I
"It is not possible, O Subhûti, that this treatise of the
Law should be heard by beings of little faith,--by those
who believe in Self, in beings, in living beings, and in
persons."--_The Diamond-Cutter._
There still widely prevails in Europe and America the idea that Nirvana
signifies, to Buddhist minds, neither more nor less than absolute
nothingness,--complete annihilation. This idea is erroneous. But it
is erroneous only because it contains half of a truth. This half of a
truth has no value or interest, or even intelligibility, unless joined
with the other half. And of the other half no suspicion yet exists in
the average Western mind.
Nirvana, indeed, signifies an extinction. But if by this extinction of
individual being we understand soul-death, our conception of Nirvana
is wrong. Or if we take Nirvana to mean such reabsorption of the finite
into the infinite as that predicted by Indian pantheism, again our idea
is foreign to Buddhism.
Nevertheless, if we declare that Nirvana means the extinction of
individual sensation, emotion, thought,--the final disintegration of
conscious personality,--the annihilation of everything that can be
included under the term "I,"--then we rightly express one side of the
Buddhist teaching.
*
The apparent contradiction of the foregoing statements is due only to
our Occidental notion of Self. Self to us signifies feelings, ideas,
memory, volition; and it can scarcely occur to any person not familiar
with German idealism even to imagine that consciousness might not
be Self. The Buddhist, on the contrary, declares all that we call
Self to be false. He defines the Ego as a mere temporary aggregate
of sensations, impulses, ideas, created by the physical and mental
experiences of the race,--all related to the perishable body, and
all doomed to dissolve with it. What to Western reasoning seems the
most indubitable of realities, Buddhist reasoning pronounces the
greatest of all illusions, and even the source of all sorrow and sin.
"_The mind, the thoughts, and all the senses are subject to the law
of life and death. With knowledge of Self and the laws of birth and
death, there is no grasping, and no sense-perception. Knowing one's
self and knowing how the senses act, there is no room for the idea of
or the ground for framing it The thought of 'Self' gives rise to all
sorrows,--binding the world as with fetters; but having found there is
no 'I' that can be bound, then all these bonds are severed._"[1]
The above text suggests very plainly that the consciousness is not the
Real Self, and that the mind dies with the body. Any reader unfamiliar
with Buddhist thought may well ask, "What, then, is the meaning of the
doctrine of Karma, the doctrine of moral progression, the doctrine
of the consequence of acts?" Indeed, to try to study, only with the
ontological ideas of the West, even such translations of the Buddhist
Sutras as those given in the "Sacred Books of the East," is to be at
every page confronted by seemingly hopeless riddles and contradictions.
We find a doctrine of rebirth; but the existence of a soul is denied.
We are told that the misfortunes of this life are punishments of faults
committed in a previous life; yet personal transmigration does not take
place. We find the statement that beings are reindividualized; yet both
individuality and personality are called illusions. I doubt whether
anybody not acquainted with the deeper forms of Buddhist belief could
possibly understand the following extracts which I have made from the
first volume of "The Questions of King Milinda:"--
*
The King said: "Nagasena, is there any one who after death is
not reindividualized?" Nagasena answered: "A sinful being is
reindividualized; a sinless one is not." (p. 50.)
"Is there, Nagasena, such a thing as the soul?" "There is no such thing
as soul." (pp. 86-89.) [The same statement is repeated in a later
chapter (p. 111), with a qualification: "_In the highest sense,_ O
King, there is no such thing."]
"Is there any being, Nagasena, who transmigrates from this body to
another?" "No: there is not." (p. 112.)
"Where there is no transmigration, Nagasena, can there be rebirth?"
"Yes: there can."
"Does he, Nagasena, who is about to be reborn, know that he will be
reborn?" "Yes: he knows it, O King." (p. 113.)
Naturally the Western reader may ask,--"How can there be
reindividualization without a soul? How can there be rebirth without
transmigration? How can there be personal foreknowledge of rebirth
without personality?" But the answers to such questions will not be
found in the work cited.
It would be wrong to suppose that the citations given offer any
exceptional difficulty. As to the doctrine of the annihilation of
Self, the testimony of nearly all those Buddhist texts now accessible
to English readers is overwhelming. Perhaps the Sutra of the Great
Decease furnishes the most remarkable evidence contained in the
"Sacred Books of the East." In its account of the Eight Stages of
Deliverance leading to Nirvana, it explicitly describes what we should
be justified in calling, from our Western point of view, the process
of absolute annihilation. We are told that in the first of these
eight stages the Buddhist seeker after truth still retains the ideas
of form--subjective and objective. In the second stage he loses the
subjective idea of form, and views forms as external phenomena only.
In the third stage the sense of the approaching perception of larger
truth comes to him. In the fourth stage he passes beyond all ideas
of form, ideas of resistance, and ideas of distinction; and there
remains to him only the idea of infinite space. In the fifth stage the
idea of infinite space vanishes, and the thought comes: _It is all
infinite reason._ [Here is the uttermost limit, many might suppose, of
pantheistic idealism; but it is only the half way resting-place on the
path which the Buddhist thinker must pursue.] In the sixth stage the
thought comes, _"Nothing at all exists."_ In the seventh stage the idea
of nothingness itself vanishes. In the eighth stage all sensations and
ideas cease to exist. And _after_ this comes Nirvana.
The same sutra, in recounting the death of the Buddha, represents
him as rapidly passing through the first, second, third, and fourth
stages of meditation to enter into "that state of mind to which the
Infinity of Space alone is present,"--and thence into "that state
of mind to which the Infinity of Thought alone is present,"--and
thence into "that state of mind to which nothing at all is specially
present,"--and thence into "that state of mind between consciousness
and unconsciousness,"--and thence into "that state of mind in which
the consciousness both of sensations and of ideas has wholly passed
away."
For the reader who has made any serious attempt to obtain a general
idea of Buddhism, such citations are scarcely necessary; since
the fundamental doctrine of the concatenation of cause and effect
contains the same denial of the reality of Self and suggests the same
enigmas. Illusion produces action or Karma; Karma, self-consciousness;
self-consciousness, individuality; individuality, the senses; the
senses, contact; contact, feeling; feeling, desire; desire, union;
union, conception; conception, birth; birth, sorrow and decrepitude
and death. Doubtless the reader knows the doctrine of the destruction
of the twelve Nidanas; and it is needless here to repeat it at length.
But he may be reminded of the teaching that by the cessation of contact
feeling is destroyed; by that of feeling, individuality; and by that
of individuality, _self-consciousness._
*
Evidently, without a preliminary solution of the riddles offered by
such texts, any effort to learn the meaning of Nirvana is hopeless.
Before being able to comprehend the true meaning of those sutras now
made familiar to English readers by translation, it is necessary to
understand that the common Occidental ideas of God and Soul, of matter,
of spirit, have no existence in Buddhist philosophy; their places being
occupied by concepts having no real counterparts in Western religious
thought. Above all, it is necessary that the reader should expel from
his mind the theological idea of Soul. The texts already quoted should
have made it clear that in Buddhist philosophy there is no personal
transmigration, and no individual permanent Soul.
[Footnote 1: _Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King._]