"O Subhûti, if I had had an idea of a being, of a living
being, or of a person, I should also have had an idea of
malevolence.... A gift should not be given by any one who
believes in form, sound, smell, taste, or anything that can
be touched."--_The Diamond-Cutter._
The doctrine of the impermanency of the conscious Ego is not only the
most remarkable in Buddhist philosophy: it is also, morally, one
of the most important. Perhaps the ethical value of this teaching
has never yet been fairly estimated by any Western thinker. How much
of human unhappiness has been caused, directly and indirectly, by
opposite beliefs,--by the delusion of stability,--by the delusion
that distinctions of character, condition, class, creed, are settled
by immutable law,--and the delusion of a changeless, immortal,
sentient soul, destined, by divine caprice, to eternities of bliss or
eternities of fire! Doubtless the ideas of a deity moved by everlasting
hate,--of soul as a permanent, changeless entity destined to changeless
states,--of sin as unatonable and of penalty as never-ending,--were not
without value in former savage stages of social development. But in the
course of our future evolution they must be utterly got rid of; and it
may be hoped that the contact of Western with Oriental thought will
have for one happy result the acceleration of their decay. While even
the feelings which they have developed linger with us, there can be no
true spirit of tolerance, no sense of human brotherhood, no wakening of
universal love.
Buddhism, on the other hand, recognizing no permanency, no finite
stabilities, no distinctions of character or class or race, except as
passing phenomena,--nay, no difference even between gods and men,--has
been essentially the religion of tolerance. Demon and angel are but
varying manifestations of the same Karma;--hell and heaven mere
temporary halting-places upon the journey to eternal peace. For all
beings there is but one law,--immutable and divine: the law by which
the lowest _must_ rise to the place of the highest,--the law by which
the worst _must_ become the best,--the law by which the vilest _must_
become a Buddha. In such a system there is no room for prejudice and
for hatred. Ignorance alone is the source of wrong and pain; and all
ignorance must finally be dissipated in infinite light _through the
decomposition of Self._
*
Certainly while we still try to cling to the old theories of permanent
personality, and of a single incarnation only for each individual,
we can find no moral meaning in the universe as it exists. Modern
knowledge can discover no justice in the cosmic process;--the very
most it can offer us by way of ethical encouragement is that the
unknowable forces are not forces of pure malevolence. "Neither moral
nor immoral," to quote Huxley, "but simply unmoral." Evolutional
science cannot be made to accord with the notion of indissoluble
personality; and if we accept its teaching of mental growth and
inheritance, we must also accept its teaching of individual dissolution
and of the cosmos as inexplicable. It assures us, indeed, that the
higher faculties of man have been developed through struggle and
pain, and will long continue to be so developed: but it also assures
us that evolution is inevitably followed by dissolution,--that
the highest point of development is the point likewise from which
retrogression begins. And if we are each and all mere perishable forms
of being,--doomed to pass away like plants and trees,--what consolation
can we find in the assurance that we are suffering for the benefit of
the future? How can it concern us whether humanity become more or less
happy in another myriad ages, if there remains nothing for us but to
live and die in comparative misery? Or, to repeat the irony of Huxley,
"what compensation does the Eohippus get for his sorrows in the fact
that, some millions of years afterwards, one of his descendants wins
the Derby?"
But the cosmic process may assume quite another aspect if we can
persuade ourselves, like the Buddhist, that all being is Unity,
--that personality is but a delusion hiding reality,--that all
distinctions of "I" and "thou" are ghostly films spun out of perishable
sensation,--that even Time and Place as revealed to our petty senses
are phantasms,--that the past and the present and the future are
veritably One. Suppose the winner of the Derby quite well able to
remember having been the Eohippus? Suppose the being, once man, able to
look back through all veils of death and birth, through all evolutions
of evolution, even to the moment of the first faint growth of sentiency
out of non-sentiency;--able to remember, like the Buddha of the
Jatakas, all the experiences of his myriad incarnations, and to relate
them like fairy-tales for the sake of another Ananda?
We have seen, that it is not the Self but the Non-Self--the one
reality underlying all phenomena.--which passes from form, to form.
The striving for Nirvana is a struggle perpetual between false and
true, light and darkness, the sensual and the supersensual; and the
ultimate victory can be gained only by the total decomposition of the
mental and the physical individuality. Not one conquest of self can
suffice: millions of selves must be overcome. For the false Ego is
a compound of countless ages,--possesses a vitality enduring beyond
universes. At each breaking and shedding of the chrysalis a new
chrysalis appears,--more tenous, perhaps, more diaphanous, but woven of
like sensuous material,--a mental and physical texture spun by Karma
from the inherited illusions, passions, desires, pains and pleasures,
of innumerable lives. But what is it that feels?--the phantom or the
reality?
All phenomena of _Self_-consciousness belong to the false self,--but
only as a physiologist might say that sensation is a product of the
sensiferous apparatus, which would not explain sensation. No more in
Buddhism than in physiological psychology is there any real teaching
of _two_ feeling entities. In Buddhism the only entity is the Absolute;
and to that entity the false self stands in the relation of a medium
through which right perception is deflected and distorted,--in which
and because of which sentiency and impulse become possible. The
unconditioned Absolute is above all relations: it has nothing of what
we call pain or pleasure; it knows no difference of "I" and "thou,"--no
distinction of place or time. But while conditioned by the illusion of
personality, it is aware of pain or pleasure, as a dreamer perceives
unrealities without being conscious of their unreality. Pleasures
and pains and all the feelings relating to self-consciousness are
hallucinations. The false self exists only as a state of sleep exists;
and sentiency and desire, and all the sorrows and passions of being,
exist only as illusions of that sleep.
But here we reach a point at which science and Buddhism diverge.
Modern psychology recognizes no feelings not evolutionally developed
through the experiences of the race and the individual; but Buddhism
asserts the existence of feelings which are immortal and divine. It
declares that in this Karma-state the greater part of our sensations,
perceptions, ideas, thoughts, are related only to the phantom
self;--that our mental life is little more than a flow of feelings
and desires belonging to selfishness;--that our loves and hates, and
hopes and fears, and pleasures and pains, are illusions;[1]--but it
also declares there are higher feelings, more or less latent within us,
according to our degree of knowledge, which have nothing to do with the
false self, and which are eternal.
Though science pronounces the ultimate nature of pleasures and pains
to be inscrutable, it partly confirms the Buddhist teaching of their
impermanent character. Both appear to belong rather to secondary than
to primary elements of feeling, and both to be evolutions,--forms
of sensation developed, through billions of life-experiences, out of
primal conditions in which there can have been neither real pleasure
nor real pain, but only the vaguest dull sentiency. The higher the
evolution the more pain, and the larger the volume of all sensation.
After the state of equilibration has been reached, the volume of
feeling will begin to diminish. The finer pleasures and the keener
pains must first become extinct; then by gradual stages the less
complex feelings, according to their complexity; till at last, in all
the refrigerating planet, there will survive not even the simplest
sensation possible to the lowest form of life.
But, according to the Buddhist, the highest moral feelings survive
races and suns and universes. The purely unselfish feelings, impossible
to grosser natures, belong to the Absolute. In generous natures the
divine becomes sentient,--quickens within the shell of illusion, as
a child quickens in the womb (whence illusion itself is called The
Womb of the Tathâgata). In yet higher natures the feelings which are
not of self find room for powerful manifestation,--shine through
the phantom-Ego as light through a vase. Such are purely unselfish
love, larger than individual being,--supreme compassion,--perfect
benevolence: they are not of man, but of the Buddha within the man. And
as these expand, all the feelings of self begin to thin and weaken.
The condition of the phantom-Ego simultaneously purifies: all those
opacities which darkened the reality of Mind within the mirage of mind
begin to illumine; and the sense of the infinite, like a thrilling
of light, passes through the dream of personality into the awakening
divine.[2]
But in the case of the average seeker after truth, this refinement
and ultimate decomposition of self can be effected only with lentor
inexpressible. The phantom-individuality, though enduring only for
the space of a single lifetime, shapes out of the sum of its innate
qualities, and out of the sum of its own particular acts and thoughts,
the new combination which succeeds it,--a fresh individuality,
another prison of illusion for the Self-without-selfishness.[3] As
name and form, the false self dissolves; but its impulses live on and
recombine; and the final destruction of those impulses--the total
extinction of their ghostly vitality,--may require a protraction of
effort through billions of centuries. Perpetually from the ashes
of burnt-out passions subtler passions are born,--perpetually from
the graves of illusions new illusions arise. The most powerful of
human passions is the last to yield: it persists far into superhuman
conditions. Even when its grosser forms have passed away, its
tendencies still lurk in those feelings originally derived from
it or interwoven with it,--the sensation of beauty, for example,
and the delight of the mind in graceful things. On earth these are
classed among the higher feelings. But in a supramundane state their
indulgence is fraught with peril: a touch or a look may cause the
broken fetters of sensual bondage to reform. Beyond all worlds of
sex there are strange zones in which thoughts and memories become
tangible and visible objective facts,--in which emotional fancies are
materialized,--in which the least unworthy wish may prove creative.
It may be said, in Western religious phraseology, that throughout
the greater part of this vast pilgrimage, and in all the zones of
desire, the temptations increase according to the spiritual strength
of resistance. With every successive ascent there is a further
expansion of the possibilities of enjoyment, an augmentation of power,
a heightening of sensation. Immense the reward of self-conquest; but
whosoever strives for that reward strives after emptiness. One must not
desire heaven as a state of pleasure; it has been written, _Erroneous
thoughts as to the joys of heaven are still entwined by the fast cords
of lust._ One must not wish to become a god or an angel. "Whatsoever
brother, O Bhikkus,"--the Teacher said,--"may have adopted the
religious life thinking, to himself, '_By this morality I shall become
an angel;'_ his mind does not incline to zeal, perseverance, exertion."
Perhaps the most vivid exposition of the duty of the winner of
happiness is that given in the Sutra of the Great King of Glory. This
great king, coming into possession of all imaginable wealth and power,
abstains from enjoyments, despises splendors, refuses the caresses of
a Queen dowered with "the beauty of the gods," and bids her demand
of him, out of her own lips, that he forsake her. She, with dutiful
sweetness, but not without natural tears, obeys him; and he passes
at once out of existence. Every such refusal of the prizes gained by
virtue helps to cause a still more fortunate birth in a still loftier
state of being. But no state should be desired; and it is only after
the wish for Nirvana itself has ceased that Nirvana can be attained.
*
And now we may venture for a little while into the most fantastic
region of Buddhist ontology,--since, without some definite notion of
the course of psychical evolution therein described, the suggestive
worth of the system cannot be fairly judged. Certainly I am asking the
reader to consider a theory about what is beyond the uttermost limit
of possible human knowledge. But as much of the Buddhist doctrine
as can be studied and tested within the limit of human knowledge is
found to accord with scientific opinion better than does any other
religious hypothesis; and some of the Buddhist teachings prove to be
incomprehensible anticipations of modern scientific disco very,--can
it, therefore, seem unreasonable to claim that even the pure fancies of
a faith so much older than our own, and so much more capable of being
reconciled with the widest expansions of nineteenth-century thought,
deserve at least respectful consideration?
[Footnote 1: "Pleasures and pains have their origin from touch: where
there is no touch, they do not arise."--_Atthakavagga,_ 11.]
[Footnote 2: "To reach the state of the perfect and everlasting
happiness is the highest Nirvana; for then all mental phenomena--such
as desires, etc.--are annihilated. And as such mental phenomena are
annihilated, there appears the true nature of true mind with all its
innumerable functions and miraculous actions."--KURODA, _Outlines of
the Mahâyana._]
[Footnote 3: It is on the subject of this propagation and perpetuation
of characters that the doctrine of Karma is in partial agreement with
the modern scientific teaching-of the hereditary transmission of
tendencies.]