V
Early Buddhist Philosophy
Early Buddhist scriptures are guarded not only about the value of asceticism, but also about the value
of scholarly study and intellectual investigation. So one who recites, but does not practice, is said to be like a
rain-cloud that thunders, but does not rain.
Again, mere textual study cannot lead to enlightenment, nor is
one who is good at such studies permitted to criticize those who are not to escape reproach for his lack of
practice.
Such study is like holding a poisonous snake by its tail, that is, the student has got Dharma, but in
such a way that it does damage rather than good. Dharma is to enable one to cross over the stream, not to be
grasped as an intellectual attainment making one good at criticizing others and winning debates, and such
grasping leads to misery and frustration.
But although study alone brings no one to release, and much harm and suffering results from grasping
after victory in debate and a reputation for cleverness, one must also avoid the opposite error. Unless one is
a Buddha who discovers the truths of Dharma for oneself, it is necessary to hear the Dharma, and the words
of the Dharma do no good without an understanding of their meaning. Indeed, to attain the goal, one must
go beyond merely understanding the teaching—one must examine it and determine its truth for oneself.
The
Buddha rejected the Brahmanic notion that simply memorizing, reciting, and studying some sacred scripture
philologically, as it were, will lead to attainment of the goal.
Brahmanic notions are also the target of the attack on the notion that knowledge can be acquired by
revelation (svanussutam, “tradition” or “report”) independently of other sources of knowledge. Buddhism agrees
with the other naturalistic movements of its day, including Jainism, in this. Even if we can rely on an authority,
even if he is a sage, what he says is not true just because he pronounces that it is so. When we do rely on
authority and testimony, it still makes sense to ask how the authority knows what he says. If he relies on
authority himself, and that authority relies on a further authority, and so on ad infinitum, there is then no
ground at all for any confidence that the authority is right. Authority must be grounded in something other than
authority. “If a person has faith, he preserves truth when he says ‘My faith is thus’; but he does not yet come
to the definite conclusion: ‘Only this is true, anything else is wrong.’”
Not only authority is attacked as an independently reliable source of truth in the Sutta just quoted, but
also faith in what is approved (that is, the received opinion amongst experts), in oral traditions like that of the
Vedas, in the results of abstract reasoning, and in views accepted upon reflection. In each of these cases no
guarantee is provided of the truth of what is believed. Religious views based on reason and speculation (takka
and vimamsa) are not necessarily false, but neither are they true with certainty, even if fundamental doctrines
are said to be self-evident.
It seems that Rationalism, the notion that there is a faculty capable of recognizing
self-evident truths by the direct apprehension of universal real natures of things, is rejected here. Reason (takka)
seems intended to be such a capacity, and speculation (vimamsa) would seem to construct sciences from
conclusions drawn from self-evident first principles. (Logic, the faculty of drawing conclusions, is called Naya.)
The validity of rationalistic religion was attacked before Gautama, and he knew of the attacks, it seems.
The
Nyaya proofs of God’s existence are perhaps the sort of thing Gautama had in mind when he rejected reliance
on such a faculty of Reason.
[Sutta–Nipata 878–894, esp. 884–886, where it is insisted that there is only one truth, and the
disagreements among the philosophers and ascetics are due to their habit of surmising a truth from a faulty
perception of things, and then insisting that this alone is true and there is no other truth. Things are taken to
be, simply true or false, and the issue is whether it can be known that they are, and how. Irresolvable disputes
arise over metaphysical “truths,” which are not verifiable through observation. [I’m sure the reference to the
wise men and the elephant, in the Udana, concerns metaphysical beliefs.] Also relevant, Anguttara Nikaya II 25,
discussed in Kalupahana (1992) 47, Jayatilleke 345–346, which says that if the Buddha knows something, it is
“confusion” for him to say that he does not know it, or that he both knows it and does not know it (after the
Jains? in different regards?), but a bad deed to say that he neither knows it nor does not know it. Possibly the
distinction is between simple falsehood, and the attempt to assert a non–empirical view, which is not simple
falsehood, but meaningless?
The ability to gain metaphysical knowledge by special yogic powers, yet another source of knowledge
ungrounded in other kinds of knowledge, was also denied by Gautama.
To invalidate the various sources of
absolute metaphysical knowledge of reality others depended on, Gautama claimed to have explored all these
paths himself, and found them wanting. So he declared he had obtained all the possible kinds of supernatural
yogic knowledge, and insisted that it was of no use to gain such extrasensory powers if one wished to gain
knowledge of what is not empirically testable, for yogic knowledge only extends experience, it does not go
beyond it.
Thus, it does not report any supernatural fact, but only facts which can be tested by sensory
experience and other means of knowing. Thus he rejects the claims of Brahmans who have gained extrasensory
powers, and claim to have used them to discover that the world and the self are eternal, or that a God made
the world. Extrasensory powers simply do not report such “facts,” and their beliefs are in fact based on false
reasoning from what they have in fact experienced through such powers. Such beliefs, Gautama claims, prevent
one from seeing things as they are, and so hinder one from attaining freedom by non-grasping. But if grasping
and aversion do not enter into the picture, then extrasensory perception may provide information that helps
one to attain freedom.
Non–empirical beliefs are used to reinforce grasping inasmuch as people use them to
interpret reality in such a way that they can maintain their illusions, and so the Buddha rejects them on practical
grounds. But they are also rejected on the ground that every truth is about the world as it is experienced, so
there is no faculty of knowledge that informs us of non-empirical truths.
Extrasensory perception, the Buddha insisted, arises from natural causes in any case, being the result
of Samadhi, which is itself caused by meditative practices.
It is denied that such perception attained in
meditation can make one omniscient, as the Jains would wish. Rather, it can provide (1) memory of one’s past
lives (through the concentrated functioning of the mind), though not of every one of an infinite number of past
lives, but only of whatever finite number of past lives one wishes to remember, (2) knowledge of the decease
and survival after death of beings other than oneself (clairvoyance, due to the concentrated functioning of the
eye), and of the nature of of their rebirth and karmic influences, (3) knowledge in his own case of the cessation
of the defiling impulses or outflows (asavas). In addition, under the second category, there seems to be included
a direct knowledge of certain invariable causal connections, i.e. those connecting one’s mental states and
suffering and its cessation.
These outflows are originally the Jains’ karmic inflows of matter, but to a
Buddhist, they are sensual desire, desire for existence (as a Self), and ignorance, wrong views being added as
a fourth outflow later. That these are outflows is due to the Buddhist insistence that it is what one does that
defiles a person, not what happens to the person, so the shift in terminology asserts the Buddhist notion of
personal responsibility against the the Jains.
Elsewhere these three occur in a list with knowledge of the body
and its not being the self (gained through unobstructed operation of the senses), knowledge of a mind–created
body (apparently a body that can travel afar, produced in certain types of Shamanic/Yogic conentration) and
that it is not the self, psychokinesis or magical powers, a divine ear by which one can hear even what goes on
in the heavens, and the ability to read minds.
Of these powers gained in yogic meditation, only the knowledge
of the cessation of the outflows is anything like a holy knowledge.
Some of these rejections of the Brahmanic teachings comes out in a Buddhist creation story in the
Agganna Sutta.
The picture presented is one of recurrent cycles, always ending in the destruction of what
arises. There is no beginning, and usually the destruction of the world leaves the Brahma-world intact, though
it seems this world must sometimes be itself destroyed. Brahman would believe himself immortal because he
has survived destruction so often, just as the yogic meditator believes he is immortal when he recalls his
previous lives. In fact, neither one is immortal. The story of the origin of the present world-order, and of the
castes, is done along naturalistic lines. The Kshatriya caste arises when the people authorize the strongest to
keep justice. When those who were unable to endure the ascetic life compiled books instead, the Brahmins
arose. We can see what the Buddhists who wrote this think of the bookish non-practitioner. The whole point
is that the class system is conventional, arising in the course of nature, and there is no supernatural sanction for
it. Anyone who practises properly, regardless of background, can become an Arhat.
In keeping with his rejection of metaphysical, absolute knowledge, Gautama taught that many questions
were unanswerable, and that it was without profit to seek answers to them. So Kassapa was said to have asked
if suffering is caused by oneself or another, or both, or neither? In each case the Buddha replied, “Do not say
it is so,” since in each case, to say so seems to reject a tenet of Buddhism. To say that suffering is caused by
oneself denies conditional causation and suggests an eternal Atman. To say that it is not suggests Carvaka views,
placing the cause of our troubles in external circumstances and denying the validity of a spiritual path to
freedom through self-discipline. The third alternative seems to be the Jains’ view—the Jains would have
embraced both the earlier alternatives, each one qualified differently from the other, since the Self of the Jains
causes its own suffering by its attachment, and that suffering arises from the contact of the self with matter. It
is rejected because it makes both the errors of the first two views. The fourth view is rejected because it
repudiates natural causation.
Perhaps we could say that the point of taking any of these views as absolutely correct is to try to hold
onto some view of one’s Self, that it is eternal and utterly in control of its destiny, or that it is in no way in
control of its destiny, so that it has no responsibility to shape itself. Likes and dislikes, attachment, inclination
and aversion, confusion and fear are all identified as producing error about things as they are.
The notion is
pretty clear. Such states leads us to self-deception and wishful thinking, which prevents us from seeing the
world as it is. Confusion is conceived as an almost deliberate state, like willful stupidity. The view of the Jains
that the soul is by nature omniscient has its echo in Buddhist thought, but one is by nature perceptive, inclined
to see things as they are, for a Buddhist, not omniscient. It is these harmful mental states, leading to
self-deception, escapism, and deliberate stupidity, that cover over our natural insightful intelligence. So strong
are our tendencies to find metaphysical backing for our fondest delusions that Gautama hesitated to teach the
Dharma, fearing it would be misinterpreted, and converted to yet another metaphysical system reinforcing
ignorance, rather than becoming a vehicle of enlightenment.
Thus, when he did decide to teach, he adopted
the gradual method of instruction, telling each hearer what he needed to hear if he was to make progress, even
if it contradicted what was told another hearer, and would be contradicted by the Buddha himself later if the
person seized on it to reinforce his grasping.
Elsewhere a large number of metaphysical views will be listed and rejected as unknowable. For the
most part, they fall under these heads:
(1) The world is eternal, or is not eternal.
(2) The world is finite, or is not finite, in extent.
(3) The Soul is or is not identical with the body.
(4) The Tathagata exists, or does not exist, or both, or neither, after his death.
The chief metaphysical error for the Buddhists was the belief in the Self or Atman. This belief is
assigned a number of sources. One interesting suggestion, much emphasized later in Chan teachings, is that the
subject-predicate form of a sentence gives rise to the belief. “Who feeds on consciousness?” “Of whom is there
decay and death?”
The idea is clearly that we look for a reality to correspond to the subject, for an agent to
perform the action named in the predicate, and in fact there need not be any such predicate, since the sentence
need not indicate a fact of the same structure it itself has.
[Transition to positive account how to get knowledge –– in addition to below, the end of the Canki Sutta of
note 4... There must be such an account, for he only criticizes the various bad methodologies on the ground
that they do not yield certainty, and so do not produce knowledge, so since he claims direct knowledge, this
must involve certainty, and that is why we shouldn’t settle for anything less. So his account seems to be that
there is knowledge, gained through experience = direct knowledge, and experience can be trusted as long a
it is not messed up by grasping and wishful thinking. In connection with this, sensory experience...
In a more central account, it is suggested that, “depending on the visual organ and the visible objects...,
arises visual consciousness; the meeting together of these three is contact; because of this contact arises feeling.
What one feels, one perceives.” Note the shift to a personal verb here. The perception gives rise to the notion
that someone is perceiving. “What one perceives, one reasons about; what one reason about, one is obsessed
with.” The reasoning is perhaps that dwelling on the thing that is forbidden in the meditation of awareness,
where one is simply to note each passing thought and perception, and let it go by. Obsession, according to the
commentators, includes craving for external things, self-conceit or obsession with one’s self-image, and
obsession with dogmatic views that will support the latter. “What one is obsessed with, due to that, concepts
characterized by such perceptions assail him in regard to visible objects cognizable by the visual organ,
belonging to the past, future and present.” These concepts include self, duty, and anything else bearing the
notion of importance. They “assail” the person. That is, although they are only projected onto our perceptual
field, the person reacts to them as though they were real and outside him.
So one who sees things as they are,
without projecting his obsessive views into his experience, will not perceive a self or anything with
self-nature.
Buddhism is faced with a problem, given its skeptical views on metaphysical knowledge. Since Gautama
advances certain metaphysical views himself, for instance, the notion that nothing abides, and there is no self,
how can he justify this procedure? In part the answer is that he does not mean to deny the views of others here,
but only to indicate that no self, self-nature, and the like, is to be found in experience. A self beyond our
experience, of course, could not affect the issue, since its characteristics are not known, so that one cannot be
obsessed with its nature or with getting it what is best for it, since that, too, is unknown if it is not given in
experience. So when Gautama was asked what constitutes “everything,” he answered that the six sense organs
(which include mind) and their objects, namely form, sound, odor, taste, the tangible, and concepts, are, but
to posit anything further leads only to vexation and worry, for it would have to be beyond the realm of
experience.
The point seems to be that to posit anything non-empirical is to posit what can have no bearing
on one’s life, since it cannot enter one’s experience, one’s world. Thus, however we regard the non-empirical,
we can only live in the world we actually experience, and so it is best to set aside these questions of the
non-empirical as bootless.
So the Buddhist metaphysical tenets must be rooted in experience. In fact, testimony is permitted,
though it must in the end be replaced by knowledge based on one’s own experience and reflection on it.
Reasoning and inductive inference based on one’s experience are permitted, and it is allowed that some
experience might be extra-sensory, and available only to the practitioner of Yoga.
So inductive inference on
the basis of direct perception, both sensory and extra-sensory, establishes universal causality, the impermanence
of things, the non-satisfactoriness of things (that they are all “ill”, that is, not objectively valuable by their
natures, nor specified by the world as the end for man), and the non-substantiality of things. That is, in each
case we find that we have no experience of such a thing, and eventually we conclude that there is never any
experience of such a thing, at which point we should abandon its pursuit, and live as though there were no such
thing. Thus Buddhism permits us to make general inference about how experience must always go, but it does
not permit us to go beyond experience and speak of what cannot be and never has been experienced.
[It seems that nothing very sophisticated is involved here. All knowledge comes from experience, we are so
built that our experience is reliable, direct knowledge, as long as craving does not enter the picture and lead
us to conclusions that far exceed experience. Somehow, a Buddha has direct knowledge gained from yogic
powers as well as sensory stuff, but this might well be intended to be read as knowledge of psychological
processes rather than actual rebirths...]
* * * * *
According to the doctrine of causality in the early Buddhist scriptures, causality has four characteristics,
(1) Objectivity, (2) Necessity, (3) Invariability, and (4) Conditionality.
The first characteristic is asserted to
deny that cause and effect are appearances only, or a matter of mere names. The reality of causal relations, and
so of the natural world, is insisted on.
So it is emphasized in several places that the doctrine of causation was
always true, and is merely discovered by the Tathagata, not invented by him.
The second and third
characteristics assert that the cause is necessary for its effect, so that its removal will remove the effect, and
sufficient for its effect, so that the effect invariably follows the cause.
Thus the Nyaya notion of causation and
its rational establishment is accepted. These characteristics of causation are cited, in particular, when the
intention is to assert that the failure to discover the cause is simply due to our ignorance. For any given case
a causal explanation, involving a causal law establishing a necessary and sufficient condition for the event
explained, is always available if we can just discover it.
The last characteristic of causal connections is what distinguishes Buddhists from naturalists such as the
Nyaya. Its meaning is that no causal law ever expressed in a causal explanation is more than prima facie true.
The law invariably holds only under certain further conditions which cannot be entirely spelled out, and may
not be known to us at all. In effect, this means that every causal judgment is made in a context that cannot be
made entirely explicit. What is the point of saying this?
In some of the scriptures the point seems to be to find a middle road between determinism and the
denial of causality altogether. But this must not be misread. Buddhism in fact has little sympathy for those who
are desperate to rule out determinism in order to leave room for the absolutely uncaused, free actions of our
Selves. The real target of the Buddhist attack is rather fatalism, the view that it does not matter if we make an
effort or not. It does matter, else the attempt to gain Nirvana will be useless. The doctrine of the conditionality
of causation helps by making it clear that the ordinary causal processes that predispose us to rebirth, ignorance,
and suffering depend on certain conditions for their effectiveness. If we can determine what those conditions
are, we can then undermine them and bring the process of re-birth to a halt. Moreover, we can do whatever
is necessary to accomplish this, if the causal roots of such an action are present. (In particular, the causal roots
for making an effort must be present.) It is repeatedly emphasized that enlightenment and the attainment of
the Arhant are causally conditioned, and only occur with the right causal background. No attempt is made to
establish free will and responsibility for our actions through some form of indeterminism.
But the chief use of the doctrine of the conditionality of causation is to undermine the notion that there
can be a self. The self is supposed to be the true agent, entirely responsible for one’s action. Thus the Jains
postulate individual souls that have a radical, indeterministic freedom of will. They are morally responsible for
their actions because they themselves (the soul, not some event) form the only causal antecedent to their
actions. Such a view amounts to a rejection of the conditionality of causal laws, since the cause acts in an
unconditioned manner here. Similarly, Buddhism rejects the view that would make the real self the Universe
at large, or the Brahman behind the natural world, so that the unconditioned totality acts as one’s self. By
extension, the svabhava, a substantial form akin to the self, but lying behind the actions of natural objects, is
also, as an unconditioned cause, to be rejected.
Thus the hope of finding unconditioned, ultimate natural laws
is held to be a vain one. In the end, it was insisted that events cause events, never do things or selves, in some
unconditioned way, cause events. A thing causes an event only if the right events have determined that it act
in the way required to produce that event.
Moreover, by a natural extension of the doctrine ultimate reasons and values are rejected. Nothing is
a good reason for doing or believing a thing except under the right conditions, and nothing is valuable except
under the right conditions. Thus the self viewed as the ultimately valuable, the Kantian good will (which we
hope turns out to be ourselves) which is the only thing that is in itself valuable and is the source of value, these
things are ruled out as impossibilities.
Is early Buddhism anti-realist, then? In a way it is, since it insists that it is useless to speculate about an
unconditioned, ultimate, reality. The assertion is not generally that there is no Self, or that there are no
unconditioned causes, at all, but only that no such things can occur in experience. There may be such things,
one might suppose, but since we cannot experience them, their existence can have no bearing on our lives.
And, indeed, it is clear that for all their agnosticism on such metaphysical questions, the Buddhists did not wish
to reject the reality of the empirical world, but only to insist that we must always approach every reality from
within a context, and never as a whole with nothing outside it that can determine what it is or influence its
behavior. But I suspect the Buddhist view goes deeper than that. The insistence that the thing is not to be found
in experience leads not merely to agnosticism, but in the end to a rejection of such categories of speech
altogether. The objectivity of the world and of causal processes is to be maintained without any reference to
the existence, or the non-existence, of an ultimate, unconditioned, reality. Such a reality is not merely not
given in experience, but cannot be given in experience, and as a result, should play no role in our view of the
world. In particular, it should not play a negative role, for Buddhists are not subjectivists who wish to deny
reality to the natural world. They simply have no truck with the notion of an unconditioned reality.
A view of the sort required might go like this: (1) All causal relations hold between events, there being
no essential nature (svabhava) or self (atman) that produces activity out of itself. (2) All causal laws connecting
events are conditioned, and so prima facie. (3) The nature of an event is itself conditioned, for it is this or that
depending on the context in which it occurs. Which causal laws are to be applied to it depends on what sort
of event it is, so this “conditioning” passes over to causal laws applying to the event as well. (4) Thus nothing
is what it is absolutely, but perhaps an unconditioned reality can be found in the whole of things, which has
nothing outside it to condition it. But such a whole does not exist, because the world is of indefinite extent,
as is time, so that no finite whole can be found.
(5) If one suggests that the requisite whole is somehow
infinite, then it might be argued that no causal laws bearing on such a whole can be proposed. Alternatively,
one might point out the mathematical antinomies that arise when one deals with illegitimate totalities, and
suggest that similar antinomies must arise in the case of this whole = reality. Thus nothing will exist or take
place that is not conditioned both as a cause and effect, and in its very essential nature. Such a view seems
possible, and is surely not subjectivist. For one thing, the conditions may well be right for something to be of
a given sort, or for a given causal law to actually operate. It is not our everyday reality, but only the ultimate
reality of the philosopher and the scientist that is attacked.
Given all this, it might well be wondered how the Buddhist thinks causal laws are known, and how he
thinks that such universally valid principless as No-self and the conditionality of causes are known. Causal laws
are said to be known by inductive inference, and thus a certain skepticism is enforced, since it is insisted that
incomplete inductive inference (the only sort we ever have) can go wrong. It is insisted in particular that not
even Yogic powers give knowledge of the future, but only inductive inference can do so.
I don’t know of a
detailed account of inductive inference in the Nikayas, but it presumably is a matter of hypothesis testing, with
perhaps some special influence that leads one to good hypotheses.
* * * * *
Let us now turn to some of the details of Buddhist cosmology, which will clarify the doctrine of
causation.
Later Scholastics speak of five realms of causation, the physical, divided into organic and inorganic
causation, the psychological, the moral, and the spiritual realm.
The notion seems to be that each of these
realms can be treated independently of the others, so that type-reductionism of, say, biological laws to physics
and chemistry, is not to be found. The first three realms are familiar enough to us. The moral realm is the
realm of karmic connections, and the spiritual realm is the realm of Nirvana, in which the Buddha acts free
from karmic influences. The postulation of these five realms is rooted in a consideration of the Scriptures.
The chief discussion of the details of a particular causal process in the Tripitaka occurs in the twelve-fold
formula concerning rebirth, which elucidates the the second Noble Truth. (1) From ignorance (avidya) of the
dharma, which is at the root of it, arises (2) dispositions or forces (samskarah, “aggregates”), or character traits.
these two phases are taken by Buddhaghosa to refer to the first life of the person being considered, and the
character traits are taken to result in a new being, (3) whose consciousness (vijnana) continues one’s own, so
one’s character determines that a new consciousness will arise, and determines its characteristics. This is the
law of Kharma, of course. Consciousness gives rise to (4) the psychophysical person (nama and rupa, “mind and
body”) which can be sensed and referred to, that is, a foetus in whom the new consciousness has come to
reside. This person gives rise to (5) the six gateways of perception (sadayatana), or the sense organs, which give
rise to (6) contact (sparsa) with the objects of sense, that is, sensory awareness of the minimal sort leading to
reflex actions. From this sensory awareness arises (7) feeling (vedana), that is, awareness of the pleasantness,
unpleasantness or neutrality of what one is experiencing. From those feelings arises (8) craving or attachment
(trishna), whether to feelings, or to the existence or nonexistence of a self. From craving comes (9) grasping
(upadana), the activities by which one clings to what one craves and avoids what one craves to avoid. In later
thought this grasping is essentially connected to the consciousness of a self. It gives rise to (10) becoming or
existence (bhava). This is the last stage of the second life in Buddhagosa’s view of the thing, though Tibetans
take it to be conception, and so the beginning of the third life. From becoming arises (11) birth, and from birth
arises (12) ageing, death, sorrow, lamentation, suffering, dejection, vexation, and this whole mass of ill.
Taken on the surface, the doctrine clearly concerns the causal conditions that lead to rebirth after
death, though this rebirth is not to be read as the continuation of the Self in a new life, since there is no Self.
Rather, it involves the same sort of connection that holds between earlier and later stages of the same person,
between birth and death, earlier conditions setting the stage for and producing later mental events, so that a
coherent causal story is followed out and one can view the person as a continuing unity of a sort. But a different
reading of the thing is possible, for this could be read as concerning not only the rebirth that occurs after death,
but also a metaphorical rebirth from moment to moment of the self, or, rather, of the illusory consciousness
of a self which we cling to so that it controls our lives. On this reading we have an account how someone who
begins (1) ignorant of the dharma, and possessing (2) certain established character traits, that is, an organized
and coherent personality, will become entrapped in (3) “consciousness”, or the illusion that there is a self. Such
a person will, immediately after this, be conscious of his self and its characteristics, and thus (4) the
psychophysical personality of the next moment in time will arise as a continuation of the previous
psychophysical personality, that is, it will be what it is, that psychophysical personality, because of the
consciousness it has of “its” previous stages. (Compare the notion of identity of a person over time in Locke’s
treatment, which makes it rely on the later stage’s memory of the earlier stage’s actions and thoughts. Of
course, the awareness of its self, past or present, is illusory, but the account here has to be an account how an
illusory world arises.) This personality will have (5) perceptual organs, but these too are only a continuing
process with earlier stages, so that the presence of sense organs now is conditioned by the earlier stage of one’s
personality, which is connected to the present stage by memory. But from sense organs arises (6) sensation,
contact with other things, and from this sensation or awareness how things are there arise (7) feelings of
pleasure or displeasure, which produce (8) craving, which leads to (9) grasping. Grasping is what gives rise to
(10) (the illusion of) existence, that is the production and maintenance of the illusion of the self, the chief
object of grasping being the self. Thus (11) birth of the self occurs, and (12) all the ills of the world come to
be, since they all attach to this illusory self, which must needs suffer death, ageing, loss, and so on. Taken in
this way, the doctrine clearly entails the recommendation that we eliminate ignorance. It is an expansion of
the second noble truth concerning the arising of ill.
The treatment of the doctrine in later Abhidharma is generally ambiguous precisely because the same
chain of events that leads to rebirth in a new body is also conceived in Abhidharma to lead to the production
of the new self in the next moment within a single life. Since nothing persists more than a moment, rebirth in
fact occurs continuously. It is possible, I think, to take it that the metaphorical reading was in fact the Buddha’s
intention, and that the Abhidharmic doctrine of the momentary nature of all existents arose precisely because
the monks knew that this was the right way to read it, and so, when they got literal about ontology, were
forced to make room for the self to create the next self from one moment to the next. The Buddha himself
probably thought of the basic things making up the world as events, including such things as the presence of
a body of a certain sort at a certain time, the usual view in later Buddhist thought, which means the
Abhidharmists were pretty close to the mark. But why must we read it in this metaphorical way rather than
dealing straightforwardly with rebirth after one’s death?
The point of the exercise here is salvational. One is to see that birth is the cause of ill, and so determine
how to prevent birth. Now this would fit in with the views of any number of groups in India at the time of the
Buddha, who sought an end to the life of this world in order to enter a life separated from the causal nexus of
the cosmos, a life of perfect bliss. But we have seen that Gautama rejected the possibility of such a life. For him,
death was simply the end of the matter. Indeed, it is hard to believe that he could have taken the end of further
rebirths in the Jain or Hindu sense as the aim to be achieved, though, assuming that he accepted that
reincarnation does occur, and would cease to occur once enlightenment was attained, he might have accepted
the end of one’s incarnations as a necessary, and presumably unfortunate, result of attaining nirvana. The life
to be aimed for, the Buddha insists, is not that in which no experience occurs, but the life of ordinary
experience, but cleansed of grasping, anger, and ignorance. The metaphorical reading of the chain of causation,
not the literal one, fits this aim, for it is the end of the rebirth of the illusory consciousness of self that is the
aim, not the end of experienced life altogether. I suspect, then, that the Buddha had no belief one way or the
other concerning the matter of multiple lives and rebirths, or was skeptical about it, and certainly regarded it
as a matter of no import to salvation.
The metaphor, however, was useful in part because of its literal sense. Many laymen and monks must
have taken it literally, given that they expected a way of salvation to free them from the conventional round
of rebirths, and the religion would be honored by laymen for attaining this aim. Those who were capable would
see the ironic intent, and understand the metaphor. It was probably a necessary, if very subtle, maneuver, for
to deny the whole doctrine of karma and rebirth and put the whole affair literally would probably have left the
Buddha largely without converts, given how engrained these doctrines were in the Indians of his time. A similar
situation exists with the teaching of morality for the purpose of gaining favorable rebirths. A sly monk would
understand the real purpose, which was to lead the layman closer to nirvana in this life, but to try to tell that
to the layman would be to court disaster.
The statement of this twelve-fold chain led later Buddhist thinkers to claim that consciousness, the
sense organs, and the like, would all vanish with the elimination of ignorance. Such a reading suggests that the
Buddha is supernatural, a view followed by some deviant later Buddhists, but the usual intepretation of such
pronouncements is that a delusory conception of the sense organs or whatever is eliminated. In particular, there
is a delusion in the consciousness of previous stages of the unenlightened person, since she sees a Self as
continuing from the earlier stages into the present stage, and this contamination of one’s sense of the
continuation of one’s self spreads to one’s view of the new stage of the person. Of course one continues to
have sense organs in a way even if one is a Buddha, but the unenlightened man does not see his sense organs
as they really are, so that he has illusory sense organs. This is a plausible reading, but it may be that it does
violence to Gautama’s intention. He might have intended that the later stages, perhaps the last six starting with
feeling, are eliminated when ignorance is, since dispositions cannot give rise to these in the absence of
ignorance, though it does give rise to consciousness and such, which are present even in a Buddha.
An alternative reading of the twelve-fold formula sometimes encountered would put ignorance at the
nave of the wheel of becoming, with ageing, death and the like at the rim. Items (2) - (11) are placed as spokes
of the wheel. The ten spokes would form a chain of causes that has ignorance as an underlying condition, and
ageing, death and the like would be by-products of this chain.
Whether this reading can be taken as correct
or not, it indicates a resource of the interpreter—given that all causes are conditioned, it need not be the case
that the twelve-fold formula is presenting a chain of causes. It may well be that some items in the table are
preconditions that must be met if the causal connections between later items are to hold, not earlier parts of
the chain.
In the more popular version of the Wheel of Becoming (Divyavadana) there are five spokes, the regions
between the spokes representing the five realms into which one may be reborn. These realms are the hells, the
world of animals, the world of the pretas or hungry ghosts (the wandering ghosts of those whose funeral rites
were not properly observed), the world of the gods and the world of human beings. All these realms are
illusory, that is, the creatures therein are all dominated by the illusion of a self, and so the worlds they live in
are informed by their notions of their selves. None of them see the world as it is. The Tathagata, or enlightened
one, will stand outside the five realms. In the nave of the wheel stand desire (or passion), hatred (or anger),
and stupidity (or ignorance), the three poisons, which keep the whole wheel in motion, represented in a snake,
a dove or cock, and a pig. Around the edge are arranged the causes (nidanas) in the twelve-fold chain, and the
whole thing is being eaten by impermanence. Outside the wheel there is a circle of Nirvana, and a Buddha
pointing to it. The Tibetans added a sixth realm of angry gods to the five.
These six realms can be taken to represent the places where one can be reincarnated, but the more
sophisticated take them as six personality-types into which one is reborn from moment to moment. Hell
creatures are destructive toward themselves and others; hungry ghosts, starving with mouths too small to admit
more than a grain of rice, are those who cannot be satisfied with anything; while the animals pursue their aims
without intelligence, reflection or adaptability. All of these fall short of the human beings, who are capable of
sympathy and friendliness for themselves and others, capable of satisfaction, and intelligent in their pursuit of
their aims. The Gods differ from human beings in that they need nothing, and are perfectly happy. The only
problem with being a God is that the state is impermanent. A God who doubts himself, and begins blustering
and boasting to reassure himself about his perfection, is the Tibetan Angry God, and he is at war with the gods.
The Scholastics discuss in detail the ways in which one can move from one of these realms to the other, and
the result is an interesting psychology of personality. Only those in the human realm can follow the path to
enlightenment, for only they are reflective enough to understand that it is all suffering, and to seek a way out.
Typically Buddhist writers speak of existing things when they really mean the illusory things of these
six worlds.
It must be born in mind that Buddhism often treats these illusory things as a kind of reality, and
then goes on to say crazy things about them, asserting their non-existence, for instance. After denying the
existence of things, the text will often go on to guard against a misconception, since it might be taken that one
really means to deny that there is anything at all, rather than denying only that the illusory things of the six
realms exist, so it will be denied that things do not exist. Then similar moves to guard against misunderstanding
will lead to denials that things both exist and do not exist, and that they neither exist nor do not exist. Thus
the typical dialectic of Buddhism is established on the consideration of the illusory world, and the fact that the
respondent to the master is incapable of speaking without referring to his illusions.
The Buddhist cosmology, then, whether it be taken literally, so that the Buddha’s Nirvana becomes
a sort of highest heaven, or taken in the more sophisticated way indicated above, is built around the notion of
karma and rebirth. Accounts of how these doctrines are known to be true take on the same ambiguity as the
cosmology. So we are told that “With his clear paranormal clairvoyant vision he sees beings dying and being
reborn, the low and the high, the fair and the ugly, the good and the evil each according to his karma.”
Taken
literally, the claim is the same as one we would find among the Hindus, who presumably take the realms of
illusion to be real. The enlightened sage verifies the cosmology and the metaphysics of Hinduism by his
super-normal yogic vision. It is quite likely, though, that Gautama set little store by such vision, and if we read
this in the more sophisticated way, it will indicate that Gautama is able, with his insight into reality as it is, to
see certain facts of psychology, that is, how the illusory self arises and goes through its transformations in
response to psychological causes. Psychological rather than cosmological insight will be indicated, and one need
not suppose anything beyond what we regard as natural. By the way, it is to be noted that one point of the
passage is that these truths are known by experience, not by authority.
In any case, Buddhism insists that the laws of karma are just as conditional as any other laws. That is
why those of yogic attainments don’t agree on their observations as to karma. In general, their observations
are informed by one-sidedness, so that they never consider the causal factors they don’t like to think about.
Some even say that no deeds at all affect one’s future existence (the Carvakan group). Gautama argued that
laws of karma are always prima facie. Conversion just before one’s death, good deeds outweighing the bad,
and so on, may block karmic consequences.
In particular, enlightenment entirely upsets karmic laws, since
there is then no longer a self to suffer karmic consequences. Indeed, if karmic laws were unconditioned, then
the holy life could not save one from suffering.
The reason is that even good karma leads to formation of an
ego-consciousness, and so rebirth, though in a heaven. In no way can the accumulation of any kind of karma
lead to the extinction of the self. To some extent this point is obscured in the texts by the notion that
enlightenment is only attained by great virtue, and is, of course, a consequence of one’s acts, so that it comes
to appear like a highest heaven, the highest reward of good karma. But generally the paradoxical alternative
view, placing the Tathagata outside the world of karmic consequences, asserts itself somewhere.
There is considerable discussion in the scriptures and the Abhidarma commentaries on it concerning
psychology in general and the causal factors leading to enlightenment in particular. Three factors noted in
particular are merit acquired in the past by good deeds, life in appropriate surroundings, and proper resolve
and application.
The causes of action are divided into three groups. Contact, that is, stimuli leading to reflex action,
this being the sixth of the twelve causes, is operative even in an infant in the womb, and gives rise to feeling,
the seventh cause.
Unconscious motives, which seem to correspond to the eighth of the causes, include the
desire for pleasure and perpetuation of life, and the aversion to death and pain. They are unconscious, not in
Freud’s sense of being repressed, but rather in virtue of being instinctive. They are present before the
consciousness of a self is, though they are still the result of ignorance, that is, perhaps, an inchoate notion of
the objective importance of things that will naturally lead to self-consciousness.
The third cause is conscious
motives, that, is, the motives belonging to an ego-conscious being, including attachment, aversion, and
confusion. They correspond to the ninth of the twelve causes.
The absence of such motives is generally cited
as the cause of good actions.
The Self is generally said to be an aggregate of the four elements, space, and consciousness (when the
physical self is envisioned), or of the five aggregates (skandhas) (when the psychical self is envisioned).
The
birth of a new being requires coitus of the parents, a mother ready to conceive, which together produce the
physical foetus, or nama-rupa. The physical being is completed by the influence of the consciousness of the
dieing person, it being supposed that the influence of the old consciousness is necessary if the foetus is to attain
maturity.
If one has attained Nirvana, rebirth will not occur, for the elimination of craving for existence
prevents the psychic influence on the foetus.
All this is put as though reincarnation were at issue, but it makes
the most sense if one takes it allegorically to refer to re-birth of a self-conscious being from one moment to the
next. At least the influence of the desire for continuation of the Self makes sense in that more esoteric context.
The resultant self is sometimes analyzed into a body and mind, and sometimes into a body, feelings,
perception, the aggregates, and consciousness. In one place, it is analyzed into nama, the mental elements
among the skandhas, that is, feeling, perception, volition, contact and attention, and rupa, the body, that is, the
four elements and what is in them.
* * * * *
All things that exist, that is, that exist in the illusory world of those with an illusory consciousness of
self, are said to have three marks: (1) Impermanence, (2) Unsatisfactoriness, and (3) Non-selfhood. Associated
with these marks are the four perverted views (viparyasa) which lead to the continuation of our suffering, that
permanence is to be found in the impermanent, satisfaction or ease in what is unsatisfactory, the self in what
is not self, and delight in what is intrinsically unpleasant.
Impermanence is probably nothing more than a
matter of the inevitability of eventual destruction, though Abhidharma took it to mean that nothing persisted
for any time at all. If the idea is that all reality consists in events, with no permanent substance persisting
through any change or series of actions, the source of the Abhidharma notion would be clear enough, and the
absence of any theory of moments (ksana) in the early texts provide no problem for the postulation of such a
view. “Unsatisfactoriness” is a much better translation of duhkha than “ill” or “suffering.” The point is that
nothing lasts, so that nothing is satisfactory to one who grasps, for such a one demands permanence.
Thus
grasping invariably results in suffering. “What is impermanent, that is not worth delighting in, not worth being
impressed by, not worth clinging to.”
This is not to say that life is all inevitably unsatisfactory. The claim is only that it is unsatisfactory for
one who grasps after something permanent. The enlightened arhat, who has extinguished all grasping after the
permanent, should find life perfectly satisfactory. For those who has not extinguished grasping life is all of it
unsatisfactory, but they may not realize it. One first realizes that life seems inevitably to throw up stretches
of suffering in one’s way. Only after some experience of life without grasping does one start to realize that
even what were thought of as pleasant times were not really so. Meditative practice leads people to an
awareness of life in this very moment which most of us ordinarily avoid. One result is the realization of the
seriousness and extent of our escapism, of the way in which we take events that were miserable to live through
and retell them in such a way that they look exciting and romantic, the way in which we distract ourselves
continuously from our anger and unhappiness through entertainment, superficial socializing, fantasizing, work,
or whatever other distraction can be contrived, and the way in which we ignore what is really going on in order
to act out dramas within which our importance and value are made clear. Meditation takes away all our toys
and games by blocking our continuous resort of fantasy and story-telling about ourselves and our lives, and
leaves us face to face with the reality of the moment, and our desperate desire to be important and secure.
Finally, one comes to recognize that life is unsatisfactory as long as there remains any grasping, that is, an