ing it is available. Hence we read that anything that is well said is a word of the Buddha, and its characteristics are given as four; it refers to truth, not to untruth; to the law, not to the non-law; it lessens sin, not increases it; it shows the advantages of Nirvaṇa, and does not indicate those of continued rebirth. The change of view is characteristic; originally the word of the Buddha was the norm, and hell the fate of him who, when the lion voice uttered its decrees, had the temerity to disbelieve the Buddha's superhuman knowledge, and to think that his norm was founded on dialectic, accompanied by reasoning or experience, made of individual intuition.2 The new attitude does not contradict the old; the word of the Buddha remains authoritative, but we are entitled to treat as the word of the Buddha every teaching which conforms to the essential characteristics of his teaching. The logic is sound enough; granted that the Buddha's word has the extraordinary virtue of leading to salvation, and that this is a unique quality, it does follow that, if we can ascertain the characteristics of his utterances, such other sayings as possess these characteristics must be his, though not contained in the canonical records. Obviously these records neither are, nor pretend to be, complete accounts of all the declarations of a generation of active instruction to very diverse audiences. Again, we must allow for the fact that the Buddha even in the Suttas shows a clear willingness to accommodate his views to the opinions of his interlocutors; he is the physician, whose aim is to heal, and who, accordingly, is most anxious to find the best. means of effecting this result, and does not concentrate his attention on the precise and absolute value of the means in themselves, a conception which later in the Mahāyāna appears in full development in the doctrine of the two forms of truth.3 The texts themselves clearly demand the exercise of reason; it is necessary doubtless to regard the letter, nor must a teacher be hastily accused of subordinating the sense to the literal meaning.1 But mere reading of the text is far from sufficient; the law is a doctrine which must be understood, just as a serpent must be 1 Ç., p. 15; BCAP. ix. 43. 2 MN. i. 71; cf. SN. iii. 103. 3 Cf. Çankara, BS. ii. 2, 18; SDS. ch. ii; below, ch. ix. § 1. •, p. 96. handled with skill lest it slay the holder. To dispute on words is an error and a waste of energy, and it is essential to distinguish between those pronouncements which are complete and explicit, and those which are made for a special occasion, and cannot be taken as adequate unless understood in regard to the special subject matter involved. The context of passages must be considered as well as the mere words. Even then doubt may arise, and there is scriptural authority to make it clear, as is asserted in the Mahāyāna in categoric terms, that there is no binding value in the interpretation of any teacher; the Buddha in his own time had to complain that there were those who cherished texts composed by poets and other men of letters to the neglect of the profound doctrines of the Buddha, superhuman, and consecrated to the doctrine of the void. But, if no teacher is authoritative, there must still be some final authority, and that authority must lie in the law or norm itself, or, regarded from another point of view, in reason which alone under these circumstances can decide what the law is. There are of course narrow limits to the autonomy of the reason; the Buddha tolerates no heresy; 'can a man, dominated by passion, go beyond the teaching of the master?' is his crushing rebuke to the monk who sought to penetrate a veil which he had declined to lift.3 The reasoner must, therefore, see that his views conform to the law, or he will be guilty of the crime of the arch-traitor Devadatta. But this does not exclude expert interpretation of the law, nor even the assertion that such and such texts, which are inconvenient, are lacking in authenticity, though such a contention is rare, doubtless because of the rule governing Buddhist controversy, which aims at achieving results on the ground of arguments based on beliefs accepted by both parties to the controversy. 4 But the place available for the exercise of discursive reasoning is also limited by a further consideration. The Buddha in the Suttas reasons indeed, and instructs by analogy and parable and simple inductive argument, but it is not claimed that he attained 1 MN. ii. 240; MKV., pp. 41, n. 1; 44, 276, 597 : nītārtha and neyārtha. 2 BSB. I. xvii; SN. ii. 267. Cf. Minayeff, Recherches, pp. 221 f.; 3 SN. iii. 103. his saving insight by this means, and still less that the insight itself consists of any such reasoning. The Buddha attains enlightenment in a complete intuition, the fruit of a long process in which he has overcome all form of empiric knowledge, and the way of intuition lies open for the disciple, and indeed must1 be followed if the end is to be attained. Hence it is essential and proper to develop the capacity for winning such visions, and this is and must be a matter for individual experience, and in it the autonomy of the individual successfully emerges from the constraint of authority in an experience which is essentially ineffable, however real it may be to him who experiences it. 2. Agnosticism Of the individual traits of the teaching of the Buddha none is really more assured than his definite insistence on the limits to the investigation of reality which are imposed on his disciples. The one aim which he sets himself is to make an end of pain or ill for the individual who is willing to accept his teaching, and he reserves to himself the absolute right to decide what matters are profitable to the attaining of this end. He makes no promise to a disciple to teach him anything save what tends to the final end; he is a physician to heal a wound, who has no need and no time to answer such foolish questions as those affecting the personality of him who inflicted the injury or the kind of missile with which he worked his evil will.2 The Brahmajāla Sutta 3 gives, under the fallacious guise of an enumeration of existing doctrines which the Buddha rejects as of final authority, a list of sixty-two views which are laid aside as matters beyond the limits of legitimate research. The first groups of these consist of eternalists, teachers who believe in the eternity of the soul and of the world, induced to this conviction in the first three cases by memories of former births, extending for periods reaching in the last case forty Aeons, and We hear of persons delivered by faith alone (AN. i. 118; PP. iii. 3), but this is abnormal. Intuition is possible in early Buddhism without trance; below, ch. vii., § 3. 2 MN. i. 426. 9 DN. i. 17 ff.; cf. below, ch. vii. Cf. DN. i. 56; Sūtrakṛtāīga, i. 1. 1. 15, 16; ii. 1. 21 f. ; Ui, VP., p. 20. in the fourth case by reasoning and sophistry. The next four groups are represented by those who maintain that the soul and the world are partly eternal and partly not; the first of these groups arises through the delusion of memory of one who has come to life again after a world period in the retinue of Brahmā; like Brahma himself he thinks that Brahma is absolutely the first of beings, and he thinks that he is created by Brahma, and, when he is reborn in the fullness of time as a teacher on earth, he deems that Brahma is eternal, while others are impermanent. The second and third groups have their origin in the memories of those teachers who were once gods in heaven, but by moral defects, love of pleasure or envy towards one another, fall from their high estate, and erroneously compare themselves as impermanent with the permanent deities who shared not their defects. The fourth group rely on reasoning; the body and the organs pass away, but the soul as heart, or mind, or consciousness, is abiding amid the impermanence. A third set of four groups includes those who by application of intuitive thought convince themselves that the world is finite, or infinite, or finite vertically and infinite horizontally, or by reasoning conclude that it is neither finite nor infinite. Other four groups are formed by equivocators, who are agnostics of the most pronounced sort, and not merely, like the Buddha, unwilling to speculate on certain topics. Their motives differ; some fear error, and the remorse arising from thus hindering their development; others fear to create the grasping spirit which causes rebirth and produces remorse; others feel conscious that they know neither good nor evil and that they could not explain them, so that they might be rebuked, if they tried, by others, and feel remorse; while yet others are simply too stupid. All agree in such answers to any question as these: 'I don't take it thus. I don't take it the other way. But I advance no different opinion. And I don't deny your position. And I don't say it is neither the one nor the other.' These fascinating views they are represented as applying impartiality to the propositions: There is another world. There is not another world. There both is and is not another world. There neither is nor is not another world. Simi larly they reason on the interesting question of the existence, &c., of chance beings, those that come into existence through former merit without the tedious intervention of human parents; of the fruit of good deeds and, last not least, of the continued existence of the Tathagata, the perfect saint, after death. Amusing as the position is, it has the merit of every appearance of historical reality; Sanjaya of the Belaṭṭha clan, appears in Samaññaphala Sutta' as expounding these precise views, and the love of the fourfold exposition of possible views is prominent in Buddhism itself. ; Then come two groups who believe in the fortuitous origin of the world and the soul. Memory again accounts for the first these teachers were once gods in the form of unconscious beings, who fell from that state in the course of time, when an idea occurred to them. The second consists of teachers who reason, and on the ground of their reasonings conclude that the soul and the world came without cause into being. These eighteen views concern the past; the remaining deal with the future. The first sixteen maintain that the soul, after death, does not suffer decay but is conscious, and their divergence of view depends on the point of the actual condition of the soul; thus some hold that it has form, is formless, is both, is neither; some maintain it is finite, is infinite, both, or neither; some that it has one mode of consciousness, or various modes, or limited consciousness, or unlimited consciousness; some that it is altogether happy, altogether miserable, both or neither; a curious opportunity of further enumeration is lost in the failure to specify the results attained by combining these sixteen different views. Eight groups approve an unconscious existence after death for the soul, their divisions resting on the four possibilities regarding form, and finite character. Eight more groups accept the doctrine that the soul is neither conscious nor unconscious after death, with the same grounds of subdivision. The scholastic character of these divisions is apparent enough, but we are assured by Buddhaghosa that the Ajivakas accepted the conscious survival of 1 DN. i. 59; Franke, DN., p. 5o, n. 6. |