judicious pruning of everything it judged might wreck or hinder the evolution of a life of finer, higher quality. If we, admitting this intention, look on the frequent injunctions respecting what" was to be put away" (pa hata bba m)1 from the life of each disciple, whether by insight or by culture, whether by gentle or by forcible restraint,2 not as so much mere self-mortification and crippling of energy, but as expressions of selective culture for the better "forcing" of somewhat tender growths, we may, if we still would criticize, appraise more sympathetically.

If I have dwelt at some length on a side of Buddhist psychological ethics which is not thrown into obvious relief in our Manual, it was because I wished to connect that side with the specially characteristic feature in Buddhist psychology where it approximates to the trend of our own modern tradition. There, on the one hand, we have a philosophy manifestly looking deeper into the mental constitution than any other in the East, and giving especial heed to just those mental activities attention and feeling, conation and choice-which seem most to imply a subject, or subjective unity who attends, feels, wills, and chooses. And yet this same philosophy is emphatically one that attempts to "extrude the Ego". If, on the other hand, we leap over upwards of 2,000 years and consider one of the most notable contributions to our national psychology, we find that its two most salient features are a revival of the admission of an Ego or Subject of mental states, which had been practically extruded, and a theory of the ultimate nature of mental procedure set out entirely in terms of attention and feeling.3

And yet the divergence between the two conclusions,

1 See e.g. below, § 1002 et seq.

2 Cf. the Sabbasava Sutta and passim, M. i, especially the Vitakkasanthāna Sutta.

3 I refer to Professor Ward's "Psychology": Ency. Brit., 9th ed.

widely removed though they are by time and space, is not so sharp as at first appears. The modern thinker, while he finds it more honest not to suppress the fact that all psychologists, not excepting Hume, do, implicitly or explicitly, assume the conception of "a mind" or conscious subject, is careful to "extrude" metaphysical dogma. That everything mental is referred to a Self or Subject is, for him, a psychological conception which may be kept as free from the metaphysical conception of a soul, mind-atom, or mindstuff as is that of the individual organism in biology. In much the same way the Buddhists were content to adopt the term at tabhavo (self-hood or personality-for which Buddhaghosa half apologizes 1)—a j j hattikam (belonging to the self, subjective 2) and the like, as well as to speak of cittam, mano and viññānam where we might say "the mind ". It is true that by the two former terms they meant the totality of the five skandhas; that is to say, both mind and body, but this is not the case with the three last named. And if there was one thing which moved the Master to quit his wonted serenity and wield the lash of scorn and upbraiding, and his followers to use emphatic repudiation, it was just the reading into this convenient generalization of mind or personality that "metaphysical conception of a soul, mind-atom, or mind-stuff" which is put aside by the modern psychologist.

And I believe that the jealous way in which the Buddhists guarded their doctrine in this matter arose, not from the wish to assimilate mind to matter, or the whole personality to a machine, but from the too great danger that lay in the unchecked use of atta,3 ahankara, attabhāvo, even as a mere psychological datum, in that it afforded a

1 See below, p. 175, n. 1.

2 Ibid., p. 207, n. 1.

3 Svayam (this one) is nearly always substituted for atta as a nominative, the latter term usually appearing in oblique cases.

foothold to the prevailing animism. They were as Protestants in regard to the crucifix. They remembered with Ste. Beuve : “La sauvagerie est toujours là à deux pas, et, dès qu'on lâche pied, elle recommence."

What, then, was their view of mind, as merely phenomenal, in relation to the rupa-skandha or non-mental part of the human individual? We have considered their doctrine of external phenomena impingeing on and modifying the internal or personal rūpa m by way of sense. Have we any clue to their theory of the propagation of the modifications, alleged in their statement 1 to take place in relation to those factors of personality which were a rūpino, and not derived from material elements-the elements (d ha tu's), namely, or skandhas of feeling, perception, synergies, and cognition? How did they regard that process of co-ordination by which, taking sensuous experience as the more obvious starting-point in mental experience, sensations are classed and made to cohere into groups or percepts, and are revived as memories, and are further co-ordinated into concepts or abstract ideas? And finally, and at back of all this, who feels, or attends, or wills?

Now the Dhamma-Sangani does not place questions of this kind in the mouth of the catechist. In so far as it is psychological (not psycho-physical or ethical), it is so strictly phenomenological that its treatment is restricted to the analysis of certain broadly defined states of mind, felt or inferred to have arisen in consequence of certain other mental states as conditions. There is no reference anywhere to a "subjective factor" or agent who has the citta m or thought, with all its associated factors of attention, feeling, conception, and volition. Even in the case of Jhana, where the book is dealing with more active modes of regulated attention, involving a maximum of constructive thought with a minimum of receptive sense, the agent, as conscious subject, is kept in

1 See answers in §§ 600, 604, etc.

the background. It was claimed by leading disciples to be perfectly practised Jhāna when self-reference was eliminated; cf. e.g. S. iii, 235-7. The inflexion of the verb 1 alone implies a given personal agent, and the Commentary even feels it incumbent to point him out. It is this psychologizing without a psyche that impressed me from the first, and seemed to bring the work, for all its remoteness in other respects, nearer to our own Experiential school of, and since, Locke than anything we find in Greek traditions.

It is true that each of the four formless skandhas is defined or described, and this is done in connexion with the very first question of the book. But the answers are given, not in terms of respective function or of mutual relation, but of either synonyms or of modes or constituent parts. For instance, feeling (vedana) is resolved into three modes,2 perceptiom (s a ñ ñ ã) is taken as practically self-evident and not really described at all,3 the complexes or synergies (sankhara) are resolved into modes or factors, cognition (viññāņa m) is described by synonyms.

Again, whereas the skandhas are enumerated in the order in which, I believe, they are unvaryingly met with, there is nothing, in text or Commentary, from which we can infer that this order corresponds to any theory of genetic procedure in an act of cognition. In other words, we are not shown that feeling calls up perception or that the sankhāras are a necessary link in the evolution of perception into conception or reasoning. If we can infer anything in the nature of

1 Bhaveti, vihara ti (cultivates, abides); p. 43 et seq. 2 See pp. 3-9, 27-9. An attempt to define each skandha is given in S. iii, 86 f.

3 Described with some fullness in the Cy. See my note s.v. 4 Cf. the argument by Dr. Neumann, "Buddhistische Anthologie xxiii, xxiv. If I have rendered s a n khārā by "syntheses", it is not because I see any coincidence between the Buddhist notion and the Kantian Synthesis der Wahrnehmungen. Still less am I persuaded that Unterscheidungen is a virtually equivalent term. Like the confections" of

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causal succession at all, it is such that the order of the skandhas as enumerated is upset. Thus, taking the first answer (and that is typical for the whole of Book I when new ground is broken into): a certain sense-impression evokes, through "contact", a complex state of mind or psychosis called a thought or cittam. Born of this contact and the appropriate" citta m, now (i.e. in answer 3) called, in terms of its synonym, representative intellection (m anoviññāṇadhātu), feeling, we are told, is engendered. Perception is called up likewise and, apparently, simultaneously. So is volition (cetana) of the sankhara-skandha. And associated with the cittam come all the rest of the constituent dhammas, both sankhāras, as well as specific modes 1 or different aspects 2 of the feeling and the thought already specified. In a word, we get contact evoking the fifth skandha, and, as the common co-ordinate resultant, the genesis or excitement of the other three. This is entirely in keeping with the many passages in the Nikayas, where the concussion of sense and object are said to result in viññāņa m = cittam the fifth skandha. "Eye", for instance, and "form", in mutual "contact", result in "visual cognition".

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=

In the causal chain of that ancient formula, the Paticcasamuppāda,3 on the other hand, we find quite another order of genesis, sankhāras inducing consciousness, and contact alone inducing feeling. This mysterious old rune must not further complicate our problem. I merely allude to it as not in the least supporting the view that the order of statement, Rhys Davids and the Gestaltungen of Professor Oldenberg, I used syntheses simply as, more or less, an etymological equivalent, and waited for more light. The new rendering" synergies" is etymologically as literal (sam-sky) as confections. I may here add that I have used intellection consciousness, cognition interchangeably as comprehending the whole process of knowing or coming to know.

2 e.g. the "faculties " of mind (ideation) and of pleasure. 3 Given below on p. 348 [1336].