"O Bhagavat, the idea of a self is no idea; and the idea of a being, or
a living person, or a person, is no idea. And why? Because the blessed
Buddhas are freed from all ideas."--_The Diamond-Cutter._
And now let us try to understand what it is that dies, and what
it is that is reborn,--what it is that commits faults and what
it is that suffers penalties,--what passes from states of woe to
states of bliss,--what enters into Nirvana after the destruction of
self-consciousness,--what survives "extinction" and has power to return
out of Nirvana,--what experiences the Four Infinite Feelings after all
finite feeling has been annihilated.
It is not the sentient and conscious Self that enters Nirvana. The Ego
is only a temporary aggregate of countless illusions, a phantom-shell,
a bubble sure to break. It is a creation of Karma,--or rather, as a
Buddhist friend insists, it _is_ Karma. To comprehend the statement
fully, the reader should know that, in this Oriental philosophy, acts
and thoughts are forces integrating themselves into material and mental
phenomena,--into what we call objective and subjective appearances.
The very earth we tread upon,--the mountains and forests, the rivers
and seas, the world and its moon, the visible universe in short,--_is
the integration of acts and thoughts,_ is Karma, or, at least, Being
conditioned by Karma.[1]
[Footnote 1: "The aggregate actions of all sentient beings give birth
to the varieties of mountains, rivers, countries, etc. ... Their eyes,
nostrils, ears, tongues, bodies,--as well as their gardens, woods,
farms, residences, servants, and maids,--men imagine to be their
own possessions; but they are, in truth, only results produced by
innumerable actions."
--KURODA, _Outlines of the Mahâyana._
"Grass, trees, earth,--all these shall become Buddha."
--CHŪ-IN-KYŌ."
"Even swords and things of metal are manifestations of spirit: within
them exist all virtues (or '_power_') in their fullest development and
perfection."--HIZŌ-HŌ-YAKU.
"When called sentient or non-sentient, matter is Law-Body (or
'_spiritual body_')."--CHISHŌ-HISHŌ.
"The Apparent Doctrine treats of the four great elements _[earth, fire,
water, air]_ as non-sentient. But in the Hidden Doctrine these are said
to be the Sammya-Shin (_Samya-Kaya_), or Body-Accordant of the Nyōrai
(Tathâgata)."--SOKU-SHIN-JŌ-BUTSU-GI.
"When every phase of our mind shall be in accord with the mind of
Buddha, ... then there will not be even one particle of dust that does
not enter into Buddhahood."--ENGAKU-SHŌ.]
The Karma-Ego we call Self is mind and is body;--both perpetually
decay; both are perpetually renewed. From the unknown beginning, this
double--phenomenon, objective and subjective, has been alternately
dissolved and integrated: each integration is a birth; each dissolution
a death. There is no other birth or death but the birth and death of
Karma in some form or condition. But at each rebirth the reintegration
is never the reintegration of the identical phenomenon, but of another
to which it gives rise,--as growth begets growth, as motion produces
motion. So that the phantom-self changes not only as to form and
condition, but as to actual personality with every reëmbodiment. There
is one Reality; but there is no permanent individual, no constant
personality: there is only phantom-self, and phantom succeeds to
phantom, as undulation to undulation, over the ghostly Sea of Birth and
Death. And even as the storming of a sea is a motion of undulation,
not of translation,--even as it is the form of the wave only, not the
wave itself, that travels,--so in the passing of lives there is only
the rising and the vanishing of forms,--forms mental, forms material.
The fathomless Reality does not pass. "All forms," it is written in the
_Kongō-hannya-haramitsu-Kyō,_[2] "are unreal: he who rises above all
forms is the Buddha." But what can remain to rise above all forms after
the total disintegration of body and the final dissolution of mind?
[Footnote 2: Vagra-pragnâ-pâramita-Sutra.]
Unconsciously dwelling behind the false consciousness of imperfect
man,--beyond sensation, perception, thought,--wrapped in the envelope
of what we call soul (which in truth is only a thickly woven veil of
illusion), is the eternal and divine, the Absolute Reality: not a soul,
not a personality, but the All-Self without selfishness,--the _Muga
no Taiga,--_the Buddha enwombed in Karma. Within every phantom-self
dwells this divine: yet the innumerable are but one. Within every
creature incarnate sleeps the Infinite Intelligence unevolved, hidden,
unfelt, unknown,--yet destined from all the eternities to waken at
last, to rend away the ghostly web of sensuous mind, to break forever
its chrysalis of flesh, and pass to the supreme conquest of Space and
Time. Wherefore it is written in the _Kegon-Kyō_ (Avatamsaka-Sutra):
"Child of Buddha, there is not even one living being that has not the
wisdom of the Tathâgata. It is only because of their vain thoughts and
affections that all beings are not conscious of this.... I will teach
them the holy Way;--I will make them forsake their foolish thoughts,
and cause them to see that the vast and deep intelligence which dwells
within them is not different from the wisdom of the very Buddha."
*
Here we may pause to consider the correspondence between these
fundamental Buddhist theories and the concepts of Western science.
It will be evident that the Buddhist denial of the reality of the
apparitional world is not a denial of the reality of phenomena as
phenomena, nor a denial of the forces producing phenomena objectively
or subjectively. For the negation of Karma as Karma would involve the
negation of the entire Buddhist system. The true declaration is, that
what we perceive is never reality in itself, and that even the Ego that
perceives is an unstable plexus of aggregates of feelings which are
themselves unstable and in the nature of illusions. This position is
scientifically strong,--perhaps impregnable. Of substance in itself
we certainly know nothing: we are conscious of the universe as a vast
play of forces only; and, even while we discern the general relative
meaning of laws expressed in the action of those forces, all that
which is Non-Ego is revealed to us merely through the vibrations of
a nervous structure never exactly the same in any two human beings.
Yet through such varying and imperfect perception we are sufficiently
assured of the impermanency of all forms,--of all aggregates objective
or subjective.
The test of reality is persistence; and the Buddhist, finding in the
visible universe only a perpetual flux of phenomena, declares the
material aggregate unreal because non-persistent,--unreal, at least,
as a bubble, a cloud, or a mirage. Again, relation is the universal
form of thought; but since relation is impermanent, how can thought be
persistent?... Judged from these points of view, Buddhist doctrine is
not Anti-Realism, but a veritable Transfigured Realism, finding just
expression in the exact words of Herbert Spencer:--"Every feeling and
thought being but transitory;--an entire life made up of such feelings
and thoughts being also but transitory;--nay, the objects amid which
life is passed, though less transitory, being severally in the course
of losing their individualities, whether quickly or slowly,--_we learn
that the one thing permanent is the Unknowable Reality hidden under all
these changing shapes._"
Likewise, the teaching of Buddhism, that what we call Self is an
impermanent aggregate,--a sensuous illusion,--will prove, if patiently
analyzed, scarcely possible for any serious thinker to deny. Mind,
as known to the scientific psychologist, is composed of feelings and
the relations between feelings; and feelings are composed of units
of simple sensation which are physiologically coincident with minute
nervous shocks. All the sense-organs are fundamentally alike, being
evolutional modifications of the same morphological elements;--and
all the senses are modifications of touch. Or, to use the simplest
possible language, the organs of sense--sight, smell, taste, even
hearing--have been alike developed from the skin! Even the human brain
itself, by the modern testimony of histology and embryology, "is, at
its first beginning, merely an infolding of the epidermic layer;" and
thought, physiologically and evolutionally, is thus a modification of
touch. Certain vibrations, acting through the visual apparatus, cause
within the brain those motions which are followed by the sensations
of light and color;--other vibrations, acting upon the auditory
mechanism, give rise to the sensation of sound;--other vibrations,
setting up changes in specialized tissue, produce sensations of taste,
smell, touch. All our knowledge is derived and developed, directly or
indirectly, from physical sensation,--from touch. Of course this is
no ultimate explanation, because nobody can tell us _what feels the
touch._ "Everything physical," well said Schopenhauer, "is at the same
time meta-physical." But science fully justifies the Buddhist position
that what we call Self is a bundle of sensations, emotions, sentiments,
ideas, memories, all relating to the _physical_ experiences of the
race and the individual, and that our wish for immortality is a wish
for the eternity of this merely sensuous and selfish consciousness.
And science even supports the Buddhist denial of the permanence of
the sensuous Ego. "Psychology," says Wundt, "proves that not only our
sense-perceptions, but the memorial images that renew them, depend
for their origin upon the functionings of the organs of sense and
movement.... A continuance of this sensuous consciousness must appear
to her irreconcilable with the facts of her experience. And surely we
may well doubt whether such continuance is an ethical requisite: more,
whether the fulfillment of the wish for it, if possible, were not an
intolerable destiny."