T.A.P Aryaratne
When we speak of Buddhism we mean
the doctrine set forth in a certain collection of compositions, chiefly
discourses, orally transmitted over a period of some five centuries before the
Christian era began, and committed to writing towards the close of that period.
From this fact we cannot justly conclude that these documents are totally
unreliable as a guide to the teaching of the Buddha; but to assume the
opposite, namely that they constitute a completely or even largely accurate
record of the Buddha’s doctrine, would be to discount the propensity of
chroniclers of the ancient world to take liberties with facts and events to
enlarge, embellish, and adorn them. If, in addition, we have reason to believe
that the various composers of the discourses had sectarian interests, or had
their special causes to plead, we cannot reasonably expect from them an
objective record of facts. And we do certainly know that the authors of the
discourses, the Buddhist monks, belonged to an order that was badly split by
dissensions which began in the very lifetime of its founder.
In this connection, what Dr.
Edward Consze says, in a book published just four years ago, is very pertinent.
He says: “The history of Buddha’s thought might be expected to begin with an
account of the teaching of the Buddha himself or at least the beliefs current
in the most ancient community. The nature of our literary documents makes such
an attempt fruitless and impossible.” Thus according to Dr. Consze not only the
Buddha’s actual teaching but even the beliefs commonly held by the earliest
Buddhist community are impossible to ascertain. I would not go all the way with
Dr. Consze. I would not say it is altogether impossible to get a fairly clear
notion of what the Buddha taught; but I would say that to do so demands a
readiness to accept what investigation reveals, no matter how startling the
revelation may be.
Before we go into the question of
the authenticity of the texts, it is perhaps pertinent to ask why this question
of authenticity should arise at all. What if the ancient authors of the
canonical documents had in fact made a scrupulous effort to hand down to
prosperity the genuine word of the Master? It would not be difficult to
entertain that possibility if only the documents disclosed a consistent system
and a credible narrative. But to our disappointment where we expect to find
consistency we only find contradiction. We are presented with the startlingly
original philosophy of impermanence along with the primitive Indian doctrine of
rebirth and as part and parcel of it; we find the Buddha, whom we have pictured
in our minds as a soul of humility, presented in many places as one given to
vainglorious talk, to bragging about his wisdom; we find arahats, of whom we do not find a single nowadays, scattered far
and wide in their hundreds in the Thatagata’s
time; we find the arahat shown as
being capable of miracles and marvels that would put to shame the miracles of
the New Testament (he can multiply his human form and appear as many persons: he
can become invisible at will; and he can go right through a wall or a mountain,
crash through to the bowels of the earth, walk on water without sinking, fly
through the air, touch and stroke the sun, the moon and the stars, creep
through key holes, etc); we find the Buddha and the arahats shown as making flying trips to one or other of the heavens
to hold converse with the gods and other exalted beings who inhabit them and we
read of such monstrosities as the cutting of their own throats by arahats for fear of falling from the arahat state! There is also, of course,
the other side of the coin; the Buddha is shown as noble and dignified in
conversation, as denouncing miracles and marvels, as instructing his hearers
again and again in the sublimely beautiful Brahmaviharas
and the Eightfold Path of deliverance.
But which of these is the true
picture? The meditations on abounding loving kindness and the path to the
passionless state or the descriptions of the alleged supernormal powers of
those who have reached that state; the non-self regarding principle of
impermanence and soullessness or self-emphasizing doctrine of rebirth? A satisfactory
answer to these questions can, I think, be found if we can first find an answer
to the larger question, the pursuit of which Dr. Conze characterised as “fruitless
and impossible” namely the question, “What did the Buddha teach?”
At the outset of this
investigation I would make one assumption, namely that Siddatta Gouthama was an
original philosopher and not a reformer or a reshaper of existing systems. The average
Hindu, of whom Radhakrishnan is the typical representative, believes that the
Buddha was a reformer of Hindu ideas. I think the evidence suggests that the
Buddha was nothing if not original. There is no gainsaying that he was the
greatest original thinker India ever produced. And if it is accepted that the
Buddha taught an original philosophy which broke away radically from existing
traditions, then by eliminating from the texts all the elements of religion and
philosophy that were current in India at the time the Buddha began his
ministry, we can arrive at reasonably accurate idea of what his teaching was.
It is easy enough, at least for
educated Buddhists, to discard a good deal of the supernatural elements in the Tripitaka, though some may be loath to
surrender the belief in the miraculous powers of the arahat. But no matter how intelligent educated a Buddhist may be,
he will cling to the rebirth doctrine as though it were the very lifeblood of
the Buddha Dhamma. And the reason for
this passionate attachment to the belief in rebirth is not far to seek. The doctrine
responds to man’s deepest craving - the craving for more life. Man has a vital
stake in the doctrine, and it is easy to understand why all religions are
founded on the craving for more life. Christianity is founded on the rock of
personal immortality, and popular Buddhism founded on the rebirth doctrine. If
after this life man cannot hope to live on in heaven, he must at least have
another spell in this world, or in any world whatever; life anywhere is
preferable to the finality of death and extinction.
It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that the rebirth doctrine, which was deeply embedded in the Indian
consciousness should have crept into the Buddhist Cannon and entrenched itself
there after the Buddha’s death. Without it Buddhism had no chance of finding a
foothold in India as a religion; the monks of the Buddhist Order, the Sangha knew this; and it is they who
fixed the Canon as we know it. The monks knew also, no doubt, from the fact
that the common man was not capable of grasping the revolutionary concept of
impermanence of Anicca and even more
from his natural horror of a teaching that denies the reality of his self, that
there was no hope of survival for their Order amidst the other religious
movements which catered for man’s lust for more life. So they set about
purposefully garnishing the absolutely original teaching of the Buddha with
elements of popular appeal - the rebirth dogma, the popular gods, the
miraculous powers of the arahat, etc.
It would be interesting to
compare the popular elements of the Jain religion with those of Buddhism. In
both we have the Karma - and -
rebirth doctrine; in both it is taught that enlightened ones appear in this
world from time to time - from eternity until, eternity; in both there are
exactly 24 previous enlightened ones named (the Jain list starts with Vrasabha
and the Buddhist with Dipankara); both systems speak of the omniscience of the
founder; both speak of deliverance from Samsara
and attainment of Nirvana; and
both were characterised by mendicant orders. And when we remember that the Jain
system was first in the field, it becomes obvious which system borrowed from
which. To say that popular Buddhism borrowed from Jainism, however, does not
mean that the Buddha was a borrower. There are two Buddhisms - the Buddhism of
the monks, which is popular Buddhism, and the Buddhism of the Buddha- the
esoteric original Buddhism. It is the Buddhism of the monks that borrowed the
religious trappings of other faiths in India. And When these borrowings are removed
from the system that has come to be known as Buddhism, the residue is the pure
doctrine of the Buddha, which is entirely original; and this consists of the Anicca - Anatta doctrine with -its
corollary, imperfection or ill or suffering and path out of his oppressive
sense of suffering, which is also the middle path - the path that avoids the
extremes of self-torture and of self-gratification.
Almost all the writers on
Buddhism father on the Buddha all the ideas found in the Canon, and thus
implicate him in the naive beliefs of his philosophical forbears and of his
contemporaries. They forget one of the utterances frequently attributed to him
that his doctrine was unheard of before, difficult to perceive, hard to
understand, not grasped by ordinary minds. In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta and elsewhere, it is said that the Buddha did
not at first want to teach this “toilsome, abstruse, deep, difficult, subtle
doctrine” But out of compassion for humanity he eventually taught it. Now what
is so hard to understand, subtle, and abstruse in the teaching that the
individual has a series of lives and what he sows in one he reaps in another?
The dogma is not only extremely simple to grasp but it is one that the average
man avidly and fondly embraces; no mental operations are involved in
apprehending it; and far from being unheard of, it was a very commonplace
doctrine. What was unheard of before, what was deep, what was difficult to be
understood by ordinary minds, was the denial of rebirth, the doctrine of Anatta, and the broader concept of Anicca. There cannot be the slightest
doubt that this is the only meaning of the words so definitely attributed to
the Buddha in the Canon.
Let us look more closely at the
question of what is not original in Buddhism; what it shares, for example with
the Jain system. The Jains taught that existence is suffering, that this
suffering is due to karma in pervious
births, that rebirth will persist so long as karma persists, that the way to end rebirth is by destroying past
karma, that past karma can be destroyed by austerities, and that with the
destruction of past karma by austerities rebirth is ended and the soul at the
death of the body attains nirvana. The Jains also held that these truths were
taught by enlightened beings, called Thirthakaras,
who appeared at different epochs; and, as we saw, they named 24 of them. Now
all these features are found in Buddhism, except for the following variations.
The Buddhist system admitted the problem of suffering as humanity’s major
problem, not as a truth that had to be discovered but as an obvious phenomenon
that cannot escape notice; and it explained that suffering was not due to past karma, as the Jains taught, but to the
very nature of sentient life, which is short lived and necessarily therefore
imperfect, and which is conscious of its imperfection (the man who is
bountifully endowed with wealth and health will still think of the approaching
end of his good life and groan). And the way to escape from suffering that the
Buddha taught was - a radical departure from the extreme path of austerities or
self-mortification of the Jains; namely, the middle path of moderation, and
constant meditation on the vanity of belief in an enduring self. When one
unswervingly observes the eightfold path of unselfish living, which includes
the brahmaviharas or meditations
concerned with identifying oneself with the whole of humanity or, more
correctly, with the whole of sentient life, in this life itself (diththe va dhamme) one achieves nibbana or equanimity or deliverance
from suffering; and release from suffering is identical with release from the
sense of a separate self.
The problem facing the Jains and
the Buddha was the same, the problem of suffering. In determining the causes
and prescribing the cure for suffering, the Buddha differed fundamentally from
the Jains; the physician was not content with publicizing his remedy; he also
denounced the quacks, their diagnosis, and the remedy they prescribed. Again
and again in the Nikayas, we find the
Buddha denouncing the practices and the beliefs of the Jains or Niganthas, as they were called. In the Devadha Sutta of the Majjhima Nikayas, for example, the
Buddha takes up the karmaand -
Rebirth doctrine, which was a fundamental article of faith with the Jains,
analyses it, and exposes it as hollow and false. At this point, I should like
to digress a little and refer to a method characteristic of the Buddha when
dealing with irrational beliefs. It is the method of one who accepts as true
only those doctrines, the truth of which can be observed, or demonstrated, or
directly inferred. In the famous Tevijja
Sutta a young Brahmin asks him how he should affect union with Brahma, the
highest God; and the Buddha’s answer is: How do you know that Brahma exists?
Have you seen him face to face? And he proceeds to show that the only way
Brahma should be understood is in impersonal sense, as man’s highest
aspiration, and the way to union with Brahma is by practising universal love,
which is identical with self-forgetful meditation.
It is with the same directness,
amounting almost to bluntness, that the Buddha deals with the Iains’s concept
of Karma and Rebirth. Addressing the
Jains, he says: “You Niganthas believe
that your sufferings are due to Karma
coming over from past births. How do you know you existed in the past and
produced such-and-such karma?” He ridicules the whole idea of previous births,
and proceeds to show that cause and effect or Karma is an observable and
demonstrable process; and he gives examples. A man is struck by a poisoned
arrow, and he feels acute pain and experiences suffering; a surgeon is summoned
and surgeon extracts the dart, and the extraction causes the wounded man
intense suffering; the surgeon applies medicaments on the wound, and the man
again suffers, acutely; eventually the treatment heals the wound, and the man
suffers no more, and is free to go about his normal business.
Here a particular series of the
occurrence of pain and suffering is analyzed and is shown to be due to
observable cause, and the cessation of suffering, too, shown due to an
observable cause. The question as to why that particular man and none other was
struck by the dart is not raised because not relevant to the explanation of the
man’s suffering; but I think it is implied that such a question leads one to
postulate mystical, indemonstrable and irrational causes when the real cause
stares in the face. Another example cited is that of a man who falls passionately
in love with a woman: he sees this woman flirting with another man, enjoying
his talk and his company and he feels the pangs of jealousy and suffers acute
mental agony; then at a certain stage he decides to get out of his
infatuation, and casts out of his mind all thoughts concerning the woman, and
he suffers no more. Here again a particular effect is shown to have an
observable cause. It is not necessary to postulate a cause beyond one’s birth
to account for one’s sufferings; nor is a future birth necessary to overcome
one’s present suffering. In this example, it was utterly unnecessary to
account for the lover’s sufferings by the unverifiable theory that in the past
birth he committed the crime of weaning the affections of a woman from her
rightful lover; the cause and the cure are both to be found in this life; they
are symptoms and features common to human instincts anywhere. The same theme,
with variations is the subject matter of the Cula-dukkakkhanda Sutta of the Majjhima
Nikaya.
That the denial of rebirth by the
Buddha was the unique and revolutionary feature of the philosophical teaching
in India of the 6th century B.C. is evident from a number of crucial passages
in the texts in which the view is expressed in a variety of ways. Anicca or the principle of impermanence
was emphasized in the first sermon itself. If this sermon is thoughtfully
studied it will be seen that although it has not been seriously tampered with,
the nooks have not been altogether blind to the possible danger of leaving it
entirely unedited. It will be observed that when the discourse was ended the
immediate reaction of Kondanna, one of the five original disciples was to exclaim
“whatever by nature has a beginning has also by nature an end” and the Buddha’s
reply to Kondanna’s exclamation was in turn to exclaim that Kondanna had
understood, that is, grasped the meaning of the discourse. Therefore, we may
safely infer that the starting point of the first discourse was Anicca, though the dukka phenomenon resulting from Anicca
is elaborately described. We can reasonably presume that at the out set the
Buddha wanted his hearers to know that whatever begins must come to an end: for
example a living being that begin existence at birth must finish it at death.
He reinforced this idea in the next sermon by clearly demonstrating the absence
of an enduring soul in man, which alone can be supposed to supply a basis for
rebirth. And, logically, in the final message to his followers he emphasized,
the same basic principle. “Perishable, are compounded things”, and compounded
things have a beginning or organisation.
This is the vital principle that
the Buddha laid his finger on: what is caused to come into being as an entity
must in due course disrupt and perish. And cause is what we normally understand
by the term - a real process that can be observed or directly apprehended or
directly inferred: it just cannot be something that can only be imagined or
must be taken on trust and is unverifiable. The Buddha knew that the belief in
rebirth was widespread in his time; and he concentrated his logic right from
the start on demolishing the mystical, superstitious, and unscientific nature
of that belief.
It may be argued that by the
statements “whatever has a beginning has also an end”, and “All samskaras are perishable” the Buddha
meant that each span of life in the infinite samsaric series is of limited duration. But why should a world
teacher repeatedly emphasize what is obvious to any simpleton, that every
creature born must also die? And, again, it may be argued - and it has been -
that the Anicca merely means that
every thing including human beings change every moment, that the child is not
the same as the youth or the youth the same as the old man. But this, too, is
obvious to any average intelligence: Nothing is added to existing knowledge by
emphasizing the truism that everything changing that nothing is the same for
long. The statement of the Buddha makes sense only when it is understood as a
denial of the continuity of the individual beyond death or the disruption of
the khandas.
And what of Anatta? Was the word coined merely to distinguish it from the Hindu
Atman which wanders in Samsara unchanged and intact, did Anatta merely emphasize as popular
Buddhism seems to assume, that the wandering Atman or Atta is changing all the time? Is not Anatta on the contrary the very negation of Atta, the denial of the reality of a wandering element changing or
unchanged, from birth to birth? It certainly is what it means - it is the
opposite of Atta, not a modified Atta or Atman, Anatta is implied
in Anicca, in the statement that
whatever by nature has a beginning has also an end. Samsara the stream of births by definition has no beginning and,
logically, can have no end. Kondanna’s understanding of the first sermon was
hailed by the Buddha, and since the same idea was repeated by him in many
discourses and just before his death, it must be presumed to be the basis of
his teaching; and eternal Samsara,
which contradicts that teaching and which was taught by others before him, must
be ruled out as having no part or lot with the Dhamma.
Let us for a moment assume that the Buddha did teach karma and rebirth, and try to work out the implications of the doctrine and
see whether they square with his reputation for unsurpassed insight and intelligence.
For deeds to produce karmic effects, in the shape of rewards
or punishments in this or a future life, it is said that they should be
consciously and intentionally done. It is asserted that a man’s conscious and
deliberate actions have reactions in some mysterious manner even after death,
and that he must be reborn in order to reap the results of at least some of
those actions. The mechanism of this scheme of retribution is not explained at
all, but let that pass for the moment. Buddhists maintain that the Buddha
expressly taught that good actions win reward or merit in this life or in a
future life and that evil actions are duly followed by punishments in the
course of repeated lives. Now what are good and evil actions? What are the
norms for judging actions to be good or evil? Evidently deeds are classified
good or bad according to conventional standards of civilized society. We are
not told what happens when a cannibal or a head-hunter kills according to the
decrees of tribal law. The savage kills from what he believes to be his duty;
and his purpose therefore is highly moral. What are the karmic effects of such
acts which are evil and criminal by our standards but correct according to the
primitive conception of right action? What are the karmic effects of animal
sacrifice performed in primitive societies from high religious motives? It has
been estimated that some 500,000 years ago there were no human beings on this
planet, evolution had not proceeded to the point of producing man. How did Karma work for the inconceivable variety
of animals, birds, insects and reptiles that roamed the earth in the pre-human
age? The explanation of popular Buddhism might be that these animals were human
beings who had previously existed in other planets, and other worlds and were,
as animals in this world, living out the karmic effects of evil deeds in their
earlier human life. This of course suggests that a being must first be born in
human form, since the acts of animals are not motivated or deliberate and could
not produce karma, whether good or bad. Those who would not make the karma
theory an integral part of the Buddha’s teaching probably did not bargain for
his impasse!
It cannot be too strongly emphasized
that the real Buddha-vachana has got
to be methodically extracted from the vast number of documents which constitute
the canon; and in this process many portions of the canon, including whole Suttas have to be eliminated as being
inconsistent with the basic doctrine. Even in the very earliest times there
could be no agreement among Buddhist as to what the Master’s teaching was.
There were even in those early days, about the second century after the
Buddha’s death, as many as 18 different sects, and of the disputes that arose
within the Buddhist community, this question of the surviving individual took
first place. It is in fact, the first subject discussed in the kathavaththu, which is an account of the
various disputes current in the time of Asoka. The question of the permanence
of the individual self, or the pudgalavada,
as the subject came to be known, was nothing but a symptom of the confusion
created by the very earliest monks, who would not make up their minds to break
with the Athma or Atta tradition therefore sought to effect a compromise between the
Anatta and Atta.
A favourite method adopted by the
authors of the documents in grafting the rebirth doctrine on the Dhamma, was to tack on to a Sutta on a definite subject some quite irrelevant
passange bearing on the rebirth theme and in conflict with the general tenor of
the discourse. Such a stock passage is the description of the monk who attains arahathood, going through the various jhanas or trances, in the course of
which he recalls his past lives and acquires miraculous powers. The Devadha Sutta (already quoted) and
others are disfigured and sometimes rendered meaningless by such passages.
I now come to a more sophisticated
explanation of Karma, the alleged
motive force of the wheel of rebirth. Karma
is explained as the process or mechanism of natural justice in the universe.
This is a dogmatic assertion without a shred of evidence to support it. How do we know that the processes of nature are
just? All that we know is that there are uniformities in nature; that there is
system in the structure and operations of the physical world: for the rest
nature is blind, wasteful, red in tooth and claw, utterly amoral. Natural
justice indeed! What natural justice could there be in a world where animal life
on land and sea is organised on the principle that the bigger must swallow the smaller
in order to exist; where the reason for the existence of small animal species
is to serve as food for the bigger; where the mouse is the foreordained prey of
the cat, and the fly of the spider. Those who talk of karmic or natural justice talk only in human terms - terms
agreeable to the mind of civilized man. All moral values are man-made. Justice is
a value-concept born under the stress of the human situation and man tends to
assume that his values are the highest and the most appropriate to the
universe! The idea of natural justice or karmic
justice is simply the desire to extend a human value-idea to the universe of eternal
time and boundless space. It is of the same order as the concept of an almighty
personal god. Both are arbitrary human concepts based on faith. The Buddha had
no use for either.
We can legitimately or rationally
explain only what falls within the limits of a span of human life, the limits
being birth on the one hand and death on the other. Talk concerning
possibilities beyond these two limits is idle talk. Nagasena in the Milinda Panna, trying to explain rebirth
of beings changed by Karma can only
devise, examples like milk changing into curd, one flame being lit from
another, mangoes being produced from previously planted mangoes - all observable
physical phenomena which do not reach out to the world of the seen and the
unknown. You cannot prove the unseen or the mystical or the imaginary by the
analogy of what is actual or real and observable.
The rebirth idea arose among
primitive people and remained with them as an article of faith, and certain modern
communities hold to the belief purely as a matter of faith and tradition, with
no intelligent or demonstrable method of making it acceptable to the rational
mind. Hence the feverish enthusiasm with which Hindus and Buddhists hail any
person who claims to recall a previous birth. None of these cases of claimed
recollection have been investigated under fully scientific condition, though a
great many have received a quasi-scientific investigation, mostly by interested
parties. When eventually such cases come to be investigated by genuine
scientific methods of control, I have no doubt, that they will all turn out to
be carefully engineered frauds, not unlike the hoaxes perpetrated in the sphere
of spiritualism by mediums who have claimed to be able to contact spirits of
dead people and who have successfully hoodwinked professors of psychology for
years. Spiritualistic mediums rely heavily on human gullibility, particularly
on the gullibility and sometimes the complicity of investigators. Lazlo-Lazlo,
the Hungarian medium, soon after his exposure confessed to Cornelius Tabori the
journalist, that he had been able to carry on his sham demonstration chiefly
owing to the gullibility of the investigating university professors who
attended his seances!
This is the condensed text of a
lecture delivered under the auspices of the Rationalist Association of Ceylon
in 1966, later published in The Ceylon Rationalist Ambassador brought out by Abraham T Kovoor. This paper is mainly concerned with Pali Buddhism.
Courtesy: Soul, Spirit, Rebirth and Posession: Author & Editor: Abraham T Kovoor [Publisher: B Premanand, Indian CSICOP, Podanur, 2009]
0 comments:
Post a Comment