truth which shows the cessation of suffering. Suffering is Samsāra; cessation of suffering is Nirvāṇa. Both are only aspects of the same Reality. Pratītyasamutpāda, viewed from the point of view of relativity is Samsāra; while viewed from the point of view of reality, it is Nirvāṇa. It is relativity and dependent causation as well as the Absolute, for it is the Absolute itself which appears as relative and acts as the binding thread giving them unity and meaning. Pratītyasamutpāda tells us that in the empirical world dominated by the intellect everything is relative, conditional, dependent, subject to birth and death and therefore impermanent. The causal formula is: ‘This being, that arises,’ i.e., ‘depending on the cause, the effect arises.’ Thus every object of thought is necessarily relative. And because it is relative, it is neither absolutely real (for it is subject to death) nor absolutely unreal (for it appears to arise). All phenomenal things hang between reality and nothingness, avoiding both the extremes. They are like the appearances of the Vedāntic Avidyā or Māyā. It is in this sense that Buddha calls the doctrine the Middle Path, Madhyamā Pratipat, which avoids both eternalism and nihilism. Buddha identifies it with the Bodhi, the Enlightenment which dawned upon him under the shade of the bo tree in Gaya and which transformed the mortal Siddhārtha into the immortal Buddha. He also identifies it with the Dharma, the Law: ‘He who sees the Pratītyasamutpāda sees the Dharma, and he who sees the Dharma sees the Pratītyasamutpāda.’ Failure to grasp it is the cause of misery. Its knowledge leads to the cessation of misery. Nāgārjuna salutes Buddha as the best among the teachers, who taught the blessed doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda which leads to the cessation of plurality and to bliss. Shāntarakṣita also does the same.
Troubled by the sight of disease, old age and death, Buddha left his home to find a solution of the misery of earthly life. Pratītyasamutpāda is the solution which he found. Why do we suffer misery and pain? Why do we suffer old age and death? Because we are born. Why are we born? Because there is a will to be born. Why should there be this will to become? Because we cling to the objects of the world. Why do we have this clinging? Because we crave to enjoy the objects of this world. Why do we have this craving, this thirst for enjoyment? Because of sense-experience. Why do we have this sense-experience? Because of sense-object-contact. Why do we have this contact? Because of the six sense-organs (the sixth sense being the mind). Why do we have the six sense-organs? Because of the psycho-physical organism. Why do we have this organism? Because of the initial consciousness of the embryo. Why do we have this consciousness? Because of our predispositions or impressions of Karma. Why do we have these impressions? Because of Ignorance. Hence Ignorance is the root-cause of all suffering.
Thus we get the twelve links of the Causal Wheel of Dependent Origination:
Ignorance (avidyā).
Impressions of karmic forces (samskāra).
Initial consciousness of the embryo (vijñāna).
Psycho-physical organism (nāma-rūpa).
Six sense-organs including mind (ṣaḍāyatana).
Sense-object-contact (sparsha).
Sense-experience (vedanā).
Thirst for sense-enjoyment (tṛṣṇā).
Clinging to this enjoyment (upādāna).
Will to be born (bhava).
Birth or rebirth (jāti).
Old age and death (jarā-maraṇa).
Out of these twelve links the first two are related to past life, the last two to future life and the rest to present life. This is the cycle of birth-and –death. This is the twelve-spoked wheel of Dependent Origination. This is the vicious circle of causation. It does not end with death. Death is only a beginning of a new life. It is called Bhava-chakra, Samsāra-chakra, Janma-maraṇa-chakra, Dharma-chakra, Pratītyasamutpāda-chakra etc. It can be destroyed only when its root-cause, Ignorance, is destroyed. Otherwise, Ignorance being present, impressions arise; impressions being present, initial consciousness arises and so on. And Ignorance can be destroyed only by Knowledge. So Knowledge is the sole means of liberation. Ignorance is bondage; Knowledge is liberation. An analysis of these twelve links shows their psychological significance. It is important here to note that life is not regarded by Buddha as a product of the blind play of mechanical nature, but as due to the internal urge, the life-force, the e’lan vital, the will to be born.
The doctrine of Dependent Origination is the central teaching of the Buddha and his other teachings can be easily deduced from it as corollaries. The theory of Karma is base on this, being an implication of the law of causation. Our present life is due to the impressions of the Karmas of the past life and it will shape our future life. Ignorance and Karma go on determining each other in a vicious circle. Again, the theory of Momentariness (kṣaṇa-bhaṅga-vāda) is also a corollary of Dependent Origination. Because things depend on their causes and conditions, because things are relative, dependent, conditional and finite, they must be momentary. To say that a thing arises depending on its cause is to admit that it is momentary, for when the cause is removed the thing will cease to be. That which arises, that which is born, that which is produced, must necessarily be subject to death and destruction. And that which is subject to death and destruction is not permanent. And that which is not permanent is momentary. The theory of No-Ego (nairātmyavāda), the theory that the individual ego is ultimately false is also based on this doctrine. When everything is momentary, the ego is also momentary and therefore relative and false. The theory that the so-called matter is unreal, that there is no material substance (saṅghātavāda) is also derived from this doctrine. Matter, being momentary, is relative and therefore ultimately unreal. The theory of causal efficiency (artha-kriyā-kāritva) is also based on it, because each preceding link is causally efficient to produce the succeeding link and thus the capacity to produce an effect becomes the criterion of existence.
NIRVĀṆA
The ideal saint of both the schools of Hīnayāna is the Arhat who has simply ‘blown’ himself out of existence by annihilating all desires and passions. The ideal is said to be negative, individual and selfish. Nibbāna is said to be a negative cessation of all earthly miseries. It is given in the third Noble Truth about the cessation of suffering. It is often compared with the extinction of the flame of a lamp. Just as a lamp when it becomes extinguished goes neither hither nor thither, neither to the earth nor to the sky, neither to this direction nor to that, it has been utterly blown out on account of the oil being consumed; similarly a sage obtains Nirvāṇa when the desires and the passions have been consumed; he goes neither this way nor that, but obtains utter peace. The very word ‘Nirvāṇa’ means ‘blowing out’. It is the dissolution of the five skandhas. It is the cessation of all activities (chittavṛttinirodha) and of all becoming (bhavanirodha). But there are many verses and passages in the Pāli Canon which emphatically reject this negative conception of Nirvāṇa. Here the real nature of Buddha’s teachings bursts forth breaking the outward covering of the Hīnayāna. Nirvāṇa is identified with positive bliss. It is said to be the highest and the indestructible state. It is the fearless goal. It gives happiness here and hereafter. It is the highest bliss. We are even told that to mistake Nirvāṇa as annihilation is ‘a wicked heresy’. This repudiates the views of Rhys Davids, Oldenberg and Paul Dahlke and the earlier view of Mrs. Rhys Davids that Nirvāṇa is only negative extinction. Unfortunately, the Pāli Canon gives both the negative and the positive descriptions of Nirvāṇa and Hīnayāna inclines towards the former.
GENERAL ESTIMATE
If Nirvāṇa is to be taken as positive bliss, the theory of momentariness would be relegated to the sphere of the empirical alone. Momentariness is inconsistent with ethical life and with spiritual experience. If it is given universal application, it contradicts even the empirical life. To negate the distinction between the empirical and the absolute and to grant mistaken absolute application to momentariness is not only to lose the Absolute which is wantonly thrown away, but to lose even the empirical. The essential objection of King Milinda that if the soul is a flux of momentary ideas, then who is it that performs acts and who is it that reaps their fruits? Remains unanswered. To maintain action without an agent is to have a marriage without a bride, an ‘alehouse without a customer’, a drama without an actor. The charge of vicarious liability asserts itself. The momentary idea which performs an action vanishes without reaping its fruit (kṛtapraṇāsha), and another momentary idea reaps the fruit of an action it never performed (akṛtābhyāgama). The ethical theory of Karma is thus thrown overboard. Bondage and liberation both become impossible. One momentary idea is bound and another is liberated. Suffering itself is momentary. So why should a person at all try to overcome suffering when he himself together with the suffering will vanish in the next moment? Thus the first noble truth and the other three which presuppose it become useless. The noble eightfold path too becomes uninspiring. The very aim of the Buddha becomes defeated. Hīnayāna answers these charges by saying that the preceding link does not perish before transmitting its content to the succeeding link and so the continuity is never broken. The successor bears all the burden of the predecessor. The law of Karma, being an impersonal force, makes action possible without an agent and transmigration without a transmigrating soul. Bondage means the flow of an impure series beginning with Ignorance, while liberation means the transformation of this flow into that of a pure series beginning with Knowledge. But all these answers are unavailing. Knowledge itself becomes impossible without a synthesizing subject. Perception, conception, memory and recognition all become impossible without such a subject. One perception cannot perceive another. The momentary idea cannot ideate itself. Without the self, the ‘transcendental unity of pure apperception’, the foundational consciousness, the synthesizing the subject, perceptions remain at the level of scattered sense-data and cannot become knowledge. He who experiences the flux is, for that very reason, above the flux. Identity of the subject cannot be explained away by similarity, for, firstly, similarity cannot account for identity, and secondly, similarity itself presupposes identity. There must be a self which is not itself momentary to recognize and compare two things as similar. The different pieces of empirical consciousness must be connected in one self-consciousness. It is the permanent self which unites all the scattered ideas and weaves them into knowledge. This is the essence of the classic criticism offered by Shaṅkarāchārya against the theory of Momentariness. Hemachandra, a great Jaina writer, also says that the theory of Momentariness makes the law of Karma, bondage, liberation, empirical life, recognition and memory impossible. The theory of Momentariness, therefore, cannot be upheld without a permanent self.
Thus the Sarvāstivāda school of Hīnayānism which is a radical pluralism based on the doctrine of Universal Momentariness is a bundle of contradictions. Though outwardly it says it believes in the reality of all, yet in fact it has undermined the reality of all. It has reduced mind to momentary ideas, matter to momentary atoms and God to the relics of the Buddha’s body.
Dr. Anumala Singh
Assistant Professor
Deptt. of Philosophy
RLSY College, Bakhtiyarpur, Patna.
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