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Liker to those brilliant visions the heavens of Form seem to have been than to the "quiet air" and "the meadow of fresh verdure" on that slope of Limbo where

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"Genti v' eran con occhi tardi e gravi ",

"Parlavan rado, con voci soavi".

Yet the rare, sweet utterances of these devas of Europe, discoursing with "the Master of those who know", may better have accorded with the Buddhist conception of the remotest worlds as inhabited by "beings made of mind" than the choric dances of the spheres above.

Among these shadowy beings, however, we are far from the fully bodied out idea of the "all form" and the "skandha of form" of the second and third Books of the Manual. It may be that the worlds of r u pa and a rūpa were so called in popular tradition because in the former, visible, and in the latter, invisible beings resided.1 But there is no lack of information concerning the attributes of form in the "sensuous universe" of ka må va caram. If the list given of these in the first chapter of Book II be consulted, it will be seen that I have not followed the reading of the PTS. edition when it states that all form is kā māvacaram eva, rūpā vacaram eva, that is, is both related to the universe of sense and also to that of form. The Siamese edition reads kāmāva caram eva na rupā vacaram

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eva.

It may seem at first sight illogical to say that form is not related to the universe of form. But the better logic is really on the side of the Siamese. In §§ 1281-4 of my translation

1 The Suttas leave us in no doubt as to the presence of material conditions in the Brahma sphere of the Rūpa world and its devas. Cf. Kindred Sayings, i, 173: The shoulder, knee, arms of its ruler and his robe. He assumed a relatively grosser body to enable him to visit the "lower" heavens. Dialogues, ii, 244, 264. Whether a yet grosser one was needed for earth-visits is not stated. Because of this glimpse of sublimated matter in the Rūpa world I called it, in Maung Tin's Expositor, the realm of attenuated matter. But no good term is forthcoming. Cf. note, p. ciii.

it is seen that the a vacaras were mutually exclusive as to their contents. To belong to the universe of form involved exclusion from that of sense. But in the inquiry into "all form" we are clearly occupied with facts about this present world and about women and men as we know them-in a word, with the world of sense. Hence the "all form " of Book II is clearly not the form of the rūpāvacaram. It is not used with the same implications.

Further than this, further than the vague avacarageography gathered already from other sources, the Manual does not bring us, nor the Commentary either.

We come, then, to rūpam in the sensuous plane of being, or at least to such portion of that plane as is concerned with human beings; to sabbam rūpam and to its distribution in each human economy, termed rūpakkhand ho. Under it are comprised four ultimate primary, or underivable, constituents and twenty-three secondary, dependent, or derived modes. Thus :

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classification, so rich in interesting suggestions, would occupy itself a volume. In an introduction of mere notes I will offer only a few general considerations.

We are probably first impressed by the psychological aspect taken of a subject that might seem to lend itself to purely objective consideration. The main constituents of the material world, classified in the East as we know them to have been classified, contemporaneously, in the West, are set down in terms of subjective or conscious experience. The a podhatu is not called explicitly the Intangible; virtually, however, it and the other three "Great Phenomena ", or literally "Great things that have Become ",1 are regarded from the point of view of how they affect us by way of sense. We might add, how they affect us most fundamentally by way of sense. In the selection of Touch among the senses the Indian tradition joins hands with Demokritus.

of this no more at present.

But

Again, in the second table, or secondary forms, the same standpoint is predominant. We have the action and reaction of sense-object and sense, the distinctive expressions of sex and of personality generally, and the phenomena of organic life, as "sensed" or inferred, comprehended under the

1 Better in Greek τà vóμeva, or in German die vier grossen Gewordenen. In the Compendium (1910), S. Z. Aung and I agree to use the term "Great essen tial". P. M. Tin, in the Expositor, follows suit. How the Buddhist logic exactly reconciled the anomaly of a podhātu as underived and yet as inaccessible to that sense which comes into contact with the underived is not, in the Manual, clearly made out. In hot water, as the Cy. says, there is heat, gas, and solid, and hence we feel it. Yet by the definition there must be in fluid a something underived from these three elements.

The Buddhist Sensationalism was opposed to the view taken in the Upanishad, where the senses are derived from prajñā (rendered by Professor Deussen "consciousness"), and again from the World Soul. In the Garbha Up., however, sight is spoken of as fire. The Buddhist view was subsequently again opposed by the Sankhya philosophy, but not by the Nyāya.

most general terms. Two modes of form alone are treated objectively space and food. And of these, too, the aspect taken has close reference to the conscious personality. Ā kā so is really o kā s o, room, or opportunity, for life and movement. Food, though described as to its varieties in objective terms, is referred to rather in the abstract sense of nutrition and nutriment than as nutritive matter. (Cf. p. 203, n. 3.)

Or we may be more especially struck by the curious selection and classification exercised in regard to the items of the catalogue of form.

Now, the compilers of this or of any of the canonical books were not interested in rupam on psychological grounds as such. Their object was not what we should term scientific. They were not inquiring into forms, either as objective existences or as mental constructions, with any curiosity respecting the macrocosm, its parts, or its order. They were not concerned with problems of primordial An, of first causes, or of organic evolution, in the spirit which has been operative in Western thought from Thales (claimed by Europe) to Darwin. For them, as for the leaders of that other rival movement in our own culture, the tradition of Socrates and Plato, man was, first and last, the subject supremely worth thinking about. And man was worth thinking about as a moral being. The physical universe was the background and accessory, the support and the “fuel” (u pādā nam), of the evolution of the moral life. That universe was necessary to man (at least during his sojourn on the physical plane), but it was only in so far as it affected his ethical life that he could profitably study it. The Buddhist, like the Socratic view, was that of primitive manWhat is the good of it?"-transformed and sublimated by the evolution of the moral ideal. The early questioning: Is such and such good for life-preservation, for racepreservation, for fun? or is it bad? or is it indeterminate? becomes, in evolved ethics: Does it make for my perfection,

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for others' perfection, for noblest enjoyment? does it make for the contrary? does it make for neither?

And the advance in moral evolution which was attempted by Buddhist philosophy, coming as it did in an age of metaphysical dogmatism and withal of scepticism, brought with it the felt need of looking deeper into those data of mental procedure on which dogmatic speculation and ethical convictions were alike founded.1

Viewed in this light, the category of rūpam or of rūpakkhand ho becomes fairly intelligible, both as to the selection and classification of subject matter and as to the standpoint from which it is regarded. As a learner of ethical doctrine pursuing either the lower or the higher ideal, the Buddhist was concerned with the external world just as far as it directly and inevitably affected his moral welfare and that of other moral beings, that is to say, of all conscious animate beings. To this extent did he receive instruction concerning it.

In the first place, the great ultimate phenomena of his physical world were one and the same as the basis of his own physical being. That had form; so had this. That was built up of the four elements; so was this. That came into being, persisted, then dissolved; this was his destiny, too, as a temporary collocation or body, "subject to erasion, abrasion, dissolution, and disintegration." 2 And all that side of life which we call mind or consciousness, similarly conceived as collocations or aggregates, was bound up therein and on that did it depend.

Here, then, was a vital kinship, a common basis of physical being which it behoved the student of man to recognize and take into account, so as to hold an intelligent and consistent attitude towards it. The bhikkhu sekho 3

1 G. Croom Robertson, Philosophical Remains, p. 3.

2 D. i, 76, e.g.

3 The brother in orders undergoing training. M. i, 4.

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