Home I should like to be permitted to comment on the essay in the Journal Asiatique, Sept.-Oct., 1902, by Professor de la Vallee Poussin on "Dogmatique bouddhiste." The article, which is of extraordinary interest, is the fruit of untiring labour in untrodden fields, and marks a new departure in the exegesis of Buddhist literature. It is an inquiry whether and how far certain tenets, of cardinal importance according to the Pali Pitakas, appear as elaborated, modified, or otherwise evolved in the Sanskrit sources of Buddhism.
The
tenets in question are the negation of atman (Pali, atta) or soul, and the acquiescence
in the current belief in karmaphala, or moral retribution in the after-life. To
Western minds the nihilism of the one tenet and the persistent individuality implied
in the other form an antinomy or paralogism which implies either muddle-headedness,
or sophistry, or esotericism, or all three in early Buddhism. The difficulty of
reconciliation was not unnoticed even by original adherents.(1) And Professor
Poussin's inquiry turns, as might have been expected, on the nature and function
assigned, in both Pali and Sanskrit sources, to that constituent of the Buddhist
moi biologique (I thank the author for that word!) which might replace the more
obviously transcendental atman -- to wit, vijnana (Pali vinnana). The inquiry
is of necessity lengthy and discursive, but the erudition of the author has brought
together a considerable mass of citations in text(2) and footnotes. These, together
with the author's lucid presentments of ideas, should make the essay a guidepost
which no one can afford to neglect, but which will, on the contrary, be gratefully
consulted. Professor de la Vallee Poussin finds a very positive evolution of vijnana-theory
in certain Sanskrit-Buddhist
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1 M. III, 19;
cf. I, 8, 258; S. III, 103. See the present writer on Majjhima Nikaya, J.R.A.S.,
1902, p..480. 2 On p. 287, for XXVII of Samyutta, read XXII.
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texts. The term samtana is joined to or substituted for it -- a term which
seems to approximate to our own neopsychological concept of mind as a 'continuum'
or flux. And he infers from certain contexts that this vijnana-samtana was regarded,
not as one permanent, unchanging, transmigrating entity, as the soul was in the
atman-theory, but as an "essential series of individual and momentary consciousnesses,"
forming a "procession vivace et autonome." By autonomous he means independent
of physical processes. According to this view the upspringing of a new vijnana
at conception, as the effect of the preceding last vijnana of some expiring person,
represents no change in kind, but only, to put it so, of degree. The vijnana is
but a recurring series, not a transferred entity or principle. Hence it is more
correct, if less convenient, to speak, not of vijnana, but of the samtana of pravrtti-vijnanani.
This
notion, he holds, gives us a continuous `I,' yet susceptible of interruptions.
And hereby the extremes of negation and affirmation in the early tradition are
bridged over; and we get a coherent system, vindicating for Buddhism the claim
of its founders to teach a Mean Doctrine (majjhena dhammam) between the Eternalism
of sabbam atthi and the Nihilism of sabbam natthi.(1) He concludes that since
in place of Soul the Buddhists substituted a protagonist who played the part of
soul so uncommonly well, we must put into the background all their reiterated
rejection of the Atta.
Now I venture to think that in breaking up the notion
of an abstract vijnana - entity into a series of intellectual processes or force-moments,
Professor Poussin shows true insight into Buddhist thought Dimly and crudely without
scientific language or instrument, the early Buddhists were groping, under the
crust of words, after that view of phenomena which we are tending to make fundamental
in our science of to-day. They were feeling out after a dynamic conception of
things -- after a world-order of becoming, movement, process, sequence, force.
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1.
S.II, 17, 20, 23, 61, 76; III, 135: cf. II, 49, bhutam idan ti Sariputta passasi?
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Heracleitus, with his flux of becoming, had preceded
them in a rudimentary fashion. Aristotle, with an inherited tradition of soul
as a kind of motion, and with his own theory of soul as informing energy, actualizing
the potential, was groping with them. Hume resolved a soul-being, for us, into
'particular' processes. Wundt has done much the same for the "fine old crusted"
Seele of Germany. Matter itself is melting away as substance. For the relatively
static and material notion of an indivisible soul-monad dwelling in one concrete
perishable cage after another, Gotama substituted the idea of a series of wholly
transient compounds (sambhavo), organisms, personal nexus, living beings. Living
revealed itself as a congeries of manifestations (patubhavo, uppado) of becomings
and extinctions. Part of the compound was relatively stable, to wit, the body
(rupa, kaya); but the rest--and this, pace the four other skandhas, virtually
amounted to affective reaction or vedana, and intellectual reaction, or mano,
citta, or vinnana--was in a state of constant flux, "by day one thing as
it arises, another as it wanes." To call this by the name of a substance,
conceived as permanent and unchanging, were the last absurdity (S.II, 94-5). And
with respect to its destiny, the faithful are forbidden to hold any view "about
the coming, going, transmigration, rebirth, growth, development of vinnana apart
from what is hereon taught respecting the other skandhas" (S.III, 53 foll.).
In
the Abhidhamma, e.g. the Dhamma-Sangani, there appears already a tendency to substitute
the plural vinnanani for the term groups of vinnana (cha vinnanakaya) of the Sutta
Pitaka. But if the early Buddhists did not find fitting terms for the view they
were seeking to realize so ready to hand as Aristotle did, it should be remembered
that they had not a body of scientific tradition and terminology, however imperfect,
to draw upon as he had. It is true that they did not guard their position as well
as they might have done, had they fully realized its great issues. They used now
and again the traditional animistic expressions as to the 'descent'(1) of vinnana
or namarupa into the womb at conception (D. II, 63; S. II, 91, 101); as to laying
down this body and taking another (S. IV, 60, 400), and so on. And they incorporated
into their canon, with so much other mythical lore, the Marchen about Mara seeking
the vinnana of the suicides Godhika and Vakkali (S. I, 122; III, 119-124 -- a
fanciful, almost humorous legend which even M. Poussin, with all his sense for
'ironie subtile,' takes as seriously as other Paliists have done. Again, they
use the conventional phraseology of transmigration in making a person speak of
his past births and his future destiny. But the great mass of sober argument and
positive exposition in the Pitakas goes to show both that the Buddhists resolved
soul-entity into psychological process, and also that a future personal complex
or self like unto, and the effect of, yet not identical with the present self,
would reap the Karma harvest sown here..When, however, M. Poussin defines what
he thinks is meant by the samtana of pravrtti-vijnanas, it seems to me that he
draws, from the later sources he quotes, implications very heavy for them to bear.
He finds the psychology of the Nikayas superseded by a metaphysical hypothesis
of Sanskrit commentators. He will not admit that this flux of vijnanas is "the
sequence of states of mind caused by the casual impact of sense and object "(the
Nikaya doctrine).
No, it is an autonomous continuum of vijnana-moments: "leur
serie essentielle, leur procession vivace et autonome." These are his own
words. But the quotations he supplies hardly bear him out in this metaphysical
elaboration of vinnana-psychology. He does not claim that this hypothesis exists
in the Nikayas. They indeed affirm of vinnana the merely phenomenal nature which
he transcends. Far from being autonomous, vinnana, for them, is not, does not
arise (uppajati), unless there is contact by way of sense or
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1 This term is used in Samy. III, 46, to mean simply the 'arising' in consciousness
of certain feelings or of ideas about them: -- pancannam indriyanam avakkanti
hoti.
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image (see e.g. M.I., 258-9). And I
have not yet traced the samtana-hypothesis in the traditions of the southern scholasticism,
although pavatta for psychological process is a favourite term with Buddhaghosa.
It
is easy to call vijnana a protagonist of the atman when it has been elaborated
into a hypothetical quasi-noumenal continuum of self-induced flashpoints of consciousness.
I am not denying that this heterodox elaboration came to pass. On such a dynamic
ego further light will be most welcome. But, however strongly its place in Indian
thought becomes substantiated, it cannot dwarf the significance, as M. Poussin
suggests it can, of Gotama's original position with respect to soul.
The rejection
of atta, was based, it is true, on a logical interpretation of individual experience
and consistency of terms. But its import was, in face, profoundly ethical and
social. Gotama was making a stand against priests and gods and sacrificial ritual.
And where soul was believed in, there Oversouls and the claims of the soul's `medicineman'
could not be kept out. That belief he undermined by breaking up the notion of
the person as consisting of two distinct homogeneous substances, and by resolving
him into a number of impermanent elements and activities -- activities that were
only potential till called into temporary actuality by natural law-governed antecedent
causes. The path he hewed was inevitably rough and ill guarded. It was the work
of a great pioneer.
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