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Cause and Final Cause. And hence the Paticca-samuppâda
of Buddhism was as decided a negation of all teleology as
was the theorem of Demokritus and his master Leukippus,
that nothing happens by chance, but everything through a
cause and of necessity 1.'

Had the fates been kinder to the writings of the Atomist
of Abdera, had the 'teleological reaction' not been led by
two men of such extraordinary genius as Plato and Aristotle,
it is conceivable that the whole philosophy, not to say the
Dhamma, of the West, might have flowed along a channel in
which the influence of the mikros and the megas Diakosmos
might have brought both that philosophy and that Dhamma
more nearly parallel to the informing principle of the Paticca-
samuppâda. As it happened, (Europe learned from Athens
compromise and comprehensiveness, learned to believe in a
universe governed partly by necessity and partly by chance,
learned to combine belief in unchanging natural law with
belief in first and final causes.

And so gradually has the realm of regular, causal sequence encroached upon that of the casual and the arbitrary, that 7 on no period in the intellectual development of Europe can we place our finger and say :-Here the concept of a universe governed, as to its every movement and happening, by natural causation, was brought home to the minds of men,to the mind of one man. (There is nothing resembling the intellectual earthquake caused half a century ago by that extension of the law of causation: the theory of evolution. Or was there some such milestone of rational development reached, when Demokritus formulated the philosophy of Atomism, and won renown as a great prophet and teacher of mankind?

In the history of Indian thought, on the other hand, we can point to such an epoch-making crisis, we can discern the significance of the law of universal causation breaking in on a great mind with a flash of intuition. The law, we read, stands as fundamental, whether Tathâgatas have arisen or not. But the Tathagata penetrates and masters it, and delivers the knowledge thereof to the world 2.

1

Lange, History of Materialism,' I, ch. 1. Demokritus flourished apparently about half a century after the Buddha's death. See also Vis. Magga XVII: 'the wheel of becoming is without known beginning, lacking both maker (kârako)... such as Brahmâ. . . and percipient (vadako) "I." For each consequent, proceeds by reason of its antecedent.

all

&

No such crisis of thought is patent in the literature of the Brahmins, though that literature extends over practically the whole era of Indian culture. Those Upanishads which are ranked as the oldest show a naïf animism: those ranked later reveal thought attained (to relative maturity1. But there is no evidence of a transition causing a mental upheaval. In the seventy-two stanzas of the Sânkhya Kârikâ, again, 25 per cent. contain some consciously generalized affirmation respecting cause and effect. The abstract causal concept shows as a well-matured instrument of metaphysical thought. Throughout the Yoga Sutra too we find allusions to causality as an abstract idea 2. It is only in the Buddhist Nikâyas that we come up against the actual effort itself of the human mind to get at a more scientific view of world-order, an effort which is marked with the freshness and vigour of a new fetch of intellectual expansion, and the importance and gravity of which is affirmed with the utmost emphasis, both in the earliest records and in the orthodox literature of ten centuries later.

The significance of the Pitakas, as the vehicle of this evolutionary cry of travail and new birth, is not minimized by the objection, that a gospel promulgated by laymen (Khattiyas), and preached to the man in the street, would naturally regard, as truths new and wonderful, axioms which, to the more esoteric, philosophical schools of the day, were the commonplaces of dialectical metaphysic. For we have shown that, in the one case where such a school has preserved its ancient literature, we find books of pre-causational and post-causational thought, but nothing indicating that the conviction of a law of universal natural causation was taking birth. The aphorisms, constituting the oldest existing survivals of Yoga and Sânkhya thought, reveal no inner evolution of philosophic progress, and no traces of early animistic culture such as appear in certain of the Upanishads. Most of the Jain literature still awaits it editor, but we have Dr. Jacobi's learned authority for it, that, in spite of an atomistic theory of some interest, its philosophy was crude, animistic and mere 'common

1 Cf. Aitareyya Up. The Atman deliberated: I will send forth worlds-he then formed the person ... he brooded over him, and .. a mouth burst forth like an egg'-with Cvetâśvatara Up. Should time, or nature, or necessity, or chance, or the elements, or the Person be considered as the cause?'

In one passage (IV, 11), the statement takes the form of the negative part of the Buddhist formula. As the sankhâras are collected by cause, effect, substratum, and support, therefore through the absence of these, there is an absence of the sankharas.'

sense.' It is not likely therefore (that the Angas which are still inedited will reveal any conception of causation possessing deep philosophical insight. Hence all early Indian literature, for which any such insight is claimed, except that of Buddhism, either shows both the child-like and the more adult stages of thought without the (supremely interesting) transitional stage, or else it has preserved only its more adult records, or else it never had any but adult records to show, i. e. it is later literature only.

Now in the history of philosophy, whether its concepts be sought in the cell and the academy of the originating seer, or in the reaction to his influence in thoughtful and earnest minds, nothing is more illuminating either for chronology or for interpretation, than to catch the intelligence (in the act of ascending to a fresh vantage-point in its interpretation of the world

And since no auspicious day,amid Egyptian or trans-Aegean ruins has brought back to us Leukippus or Demokrītus, the Buddhist Pitakas, by presenting this evolutionary moment possess a unique interest for the historian of human ideas, not only in India, but in the entire world of culture.

1 See preceding Suttanta, p. 39 of the text.

1. [55] Thus have I heard. The Exalted One was once dwelling among the Kurus'. Now a township of that country is named Kammâssadamma. And the venerable Ânanda came to where the Exalted One was, bowed in salutation before him, and took a seat on one side. And so seated he said to the Exalted One :Wonderful, lord, and marvellous it is, that whereas this doctrine of events as arising from causes is so deep and looks so deep, to me it seems as clear as clear can be!'

'Say not so, Ânanda, say not so! (Deep is this doctrine of events as arising from causes, and it looks deep too. It is through not understanding this doctrine, through not penetrating it, that this generation has become a tangled skein, a matted ball of thread, like

1 The Kurus occupied the country of which Indraprastha, close to the modern Delhi, was the capital. See Rh. D. Buddhist India,'

p. 27.

2 Water, muses the Cy., may be shallow and look deep like a pool black with the rotten leaves beneath the surface; it may be deep and look shallow, like the jewel-like translucence of Ganges water); it may be and look shallow, like the contents of a basin; it may be and look deep, like the ocean at the foot of Mount Sineru. But this doctrine is ever and only deep both in substance and appearance.

3 The Greek yévvnua of the Gospels has much the same vague meaning as pajâ-offspring, here rendered 'generation.'

A more literal rendering than Warren's picturesque 'entangled warp... ensnarled web. The similes are drawn from weaving cloth and making nets. The tangle is due to bad workmanship or the teeth of mice; the matting, to grease (kañjiyasuttam), (the ball resembling ✓ a bird's nest. Both similes are to illustrate the confused state of the popular mind, lost in fallacies of opinion, prejudice and superstition e. g. among the sixty-two heresies of the first Suttanta (Vol. I). Cy.

to munja-grass and rushes1, unable to overpass the doom of the Waste, the Woeful Way, the Downfall, the Constant Round [of transmigration].

2. If you, Ananda, were asked :-"Is old age and death due to a particular cause?" you should say :"It is." And to the question:-"From what cause is old age and death?" you should say:-"Birth is the cause of old age and death."

If you, Ananda, were asked:-" Is birth due to a particular cause?" [56] you should say:-"It is." And to the question:-"From what cause is birth?" you should say:-" Becoming is the cause of birth."

66

And

'If you, Ananda, were asked :-"Is becoming due to a particular cause"? you should say: "It is.' And to the question :-"From what cause is becoming?' you should say: "Grasping is the cause of becoming." 'If you, Ânanda, were asked:-"Is grasping due to a particular cause?" you should say :-" It is.' to the question:-" From what cause is grasping?" you should say :-" Craving is the cause of grasping?" 'If you, Ananda, were asked: "Is craving due to a particular cause?" you should say:-" It is." And to the question:-" From what cause is craving?" you should say "Sensation is the cause of craving."

66

'If you, Ânanda, were asked :—“Is sensation due to a particular cause? you should say:-" It is." And to the question:-"From what cause is sensation?" you should say:-" Contact is the cause of sensation."

When these are withering and cut in autumn, if gathered up in sheaves wherever they fall, it becomes difficult to extricate stalk from stalk and lay them in parallel order. (Cy.)

2

Apâya. For the concrete meaning see above, Vol. I, p. 125. In the secondary sense the word is often-quite wrongly, rendered 'hell.' There is no hell, i. e no existence of unending torment, in Indian thought.

These four terms all refer to a change for the worse in rebirth, i.e. to one or other of the four infra-human grades of existence-purgatory, animal kingdom, shades or ghosts, and asuras or fallen angels.

The Cy. is at no pains to explain here the staple terms in the chain of causation, the author having expounded them after his fashion in the Visuddhi Magga.