Buddhist Philosophy

Buddha, it is said, used the popular language of the area he lived in, which was a Prakrit, a derivative of Sanskrit. He must have known Sanskrit, of course, but he preferred to speak in the popular tongue so as to reach the people. From this Prakrit developed the Pali language of the early Buddhist scriptures. Buddha's dialogues and other accounts and discussions were recorded in Pali long after his death, and these form the basis of Buddhism in Ceylon, Burma, and Siam, where the Hinayana form of Buddhism prevails. Some hundreds of years after Buddha there was a revival of Sanskrit in India, and Buddhist scholars wrote their philo-sophical and other works in Sanskrit. Ashvaghosha's writings and plays (the earliest plays we have), which are meant to be propaganda for Buddhism, are in Sanskrit. These Sanskrit writ-ings of Buddhist scholars in India went to China, Japan, Tibet, and Central Asia, where the Mahayana form of Buddhism pre-vailed. The age which gave birth to the Buddha had been one of tremendous mental ferment and philosophic inquiry in India. And not in India only for that was the age of Lao-tze and Confucius, of Zoroaster and Pythagoras. In India it gave rise to materialism as well as to the Bhagavad Gita, to Buddhism and Jainism, and to many other currents of thought which were subsequently to consoli-date themselves in the various systems of Indian philosophy. There were different strata of thought, one leading to another, and sometimes overlapping each other. Different schools of philosophy developed side by side with Buddhism, and Buddhism itself had schisms leading to the forma-tion of different schools of thought. The philosophic spirit gradually declined giving place to scholasticism and polemical controversy. Buddha had repeatedly warned his people against learned controversy over metaphysical problems. 'Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent,' he is reported to have said. Truth was to be found in life itself and not in argument about matters outside the scope of life and therefore beyond the ken of the human intellect. He emphasized the ethical aspects of life
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and evidently felt that these suffered and were neglected because
of a preoccupation with metaphysical subtleties. Early Buddhism
reflected to some extent this philosophic and rational spirit of the
Buddha, and its inquiries were based on experience. In the world
of experience the concept of pure being could not be grasped and
was therefore put aside; so also the idea of a creator God, which
was a presumption not capable of logical proof. Nevertheless the
experience remained and was real enough in a sense; what could
this be except a mere flux of becoming, ever changing into something
else ? So these intermediate degrees of reality were recognized
and further inquiry proceeded on these lines on a psychological basis.
Buddha, rebel as he was, hardly cut himself off from the ancient
faith of the land. Mrs. Rhys Davids says that 'Gautama was born
and brought up and lived and died as a Hindu.... There was not
much in the metaphysics and principles of Gautama which cannot
be found in one or other of the orthodox systems, and a great
deal of his morality could be matched from earlier or later Hindu
books. Such originality as Gautama possessed lay in the way in
which he adapted, enlarged, ennobled, and systematized that
which had already been well said by others; in the way in which
he carried out to their logical conclusion principles of equity and
justice already acknowledged by some of the most prominent
Hindu thinkers. The difference between him and other teachers
lay chiefly in his deep earnestness and in his broad public spirit
of philanthropy.'*
Yet Buddha had sown the seeds of revolt against the conventional
practice of the religion of his day. It was not his theory or
philosophy that was objected to—for every conceivable philosophy
could be advocated within the fold of orthodox belief so long as
it remained a theory—but the interference with the social life and
organization of the people. The old system was free and flexible
in thought, allowing for every variety of opinion, but in practice
it was rigid, and non-conformity with practice was not approved.
So, inevitably, Buddhism tended to break away from the old faith,
and, after Buddha's death, the breach widened.
With the decline of early Buddhism, the Mahayana form developed,
the older form being known as the Hinayana. It was in this
Mahayana that Buddha was made into a god and devotion to him
as a personal god developed. The Buddha image also appeared
from the Grecian north-west. About the same time there was a
revival of Brahminism in India and of Sanskrit scholarship.
Between the Hinayana and the Mahayana there was bitter
controversy and the debate and opposition to each other has
continued throughout subsequent history. The HinSyana countries
*This quotation, as well as much else, is taken from Sir S. Radhakrishnan" s 'Indian Philosophy
(George Allen and Unwin, London, 1940).
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(Ceylon, Burma, Siam) even now rather look down upon the
Buddhism that prevails in China and Japan, and I suppose this
feeling is reciprocated.
While the Hinayana adhered, in some measure, to the ancient
purity of doctrine and circumscribed it in a Pali Canon, the
Mahayana spread out in every direction, tolerating almost everything
and adapting itself to each country's distinctinve outlook.
In India it began to approach the popular religion; in each of the
other countries—China and Japan and Tibet—it had a separate
development. Some of the greatest of the early Buddhist thinkers
moved away from the agnostic attitude which Buddha had taken
up in regard to the existence of the soul and rejected it completely.
Among a galaxy of men of remarkable intellect, Nagarjuna
stands out as one of the greatest minds that India has produced.
He lived during Kanishka's reign, about the beginning of the
Christian era, and he was chiefly responsible for formulating the
Mahayana doctrines. The power and daring of his thought are
remarkable and he is not afraid of arriving at conclusions which
to most people must have appeared as scandalous and shocking.
With a ruthless logic he pursues his argument till it leads him to
deny even what he believed in. Thought cannot know itself and
cannot go outside itself or know another. There is no God apart
from the universe, and no universe apart from God, and both are
epually appearances.
And so he goes on till there is nothing left, no distinction between
truth and error, no possibility of understanding or misunderstanding
anything, for how can anyone misunderstand the
unreal? Nothing is real. The world has only a phenomenal existence;
it is just an ideal system of qualities and relations, in which
we believe but which we cannot intelligibly explain. Yet behind
all this experience he hints at something—the Absolute—which
is beyond the capacity of our thinking, for in the very process of
thought it becomes something relative.*
This absolute is often referred to in Buddhist philosophy as
Shunyata or nothingness (Shunya is the word for the zero mark)
*Professor Th. Stcherbatsky of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., in his book ' The
Conception of Buddhist Nirvana' (Leningrad, 1927) suggests that Nagarjuna should be placed
'among the great philosophers of humanity.' He refers to his 'wonderful style' which never
ceases to be interesting, bold, baffling, sometimes seemingly arrogant. He compares Nagarjuna's
views with those of Bradley and Hegel: 'Very remarkable are then the coincidences
between Nagarjuna's negativism and the condemnation by Mr. Bradley of almost every
conception of the everyday world: things and qualities, relations, space and time, change,
causation, motion, the self. From the Indian standpoint Bradley can be characterised as a
genuine Madhyamika. But above all these parallelisms we may perhaps find a still greater
family likeness between the dialectical method of Hegel and Nagarjuna's dialectics '
Stcherbatsky points out certain resemblances between some of the Buddhist schools of
philosophy and the outlook of modern science, especially the conception of the final condition
of the universe according to the law of entropy. He gives an interesting story. When the
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yet it is something very different from our conception of vacancy
or nothingness.* In our world of experience we have to call it
nothingness for there is no other word for it, but in terms of metaphysical
reality it means something transcendent and immanent
in all things.
Says a famous Buddhist scholar: 'It is on account of Shunyata
that everything becomes possible, without it nothing in the world
is possible.'
All this shows where metaphysics leads to and how wise was
Buddha's warning against such speculations. Yet the human
mind refuses to imprison itself and continues to reach out for
that fruit of knowledge which it well knows is beyond reach.
Metaphysics developed in Buddhist philosophy but the method
was based on a psychological approach. Again, it is surprising
to find the insight into the psychological states of the mind. The
subconscious self of modern psychology is clearly envisaged and
discussed. An extraordinary passage in one of the old books has been
pointed out to me. This reminds one in a way of the Oedipus
Complex theory, though the approach is wholly different.|
Four definite schools of philosophy developed in Buddhism,
two of these belonged to the Hinayana branch, and two to the
Mahayana. All these Buddhist systems of philosophy have their
origin in the Upanishads, but they do not accept the authority
of the Vedas. It is this denial of the Vedas that distinguishes them
from the so-called Hindu systems of philosophy which developed
about the same time. These latter, while accepting the Vedas
generally and, in a sense, paying formal obeisance to them, do
not consider them as infallible, and indeed go their own way without
much regard for them. As the Vedas and the Upanishads spoke
educational authorities of newly founded republic of Burials in Transbaikalia in the U.S.S.R.
started an anti-religious propaganda, they emphasized that modern science takes a materialistic
view of the universe. The Buddhist monks of that republic, who were Mahayanists,
retorted in a pamphlet, pointing out that materialism was not unknown to them and that,
in fact, one of their schools had developed a materialistic theory.
* Professor Stcherbatsky who is an authority on the subject, having personally examined the
original texts in various languages, including Tibetan, says that 'shunyata' is relativity.
Everything being relative and interdependent has no absoluteness by itself. Hence it is 'shunya.'
On the other hand, there is something entirely beyond the phenomenal world, but comprising
it, which might be considered the absolute. This cannot be conceived or described in terms
of the finite and phenomenal world and hence it is referred to as 'tathata' or thatness, suchness.
This absolute has also been called 'shunyata'.
f This occurs in Vasubandhu's' Abhidharmakosa', which was written in the early fifth century
A.C., collecting previous views and traditions. The original in Sanskrit has been lost. But
Chinese and Tibetan translations exist. The Chinese translation is by the famous Chinese
pilgrim to India, Hsuan Tsang. From this Chinese translation a French translation has been
made (Paris-Louvain, 1926). My colleague and companion in detention, Acharya Narendra
Dev, has been translating this book from the French into Hindi and English, and he
pointed out this passage to me. It is in the third chapter.
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with many voices, it was always possible for subsequent thinkers
to emphasize one aspect rather than another, and to build their
system on this foundation.
Professor Radhakrishnan thus describes the logical movement of
Buddhist thought as it found expression in the four schools. It
begins with a dualistic metaphysics looking upon knowledge as
a direct awareness of objects. In the next stage ideas are made
the media through which reality is apprehended, thus raising a
screen between mind and things. These two stages represent the
Hinayana schools. The Mahayana schools went further and
abolished the things behind the images and reduced all experience
to a series of ideas in their mind. The ideas of relativity and the
sub-conscious self come in. In the last stage—this was Nagarjuna's
Madhyamika philospohy or the middle way—mind itself is
dissolved into mere ideas, leaving us with loose units of ideas and
perceptions about which we can say nothing definite.
Thus we arrive finally at airy nothing, or something that is
so difficult to grasp for our finite minds that it cannot be described
or defined. The most we can say is that it is some kind of consciousness
—vijyana as it is called.
In spite of this conclusion arrived at by psychological and
metaphysical analysis which ultimately reduces the conception of
the invisible world or the absolute to pure consciousness, and thus
to nothing, so far as we can use or comprehend words, it is
emphasized that ethical relations have a definite value in our finite
world. So in our lives and in our human relations we have to conform
to ethics and live the good life. To that life and to this phenomenal
world we can and should apply reason and knowledge and
experience. The infinite, or whatever it may be called, lies somewhere
in the beyond and to it therefore these cannot be applied.